bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Information Security Management
Authors: Rahman Mohammad Mahfuzur , Rezaul Karim Mohammed
Published: April 2012

The expansion of electronic commerce (E-commerce) has become an increasing reality due to Internet’s rapid growth during the last few years. E-commerce is growing at an exceptional rate with more organizations offering their goods and services online every day. Importantly, this growth is being matched by the number of people gaining access to the Internet in a variety of ways. E-commerce offers opportunities as well as threats. Information is crucial for any organization, especially in the e-market. The lack of an effective and trusted payment system that can be used in combination with online shopping has been limiting factor in the growth of Internet sales. Consumers are hesitant to provide personal information, including credit card details, over the Internet because of high perception of risk and concerns with privacy. Establishment of Information Security System can minimize the threats and risks. Technology can play an important role in intensifying trust in the information society and securing consumer rights. E-commerce will not be successful without protecting the consumers’ rights, especially in the area of information security. The research highlights the relevant theories of information security within the e-commerce sectors, including identifying and investigating the problems.
Assessing the Security of Software Configurations
Authors: Neto Afonso Araújo , Vieira Marco
Published: April 2012

Security evaluation is a complex problem. As more and more software systems become available, more diversity and alternatives can be found to accomplish the same tasks. However, there is still a lack of a standard approach that can be used to choose among the available alternatives or evaluate their configuration security. In this chapter, the authors present a methodology to devise security appraisals, which is based on the collection of widespread security knowledge for a specific domain. They demonstrate their methodology by devising two specific appraisals for the domain of transactional systems. The first one can be used to evaluate and assess the configuration of an already deployed database installation, while the target of the second one is to compare the capability of specific database brands concerning security aspects. The authors also present a real demonstration of both appraisals in real scenarios.
Distributed Key Management Scheme Based on CL-PKC in P2P Networks
Authors: Li Zhongwen , Xu Zhibin , Liang Chen
Published: April 2012

P2P networks have characteristics of decentralization, autonomy, and dynamicity. The security problems caused by these characteristics have seriously affected further development of P2P networks. The authors did research on CL-PKC key management schemes. (1) They propose a certificateless-based key distribution scheme with multiple trusted centers that fits the characteristics of P2P networks, and analyzed its security. (2) They also propose an improved interactive key agreement protocol across multiple domains, and then compare it with some existing key agreement protocol from aspects of security and computational efficiency. (3) The authors have implemented the proposed key management schemes, then verified their correctness and tested their computational efficiency. Combined with master key share management and key management of nodes, this system constructed a complete certificateless-based key management model, which is an exploration to solve security problems in P2P networks.
Creating and Applying Security Goal Indicator Trees in an Industrial Environment
Authors: Bagnato Alessandra , Raiteri Fabio , Jung Christian , Elberzhager Frank
Published: April 2012

Security inspections are increasingly important for bringing security-relevant aspects into software systems, particularly during the early stages of development. Nowadays, such inspections often do not focus specifically on security. With regard to security, the well-known and approved benefits of inspections are not exploited to their full potential. This book chapter focuses on the Security Goal Indicator Tree application for eliminating existing shortcomings, the training that led to their creation in an industrial project environment, their usage, and their reuse by a team in industry. SGITs are a new approach for modeling and checking security-relevant aspects throughout the entire software development lifecycle. This book chapter describes the modeling of such security goal based trees as part of requirements engineering using the GOAT tool dedicated plug-in and the retrieval of these models during the various phases of the software development lifecycle in a project by means of Software Vulnerability Repository Services (SHIELDS, Software Vulnerability Repository Services) created in the European project SHIELDS (SHIELDS, SHIELDS - Detecting known security vulnerabilities from within design and development tools).
Can Formal Methods Really Help
Authors: Weldemariam Komminist , Villafiorita Adolfo
Published: April 2012

In this chapter, first the authors discuss the current trends in the usage of formal techniques in the development of e-voting systems. They then present their experiences on their usage to specify and verify the behaviors of one of the currently deployed e-voting systems, using formal techniques and verification against a subset of critical security properties that the system should meet. The authors also specify attacks that have been shown to successfully compromise the system. The attack information is used to extend the original specification of the system and derive what the authors call the extended model. This work is a step towards fostering open specification and the (partial) verification of a voting machine. The specification and verification was intended as a learning process where formal techniques were used to improve the current development of e-voting systems.
Countering Spam Robots
Authors: Raj Aditya , Pahwa Tushar , Jain Ashish
Published: April 2012

