Informatics Engineering and Information Science

The objective of this paper is to outline the development of knowledge mobilization in terms of inter-school and school to home collaboration to extend learning opportunities, particularly for students and their families who live in rural communities. The application of internet-based technologies has enabled networks to be established for the development of small schools located beyond major centres of population in ways that have expanded their learning capacities and, potentially, sustained the communities that host them. The creation of internet-based networks has, furthermore, enabled knowledge to be mobilized between schools and their communities, thereby promoting new e-living possibilities.

In this paper we investigate students’ preparedness towards using Social Networks and Internet-enabled mobile devices for learning and propose requirements that need to be met before higher learning institutions can embrace these two technologies for learning. To achieve this we conducted a survey in higher learning institutions in Tanzania. We looked at students’ possession of Internet-enabled mobile devices, affordability of the Internet, level of competency and experience in operating mobile devices and using Social Networks. We also assessed time that students spend on social networking sites. In conclusion, the survey reveals that students in higher learning institutions are almost ready in terms of infrastructure, experience, and competence needed for operating mobile devices for learning, hence making these tools appropriate to be used as supplementary pedagogical tools for learning.

Online survey offers cheapest data collection and processing cost, efficient service, easy data processing and wide coverage over traditional paper-and-pencil surveys; due to this its adoption recently has been inevitable. However, despite the number of advantages an online questionnaire can offer, there are still a number of problems and challenges related to authentication that need to be closely addressed. Multiple submissions, respondent authenticity/validity, and respondent’s anonymity are among the issues that hinder the proliferation of online surveys.

This paper addresses the aforementioned challenges and fills the left gap by improving previous works and later presents an online survey system which behaves well. The system considers also the problem of identity theft.

Internet applications have been revolutionary in our daily life since the moment that they were first implemented several years ago. An increasing number of institutions is changing traditional methods for the ‘e’ ones. It also affects the educational field. The beginnings were mainly about the external teaching. For a few years now extensive research, regarding the e-exams has been done [6],[7],[8], that is the system which enables checking pupils’ knowledge and skills in the real time instead of doing written exams. This paper shows the report based on the first mock e-mature in mathematics in Poland.

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a disability with condition where children have problem controlling their movement coordination as a result of damage in the part of the brain - cerebrum. It may also cause the speech fails to function properly which resulting CP disabled often communicate by using sign or body language. Speech impairment in CP disabled is common because of the connection error between the cortex and other parts of the brain such as the cerebellum. Therefore, most of the time CP disabled need to repeat their words or sentences in their conversations to make other people more understand. In this paper, the development of a flexible speech to text recognition system for CP disabled is presented. It is a system where the stored speech references in the database can be adapted flexibility according to speech of CP disabled. The development algorithms are including speech detection triggering, zero crossing rate (ZCR) for the endpoint detection, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) for the feature extraction, and dynamic time warping (DTW) for the pattern classification. In other words, this flexible system is based on the speech training of CP disabled and then recognizing their speech inputs. The results show the credibility of the developed recognition system by giving high accuracy of speech detection approximately which is ranged from 78% to 97% accuracy. This performance shows that the developed flexible speech recognition system is ready to give positive impacts to the CP disabled in terms of daily conversation with normal human.

Computers and Internet have become necessities of life, mostly because they provide a gateway into the World Wide Web. The web-growth as a platform for online-learning makes the Web an essential technology; hence the accessibility issues in Web applications are vital, this includes the Hearing-Impaired Individuals. The objective of this research is to investigate the Hearing-Impaired Individuals’ level of interests in the various ICT courses, hence to identify the most-demanded chosen ICT course, to offer via E-Learning. The Methodology of this research were designed in such a way where the questionnaires for the students acts as the research instrument involved in this research. A total of 24 schools executing the Hearing-Impaired Education Program from the whole of Malaysia is the research location. This brings a total of 245 Hearing-Impaired Students from Form 4 and Form 5 of the Secondary Level as the research sample. In evaluating the results of the questionnaires, among all the ICT courses, the Computer Graphics course has the majority chosen by the Hearing-Impaired Individuals, mainly for reasons like enhances deaf-creativity in drawing images, web-design, 3D-animation and multimedia purposes.

