Papers by Solomon Atnafu Besufekad
American journal of geographic information system, 2015
This study focused on land suitability analysis to identify permissible areas suitable for rice c... more This study focused on land suitability analysis to identify permissible areas suitable for rice crop production in west central highlands of Amhara Region, Ethiopia. The research applied GIS-based Multi-Criteria Decision Approach. Soil, climatic conditions, and topography were a criteria identified as necessary for the intended application. An Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) was used to rank the various suitability factors and the resulting weights were used to construct the suitability map layers using weighted sum overlay tool in ArcGIS 10.1 platforms. Then, the suitability map for rice crop production in the study area was formed. Accordingly, more than 70% of the total study area were found to be highly and modereately suitable for rice crop production. The relationship between suitability map and current vegetation cover of the study area has also been computed and the result predicts the inverse relationship between the density of vegetation cover and rice land suitability. Overall, the results indicate that the study area has a huge potential for rice production. Therefore, economic levels of agricultural production can be achieved by cultivating rice crop in highly and moderately suitable areas, and practicing diversification of marginally suitable areas to crops other than rice.
Cross-Cultural Design, 2016
This paper identifies factors important in low-literacy mobile user interaction design and develo... more This paper identifies factors important in low-literacy mobile user interaction design and development. It explains the limitations and recurrent design problems from developing countries, focusing on Ethiopia as a primary case study, with special consideration for the designer perspective. This exploratory research effort examines the match and mismatch in usability design guidelines for mobile interaction in developing countries. It also identifies the design and usability factors that affect mobile service (m-service) delivery in developing countries: context gaps, designer gaps, and technology gaps. Further, the paper examines the designer perception towards design guidance requirement and application. In so doing, it seeks to provide input for design guidance development in a generic way such that mobile user interface designer understanding will be enhanced and m-service delivery in developing countries will be more usable.
Claims-Inspired Pattern Development
Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction, 2016
Claims and patterns are used as structures for knowledge capture, design, and sharing. Both struc... more Claims and patterns are used as structures for knowledge capture, design, and sharing. Both structures have been researched and used independently for different application areas and in different contexts. This paper examines how the two structures can be combined to leverage interaction design for low-literacy in low-resource settings, taking into account both theoretical and practical implications of use and user. The claims-to-patterns approach seeks to provide comprehensive and concrete design guidance for stakeholders with different levels of design expertise and context knowledge.
Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development
This paper presents a method to leverage mobile interaction design knowledge for low-literacy, mo... more This paper presents a method to leverage mobile interaction design knowledge for low-literacy, moving from falsifiable hypotheses (claims) to actionable solutions (patterns). In prior work, claims and patterns have been used separately for different application areas and in different contexts. This research asserts that the transition from claims to patterns will enhance the design value, leveraging claims for uncertain situations and inexplicit user behavior and patterns for proven solutions for recurrent problems. This paper examines how these two structures can be combined in a claims-to-patterns approach to leverage mobile interaction design for low-literacy. To demonstrate this method, an example that highlights how claims evolve into patterns through research and design is discussed. CCS Concepts • Human-centered computing ➝ ➝Interaction design • Interaction design process and methods➝ ➝User interface design.
Design and Implementation of Multilanguage Electronic Dictionary for Smartphones
The ever increasing growth of the mobile technology is giving birth to more powerful devices like... more The ever increasing growth of the mobile technology is giving birth to more powerful devices like smart phones which provide many of the functionalities of personal computers in addition to making phone calls. As these devices are becoming more and more functional, they are penetrating swiftly into every society of the world. As a result, there is a need to design and develop language specific applications that can help users interact with these devices through the language they understand. Electronic Dictionaries (EDs) are one example of such applications which can be used as an electronic reference resource containing a library of words and their meanings. As globalization is bringing the world into one, understanding several languages is very crucial for smooth interaction and wide communication with others. Thus, several Multilanguage dictionary applications with two or more languages are becoming integrated on handheld devices like PDAs and smart phones to cope up with the globalization issue. Having such Multilanguage dictionary application on mobile devices is very helpful as it makes language learning easier and faster, can be accessed anytime and anywhere needed, no need of extra device purchasing and the like. However, the currently available dictionary applications on these devices cover mostly the western languages and no focus had been given to develop these applications for languages like the ones spoken in Ethiopia. In countries like Ethiopia, with various language sets, such a Multilanguage dictionary is essential for ease of communication among citizens of the country as well as other foreigners.