CAPTCHAs are employed on websites to differentiate between human users and bot programs that indulge in spamming and other fraudulent activities. With the advent and advancement of sophisticated computer programs to break CAPTCHAs, it has become imperative to continuously evolve the CAPTCHA schemes in order to keep the Internet network and website free of congestion and spam-bots. In light of these developments concerning information security, in this chapter, the authors introduce the novel concept of Scrambled CAPTCHA, which is a combination of OCR-based and Picture CAPTCHAs and exploits an inherent characteristic of human vision and perception. They also introduce Hindi CAPTCHA, developed in Hindi language (Devanagari script). This CAPTCHA will typically address spamming on Indian websites. It also contributes to the digitalization of books written in this script. The authors also discuss the features and security aspects of these schemes in detail, which, to the best their knowledge, had not been implemented earlier.
On the Notion of Collective Intelligence
Authors: Kapetanios Epaminondas
Published: April 2012

In this article, the author explores the notion of Collective Intelligence (CI) as an emerging computing paradigm. The article is meant to provide a historical and contextual view of CI through the lenses of as many related disciplines as possible (biology, sociology, natural and environmental sciences, physics) in conjunction with the computer science point of view. During this explorative journey, the article also aims at pinpointing the current strengths and weaknesses of CI-related computational and system engineering design and implementation methodologies of CI-based systems. A non-exhaustive list of case studies set up the stage for CI applications as well as challenging research questions. These can be particularly directed towards the Social Web, as a very prominent example of synergistic interactions of a group of people with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds and its potential to become a platform for the emergence of truly CI-based systems.
Analyzing Community Deliberation and Achieving Consensual Knowledge in SAM
Authors: Maleewong Krissada , Anutariya Chutiporn , Wuwongse Vilas
Published: April 2012

This paper presents a novel approach to harnessing collective intelligence that will allow a community to create, collaborate, and share knowledge based on the Semantic Argumentation Model (SAM). It encourages multiple users to express ideas or positions on complex issues, and to submit arguments that support or oppose the ideas of the other members. In principle, ideas considered possible solutions to an issue are those that contain high content quality and achieve great community agreement. Therefore, the authors define several useful measures to analyze the deliberation for determining the content quality, community preference, and achieving quality-assured consensual knowledge. Finally, a web-based prototype system founded on the proposed approach is developed and made available for public use. A preliminary study on the system usability shows that the system is practical and can enhance the collaborative knowledge creation and sharing process.
An Autonomous Agent Approach to Query Optimization in Stream Grids
Authors: Mukherjee Saikat , Srinivasa Srinath , Ramamritham Krithi
Published: April 2012

Stream grids are wide-area grid computing environments that are fed by a set of stream data sources, and Queries arrive at the grid from users and applications external to the system. The kind of queries considered in this work is long-running continuous (LRC) queries, which are neither short-lived nor infinitely long lived. The queries are “open” from the grid perspective as the grid cannot control or predict the arrival of a query with time, location, required data and query revocations. Query optimization in such an environment has two major challenges, i.e., optimizing in a multi-query environment and continuous optimization, due to new query arrivals and revocations. As generating a globally optimal query plan is an intractable problem, this work explores the idea of emergent optimization where globally optimal query plans emerge as a result of local autonomous decisions taken by the grid nodes. Drawing concepts from evolutionary game theory, grid nodes are modeled as autonomous agents that seek to maximize a self-interest function using one of a set of different strategies. Grid nodes change strategies in response to variations in query arrival and revocation patterns, which is also autonomously decided by each grid node.
Software Engineering Security Based on Business Process Modeling
Authors: Barjis Joseph
Published: April 2012

Security requirements must be tackled early in software design and embedded in corresponding business process models. As a blueprint for software design, business process models complemented with security requirements will prevent many security breaches. To accomplish secure business process modeling, the underlying method must adhere to certain capabilities and capture actions, actor roles, and interactions. The resultant models should lend themselves to automatic analysis (simulation) to ensure captured security requirements are correctly aligned with the process flow. Thus, the tradeoff between the level of security and business performance can be studied before actual software design. Since unauthorized actions cause security breaches, the software the system’s social setting could be a cradle for defining security requirements. Security requirements can be identified based on the roles, authorities, and obligations of the social actors using the system. This paper introduces a method for security embedded business process modeling. The proposed method draws on two well-tested theoretical foundations—enterprise ontology and organizational semiotics.
Elastic Modulus of Human Dental Enamel from Different Methods
Authors: Raue Lars , Klein Helmut , Hartmann Christiane
Published: April 2012