Positive user experience is associated with positive emotion which is important to engage students in online learning. Most of the previous studies focused only in one element when studying the user experience for example elements in the interface design only or in the interaction design only. This research proposed a model with the combination of design elements in the interface, content and interaction design to understand the experience specifically the students’ engagement with the online learning material. The proposed model of students’ engagement is based on the principles of Aptum model and interaction design. As the dimensions in the model is general, therefore to extract the details of the design elements, the Kansei Engineering technique is adopted as it has been proven able to extract the design elements in many areas of studies. This paper described the proposed model and explained the main design elements in interface, content and interaction design dimensions. Discussions on user experience, emotion and engagement in learning, a brief explanation about Kansei Engineering technique and some conclusion about the research are also presented.

To achieve realism in computer graphics traditionally requires increasingly complex algorithms, along with greater computer power and hardware resources. However, the recent growing integration of perception research into computer graphics offers a more economical solution. Psychophysical experiments are now conducted to find out areas that can be manipulated to transform complex computations to “computation cuts”. This perception based approach provides better resource consumption to elements that matters most to humans, so the output is still perceived as visually correct. This paper explores the opportunity to apply perceptual concepts in the development of

V-Hajj

; a 3D simulation application for Tawaf (a Hajj ritual) training. Recent findings from related psychophysical experiments are discussed to identify at which prospect perception can be applied in

V-Hajj

. It is ultimately believed that integrating perceptual concepts would help in developing a more efficient and less consumptive real-time rendering techniques that further improve user immersion and interactivity.

Basic requirements, which are imposed on LMS (Learning Management System) from the point of view of the needs of a teacher, are to present the contents of instruction, manage the instruction, communicate with students, motivate them to study, observe their progress and evaluate them. The article deals with an opportunity to implement fuzzy logic into web-based education using the created IF-THEN rules and modelling in Petri nets. By an application of fuzzy logic into Petri nets there arises a strong tool for modelling teaching processes, mainly thanks to the easy understandability and sophisticated mathematical setup, supporting a rather simple design of educational activities managed by LMS, for the compendious modularity of solution and robustness of the design.

Management of intrusion alarms particularly in identifying malware attack is becoming more demanding due to large amount of alert produced by low-level detectors. Alert correlation can provide high-level view of intrusion alerts but incapable of handling large amount of alarm. This paper proposes an enhanced Alert Correlation Framework for sensors and heterogeneous log. It can reduce the large amount of false alarm and identify the perspective of the attack. This framework is mainly focusing on the alert correlation module which consists of Alarm Thread Reconstruction, Log Thread Reconstruction, Attack Session Reconstruction, Alarm Merging and Attack Pattern Identification module. It is evaluated using metric for effectiveness that shows high correlation rate, reduction rate, identification rate and low misclassification rate. Meanwhile in statistical validation it has highly significance result with p < 0.05. This enhanced Alert Correlation Framework can be extended into research areas in alert correlation and computer forensic investigation.

Use of morphing engine in metamorphic and polymorphic malware, and virus creation kits aid malware authors to produce a plenty number of variants for a virus. These variants belong to a family and have common behavioral and some statistical characteristics. However, these variants are not detectable via a single common string signature. Some statistical analyses have been tested in recent years to fight against these types of multi-variants family malware. In this research, we introduce and examine an opcodes statistical-based classifier using decision tree. This method is very simple in implementation. Our experimental outcome shows that different malware family executable files are classifiable using their opcodes statistical feature, with a high degree of reliability.

The questions of construction of generalized cascade codes with algebraic codes on the external level are investigated in the article. The procedure of encoding and decoding with algebraic codes on the external level of generalized cascade code. Cryptosystems of theoretical resistance, construction of which is based on using algebraic block codes (code-theoretic schemes) are considered. Resistance of cascade code-theoretic schemes to hacking by an opponent with the help of the method of permutable decoding is researched.

