Projects

 CodeKids offers a wide range of engaging coding activities for students of all levels, Teachers will find a treasure trove of lesson plans and teaching materials to make coding education exciting in the classroom. We also provide interactive code block puzzles to make learning coding concepts enjoyable and accessible. Beyond these resources, our supportive community is here to guide and inspire your coding journey. 

Sally Hamouda, John Golden, Raseen  Nirjhar, Merna Khamis, Anthony Nguyen 

Supported by the ComputerScience Department at Virginia Tech, 2023

 Data4Kids is an accessible website with the ability to host seven or more different game implementations designed around data visualization concepts. These games target three groups of school levels: 1st- and 2nd-grade, 3rd- and 4th-grade, and 5th-grade and up. The goal of the games is to break down complex data visualization concepts for various levels of understanding. Consequently, each game is designed to be fun and replayable, so children engage with the website for longer periods and learn more.

Mentored this project through  

CS4624

Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access Course, 2022

KidzData is a project develops an easily accessible web-based tool for elementary school kids.  The website has twelve lessons with an interactive question-answer section. The website is divided on the basis of grade levels: 1st-2nd grade, 3rd-4th grade, and 5th-6th grade. Kids can read and practice the questions based on the visualizations. 

Gurkirat Singh, Siliang Zhang, Sahith Kancharla, Lin Yang, and Zhuoqun Wang

Independent Study Course at Virginia Tech (2022)

SimpleChartsRI is a web-based tool that helps users create visualizations. SimpleChartsRI provides fundamental charting options that enable users to simply create charts, without downloading a program or paying a fee.

Sally Hamouda, Sean Khang, Shun Huang, Matthew Spaulding

Supported by the National Science Foundation under EPSCoR Cooperative Agreement #OIA-1655221​ (2018-2022)

The CSadvisingBot project creates a virtual assistant to answer frequently asked questions of computer science students at Virginia Tech. Advisors get asked the same questions over and over from students each semester. Most of these questions are not very complex or personalized and can be answered in a few sentences or links to more resources. These questions become a burden on advisors who have to spend their time responding to numerous emails with just a simple response. This project aims to relieve this burden from advisors by providing a service to quickly answer frequently asked questions in advising, undergraduate questions. 

Mentored this project through  

CS4624

Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access Course, 2022

Data visualizations, such as charts, graphs, and maps, have been around for centuries. However, data visualizations utilizing the complex types of data found in the new field of data science, and with the amounts of data found in ‘big data’ is quite new.  The current high school curriculum does not adequately prepare students to understand, analyze, interpret, or produce more complex data visualizations. Thus, it also does not prepare them for a possible career in data science. There is a rapidly increasing number of college-level programs for data scientists but, at least in Rhode Island, nothing at the high school level. This study aims to reveal what high school students need to know to understand data visualizations and to encourage them to consider a career in data science. It focuses best on how to best equip teachers to teach data visualization. This was done using a survey administered to high school teachers in the state of Rhode Island over the summer of 2020. 

Meghan VanSchalkwyk and

Sally Hamouda

Supported by the National Science Foundation under EPSCoR Cooperative Agreement #OIA-1655221​ (2020)

With 40% of students being visual learners, there is an opportunity to help engage students through data visualizations. Currently, most efforts are on reading visualizations and not creating them. However, encouraging students to create visualizations can help prepare them for a future where the ability to represent complicated data simply is crucial. 

Every subject can incorporate visualizations. Biology classes can incorporate visual methods to help students visualize and understand molecular structures, English classes can use text-parsing programs to analyze novels and see the evolution of our language,  and Science classes in general can use local data to show the impact of pollution. Sites such as Khan Academy use interactive videos and have demonstrated through use in schools to enhance comprehension in difficult subjects like Math. 

Destiny Gonzalez, Matthew Spaulding, and Sally Hamouda

 Supported by the National Science Foundation under EPSCoR Cooperative Agreement #OIA-1655221​ (2020)

 Building a chatbot that can naturally and consistently converse with human-beings on open domain topics draws increasing research interests in past years. Consider the utterance "I want to order a pizza and rent a movie most chatbots only perform single intent detection, so they cannot easily handle natural requests like that one. This problem is known as ”double/dual intent detection”. The main motivation of this work is to recognize double intents in a single utterance. Detecting double intents in a single utterance is especially challenging given the lack of context and that utterances provided by the users are usually short.
In this work, baseline approaches
and advanced approaches for double intent detection were used. The first advanced approach is based
on using the Conditional random field.
Whereas the second approach is based on using dependency parse model. All the approaches were evaluated using two real datasets.

 Sally Hamouda and Nayer Wanas

Supported by Microsoft Research in Egypt (2018)

 IgualDistricts is a genetic algorithm redistricting program. Redistricting is the process of redrawing district lines as populations rise and fall. The purpose of IgualDistrict is to create a non partisan, mathematical solution to drawing districts. IgualDistricts draws maps based on three main factors equal population, compactness and the efficiency gap. This paper covers current issues in the US redistricting system, the details of the system, issue that occurred during development, and future improvements.

Marisella Birios and Sally Hamouda

RIC CS Honors Project

(2019)

Fractal mathematics and geometry are useful for applications in science, engineering, and art, but acquiring the tools to explore and graph fractals can be frustrating. Tools available online have limited fractals, rendering methods, and shaders. They often fail to abstract these concepts in a reusable way. Chaos is an extensible, abstract fractal geometry rendering program created to solve this problem. Chaos is implemented in Java for PC and Android.

Anthony Atella, Sally Hamouda and Namita Sarwagi

RIC CS Honors Project

(2018)

Sally Hamouda, Clifford Shaffer and multiple collaborators

OpenDSA is infrastructure and materials to support courses in a wide variety of Computer Science-related topics such as Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), Formal Languages, Finite Automata, and Programming Languages.

OpenDSA materials include many visualizations and interactive exercises. Our philosophy is that students learn best when they engage the material and then practice it until they have demonstrated their proficiency.

Supported by the National Science Foundation under TUES program grant DUE-1139861 

2013-2015

Sally Hamouda and Nayer Wanas

The focus of this work is to

 make social recommendation within the extended social network of users based on a specific information need. This reduces the need to spam the immediate

social networks, and allows for ranking users based on specific information needs based on the proximity to  the user and

Supported by Microsoft Research in Egypt 2010