Knowing the elastic modulus of human dental enamel is of high importance since dental filling materials should posses equal mechanical properties as enamel itself. If this demand is not fulfilled, the interaction between filling and enamel is not equivalent, so that healthy enamel could be simply abrased during chewing. Hence it is astonishing that the literature shows a big variety of suggestions for the elastic modulus. This paper will give a short overview about some existing results (maybe not all) and tries to compare and evaluate them. The experiments have been done too, trying to make it more easy for the experienced reader to make up his own mind about the elastic modulus of human dental enamel.
Model Based Monitoring and Controlling for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Authors: Shao Jin , Wang Qianxiang , Mei Hong
Published: April 2012

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a typical cloud service paradigm that allows PaaS consumers to deploy and manage applications (usually services to SaaS consumers). To ensure the quality of services to both PaaS consumers and SaaS consumers, PaaS must be equipped with enough monitoring and controlling ability to make runtime adjustment actions. Although most of the components in PaaS have provided their own management interface, it is hard to perform adjustment actions based on raw runtime data collected from these low level management interfaces due to the diversity and dynamics of components in PaaS. This paper proposes a model based monitoring and controlling approach for PaaS. The proposed approach masks the underlying heterogeneity of components in PaaS and presents a high level model for monitoring and controlling. The model is instantiated automatically based on pre-defined meta-model, which effectively reduces the development efforts. A monitoring and controlling framework based on this approach is designed and implemented in a practical PaaS, which shows the feasibility of the proposed approach.
Business Integration as a Service
Authors: Chang Victor , Walters Robert John , Wills Gary
Published: April 2012

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaS) which enables connections between services operating in the Cloud. BIaS integrates different services and business activities to achieve a streamline process. The authors illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in two case studies at the University of Southampton and Vodafone/Apple. The University of Southampton case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. The Vodafone/Apple case study illustrates statistical analysis and 3D Visualisation of expected revenue and associated risk. These two cases confirm the benefits of BIaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management of University of Southampton and potential and current investors for Vodafone/Apple.
Analysis for REPERA
Authors: Lai Longbin , Shen Linfeng , Zheng Yanfei , Chen Kefei , Zhang Jing
Published: April 2012

Distributed systems, especially those providing cloud services, endeavor to construct sufficiently reliable storage in order to attract more customers. Generally, pure replication and erasure code are widely adopted in distributed systems to guarantee reliable data storage, yet both of them contain some deficiencies. Pure replication consumes too much extra storage and bandwidth, while erasure code seems not so high-efficiency and only suitable for read-only context. The authors proposed REPERA as a hybrid mechanism combining pure replication and erasure code to leverage their advantages and mitigate their shortages. This paper qualitatively compares fault-resilient distributed architectures built with pure replication, erasure code and REPERA. The authors show that systems employing REPERA share with erasure-resilient systems a higher availability and more durable storage with similar space and bandwidth consumption when compared with replicated systems. The authors show that systems employing REPERA, on one hand, obtain higher availability while comparing to erasure-resilient systems, on the other hand, benefit from more durable storage while comparing to replicated systems. Furthermore, since REPERA was developed under the open platform, REPERA, the authors prepare an experiment to evaluate the performance of REPERA by comparing with the original system.
Defect Detection Approach Based on Combination of Histogram Segmentation and Probabilistic Estimation Technique
Authors: Ershad Shervan Fekri
Published: April 2012

Defect Detection is a problem that has received much attention from image processing scientists. If defect detection is done correctly and accurately, it can be used in visual inspection systems. Consequently, many different methods have been proposed to solve this problem. Most of these methods have computation complexity and they do not guarantee for accurate results in every application. In this article an approach is proposed for defect detection based on a main box included two stages. In the first stage the image is divided into the two groups of pixels based on histogram segmentation and in the second stage the defects in defected group are highlighted based on Probability estimation algorithm by using a train stage. This approach by using a train set, guarantees the accurate result for near all of the applications of defect detection. In result part to prove the quality of proposed approach, the algorithm is applied on stone images to detect the porosity.
Using Fuzzy Goal Programming Technique to Solve Multiobjective Chance Constrained Programming Problems in a Fuzzy Environment
Authors: Biswas Animesh , Modak Nilkanta
Published: April 2012