In 2002, De Weger show that choosing an RSA modulus with a small difference of its prime factors yields improvements on the small private exponent attacks of Wiener and Boneh-Durfee. In this paper, we extend the Weger’s bound of the Boneh-Durfee attack for the RSA modulus

N

 = 

pq

, when

$\frac{p}{q}$

being close to

$\frac{b}{a}$

with small integers

a

and

b

. We improve the bound of de Weger for the weaker and stronger results of Boneh-Durfee attack.

Certificateless Public Key Infrastructure (CL-PKI) combines the merits of the trust management in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the absence of certificate management in identity-based cryptosystem. Inspired by the advantages of CL-PKI, this paper presents the implementation of certificateless based authentication scheme called CLS. To prove the functionality and practicality of CLS authentication scheme, this paper presents a comprehensive performance analysis of various security levels of CLS in terms of public key size, signature block size and the execution time spent on signing and verification operations. The results show that various security levels of the CLS have direct influence on the length of public key and more importantly, the efficiency of the scheme in terms of bandwidth usage and run time.

Current security systems dealing with sensitive private data do not provide sufficient options to find data leaks. An approach to find the last authorized receiver of a protected copy is proposed in this paper. Existing security concepts are extended by a new security service based on reliable tracking data embedding. Additionally, a new mechanism to protect the new tracking data is shown. Digital watermarking techniques are used to provide tracking abilities for forwarded copies of the protected data. This paper briefly describes approaches to improve security for both the owner of protected data and its recipients.

A proxy signature scheme permits a proxy signer to sign messages on behalf of an original signer. Proxy multi-signature is one of the proxy signature primitives, where a group of original signers delegate their signing rights to the same proxy signer. However, as yet, to our knowledge, an ID-based proxy multi-signature scheme from bilinear pairings based on inverse computational Diffie-Hellman problem (INV-CDHP) has not been proposed. In this paper, we present the above scheme using advantage of the ‘k-plus’ problem and give a detailed analysis of the same. Due to a single pairing computation in verification phase, the new scheme is more efficient in computational and timing sense than other available schemes. Moreover, the proposed scheme fulfills all the security requirements of a safe proxy signature.

Before letter frequency analysis and the formation of the black chambers, the basic monoalphabetic substitution ciphers were practically unbreakable and sufficient for common use. But as encryption became used more widely, the need to break these cryptosystems became inevitable. With the development of letter frequency analysis and advancement of black chambers, each message encrypted with a type of monoalphabetic substitution was easily broken. As soon as a commonly used monoalphabetic substitution cipher was broken, the word spread and that particular cryptosystem was useless. The affine cipher is simply a special case of the more general monoalphabetic substitution cipher. In this paper, we study the affine cipher and generalized affine cipher.

Recently, an ultra light weight protocol for RFID tags has been published. The advantage of this protocol was its low computation cost, but it fails in its security objectives, being vulnerable to several important attacks such as traceability, full disclosure, cloning and desynchronization. In this research, that protocol was enhanced and a new Ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol with mutual authentication was proposed, while keeping the computation cost low. The proposed protocol requires only simple bit-wise operations and can resist various attacks which the previous one could not.

Authentication protocols are used to ensure the identity of a participant in a distributed environment. Since designing authentication protocols is an error prone process, formal verification techniques are used to verify the correctness of authentication protocols. In this paper, we develop simple but rigorous logic-based tests for the analysis of authentication protocols. In particular, we extend the framework of Distributed Temporal Protocol Logic (DTPL), and provide authentication tests at a higher level of abstraction. These tests can be easily applied on a variety of authentication protocols, yet they are rigorous enough to capture full capabilities of a typical Dolev-Yao intruder.

Since mobile devices have become an inseparable part of peoples’ lives, gathering user profiles from mobile devices can provide a better grasp of the device ownership. Mobile user profiling is done by focusing on information that can be used to authenticate the real owner of a device. A novel human-machine authentication mechanism is proposed. This objective is achieved via profiling of the user through his or her interaction with a virtual pet that resides on the mobile device to provide robust, intelligent, continuous and transparent authentication of the user. Virtual pets that reside in devices can turn phones into ‘sentient beings’ and are able to analyse the users’ behaviour through constant interaction with them.