The “ሀለሐ” Virtual Ethiopic Keyboard for Smart Phones
The need for effective text input methods on smart phones has increased with the advent of virtua... more The need for effective text input methods on smart phones has increased with the advent of virtual keyboard being one of the major methods. The nature of the Ethiopic characters that are used for writing of several languages such as Amharic, Tigrigna, Geez, etc. needs special considerations in its design. Though it is UNICODE supported, the large quantity of the characters brings a challenge for designing a virtual Ethiopic keyboard for smart phones. We designed the layout for the virtual keyboard considering these inherent challenges. We then developed a working virtual Ethiopic keyboard system. The developed virtual keyboard is implemented and tested on the emulator and the real Android based smart phones. The system is also designed in such a way that users can switch between our virtual Ethiopic keyboard and the default virtual English keyboards for multi-script text entry in the different applications that can exist on smart phones. Keywords: virtual keyboard, virtual Ethiopic keyboard, multi-script text entry, localization of smart phones, virtual Ethiopic keyboard layout design
Epidemic and Communicable Disease Surveillance Data Reporting and Medical Cases Communication System
"In the current system of epidemic and communicable disease cases reporting, it is observed ... more "In the current system of epidemic and communicable disease cases reporting, it is observed that data reporting and analysis: takes a long time, is error prone and is vulnerable to data loss. Some experiences have shown that with the help of Short Messaging Services (SMS), text can be exchanged between mobile subscribers or other third party applications. Thus, SMS can be applicable for formal data collection, remote patient monitoring and telemedicine services. In this work, the requirements of the epidemic and communicable disease cases reporting and communication system of the Ministry of Health of the Federal Government of Ethiopia is identified. Systems analysis and design was conducted to come up with a viable SMS-based medical data collection and communication system using the existing mobile network. Our proposed system can overcome the current limitations and can permit instant access to reported medical cases by concerned health professionals and decision makers. Keyword: mobile medical record reporting, mobile epidemic disease surveillance, SMS for medical case communication."
Audio data model for multi-criteria query formulation and retrieval
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing and Multimedia - MoMM '09, 2009
The amount of available audio data is increasing rapidly in consequence of advancements in media ... more The amount of available audio data is increasing rapidly in consequence of advancements in media creation, storage and compression technologies. This rapid increase imposes new demands in audio data management and retrieval. In this work, we proposed an audio data model and repository model to fulfill user requirements in retrieving audio data from large collections. The proposed audio data repository
Journal des Sciences Pour l'Ingénieur, 2008
Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has attracted much attention of the research community. As e... more Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has attracted much attention of the research community. As exact matching is not possible with image retrieval, the approach is to use similarity-based matching using the global features of the entire image to compute a similarity score between two images. Equally important is the use of salient-objects: objects in an image that are of particular interest, as the basis of similarity-based computation. However, the current works on CBIR do not address very well the issues related to salient-objects. In this work, we propose a data repository model so that spatial features of salient objects are captured. Moreover, we propose an extension to the similaritybased selection operator defined earlier to allow salient object based selection. We also propose spatial operators that can be used to compute spatial relations between an image and its contained salient objects. To demonstrate the viability of our proposals, we extend a previous system named EMIMS, to develop EMIMS-S (Extended Medical Image Management System to support Salient objects). We also experimentally evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of salient-objects-based image queries.
E-Local Governance: A Case Study on Life-Event Services in the Kebeles of the City Government of Addis Ababa
Proceedings of the LOG-IN Africa e- …, 2008
The life-event services are purposively selected for consideration, because of the volume of the ... more The life-event services are purposively selected for consideration, because of the volume of the work and its high impacts on the other services. Based on the findings of the survey, the key driving factors for successful implementation of ICT for local governance are identified. ...
The Web is a huge repository of information in the form of text, image, audio, and video. People ... more The Web is a huge repository of information in the form of text, image, audio, and video. People use search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc, to discover resources from this huge repository. Originally these general purpose search engines are designed and optimized for English language. They fell short when they are used for locating web resources of other languages such as Amharic. This is mainly due to the specific features of the language that are not considered by those search engines. Amharic, which is a family of Semitic languages, is the working language of the federal government of Ethiopia. Currently, there are significant numbers of Amharic documents on the Web. In this work, we analyzed the specific features of Amharic language, designed a general architecture for Amharic Search Engine, developed the necessary algorithm to realize it and implemented the same for searching Amharic language web documents. The result of the work has become to be a complete language specific search engine that has a crawler, an indexer and a query engine component that are optimized for the language they are designed, Amharic language.