In this paper a fuzzy goal programming technique is presented to solve multiobjective decision making problems in a probabilistic decision making environment where the right sided parameters associated with the system constraints are exponentially distributed fuzzy random variables. In model formulation of the problem, the fuzzy chance constrained programming problem is converted into a fuzzy programming problem by using general chance constrained methodology. Then by realizing the fuzzy nature of the parameters associated with the system constraints, the problem is decomposed by considering the tolerance ranges of the parameters. The tolerance membership functions of each of the individual objectives are defined in isolation to measure the degree of achievements of the goal levels of the objectives. Then a fuzzy goal programming model is developed to achieve the highest degree of each of the defined membership functions to the extent possible. In the solution process the minsum fuzzy goal programming technique is used to find the most satisfactory decision in the decision making environment. An example is solved to illustrate the proposed methodology and the achieved solution is compared with the solution of another existing technique.
A License Revocation Protocol Supporting Digital License Reselling in a Consumer-to-Consumer Model
Authors: Gaber Tarek , Zhang Ning
Published: April 2012

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an important technology supporting e-commerce systems and online marketing, enabling content owners and market intermediaries to securely manage and deliver digital content. In addition, P2P (peer-to-peer) networks play a pro-motive role in e-commerce. However, it facilitates illegal access to copyrighted media which may cause a violation of content owners’ rights. P2P could support legal digital content transfer—reselling digital content. One peer (a reseller) could use P2P technology to send a digital content and its license to another peer (a buyer). A reseller could continue to resell it many times, causing content owners to lose revenue. This paper presents a License Revocation Protocol (LRP) to support reselling of a digital license. This LRP protocol enables a license issuer, representing a content owner, to confirm that once a reseller has resold his license, the reseller cannot continue to use the license. With LRP protocol, a reseller does not get the license payment until he revokes his resold license. The LRP protocol does not make use of any additional trusted hardware device, thus making the protocol more cost-effective.
Applying Personalized Recommendation for Social Network Marketing
Authors: Esmaeili Leila , Nasiri Ramin , Minaei-Bidgoli Behrouz
Published: April 2012

The competition among manufacturers and service providing companies as well as the widespread presence of electronic processes has introduced new business models that need special e-Marketing. Social network marketing is one of the most recent types of marketing. Today, due to their flexibility and ease of use, social networks have fallen in the center of attention for users of various age groups. The variety of online social network groups, some of which are created with commercial goals, has made users uncertain and skeptical; on the other hand, in today’s competitive market, companies are seeking their potential and actual customers. To solve this problem, this paper introduced a group recommender system which, using data mining techniques and information theory, offers customized recommendations based on user preferences. Supposing that users in each group share similar characteristics, heterogeneous members are identified and removed. Unlike other methods, in special cases where the user does not have relationships with other members or when an activity history for the user does not exist, this method could yet offer recommendations.
Scholarly Influence Research (SIR)
Authors: Takeda Hirotoshi , Truex Duane P. , Cuellar Michael J. , Vidgen Richard
Published: April 2012

Following previous research findings, this paper argues that the currently predominant method of evaluating scholar performance - publication counts in “quality” journals - is flawed due to the subjectivity inherent in the generation of the list of approved journals and absence of a definition of quality. Truex, Cuellar, and Takeda (2009) improved on this method by substituting a measurement of “influence” using the Hirsch statistics to measure ideational influence. Since the h-family statistics are a measure of productivity and the uptake of a scholar’s ideas expressed in publications, this methodology privileges the uptake of a scholar’s ideas over the venue of publication. Influence is built through other means than by having one’s papers read and cited. The interaction between scholars resulting in co-authored papers is another way to build scholarly influence. This aspect of scholarly influence, which the authors term social influence, can be assessed by Social Network Analysis (SNA) metrics that examine the nature and strength of coauthoring networks among IS Scholars. The paper demonstrates the method of assessing social influence by analysis of the social network of AMCIS scholars and compares the results of this analysis with other co-authorship networks from the ECIS and ICIS communities.
Robust Swarm Model Based on Mutual Anticipation
Authors: Gunji Yukio-Pegio , Murakami Hisashi , Niizato Takayuki , Nishiyama Yuta , Tomaru Takenori , Adamatzky Andrew
Published: April 2012

The authors propose a novel model for a swarm in which inherent noise positively contribute to generate a swarm. In the authors’ model diverse behaviors of individuals are mutually anticipated to give rise to robust collective behavior. Because a swarm is generated due to inherent perturbation, a swarm can be maintained even under highly perturbed conditions. Thus, the model reveals robust rather than stable collective behavior. The authors elaborate behavior of the model with respect to density and polarization. The authors show that mutual anticipation structure can be expressed as a fixed point with respect to a particular operation derived by equivalence relation, a collection of the fixed points can form a particular algebraic structure, called a lattice, and a swarm as a mobile network can be characterized by the structure of a lattice.
Participatory Learning in Formal Adult Education Contexts
Authors: Kucukaydin Ilhan , Cranton Patricia
Published: April 2012