Body sensor network (BSN) is a network with sensors attached on different parts of human body to collect various vital signs for the purpose of healthcare monitoring. In order to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of these data fused at BSN coordinator which is a low power and computing mobile device, i.e., smartphone, Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is promising. This is because ABE allows fine-grained sharing of encrypted data. ABE provides differential access rights arrangement for a set of users such as healthcare providers and allows flexibility in designating the access rights of individual users over the encrypted data. In this paper, we study and analyze the suitability of Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption scheme (KP-ABE) and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption scheme (CP-ABE) on BSN. Then we conclude that Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE) is preferable for designing a lightweight ABE for BSN to be implemented in low power and computing devices to fulfill all the security requirements.

Packet length covert channels are the methods to indirect conceal a secret message in the packet. A consideration on the distribution of the packet length in the network is necessary to assure the normal distribution of the packet. An analysis on standard DNS queries within a campus network showed that the distribution range of the packet is between 24 to 63 bytes of length. Hitherto, previous packet length covert channel produce abnormal packet length when the range of the packet length is less than 40. Therefore, this problem motivated the study to propose a novel hidden method based on indirect reference to DNS query to conceal the secret message. The proposed method was experimented against three DNS query sample. The result showed the propose method was within the normal packet length distribution. The contribution of this study was a normal distribution of packet length within a constrain of minima length distribution.

Proxy re-encryption is a useful concept and many proxy re-encryption schemes have been proposed in the asymmetric encryption setting. In the asymmetric encryption setting, proxy re-encryption can be beautifully implemented because many operations are available to directly transform a cipher to another cipher without the proxy needs to access the plaintexts. However, in many situations, for a better performance, the data is encrypted using symmetric ciphers. Most symmetric ciphers do not support proxy cryptography because of malleability (that is needed to implement the proxy re-encryption) is not a desired property in a secure encryption scheme. In this paper, we suggest an idea to implement a pure proxy re-encryption for the symmetric ciphers by first transforming the plaintext into a random sequence of blocks using an All or nothing transform (AONT). We show an example of the proxy re-encryption scheme using a weak encryption (i.e. simple permutation) that has a simple conversion function to convert a permutation to another. The encryption scheme exploits three characteristics of an AONT transformation: (1) the output of an AONT is a pseudorandom, (2) the output of an AONT cannot be transformed back if any parts is missing, and (3) the output of an AONT cannot be transformed back without having all blocks with correct position. We show security argument of the proposed scheme and its performance evaluation.

Internet is based on best effort and end to end design principles. Although they are the reasons for the Internet’s high efficiency and popularity, they also resulted in many inherent security problems such as the Bandwidth Attacks. There are two main characteristics of bandwidth attack. First, during an attack the incoming traffic rate is much higher than the outgoing traffic rate. Second, the proportion of protocol exploited by the attacker is higher as compare to other protocols in the traffic. Based on these two characteristics, a UDP bandwidth attack detection system based on Protocol Share Based Traffic Rate Analysis (PSBTRA) is proposed. Experiments on real world network shows that this approach can effectively detect UDP bandwidth attacks.

The rapid growth of the information technology, data hiding in audio is an important role of digital media protection and secret communication. Thus, a technique of robust data embedding in the modified discrete cosine transform domain (MDCT) of cover speech signal is presented to solve the issues of digital audio steganography application. The major contribution of the proposed scheme is introduced Probabilistic Global Search Lausanne Algorithm (PGSL) as the optimization-based problem transformation method, to search the best positions in the first selected frames of MDCT Domain on cover speech samples. The covert data are embedded into the positions of lowest bit error rate value to guarantee perfect inaudibility and enhance imperceptible as well as robustness between cover and stego audio. Speech signals from TIMIT Dataset of 452 Male and Female speakers were served to the host cover audio data. The distortion between cover and stego audio is evaluated with Informal Listening Test and Spectrogram. Results of data hiding using TIMIT clean utterance showed that the distortions in the stego audio is inaudible and imperceptible from the original cover speech even with high payload in the Spectrogram and Informal Listening Test. The proposed system defined to apply the signal manipulation attacks as resampling and noise addition to increase in the robustness of data embedding scheme. Objective measurement of stego audio quality degradation by data embedding was performed by PSNR value.

