Contact Information:
Hafida Benhidour, Ph.D.
Assistant professor
Department of computer science
College of Computer and Information Sciences
Office: 11 Building 20, Malaz Campus
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Email: 
Brief Bio:
I am an assistant professor in Computer Science. I joined King Saud University in fall 2011. My primary area of research is in Artificial Intelligence.
Before coming to King Saud University, I spent two years as a researcher in the Humanistic system Lab at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. My research focused on improving the system I developed during my PhD studies for drawing human faces using verbal desctiptions and developing a new system for modeling 3D facial expressions based on subjective descriptions of the users.
I graduated in March 2009 with a PhD degree in engineering in the field of computer science from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. My PhD research was in the field of Computational intelligence and intelligent interactive systems. I have developed an interactive face drawing system allowing users to draw faces using verbal descriptions. I have proposed an efficient approach for online learning of Gaussian fuzzy sets based on the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for Gaussian mixture. This work has been reported in two peer-reviewed academic journals and two international conferences.
During my master studies, I used Linux for 3 years as an operating system which allowed me to master different aspects of Linux. I have implemented using C/C++ (gcc compiler) a load balancing strategy for an open and organized multi-agent system where agents are distributed and are able to enter and leave the system, causing an unpredictable load.
I am grateful to have received the Monbukagakusho scholarship (2004-2008) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.
Research interests:
I am interested in various areas of artificial intelligence and Computational Intelligence, mainly in their applications to the development of innovative intelligent and interactive systems.
I am interested to work on innovative and complex problems related to intelligent and interactive systems and applying artificial intelligence and/or computational intelligence techniques to solve these problems. The long term goal of my research is to provide personalized tools that can help people to solve complex decision problems, while optimizing user-machine interaction, learning from the environment and adapting to unforeseen circumstances. I am interested in developing new machine learning algorithms for emerging applications, providing new algorithms and solutions for user adaptation and personalization, understanding how people interact with intelligent systems and building working prototypes.
Below, I list some of my future threads in this direction.
- Intelligent systems for interactive 2D and 3D design: designers require intelligent systems that enable them to quickly modify the shape, style, and functionality of a product concept. The various technologies used throughout the design process must be both intuitive and easy to use, with only a minimal amount of specialized training required. The objective of this research is to develop the next generation of automated design tools that allow the end-user to rapidly modify the product concept through human-friendly interfaces. As an example of such systems, clothes design , facial expressions modeling or logos design.
- Intelligent agents for assisting people to solve problems: this type of systems learns from the environment and the user behavior, and adapts themselves to unpredictable situations. Such systems are important in games, auctions, ecommerce or route navigation for example.
- Intelligent systems for understanding intelligent human behavior: here, image processing and pattern recognition techniques play an important role in building such systems. As an example of such systems, facial expression analysis that deals with recognition of emotions visually, body movement tracking and gesture recognition which are mostly used for direct interaction of human and computer in a command and action scenario, eye movement tracking, which is mostly an indirect form of interaction between user and machine and mostly used for better understanding of user’s attention or intent. Another important field of applications for these systems is helping people with disabilities to interact with the computer.
I am also interested in the use of advanced interfaces such as pen-centric and multi-touch user interfaces, as well as words or natural language, with the precedent mentioned intelligent systems. Handwritten recognition can be an interesting research field for systems with pen-centric user interfaces. Using natural language as an interface allows wider range of users to use these systems and improve considerably the interaction between the human and the computer.
Publications:
- H.Benhidour and T. Onisawa, Interactive Learning of Verbal Descriptors' Meaning for Face Drawing System, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics (JACIII), to appear in Vol.14 No.6, 2010.
- H.Benhidour and T. Onisawa, Interactive learning of linguistic terms meaning for face drawing system , Proceedings of SCIS & ISIS 2008, special session on Applications of Soft Computing to Human Related Problems, pp.1938-1943, September, 2008.
- Hafida Benhidour, Takehisa Onisawa, Interactive Face Generation from Verbal Description Using Conceptual Fuzzy Sets, Journal of Multimedia, Vol.3, No.2, pp.52-59, June, 2008.
- H.Benhidour and T. Onisawa, Drawing human faces using words and conceptual fuzzy sets, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, ISIC, pp.2068-2073, October, 2007.