Formal courses in adult education are most often housed within schools or faculties that include other disciplines such as teacher education, psychology, or training and development. Adult educators teaching these courses may feel obligated to follow the procedures and practices of the institution as well as of the programs with which they are associated. This creates a set of paradoxes and conflicts that are rarely addressed. Adult educators working in formal contexts teach about critical pedagogy and democratic practices without engaging in those practices themselves. This article advocates a participatory learning model based on the historical foundations of adult education theory and practice. The authors explore teaching as a subversive activity, hegemony, critical pedagogy, and power relations. The authors then discuss implications for practice in formal contexts.
Instructional Design for the Future of Undergraduate Journalism Education
Authors: Farmer Christopher J.
Published: April 2012

In the face of communication changes brought on by technology, journalism curriculum needs restructuring while staying true to its core values. Using an instructional design framework, and a case study, this paper proposes a journalism education based on Esser’s spheres of influence. Current practices and principles are discussed. A literature review and emerging trends shape the proposed curriculum clusters: the business and profession of journalism, communication, and community/society.
Managing Data and Information Quality in Outbound Transportation Systems
Authors: Cook Jack S. , Neely M. Pamela , Ziolkowski Michael F.
Published: April 2012

Using an interpretive case study approach, this paper describes the data quality problems in two companies: (1) a global wholesale technology distributor, referred to as (GWTD), and (2) a global exporter of hardwoods (GEH). These two interpretive cases examine the outbound transportation system of these two companies. Specifically, the issues examined are GWTD’s freight bill audit and payment process and GEH’s transportation coordination system. A data and information quality (DIQ) assessment of the freight bill audit and payment process, using a framework referred to as PGOT, demonstrates how the framework can identify improvement opportunities within any information intensive environment. Data quality problems within key processes were identified during the assessment, and their implications are described. This paper provides recommendations for DIQ best practices, and illustrates these best practices within this real world context of outbound transportation.
An Image-Space Approach for Collision Detection Between Multiple Volumes and a Surface
Authors: Carmona Rhadamés , Navarro Héctor
Published: April 2012

Collision detection has been studied for scenes containing only polygonal objects (surfaces) or only volumes. With the evolution of the graphics hardware, surfaces and volumes can be rendered together, demanding new challenges for the area of collision detection. In this order of ideas, the authors propose the first approach for volume-surface collision detection, with GPU support. A mapping from surface space to texture space is established, such as each mesh fragment has a 3D texture coordinate. The volume-surface collision is tested in the fragment shader, verifying if a surface fragment is texturized with an opaque voxel. OpenGL® occlusion query extension is used to count the number of mesh fragments colliding with the volume. Since one surface can be texturized with multiple volume textures, the authors’ approach is naturally extended to discard collision between one surface and several volumes in a single pass, with a minimum impact in the rendering time. The authors’ tests reveal that collision between thousands of volume-mesh pairs can be evaluated in one second, showing that our solution is ideal for real-time applications.
A Study on Embedding Efficiency of Matrix Encoding
Authors: Yu Lifang , Shi Yun Q. , Zhao Yao , Ni Rongrong , Cao Gang
Published: April 2012

In this paper, the authors examine embedding efficiency, which influences the most concerned performance of steganography, security, directly. Embedding efficiency is defined as the number of random message bits embedded per embedding change. Recently, matrix embedding has gained extensive attention because of its outstanding performance in boosting steganographic schemes’ embedding efficiency. Firstly, the authors evaluate embedding change not only on the number of changed coefficients but also on the varying magnitude of changed coefficients. Secondly, embedding efficiency of matrix embedding with different radixes is formularized and investigated. A conclusion is drawn that ternary matrix embedding can achieve the highest embedding efficiency.
Selecting Secure Web Applications Using Trustworthiness Benchmarking
Authors: Neto Afonso Araújo , Vieira Marco
Published: April 2012