Privacy has always been a crucial element in the management of personal medical information. It warrants a comprehensive model during the designing stage of the management system in order to conserve the security of the information. One of the key success factors in protecting the privacy of information is measured by the ability of the users in controlling the flow of the information in the system. This research concentrates on the integrated models of privacy protection for health information environment which can be applied as guidance while designing a secured electronic medical record for health information system (HIS). The system’s effectiveness that uses this integrated model is suggested to be evaluated with the user-centred evaluation model (UPEM). This privacy protection model outlined four important components which were based on the findings from the interviews conducted namely legislation, ethic, technology and culture.

Watermarking using genetic algorithm for the optimization of the tread-off between the watermarking requirements has attracted the attention of researchers; amongst the watermarking requirements, the robustness is an important one. Watermarking embedded in frequency domain using DWT or DCT can affect the robustness of watermarking, this paper studies the effect of embedding domain on the robustness in genetic watermarking. Results of attacks based on numerical correlation (NC) is analyzed through the paper sections, the DWT results showed more robustness than DCT in watermarking based on GA.

A space specified token may be used in future for the purpose of authentication in all aspects. Digital information to be stored in space specified token should be of minimized size. Such minimization of the digital data is done and stored using watermarking procedure as proposed for secure purpose. For higher security the key to perform watermarking and Encoding/ Decoding is obtained from a Biometric trait as an added feature

Internet users’ platform move toward smart mobile devices like smartphones and tablet PCs, so the user authentication and access control for the mobile users are strongly required to support information securities. Mobile devices have weak points like low computing power, limited power, and restricted interfaces compared with the PC. So, these characteristics of mobile devices require light-weight and stable user authentication methods. This paper proposes user authentication LSAM (Lightweight & Stable Authentication Method) applicable to smart mobile devices (representatively Smartphone). LSAM gives a way to identify the users through random matrix displayed on smart mobile devices. Authentication Token used in LSAM is featured with variations on values of the matrix, so it is safe to replay attack and sniffing attack. LSAM does not need additional devices; it is just operated as the interface software on the mobile smartphone. We will show the evaluation criteria of the mainly used hacking techniques like the Challenger Variability, Replay Attack, Brute-force Attack, MITM (Man–In-The-Middle Attack) and measured the degree of defenses of our proposed authentication algorithm to these attacks.

Spam mails distributed from botnets waste user time and consume resources such as space and network bandwidth. Many works have contribution in spam detection techniques. Mostly, these spam filtering and detection mechanisms are designed to protect the recipients. They do not stop spam spreading out actually. To block the spreading of spam, we design two modules to verify mail sender: Sender Verification (SV) Module and Sender Location Verification (SLV) Module. The first one runs on Mail Submission Agent. It verifies the sender account. The later one runs on Mail Transfer Agent. It verifies spam or ham by considering the sending country location. Since only the mail header is verified in both modules, our approach works well with both text-based spam and other kinds of image spam. Thus, these two separated modules are able to block the spam fast and effectively.

Use case diagrams is a popular early stage modeling notation for functional requirements, and misuse cases have similarly been explored for security and safety threats and requirements implied by these. One key goal of use case diagrams is simplicity, which make it possible to involve many types of stakeholders. Hence one wants to avoid including too much information in these diagrams. One type of information typically not included relates to the usage context, for instance what kind of equipment to be used to perform the use case. However, for multi-channel information systems, this is often highly relevant, and may in some cases make the diagrams clearer to stakeholders rather than more obscure, as long as the information is presented in a visually intuitive manner. This paper proposes some adapted notations to indicate what equipment is applied in use and misuse case diagrams.

