SACM - Netherlands
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14154/68623
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Item Restricted AI-Related Harm in Saudi Private Law(Saudi Digital Library, 2026) Aldhowayan, Mansour; Li, ShuThis thesis examines whether Saudi private law can adequately address harm caused by autonomous and opaque artificial intelligence systems. It argues that AI-related harm may create a structural compensation gap where victims cannot easily identify a responsible actor, prove fault, or establish causation under ordinary liability rules. Using EU AI governance and product-liability frameworks as a functional benchmark, the thesis shows the limits of individualised liability in responding to such harm. It then argues that Sharia principles, particularly harm removal and benefit-based burden allocation, can justify supplementary collective redress under Saudi private law. The thesis proposes a dual-track model combining a limited zakat- based safety net with a broader state-backed or industry-funded compensation mechanism.3 0Item Restricted Computational Screening of Main-Group Based Heterogeneous Catalysts for Chemical Upcycling of Plastics(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alramdan, Amer; Kolganov, Alexander; Pidko, EvgenyThe global plastic waste issue demands recycling technology development beyond the conventional ones, which is limited by contamination, polymer degradation, and energy inefficiency. The thesis describes the potential of main-group-based acid species supported on a zirconia as a catalyst for chemical upcycling of polypropylene (PP), one of the most widely used plastic but difficult to recycle. Inspired by previous study on sulfated zirconia (SZO), which abstract the hydride via its Lewis acidic site, this work explores whether the same activity can be achieved with phosphoric acid, tetraboric acid, boric acid, fluorosulfuric acid, triflic acid, and bistriflimide. Density Functional Theory (DFT) was used to determine adsorption energies, surface saturation effects, Lewis acidity (via probemolecules), and hydride abstraction barriers using Nudged Elastic Band (NEB) analysis. Fluorosulfuric acid and triflic acid were found to activate polyolefins, demonstrating their potential for catalytic upcycling. Also, fluorosulfuric and triflic acid were found to have comparable energy barriers to SZO; however no system studied surpassed SZO in terms of Lewis acidity or overall reactivity.8 0Item Restricted Medication Use and Cognitive Outcomes in Older Adults(Saudi Digital Library, 2023) Alghamdi, Ali; Hak, Eelko; van Munster, BarbaraAbstract: This thesis investigated whether existing medications could be repurposed to help prevent or delay Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia worldwide. Because current Alzheimer’s treatments only relieve symptoms and do not stop disease progression, there is an urgent need for new preventive strategies. Developing entirely new drugs is costly and time-consuming, so this research focused on “drug repurposing,” which means finding new uses for already approved medicines. The research used large healthcare databases in the Netherlands, including the IADB.nl prescription database and the Lifelines population cohort. Several medication groups were studied, including cardiovascular drugs, respiratory drugs, and antiviral medications. The thesis also examined patterns of polypharmacy, defined as the use of multiple medications, in older adults before an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The findings showed that people later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease used more medications overall and were more frequently exposed to drugs that may negatively affect cognition. Studies on beta-blockers and beta-agonists showed mixed and inconclusive results regarding cognitive protection. However, the strongest findings involved antiherpetic drugs such as valacyclovir, acyclovir, and famciclovir. These medications were consistently associated with a lower risk of later Alzheimer’s treatment initiation. Evidence from herpes zoster vaccination studies also suggested a reduced risk of dementia. Overall, the thesis supports the idea that some existing medications, particularly antiviral therapies, may have potential in Alzheimer’s disease prevention and deserve further clinical investigation.0 0Item Restricted Quality of Healthcare For Patients with Diabties in Primary Healthcare Centers: Evidence from Saudi Arabia(Saudi Digital Library, 2026) Alsubahi, Nizar; Wim, Groot; Milena, PavlovaSUMMARY Quality is a central aim of modern health systems, especially when it comes to managing chronic conditions like diabetes. Enhancing healthcare quality involves more than just clinical effectiveness and safety; it also requires understanding patients’ experiences, outcomes, and perceptions of their care. This broader view of quality emphasizes the importance of involving patient perspectives in quality assessment and improvement efforts. This dissertation focuses on healthcare quality from a patient perspective, focusing on patient-centered care (PCC) among patients with diabetes. Diabetes is a significant public health issue, especially in Saudi Arabia, where it increasingly strains the healthcare system. Managing diabetes demands ongoing, coordinated, and patient-focused care, particularly in primary healthcare settings, which are the first point of contact in healthcare. In recent years, value-based healthcare (VBHC) has emerged as a guiding framework that aligns healthcare delivery with the outcomes most important to patients while promoting the efficient use of resources. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 has prioritized enhancing healthcare quality and promoting VBHC as essential goals in its national healthcare transformation plan. Although PCC and outcome measurement, such as satisfaction, experiences, and outcomes, are acknowledged as crucial parts of these reforms, their practical application at the system and provider levels is in its early stages. There is still no clear and standardized implementation pathway across healthcare settings. Thus, efforts to evaluate healthcare quality and patient outcomes in Saudi Arabia have typically been fragmented, with differences across organizations and care settings. Consequently, the roadmaps guiding the shift to PCC are still in progress and are being piloted and tested across various countries and healthcare systems. To inform Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and healthcare transformation reforms, the central aim of this dissertation is to examine healthcare quality from the patients’ perspective, focusing on PCC and patient-reported measures among patients with diabetes in Saudi Arabia. This dissertation offers empirical insights into the use of PCC, patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), and patient satisfaction in evaluating healthcare quality and supporting value-based care. It explores the links among these patient-reported constructs, highlights the care aspects most important to patients, and examines how sociodemographic factors influence patients’ experiences, outcomes, and satisfaction.10 0Item Restricted Enabling Sustainable Transitions for SMEs in Saudi Arabia(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alsahli, Shahad; Jochem, KroezemThis project explores how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Saudi Arabia can contribute to the country’s sustainability transition under Vision 2030, using eco-packaging in the food and retail sectors as a practical starting point. The report highlights the shift from traditional, low-cost plastic packaging practices toward more sustainable alternatives such as compostable, reusable, and recyclable materials, driven by growing consumer awareness, government regulations, and emerging green startups. It identifies major barriers facing SMEs, including limited awareness, higher costs, weak recycling infrastructure, and lack of sustainability expertise, while also outlining institutional enablers such as government initiatives, financial support programs, and sustainability-focused incubators. Drawing lessons from Dutch SMEs, the project proposes solutions including financial incentives, cross-sector collaboration, pilot programs, digital platforms, and awareness campaigns to accelerate adoption. Ultimately, the report presents a roadmap for scaling eco-packaging adoption across Saudi SMEs as a catalyst for broader circular economy practices and long-term sustainable business transformation.4 0Item Restricted Interactive Simulation-Based Learning Tools for Training Children’s Helpline Counsellors(Delft University of Technology, 2026) AlOwayyed, Mohammed; Brinkman, Willem-Paul; Tielman, MyrtheChildren around the world contact children’s helplines when facing emotional, social, or psychological difficulties. These helplines provide confidential support via phone or textbased conversations, where children can share concerns ranging from everyday worries to serious safety issues. Helplines rely on skilled volunteer counsellors who can empathise, structure conversations, and help children find solutions. These helplines train a large number of volunteer counsellors annually to keep up with the volume of conversations they receive. For example, De Kindertelefoon in the Netherlands handled on average around 900 conversations per day and trained 300 new volunteers in 2024. Traditional training methods, such as role-playing, are valuable but resource-intensive, time-consuming, and dependent on the availability of trainers. To address these challenges, interactive simulation-based agents offer a promising extension to existing training practices by enabling scalable, safe, and consistent training. Such agents can simulate a virtual child with whom trainees can practise counselling skills without involving real children. However, current solutions mainly focus on observable interaction behaviour, while paying less attention to clarifying the motivations underlying the child’s actions. This thesis examines how interactive simulation-based learning tools can train counsellors at children’s helplines. Specifically, it investigates how simulation-based training that includes a virtual child agent can contribute to improved learning outcomes, realism, and educational value while remaining controllable and interpretable. To achieve this, we model more than surface-level dialogue in interactive agents, i.e., the virtual child. These agents should include representations of internal states and how these states change during interaction. One way to achieve this is through the Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) model, which conceptualises human cognition: beliefs shape desires and guide actions, allowing cognition to be explicitly simulated. This explicitly simulates the internal states, enabling the training system to show not only what a virtual child says but also why their actions and behaviours change. In this work, we develop a training simulation in which a trainee counsels a virtual child contacting a helpline via a text-based interface. The research empirically evaluates combinations of cognitive modelling of a virtual child with educational design to support guided, interpretable, and effective learning experiences.21 0Item Restricted FROM DISCLOSURE TO EXPLOITATION(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alsadi, Arwa Abdulkarim; Hernández, Gañán; van, EetenThe rapid growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as smart cameras, home routers, and smart thermostats, has transformed the digital landscape while also introducing new cybersecurity risks. IoT systems are often targeted by attackers due to outdated software, long device lifespans, and fragmented security practices. Although many IoT vulnerabilities are discovered and disclosed, only a small fraction are actually exploited in the wild. This raises important questions about which vulnerabilities are targeted, why attackers choose them, and how long they remain in use. This dissertation investigates how IoT vulnerabilities are selected for exploitation in practice, with a particular focus on attacker behavior, exploit development, and vulnerability characteristics. It systematically examines the interplay between these factors to understand how they collectively shape exploitation trends in IoT ecosystems. To answer the central research question on \textit{What factors shape the exploitation in IoT vulnerabilities, from target selection to exploit development and prediction?