The multiplicity of existing software and component alternatives for web applications, especially in open source communities, has boosted interest in suitable benchmarks, able to assist in the selection of candidate solutions, concerning several quality attributes. However, the huge success of performance and dependability benchmarking contrasts the small advances in security benchmarking. Traditional vulnerability/attack detection techniques can hardly be used alone to benchmark security, as security depends on hidden vulnerabilities and subtle properties of the system and its environment. A comprehensive security benchmarking process should consist of a two-step process: elimination of flawed alternatives followed by trustworthiness benchmarking. In this paper, the authors propose a trustworthiness benchmark based on the systematic collection of evidences that can be used to select one among several web applications, from a security point-of-view. They evaluate this benchmark approach by comparing its results with an evaluation conducted by a group of security experts and programmers. Results show that the proposed benchmark provides security rankings similar to those provided by human experts. In fact, although experts may take days to gather the information and rank the alternative web applications, the benchmark consistently provides similar results in a matter of few minutes.
First Experiment on Modeling Safety LifeCycle Process in Railway Systems
Authors: Hamid Brahim , Zhang Yulin (Huaxi) , Geisel Jacob , Gonzalez David
Published: April 2012

The conception and design of Resource Constrained Embedded Systems (RCES) is an inherently complex endeavor. Non-functional requirements from security and dependability are exacerbate this complexity. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a promising approach for the design of trusted systems, as it bridges the gap between design issues and implementation concerns. The purpose of process models is to document and communicate processes, as well as reuse them. Thus, processes can be better taught and executed. However, most useful metamodels are activity-oriented, and the required concepts of safety lifecycle, such as validation, cannot be easily modeled. In this paper, the authors propose a safety-oriented process metamodel that extends exiting framework to support all safety control requirements. A new safety lifecycle development processes technique has been built to ease its use in a building process of system/ software applications with safety support. As a proof of concept, the feasibility of the approach has been evaluated with an example. The example is an engineering process for building industry control systems with safety requirements for software and hardware resources. A prototype implementation of the approach is provided and applied to the example of industry control systems in the railway domain.
The Politics of Watching
Authors: Ibrahim Yasmin
Published: April 2012

What does it mean to consume and produce images non-stop in the new media economy? Images can be captured, uploaded, downloaded, and disseminated with ease in digital platforms, raising the need to understand how these acts of image capture and circulation are embedded into the familiar and everyday as well as the extraordinary where images can re-negotiate cognitive realities and re-frame notions of authenticity and truth. This new media visuality is characterised by new consumption rituals and practices which transgress the boundaries between private pleasures, personal memories, and voyeurism, on the one hand, and public communion, witnessing, and expose on the other. This paper examines the notion of visuality in digital platforms and its consequences for postmodernity in terms of subjectivity, new forms of engagement and disenfranchisement.
DIY Dying
Authors: Askanius Tina
Published: April 2012

This article examines video activism in a context where ubiquitous camera technologies and online video sharing platforms are radically changing the media landscape in which demonstrations and political activism operates. The author discusses a number of YouTube videos documenting and narrating the recurring, anti-capitalist demonstrations in Europe in the past decade. With the death of Ian Tomlinson in London during the 2009 G20 protests as an empirical starting point, the author raises questions of how video documentation of this event links up with previous protest events by juxtaposing representations of ‘the moment of death’ (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) of protesters in the past. This article suggests that these videos work as (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2) a site of commemoration in a online shrine for grieving, and (3) a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression. The author offers a re-articulation of the longstanding debate on visual evidence, action, and testimony in video activism. The results are suggestive of how vernacular commemorative genres of mourning and paying tribute to victims of police violence are fused with the online practices of bearing witness and producing visual evidence in new creative modes of using video for change.
Samizdat 2.0
Authors: Knobel Beth , Sanders Jonathan
Published: April 2012

This paper examines the case of Russian Police Major Aleksei Dymovsky, who took the unprecedented step of posting a video on the Internet in 2009 in which he exposed the corrupt practices of Russian law enforcement officials. When the video went “viral,” Dymovsky set off a national debate about corruption, but was quickly crushed by the authorities for whistleblowing. This paper uses the example of the Dymovsky affair to examine the power of streaming video as a political tool in Russia. It also examines the difference between the underground literature of the Soviet-era, samizdat, and the new-style video samizdat of the Internet era. The case of Dymovsky allows the power of the Internet in contemporary Russia to be examined and provides an opportunity to test current theories about the power of the Internet as an organizing force.
Factors Affecting Perceived Effectiveness of Local E-Government in Egypt
Authors: Abdelsalam Hisham M. , Reddick Christopher G. , ElKadi Hatem A. , Gama Sara
Published: April 2012