An ideal secure information system is not only to keep enough security strength of all components of a target system, but also to ensure all tasks in software life cycle process are done appropriately. Under the consideration, information security engineering environments that integrate various tools to support the tasks are proposed. On the other hand, it is difficult to define generally accepted security strength and its evaluation criteria. ISO information security standards, which regulate various information security related contents are expected, can be used as criteria for the purpose, and should be provided as databases to be used from the tools. However, because standards are always changed and their contents are different from each others, it is difficult to design and manage the databases. This paper proposes a systematic management for information security engineering environments that ensure safety in software life cycle based on the standards.

The rationale of this study was to respond to the popular belief that public sector organizations are less efficient and less effective regardless of being equipped with IT investments. The general purpose was to assess the factors which influence decisions on IT investments. While questionnaires were used to collect data from 21 sampled organizations, ‘judgmental sampling’ method was used in determining the sample size and the ‘stated preference’ method was used to evaluate the findings. The results of analysis showed that there are some degree of influence from both Business cases and IT business value. On the other hand, alignment was found to have no influence at all. Hence, the study recommends adopting or enhancing use of business cases, IT evaluation for alignment as well as IT governance for business value in public sectors to justify significant capital expenditures.

The communication paradigm in the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) relies on in network processing i.e. on-the-fly pre-processing of the data sensed by the sensors, on its way to the base station. However, the fallout of in-network processing is that the multihop communication used in WSNs has to be data-centric, unlike the route-centric communication used in conventional networks. This requires that the intermediate nodes have access to the data that jeopardizes the stringent end-to-end security requirements of typical security-critical applications. An approach that promises the combination of end-to-end security and in-network aggregation is Concealed Data Aggregation. In this paper, we discuss our attempts at investigating the feasibility of applying the provably secure homomorphic encryption schemes to the WSNs, within the constraints permissible and without sacrificing any security. Based on our empirical evaluation centered around defined performance metrics, we demonstrate that it is feasible to employ the proposed approach for WSNs.

The robustness of a cryptographic system substantially depends on its underlying elements. Boolean functions are the most frequently used elements in various cryptographic systems, be it block ciphers, stream ciphers and hash functions. However, constructing Boolean functions satisfying all fundamental cryptographic properties are not trivial. We study the cryptographic properties of Boolean functions of biological system namely one-dimensional Cellular Automata (CA) and show that some of its Boolean functions satisfy all mentioned properties on levels very close to optimal and therefore can be recommended as cryptographically strong Boolean function.

We are living in an age where security of digital information like digital images is becoming more important in many aspects and the tranmission of digital images is increasing over the internal and international computer networks. The protection of digital images from unauthorized access is the main purpose of this paper.

This paper introduced an approach to encrypt a digital image in frequency domain through DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and one dimenssional cellular automata. It is based on encryption of some quantified DCT coefficient in high frequencies. We applied our proposed model on one hundred numbers of JPEG grayscale images of size 800 × 800. The experimental results have indicated the robustness of our algorithm.

E-commerce applications have evolved from web-based selling via the Internet to selling in a P2P manner. P2P can enhance e-commerce applications to create lower cost systems compared to conventional client-server systems. However, P2P e-commerce applications will only be acceptable to users if they can provide robust, secure and equitable services to the peers involved during commercial transactions. In this paper, we propose use of a P2P shared store for trust information to support community based e-commerce applications. Nowadays, it can be economical and cheap to implement either in the cloud or in a distributed manner over the platforms of participating peers. Usage of a cheap and secure community store for trust data provides an effective alternative to conventional trusted third party support services for e-commerce transactions.

In reconfigurable computing systems, dynamically reconfigurable FPGA are evolving rapidly, due to their flexibility and high performance. The communication cost is one of important factors in dynamically reconfigurable FPGA. This paper proposes a new temporal partitioning algorithm for the dynamically reconfigurable FPGA to reduce communication cost between partitions. To experimentally verify the proposed temporal partitioning algorithm, we apply two benchmarks. They include discrete cosine transform (DCT) 4×4 and DCT 16×16.

