ISSN: 2074-9007 (Print)
ISSN: 2074-9015 (Online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs
Website: https://www.mecs-press.org/ijitcs
Published By: MECS Press
Frequency: 6 issues per year
Number(s) Available: 132
IJITCS is committed to bridge the theory and practice of information technology and computer science. From innovative ideas to specific algorithms and full system implementations, IJITCS publishes original, peer-reviewed, and high quality articles in the areas of information technology and computer science. IJITCS is a well-indexed scholarly journal and is indispensable reading and references for people working at the cutting edge of information technology and computer science applications.
IJITCS has been abstracted or indexed by several world class databases: Scopus, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, CrossRef, Baidu Wenku, IndexCopernicus, IET Inspec, EBSCO, VINITI, JournalSeek, ULRICH's Periodicals Directory, WorldCat, Scirus, Academic Journals Database, Stanford University Libraries, Cornell University Library, UniSA Library, CNKI Scholar, J-Gate, ZDB, BASE, OhioLINK, iThenticate, Open Access Articles, Open Science Directory, National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences, The HKU Scholars Hub, etc..
IJITCS Vol. 16, No. 4, Aug. 2024
REGULAR PAPERS
Industry heavyweights like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are at the forefront of the development and provision of cutting-edge and affordable cloud computing solutions, contributing to the widespread recognition of cloud computing. Without requiring direct human control, this technology provides network services, including data storage and computational power. But security becomes apparent as a major issue, hindering widespread adoption. The present study performs an extensive investigation to investigate security concerns related to cloud computing at several infrastructure levels, including application, network, host, and data. It examines significant issues that could impact the business model for cloud computing and discuss ways to solve security issues at every level that have been documented in the literature. The study identifies open problems, especially when considering cloud capabilities like elasticity, flexibility, and multi-tenancy, which create new problems at every infrastructure tier. Notably, it is found that multi-tenancy has a significant influence, contributing to security issues at all levels including abuse, unavailability, data loss, and privacy violations. The research ends with practical recommendations for additional studies targeted at improving overall cloud computing security. The results highlight the necessity of concentrated effort on mitigating security vulnerabilities resulting from multi-tenancy. This study makes a valuable contribution to the wider discussion on cloud security by identifying particular issues and supporting focused initiatives to strengthen the resilience of cloud infrastructure.
[...] Read more.The inaccurate detection of diabetes and hypertension causes’ time wastage and a cost burden due to higher amounts of medicine intake and health problems. The previous works did not investigate machine learning (ML)-based diabetic and hypertension patient prediction by using multiple characteristics. This paper utilizes ML algorithms to predict the presence of diabetes and hypertension in patients. By analyzing patient data, including medical records, symptoms, and risk factors, the proposed system can provide accurate predictions for early detection and intervention. This paper makes a list of eighteen characteristics that can be used for data set preparation. With a classification accuracy of 93%, the Support Vector Machine is the best ML model in our work and is used for the diabetic and hypertension disease prediction models. This paper also gives a new mobile application that alleviates the time and cost burden by detecting diabetic and hypertensive patients, doctors, and medical information. The user evaluation and rating analysis results showed that more than sixty five percent of users declared the necessity of the proposed application features.
[...] Read more.This paper presents an optimized model that uses an optimized CNN to detect depressive symptoms from image posts. This is with a view to detecting depression symptoms in individuals. Visual data were collected in their raw form and assessed as having or not having a mental condition. The images were processed, and the relevant features retrieved from them. An optimized convolutional neural network (CNN) was used to simulate the defined classification model of the image posts. The model was implemented using Python Programming Language. Precision, recall, accuracy, and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve were used as performance indicators to assess the model's efficacy. The collected findings indicate that 77% accuracy is achieved by the optimized model. As a result, 77% of the cases were accurately predicted by the model, suggesting that the model is generally accurate in its predictions. The research will contribute to a decrease in the incidence, prevalence, and recurrence of mental health illnesses as well as the disabilities they cause.