Designing Mobile Interaction for Low-Literacy (D-MILL)
Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction, 2016
With the proliferation of mobile phone and services in African rural communities, there is an eme... more With the proliferation of mobile phone and services in African rural communities, there is an emerging need for appropriate interaction design for low-literacy. This workshop will bring together people interested in low-literacy mobile interaction design to share design philosophies of low-literacy, explore design knowledge creation and sharing techniques, and brainstorm areas for future low-literacy design development. This workshop has two main goals: one is to explore and share perspectives of interaction design for low-literacy and the other is to establish a common ground to further develop a reusable design advice for low-literacy. This will contribute to organize the efforts and leverage interaction design for emerging technologies of interest to the AfriCHI community.
Modélisation et traitement de requêtes images complexes
La recherche d'images par le contenu est d'une importance croissante dans de nombreux dom... more La recherche d'images par le contenu est d'une importance croissante dans de nombreux domaines d'application. Pour cette raison, il existe des numerus recherche dans les deux domaines : DBMS et reconnaissance de formes. Mais, la plupart des systemes existants ont, en particulier, le defaut de n'offrir aucun cadre formel pour les requetes dites hybrides. Or, disposer d'un cadre formel bien fonde est tres important pour traiter efficacement de telles requetes. Dans cette these, nous presenterons un modele de representation de donnees images a meme de permettre de formuler des requetes multicriteres. Fondes sur ce modele, on a developpe une algebre fondee sur le continue des images et presente les proprietes des operateurs. Des heuristiques d'optimisation de requetes seront ensuite etudiees. Afin de valider experimentalement la faisabilite et la pertinence des concepts et techniques introduits, nous avons implemente un prototype de systeme de gestion d'image...
The ever increasing growth of the mobile technology is giving birth to more powerful devices
like... more The ever increasing growth of the mobile technology is giving birth to more powerful devices
like smart phones which provide many of the functionalities of personal computers in addition to
making phone calls. As these devices are becoming more and more functional, they are
penetrating swiftly into every society of the world. As a result, there is a need to design and
develop language specific applications that can help users interact with these devices through the
language they understand. Electronic Dictionaries (EDs) are one example of such applications
which can be used as an electronic reference resource containing a library of words and their
meanings. As globalization is bringing the world into one, understanding several languages is
very crucial for smooth interaction and wide communication with others. Thus, several
Multilanguage dictionary applications with two or more languages are becoming integrated on
handheld devices like PDAs and smart phones to cope up with the globalization issue. Having
such Multilanguage dictionary application on mobile devices is very helpful as it makes
language learning easier and faster, can be accessed anytime and anywhere needed, no need of
extra device purchasing and the like.
However, the currently available dictionary applications on these devices cover mostly the
western languages and no focus had been given to develop these applications for languages like
the ones spoken in Ethiopia. In countries like Ethiopia, with various language sets, such a
Multilanguage dictionary is essential for ease of communication among citizens of the country as
well as other foreigners.
Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2002
Managing image data in a database system using metadata has been practiced since the last two dec... more Managing image data in a database system using metadata has been practiced since the last two decades. However, describing an image fully and adequately with metadata is practically not possible. The other alternative is describing image content by its low-level features such as color, texture, shape, etc. and using the same for similarity-based image retrieval. However, practice has shown that using only the low-level features can not as well be complete. Hence, systems need to integrate both low-level and metadata descriptions for an efficient image data management. However, due to lack of adequate image data model, absence of a formal algebra for content-based image operations, and lack of precision of the existing image processing and retrieval techniques, no much work is done to integrate the use of lowlevel and metadata description and retrieval methods. In this paper, we first present a global image data model that supports both metadata and low-level descriptions of images and their salient objects. This allows to make multi-criteria image retrieval (context-, semantic-, and content-based queries). Furthermore, we present an image data repository model that captures all data described in the model and permits to integrate heterogeneous operations in a DBMS. In particular, similarity-based operations (similarity-based join and selection) in combination with traditional ones can be carried out. Finally, we present an image DBMS architecture that we use to develop a prototype in order to support both content-based and metadata retrieval.
