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Hassan Baajour

Research Officer

London Knowledge Lab
23-29 Emerald Street
London WC1N 3QS

Research

 Personalisation aims to reduce the information overload and the navigation mislaid on the Web by tailoring the relevant information objects and hypermedia links available on the Web according to the users’ preferences, interests, needs and knowledge. The User Model (UM) is the key component in personalised systems as it comprises the information specific to each individual user’s characteristics, usage behaviour and/or usage environment, which is needed to tailor the available relevant information to a particular user or group of users. In this context, the use of the user models should not be bounded to only a single system, since users are rapidly becoming involved in interaction with many different systems at the same time for various reasons. Therefore accessing and reusing user models embedded in various systems to support users’ tasks become more important and more interesting given that service-oriented architectures allow cross-system communication between different applications and systems. To this end, the overall aim of this PhD research is to investigate user models interoperability by using ontologies, semantic web and web services in the context of service oriented architectures to support cross-system personalisation.

Education

 10/2005 - present: PhD Research - Birkbeck College, University of London.
06/2004 - BEng Computer Engineering, University of Portsmouth.

Projects and Work Experience
  • Institute of Education -- Job Title: Research Officer -- from June 2008 -> Ongoing

    Brief description: I joined Becta project in 2008 and since working as research officer at the Institute of Education (IOE) to investigate the use of technology-enhanced learning for low-numeracy. Main responsibilities and experiences involve:
    - Designing, developing and testing customisable and personalised software applications for educational purpose from storyboards based on existing teaching activities, and incorporating adaptive techniques.
    - Learning and using very advanced software development environment – Macromedia Adobe Director 11 (Flash/Shockwave) and object oriented programming language (Lingo) to create the adaptive games.
    - Designing and developing of software monitoring for data collection, and the analysis of the data.
    - Linking the materials and games produced to a web-based discussion forum.
    - Working in close collaboration with experienced SEN teachers, commercial developers and with the project’s Principal Investigator.

  • Birckbeck College -- Job Title: Research Assistant -- From April 2005 to 30 September 2008

    Brief description: I joined a JISC research project for lifelong learning at Birkbeck College: The project envisages contributing to the UK e-Learning programme by developing, deploying and evaluating new techniques and tools that create personalised environment for lifelong learning. My main role in this project was designing and developing an ontology for users of lifelong learning systems using Protege.

  • NetWire Consultancy -- Job Title: IT Engineer -- From August 2004 to March 2005

    Brief description: Worked as a freelancer with computer consultants such as NETWIRE IT consultancy (main role was Network security and fixing software & hardware problems).

    • Publications
  • Baajour H, Laurillard D (2009) ‘Using New Technology to improve Learning of Children’, an article published in ‘Teaching Times’ magazine – Autumn Edition 2009.
  • Baajour H, Magoulas, G.D. and Poulovassilis A (2008) ‘Cross-System User Model Interoperability for Adaptive Lifelong Learning Systems’ to the 5th Int. Conf. workshops on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH2008) August 2008 Hannover, Germany.
  • Baajour H. Magoulas, G.D. (2008) Ontology development for lifelong learning planning. Technical report. Available online at http://www.lkl.ac.uk/research/myplan/
  • Baajour H., (2007) ‘user modelling and service oriented architectures for personalisation in lifelong learning’ A paper was submitted to AI2007 Conference for Research Forum Students Cambridge.
  • Baajour H, Magoulas, G.D. and Poulovassilis A., (2007) ‘Modelling the Lifelong Learner in a Services-based Environment’ Second International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA 07) September 2007, Wrexham, North Wales, UK.
  • Baajour H, Magoulas, G.D. and Poulovassilis A., (2007) ‘Designing Services-Enabled Personalisation for Planning of Lifelong Learning Based on Individual and Group Characteristics’ to appear at the Workshop on Personalisation in E-Learning Environments at Individual and Group Level, 11th International Conference on User Modeling (UM 2007), Corfu, Greece, 25-29 June 2007.
  • Baajour H. Magoulas, G.D. (2006) User modeling to support personalisation in the context of lifelong learning. Technical report. Available online at http://www.lkl.ac.uk/research/l4all/
  • Baajour H, Magoulas, G.D. and Poulovassilis A., (2007) ‘Modelling the Lifelong Learner in a Services-based Environment’Second International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA 07) September 2007, Wrexham, North Wales, UK.
  • Baajour H, Magoulas, G.D. and Poulovassilis A., (2007) ‘Designing Services-Enabled Personalisation for Planning of Lifelong Learning Based on Individual and Group Characteristics’ to appear at the Workshop on Personalisation in E-Learning Environments at Individual and Group Level, 11th International Conference on User Modeling (UM 2007), Corfu, Greece, 25-29 June 2007..

    • Teaching

     I worked as teaching assistant at Birkbeck College for the following courses:
  • Web developing (HTML/XHML/CSS)
  • Database and Spreadsheets (Access and Excel)
  • Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with UML
  • e-business

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