An important area of e-government research is how different stakeholders perceive the impact and the use of e-government systems on the different channels of governmental services. The objective of this article is to examine the perceived effectiveness of local e-government systems through a survey of directors in different Egyptian cities. The approach to accomplish this objective is to conduct exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis to determine what factors explain e-government effectiveness. This research adopts a model that uses the citizen-initiated contacts with government literature as a way for understanding e-government effectiveness. Results of an exploratory factor analysis reveal that e-government effectiveness is explained by management capacity, security and privacy, and collaboration. These factors were then analyzed through regression models that indicated that management capacity and security and privacy influenced e-government effectiveness. However, there was no evidence that collaboration had a statistically significant impact on e-government effectiveness. This paper fits into the theme of the special issue since it suggests strategies to better design e-government technology for local governments in Egypt through changes in security, privacy, and management capacity.
Determine the Workload of the Structural Implementation of E-Democracy
Authors: Mulder Bert , Hartog Martijn
Published: April 2012

ICT applications are powerful tools for increasing involvement of citizens in public policy-making, and as such a sound investment in better public policy. Citizens are inclined to participate more often if governments use digital tools. This paper describes preliminary research conducted at the municipality of The Hague (The Netherlands). The research categorized the issues using the policy cycle and styles of citizenship. Results show the treatment of issues by the city council and its committees over the course of 3 years. After correcting the numbers the findings show that a Dutch city with a population of around 450.000 inhabitants is run using approximately 300 democratic issues per annum. In the case of the broad adoption of e-democracy with full digital support for current democratic activities that would mean setting up and maintaining those 300 democratic dialogues online. The research shows that around 60% of this city’s inhabitants might be interested in participating on some of the democratic issues. This research also revealed a marked difference between the population of The Hague (the seat of government) and the general population, which might indicate that democratic participation is sensitive in its context and would have to be determined in each city again.
Modelling IT Outsourcing Process
Authors: Stanimirovic Dalibor , Vintar Mirko
Published: April 2012

Slovenian government has adopted the utilization of outsourcing as one of the main instruments to tackle national/municipal budget deficit and stimulate cost effectiveness of the public sector. While lacking experience as well as formal regulations and expertise in the field of outsourcing, public sector started straying to the growing and increasingly less justified outsourcing of public services, leading to a completely opposite effect than expected and desired. Being aware of the complex and almost unparalleled role of information technology (IT) in the modern organization, IT sourcing issues could define the main trajectory of public sector action in the future as well as articulate its development strategy and long-term goals of e-government in general. This paper focuses on in-depth analysis of the critical success factors of public sector outsourcing, while employing the international studies and primarily the results of the research from 2010, concerning outsourcing of IT-projects in Slovenian municipalities. This paper provides additional analysis of the material, procedural and other relevant aspects within the process of IT outsourcing, an overview of its potential implications and eventually presents a contextual framework and a set of applicable guidelines for quality management of IT outsourcing process and effective implementation of e-government projects in the public sector.
Multi-Attribute Evaluation of E-Government Projects
Authors: Jukic Tina , Bencina Jože , Vintar Mirko
Published: April 2012

This paper presents comparative review of existent (inter-)national approaches to e-government projects evaluation with the stress on intangible/hidden costs and public value dimension which are the two components usually missed out in traditional investments evaluation methods (e.g., net present value, cost/benefit analysis, return on investment). Based on the literature review and weaknesses identified through comparative review, the authors developed models for ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of e-government projects for Slovenian public administration. The models were developed together with representatives of Ministry of Public Administration.
Quality-of-Service Based Web Service Composition and Execution Framework
Authors: Shargabi Bassam Al , Hassan Osama Al-haj , Sabri Alia , El Sheikh Asim
Published: April 2012

Software is gradually becoming more built by composing web services to support enterprise applications integration; thus, making the process of composing web services a significant topic. The Quality of Service (QoS) in web service composition plays a crucial role. As such, it is important to guarantee, monitor, and enforce QoS and ability to handle failures during execution. Therefore, an urgent need exists for a dynamic Web Service Composition and Execution (WSCE) framework based on QoS constraints. A WSCE broker is designed to maintain the following function: intelligent web service selection decisions based on local QoS for individual web service or global QoS based selection for composed web services, execution tracking, and adaptation. A QoS certifier controlled by the UDDI registry is proposed to verify the claimed QoS attributes. The authors evaluate the composition plan along with performance time analysis.
Early Deterioration Warning for Hospitalized Patients by Mining Clinical Data
Authors: Mao Yi , Chen Yixin , Hackmann Gregory , Chen Minmin , Lu Chenyang , Kollef Marin , Bailey Thomas C.
Published: April 2012