Symbolic music computing has been around since early AI-music activities. Although interest in this area has declined in the past decades, recently, attempts to create a standard representation for music applications over the internet such as MusicXML and IEEE P1599 have revitalised interests in symbolic music computing. The ability to discuss music using traditional terms musicians would use in their conversation is useful. A knowledge base system that performs inferences in the same abstraction level as a human does would be able to display a clear and clean reasoning process to the human counterpart. This is very useful, particularly from the perspective of knowledge exploitation and knowledge maintenance. In this report, formalised symbolic reasoning of interval spellings and chord spellings are presented. We have shown a formal implementation of symbolic music reasoning using the Z notation. Unambiguous interval spellings and chord spellings are implemented.

The given work presents numerical algorithm to solve the model of multi-level hollow-fiber membrane systems and suggests finite-difference scheme for three configurations of the flow: co-flow, counter flow and cross flow. The suggested algorithm is easily programmed and efficient. Identification of parameters of mathematical model of gas separation process has been carried out as well. It is necessary to compare mathematical description with real technological process. With this aim quantative information in the form of model parameters has been introduced and block-scheme of parameters identification of mathematical model of gas separation has been composed.

The proposed requirement change propagation

(

ReChaP

)

approach promotes significant supports in simplifying the tedious tasks of requirement change propagation to other software artefacts during software evolution. One of the ReChaP’s pillars is the process model, which provides systematic guidelines to simplify the phenomenally time consuming and expensive efforts of the requirement change propagation process. This paper specifically reports on the preliminary results and the observation analysis for the conducted synthetic experiment in academic settings. The experiment’s goal is to evaluate the usability quality factor of the process model in terms of five main criteria; efficiency, effectiveness, learnability, satisfaction and usefulness. Our initial findings observe that the proposed ReChaP process model is soundly demonstrated as sufficiently usable, practical enough, and meantime has ideally achieved reasonable percentages for the five comprehensive criteria of the measured usability factor.

Service-based interactions have become common over the past few years. Nowadays, their applications are visible in several forms including e-commerce, Virtual Organizations, Grid, and Cloud Computing. Proliferation of services leads to the creation of new value-added services composed of several sub-services in a pre-specified manner, known as service workflows. One important challenge is how to ensure security from the viewpoints of both workflow owners and participating services; each of which possesses its own requirements. Although there are a number of proposals regarding this, the comprehensive trust and security requirements are still immature. The intuition to develop a solution generic to service workflows is that workflow and trust characteristics must be incorporated. This article studies on the relationship of workflow characteristics with respect to trust, and then trust and security requirements for service collaborations are synthesized.

This paper presents the motivations and methods to generate the machine control sound for the virtual environments. The factors of machine control sound are investigated to handle the sound efficiently in the virtual systems and some of the controllable factors are implemented. First, we propose a new sound file format to find or generate the proper sound with the sound factors in the virtual systems that cause various kind of events and sounds. Then, we apply the proposed sound generating technique to the virtual system for a reality model, especially focused on the MP player.

The increasing use and reliance on Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems (DERTS) demand the enhancement of their capabilities. This along with the unique characteristics of DERTS, such as resource constraints, make the design and development more complex. State-of-the-art software development methods like Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and Model-Driven Development can be used to cope with these complexities. However, both of the methods require the system to be designed at a higher level of abstraction and the details are provided at lower levels. Such design models for DERTS with different levels of abstractions are still currently unavailable. This paper presents four basic design models representing different levels of abstraction, to be used in Service-Oriented DERTS design. The proposed models were applied in the Home Automation domain for verification purposes. This level-by-level modelling does not only simplify the design process, but can also be used as part of a Service-Oriented modelling framework for DERTS. Furthermore, these design models can support service composition during Service-Oriented DERTS development. The service composition modelling would be beneficial for CASE tools development in supporting designers working at different levels of abstraction.

A proposal for modelling the human resource planning among projects is presented in the paper. The situation when a set of projects is expected to be accomplished in the organization is considered. The presented model provides the answer whether within available human resources with given competencies it is possible to accomplish a set of projects. Moreover the model is able to propose optimized staffing solution given objective function, e.g. maximizing the increase of competencies of the staff. Modelling is based on quantitative description of tasks and employees. The paper presents a case study of model utilization. The preliminary studies on the proposed model allow to conclude that the it reflects the nature of staffing process well.

