Conference Programme FULL (1)

LANA: An Arabic Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Phytochemical and Antimicrobial Studies on Selected Medicinal Plants from the Iraqi Flora
Sumayh Aljameel
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong developmental disability, which affects communication skills, social skills and
repetitive behaviour. Several studies reported that people with ASD have the ability to deal with technology and
computers more effectively than the general population. People with ASD have differences in learning styles. Learning
style is a set of factors, attitudes and behaviours that facilitate learning for an individual in a given situation. Researchers
have suggested that there are three kinds of learning styles (VAK): through seeing (visual), through hearing (auditory), and
through touching an object (kinaesthetic). In Saudi Arabia, the number of children who are diagnosed with autism is
increasing. The Saudi Government supports education for these children by inclusion of the children in mainstream
schools. However, most of these schools have a lack of specialised or trained teachers to deal with autistic children’s
needs. One solution to this problem is to use a virtual tutor to educate children with ASD in mainstream schools. The
fundamental research question addressed in this project is can an Arabic Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System
(ACITS) adapt to the VAK learning styles for autistic children and enhance their learning. The proposed ACITS architecture
uses a combination of Arabic Pattern Matching and Arabic Short Text Similarity to adapt VAK learning style to enhance an
individual’s learning in a particular domain (science). The ACITS is aimed at children with autism (10 to 16 years old) who
have reached a basic competency with the mechanics of Arabic writing. The new ACITS, known as LANA, will use the
learning gain measurement to evaluate the ability of ACITS to personalise the learning of individual through adaptation of
learning style in schools.
To date, the first prototype has been developed and a preliminary evaluation of the ACITS and its components has been
conducted with non-autistic children in order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses. The results show that there is
statistically a significant difference between user’s scores with and without using the VAK learning style. In addition, the
users who learned using the VAK model are much happier with remembering what they have learned from LANA (91.7%)
than users who learned without using the VAK model (50%), indicating that LANA CITS can adapt the user’s learning style
and enhance their learning. Moreover, the results show that LANA CITS is effective as an Arabic CA with the majority of
conversations leading to the goal of the conversation and the majority of the corrected responses (89%). Current work is
in developing prototype 2 of LANA in conjunction with teachers for a pilot with autistic children in Saudi Arabia.
Phytochemical and Antimicrobial Studies on Selected Medicinal Plants from the Iraqi Flora
Shaymaa Al-Majmaie, Lutfun Nahar, George P. Sharples, Satyajit D. Sarker
Herbal medicine is the oldest type of treatment for the maintenance of health and for the prevention of disease, especially
in developing countries. Natural products are small molecules, which are secondary metabolites that are not involved in
plant growth, development or reproduction. During the last century research was driven mainly towards extraction of
plant materials, and isolation of active compounds as potential drug candidates for pharmaceutical industries. In the
present study, five plants from the Iraqi flora have been selected because of their traditional medicinal uses, especially in
the treatment of infectious diseases. The plants are Ruta chalepensis, Citrus sinensis, Punica granatum, Citrus grandis and
Ricinus communis. All of the plant extracts have been tested against Micrococcus luteus, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus
aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida albicans, using agar diffusion assay and the resazurin assay. Analytical
studies on the extracts have also been carried out using HPLC. Ruta chalepensis was selected for a detailed investigation
of its chemical and antimicrobial properties with the ultimate aim of isolating and purifying the compound responsible for
antimicrobial activity.