Data mining on medical data has great potential to improve the treatment quality of hospitals and increase the survival rate of patients. Every year, 4-17% of patients undergo cardiopulmonary or respiratory arrest while in hospitals. Clinical study has found early detection and intervention to be essential for preventing clinical deterioration in patients at general hospital units. This paper proposes an early warning system (EWS) designed to identify the signs of clinical deterioration and provide early warning for serious clinical events. The EWS is designed to provide reliable early alarms for patients at the general hospital wards (GHWs). The main task of EWS is a challenging classification problem on high-dimensional stream data with irregular, multi-scale data gaps, measurement errors, outliers, and class imbalance. This paper proposes a novel data mining framework for analyzing such medical data streams. The authors assess the feasibility of the proposed EWS approach through retrospective study that includes data from 41,503 visits at a major hospital. Finally, the system is applied in a clinical trial at a major hospital and obtains promising results. This project is an example of multidisciplinary cyber-physical systems involving researchers in clinical science, data mining, and nursing staff.
A Resource Recommendation Method Based on User Taste Diffusion Model in Folksonomies
Authors: Wu Jiangning , Shi Yunfei , Guo Chonghui
Published: April 2012

Collaborative tagging has been very popular with the development of the Web 2.0, which helps users manage, share and utilize resources effectively. For various kinds of resources, the way to recommend appropriate resources to right users is the key problem in tagging system. This paper proposes a user taste diffusion model based on the tripartite hypergraph to deal with the tri-relation of user-resource-tag in folksonomies and the data sparsity problem in personalized recommendation. Through the defined tri-relation model and diffusion probability matrix, the user’s taste is diffused from itself to other users, resources and tags. When diffusion stops, the candidate resources can be identified then be ranked according to the taste values. As a result the top resources that have not been collected by the given user are selected as the final recommendations. Benefiting from the introduction of iterative diffusion mechanism, the recommendation results not only cover the resources collected by the given user’s direct neighbors but also cover the ones which are collected by his/her extended neighbors. Experimental results show that our method performs better in terms of precision and recall than other recommendation methods.
A Relation Pattern-Driven Probability Model for Related Entity Retrieval
Authors: Jiang Peng , Yang Qing , Zhang Chunxia , Niu Zhendong , Fu Hongping
Published: April 2012

As the Web is becoming the largest knowledge repository which contains various entities and their relations, the task of related entity retrieval excites interest in the field of information retrieval. This challenging task is introduced in TREC 2009 Entity Track. In this task, given an entity and the type of the target entity, a retrieval system is required to return a ranked list of related entities extracted from a given large corpus. It means that entity ranking goes beyond entity relevance and integrates the judgment of relation into the evaluation of the retrieved entities. This paper proposes a probability model using relation patterns to address the task of related entity retrieval. This model takes into account both relevance and relation between entities. The authors focus on using relation patterns to measure the level of relations matching between entities, and then to estimate the probability of occurrence of relation between two entities. In addition, the authors represent entity by its context language model and measure the relevance between two entities by a language model. Experimental results on TREC Entity Track dataset show that the proposed model significantly improves retrieval performances over baseline. The comparison with other approaches also reveals the effectiveness of the model.
Householder Algorithm Applied to Localization for Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Hssane Abderrahim Beni , Hasnaoui Moulay Lahcen , Benkirane Said , El Ouadghiri Driss , Laghdir Mohamed
Published: April 2012

Many applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) must know the position of sensor nodes in the network. That is, information from the sensors is useful only if node location information is also available. Additionally, some routing protocols use position to determine viable routes. Several localization algorithms have been proposed which can be categorized as: range-based and range-free algorithms. In this paper, the authors propose an Optimized DV-Hop (ODV-Hop), a localization range-free algorithm. The authors have used a new formula for computing the optimal hope size and used Householder algorithm for solving least square localization problem. Finally, simulation results show that the ODV-Hop achieves good location accuracy than normal DV-Hop.
LTE-A Implementation Scenarios
Authors: Jaloun Mohammed , Guennoun Zouhair
Published: April 2012

This paper covers most aspects of LTE Radio Frequency (RF) system planning; this study has been extended to cover different implementation scenario for LTE-Advance. It explains the parameters that comprise the 4G cellular RF Link Budget and the basic propagation models in order to perform a RF Planning for LTE. Cell coverage has been estimated for different spectrum band and bandwidth and different modulation and coding schemes (MCS).