Previous research has identified factors and attributes for static quality model. This research aims to construct a dynamic and intelligent software quality model for effective software product assessment. Previous model of software quality and known as PQF model consists of two main quality attributes: the behavioural and the human aspect. These two components of quality produce a balance model between technical requirement and human factor. The proposed dynamic intelligent model of PQF (i-PQF) should capable to identify and recommend to the environment if there is any new attribute to be included in the model. This is done by integrating artificial intelligence technique and methods to produce a complete algorithm for assessing software product using intelligent model. It will be tested using a prototype. The new model is useful for organization in assessment of software products as well as to integrate in future researches as a quality benchmark.

Event-B is a formalism that is used in modeling and proving the consistency of complex systems. The test suite generation methods have been recently introduced as research theme. In this paper, the multi-objective test suite optimization problem is introduced for Event-B testing. However, there exist many optimization criteria in real-life testing problems. Given that, six specifically multi-objective test suite optimization problems are formulated. Two modern Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms are used for solving them: NSGA-II [6] and SPEA-2 [18]. The experiments have been conducted using five test suites generated from two industrial inspired Event-B models (five different machines).

Software cost estimation process is frequently debated by software development community for decades. In order to estimate the cost, numerous methods can be used such as an expert judgment, algorithmic model or parametric, top-down approach, price-to-win, bottom-up and many more. Questionnaire and literature survey were carried out in this study. The result from the survey shows that the expert judgment method, which is based on experience and past estimation histories, is commonly use to estimate cost in software development project while the result from the literature shows that COCOMO II provides accurate result because many variables are being considered including the reuse of parameter besides the expert judgment. As a conclusion, expert judgment and algorithmic model are widely used as methods in software cost estimation process and the process was done manually. The integration of these two methods helps in producing accurate result for cost estimation process.

Web service technology has been successful in making business applications available through the internet to a large number of users. But because some non-functional attributes such as logging, security, transaction, etc. are scattered in web services, adaptation, composition and reusability of web service are affected. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) helps us solve this problem of web services. Although AOP provides a good way to modularize concerns not designed to collaborate, conflicts may occur when multiple aspects are combined. When multiple aspects are applied to an application at a time, unexpected results can be produced because of aspect interference. Therefore, in this paper we propose a robust aspect composition in web service using XML (Extensible Markup Language). This paper focuses on the representation and composition of aspects at the shared join points.

Recently the general-purpose programming languages community has encountered the need for more powerful and more abstract expressions, comparable to query languages. Current proposals, however, still suffer from some aspects of impedance mismatch between programming and query languages. This paper describes a prototype of a Java extension with the user-friendly object-oriented query language SBQL. The resulting functionality is partially inspired by the LINQ language available in the Microsoft .NET framework. The presented solution, although being a prototype, offers a promising performance of query evaluation. We argue that compared to LINQ, several advantages of this can be observed, e.g. with respect to universality, and a less verbose, syntax, familiar to the query language community. Moreover, it offers several unique features including query translation into a native Java code, universal sorting and transitive closure operators, and the support for generic collections. The resulting language is applicable to various data processing problems and provides a starting point for several interesting research areas. The paper presents the language design, Java integration issues, performance considerations and comparison with LINQ.

Persistent Computing Systems (PCSs) were proposed as a new generation reactive systems that are dependable and dynamically adaptive. They provide services to their users anytime and anywhere during system maintenance, upgrade, reconfiguration and even during various attacks. PCSs have demand not only for distributed systems but also centralized systems. To implement PCSs, Soft System Bus (SSB) based systems were proposed. Although a design and implementation method of SSB-based systems exists for distributed PCSs, any requirement analysis, design, and implementation method of SSB-based centralized PCSs (SSB-based CPCSs) have not been addressed yet. This paper presents requirement analysis of SSB-based CPCS, proposes its design, and investigates available techniques to realize SSB-based CPCS.