Planned disruptions such as highway constructions are commonplace nowadays and the communities living near these disruptions generally tend to be environmental justice communities---low socio-economic status with disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects. A major concern is that such activities negatively impact people's well-being by disrupting their daily commutes via frequent road closures and increased dust & air pollution. This paper addresses this concern by developing a personalized navigation service called PureNav to mitigate the negative impacts of disruptions in daily commutes on people's well-being. PureNav has been designed using active engagement with four environmental justice communities affected by major highway construction. It has been deployed in the real world among the members of the four communities, and a detailed analysis of the data collected from this deployment as well as surveys show that PureNav is potentially useful in improving people's wellbeing. The paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of PureNav, and offers suggestions for further improving its efficacy.

Online reviews have become essential for users to make informed decisions in everyday tasks ranging from planning summer vacations to purchasing groceries and making financial investments. A key problem in using online reviews is the overabundance of online that overwhelms the users. As a result, recommendation systems for providing helpfulness of reviews are being developed. This paper argues that cultural background is an important feature that impacts the nature of a review written by the user, and must be considered as a feature in assessing the helpfulness of online reviews. The paper provides an in-depth study of differences in online reviews written by users from different cultural backgrounds and how incorporating culture as a feature can lead to better review helpfulness recommendations. In particular, we analyze online reviews originating from two distinct cultural spheres, namely Arabic and Western cultures, for two different products, hotels and books. Our analysis demonstrates that the nature of reviews written by users differs based on their cultural backgrounds and that this difference varies based on the specific product being reviewed. Finally, we have developed six different review helpfulness recommendation models that demonstrate that taking culture into account leads to better recommendations.

The unprecedented health situation in the year 2020 and to some extent 2021 has forced most businesses to operate online with people working from home (WFH). Like almost all countries in the world, Saudi Arabia has suffered from the shocking unstable health situation facing the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigates different WFH impressions and behaviors that Saudi employees have built during the pandemic and how that has changed over time. We have conducted surveys in two different phases among Saudi employees that have come from varied personal and job-related demographics, including different gender, marital status, cities, managerial roles, job sectors and company sizes. Our data provides a good comprehensive coverage along different demographics. Key findings includes that for 75% of the people it was a brand new experience especially for big companies employees, people's performance and satisfaction depended on the sector that they work for and their marital status, while life work split was the top challenge and flexibility was the top advantage.