}, this dissertation presents four peer-reviewed studies. Chapter 2 provides a longitudinal analysis of over 17,000 IoT malware samples, revealing that only a handful of IoT vulnerabilities are targeted and often exploited for years after their disclosure. The average time-to-exploit a vulnerability after disclosure was found to be 29 months, far longer than in traditional IT systems. This temporal persistence highlights the enduring value of certain vulnerabilities within the attacker ecosystem. Chapter 3 examines factors influencing exploitation frequency in IoT vulnerabilities. It finds that attackers prefer vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit, affect widely deployed devices, and are difficult to patch. Technical severity scores, like CVSS, were less predictive than contextual factors such as device type and patch complexity. Chapter 4 addresses the limitations of existing prediction systems, such as the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), in assessing IoT-specific risk. By incorporating attacker community discussions from underground forums into a new predictive model, the study significantly improves accuracy and highlights the importance of behavioral and vendor-related features in anticipating exploitation for IoT devices. Finally, Chapter 5 shifts focus to the human element through interviews with 16 Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit developers. It finds that disclosure decisions are shaped by individual motivations, ethical considerations, and vendor interactions. PoCs developers play a key role in making vulnerabilities exploitable and often act as gatekeepers in the vulnerability ecosystem. This qualitative study examines the socio-technical dynamics influencing PoC developers’ decisions to publish exploits, and how these choices can shape target selection and enable the weaponization of vulnerabilities. Collectively, these findings show that targeting in IoT is not random but follows strategic patterns driven by cost, opportunity, and long-term exploit value. The dissertation argues that current governance mechanisms—market incentives, disclosure systems, and risk models, are misaligned with real-world exploitation practices and therefore fall short in addressing the distinct dynamics of IoT security. To address these gaps, it proposes a hybrid governance model that combines regulatory oversight, community collaboration, and market-based tools to more effectively manage the lifecycle of IoT vulnerability and exploitation.3 0Item Restricted The Concept of Journey in Sufism: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry as a Cinematic Safar.(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alsoghayer, Razan; Heidari, HemenThis thesis explores the intersection of Abbas Kiarostami's cinema and Sufi mysticism, focusing on his film Taste of Cherry (1997). Through a Sufi lens, it explores Kiarostami's expression of a spiritual journey, safar, which is an inward transformation process in Sufi mysticism. Kiarostami's films were investigatedas theoretical and practical embodiments (the physical, the psychological, the social, and the metaphysical) of safar. This thesis employs slow cinema theory and Sufi philosophy to view how Kiarostami's minimalistic cinematic techniques of long takes, lean dialogue, and repetitive narrative structures represent the spiritual search for oneself and divine truth. It demonstrates that Kiarostami's cinematic performance represents the social manifestation of the Sufi path, with the external flight symbolizing the interior process of spiritual purification and transcendence. It contributes to the overlooked discourse on the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of Kiarostami's cinema, offering a new angle in applying Islamic mysticism and Sufi thought to studying film.13 0Item Restricted evelopment of a Reporter Toolkit to Study Transcriptional Dynamics in Marchantia polymorpha(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alhammad, Ahmed; Weijers, Dolf; Borst, Jan Willem; García, Jorge HernándezTranscriptional regulation is pivotal for plant development and adaptation, yet mechanistic insights remain limited in liverwort plants. To bridge this, we developed a modular fluorescent reporter toolkit to enable real-time quantitative exploration of chromatin accessibility and polymerase recruitment in Marchantia polymorpha. Using a modular Golden Gate Cloning strategy, we engineered constructs tagging Histone 2B variants and RNA Polymerase II subunits with fluorescent proteins to monitor chromatin organization and polymerase activity. Furthermore, we designed a dCas9-based system coupled with the MpARF1 activation domain developed for targeted gene activation studies. Subsequently, stable transgenic lines expressing H2B.3-mScarlet-I exhibited nuclear-localized fluorescence, validating chromatin-specific labelling. While constructs for several RNAPII subunits were successfully assembled and transformed into Marchantia polymorpha, microscopy validation remains ongoing. Collectively, this toolkit provides a foundational resource for quantifying transcriptional dynamics, chromatin behavior, and RNAPII activity in non-vascular plants, thereby advancing synthetic biology applications and evolutionary studies of gene regulation. This adaptable toolkit provides essential molecular instruments for quantitative live-cell imaging and synthetic biology approaches in Marchantia polymorpha.15 0Item Restricted Dissecting Symbiosis Permissiveness in Parasponia andersonii(Wageningen University and Research, 2024-12-17) Alhusayni, Sultan Awwadh Sultan; Geurts, ReneNutrient limitations often constrain plant growth, leading to the use of chemical fertilizers, which can harm the environment. Biological nitrogen fixation, involving nitrogen-fixing bacteria in plant roots, provides a sustainable alternative. My research aligns with this goal, focusing on non-legume plants, particularly the non-nodulating Trema orientalis RG33 and the nodulating Parasponia andersonii species. One key gene I investigated was SYMRK, essential for root nodules and AM symbioses in legumes. In T. orientalis RG33, I identified a point mutation in this gene, and when introduced into the P. andersonii SYMRK gene, it did not disrupt the gene's function, successfully restoring both root nodule formation and AM symbiosis in a P. andersonii symrk mutant. I also explored the ectopic expression of NSP2, which enhanced AM mycorrhization but inhibited nodulation in Parasponia. Lastly, I discovered that the autoregulation of nodulation (AON) pathway, which regulates nodule numbers, is conserved in both legumes and non-legumes, providing a promising strategy for engineering nitrogen fixation in non-nodulating plants.9 0
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