Two Papers from My Time at UDST

Ahmed Hanif
1 min read
Which concepts the model mixes up most often. Variable assignment and scope are the hardest pair to tell apart.
Which concepts the model mixes up most often. Variable assignment and scope are the hardest pair to tell apart.

During my time at UDST, I worked on education research with Dr. Seifeddine Bouallegue. Two of those projects became papers with me as first author.

Inferring Learner Styles via Clustering of Uneven MOOC Behavioral Data. Presented at ICETC 2025 in Barcelona and now in IEEE Xplore. It groups online-course students by how they move through the material, to tell sequential learners from global ones without asking them to fill in a questionnaire.

Identifying Conceptual Weaknesses in Novice Programmers from Programming Process Data. Accepted at AICCSA 2026, which takes place in Sharjah from 26 to 29 October. This is the one I am proudest of. When a student's Python program crashes, the model looks at the code they had at that moment and names the concept they are stuck on, out of 22. It gets this right 77.4% of the time, and it works from the very first assignment. That way an instructor can step in early instead of waiting for the exam.

A third paper, led by Muaz Albaghdadi, will be submitted in December.

Both papers are under Research in my portfolio, with PDFs. Thank you to Dr. Bouallegue and to every co-author.

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