The many successful research results in the domain of computer vision have made similarity based ... more The many successful research results in the domain of computer vision have made similarity based data retrieval techniques a promising approach. As a result, the integration of similarity based retrieval techniques of multimedia data into DBMSs is currently an active research issue. We first illustrate the importance of similarity based operations. Then, we present our image data repository model that supports similarity based operations conveniently under an object-relational database paradigm. Furthermore, we present novel similarity based operators on image tables and study their properties. Finally, based on the properties of the operators identified, we derive algebraic rules that are useful for similarity based query optimization and we introduce a cost model for an implementation of one of the major similarity based operators
Database fragmentation allows reducing irrelevant data accesses by grouping data frequently acces... more Database fragmentation allows reducing irrelevant data accesses by grouping data frequently accessed together in dedicated segments. In this paper, we address multimedia database fragmentation to take into account the rich characteristics of multimedia objects. We particularly discuss multimedia primary horizontal fragmentation and focus on semantic-based textual predicates implication required as a pre-process in current fragmentation algorithms in order to partition multimedia data efficiently. Identifying semantic implication between similar queries (if a user searches for the images containing a car, he would probably mean auto, vehicle, van or sport-car as well) will improve the fragmentation process. Making use of the neighborhood concept in knowledge bases to identify semantic implications constitutes the core of our proposal. A prototype has been implemented to evaluate the performance of our approach.
Towards Efficient Horizontal Multimedia Database Fragmentation using Semantic-based Predicates Implication
... 1176 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 2 LE2I Laboratory UMR-CNRS, University of Bourgogne 21078 Dijon Ce... more ... 1176 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 2 LE2I Laboratory UMR-CNRS, University of Bourgogne 21078 Dijon Cedex France {fekadeg, satnafu}@cs.aau.edu.et, {joe.tekli,richard.chbeir}@u-bourgogne.fr Abstract. Partitioning techniques are ...
Similarity-based algebra for multimedia database systems
ABSTRACT
Image Data Model for an Efficient Multi-Criteria Query: A Case in Medical Databases
Since the last two decades, image database management has been practiced using different image re... more Since the last two decades, image database management has been practiced using different image representation methods. In the literature, images are represented using two paradigms: the metadata-based and the content-based representations. Image retrieval ...
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Papers by Solomon Atnafu Besufekad
like smart phones which provide many of the functionalities of personal computers in addition to
making phone calls. As these devices are becoming more and more functional, they are
penetrating swiftly into every society of the world. As a result, there is a need to design and
develop language specific applications that can help users interact with these devices through the
language they understand. Electronic Dictionaries (EDs) are one example of such applications
which can be used as an electronic reference resource containing a library of words and their
meanings. As globalization is bringing the world into one, understanding several languages is
very crucial for smooth interaction and wide communication with others. Thus, several
Multilanguage dictionary applications with two or more languages are becoming integrated on
handheld devices like PDAs and smart phones to cope up with the globalization issue. Having
such Multilanguage dictionary application on mobile devices is very helpful as it makes
language learning easier and faster, can be accessed anytime and anywhere needed, no need of
extra device purchasing and the like.
However, the currently available dictionary applications on these devices cover mostly the
western languages and no focus had been given to develop these applications for languages like
the ones spoken in Ethiopia. In countries like Ethiopia, with various language sets, such a
Multilanguage dictionary is essential for ease of communication among citizens of the country as
well as other foreigners.
like smart phones which provide many of the functionalities of personal computers in addition to
making phone calls. As these devices are becoming more and more functional, they are
penetrating swiftly into every society of the world. As a result, there is a need to design and
develop language specific applications that can help users interact with these devices through the
language they understand. Electronic Dictionaries (EDs) are one example of such applications
which can be used as an electronic reference resource containing a library of words and their
meanings. As globalization is bringing the world into one, understanding several languages is
very crucial for smooth interaction and wide communication with others. Thus, several
Multilanguage dictionary applications with two or more languages are becoming integrated on
handheld devices like PDAs and smart phones to cope up with the globalization issue. Having
such Multilanguage dictionary application on mobile devices is very helpful as it makes
language learning easier and faster, can be accessed anytime and anywhere needed, no need of
extra device purchasing and the like.
However, the currently available dictionary applications on these devices cover mostly the
western languages and no focus had been given to develop these applications for languages like
the ones spoken in Ethiopia. In countries like Ethiopia, with various language sets, such a
Multilanguage dictionary is essential for ease of communication among citizens of the country as
well as other foreigners.