[...] Read more.An increase in cyber threats directed at interconnected devices has resulted from the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), which necessitates the implementation of comprehensive defenses against evolving attack vectors. This research investigates the utilization of machine learning (ML) prediction models to identify and defend against cyber-attacks targeting IoT networks. Central emphasis is placed on the thorough examination of the CIC-IoT2023 dataset, an extensive collection comprising a wide range of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults on diverse IoT devices. This ensures the utilization of a practical and comprehensive benchmark for assessment. This study develops and compares four distinct machine learning models Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), and Random Forest (RF) to determine their effectiveness in detecting and preventing cyber threats to the Internet of Things (IoT). The comprehensive assessment incorporates a wide range of performance indicators, such as F1-score, accuracy, precision, and recall. Significantly, the results emphasize the superior performance of DT and RF, demonstrating exceptional accuracy rates of 0.9919 and 0.9916, correspondingly. The models demonstrate an outstanding capability to differentiate between benign and malicious packets, as supported by their high precision, recall, and F1 scores. The precision-recall curves and confusion matrices provide additional evidence that DT and RF are strong contenders in the field of IoT intrusion detection. Additionally, KNN demonstrates a noteworthy accuracy of 0.9380. On the other hand, LR demonstrates the least accuracy with a value of 0.8275, underscoring its inherent incapability to classify threats. In conjunction with the realistic and diverse characteristics of the CIC-IoT2023 dataset, the study's empirical assessments provide invaluable knowledge for determining the most effective machine learning algorithms and fortification strategies to protect IoT infrastructures. Furthermore, this study establishes ground-breaking suggestions for subsequent inquiries, urging the examination of unsupervised learning approaches and the incorporation of deep learning models to decipher complex patterns within IoT networks. These developments have the potential to strengthen cybersecurity protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, reduce the impact of emergent risks, and promote robust defense systems against ever-changing cyber challenges.
[...] Read more.The primary objective of this paper is to design a SmartCart mobile application. The proposal centres around designing a mobile app that allows customers to engage in collaborative shopping with their family members or friends, effectively shopping together in a group. This project seeks to improve upon existing shopping mobile apps that predominantly focus on online shopping. Through the development of the SmartCart mobile application, users will have the capability to shop in physical stores while collaborating with others or their group. The application adheres to the Mobile Application Development Life Cycle (MADLC) methodology, focusing on the phases of identification, design, development, prototyping, and testing. This paper provides an in-depth description of each step within the methodology, commencing with the identification stage and culminating in the testing phase. To evaluate the application's usability, ten users from various backgrounds took part in the testing process, and their feedback, measured through the System Usability Scale (SUS), indicated a positive reception of the application. The paper presents the initial framework and design concept that preceded the development of the final SmartCart mobile application design. From a pool of around 50 paper prototypes, 18 were selected as pertinent and fitting for advancement to the subsequent stage. In this subsequent phase, the chosen designs were transformed into a medium-fidelity prototype before progressing to the actual development of the SmartCart mobile application. This paper fulfils an identified need to study how collaborative shopping mobile applications can be developed and prototyped.
[...] Read more.Pursuing prey by a predator is a natural phenomenon. This is an event when a predator targets and chases prey for consuming. The motive of a predator is to catch its prey whereas the motive of a prey is to escape from the predator. Earth has many predator species with different pursuing strategies. Some of them are sneaky again some of them are bolt. But their chases fail every time. A successful hunt depends on the strategy of pursuing one. Among all the predators, the Dragonflies, also known as natural drones, are considered the best predators because of their higher rate of successful hunting. If their strategy of pursuing a prey can be extracted for analysis and make an algorithm to apply on Unmanned arial vehicles, the success rate will be increased, and it will be more efficient than that of a dragonfly. We examine the pursuing strategy of a dragonfly using LSTM to predict the speed and distance between predator and prey. Also, The Kalman filter has been used to trace the trajectory of both Predator and Prey. We found that dragonflies follow distance maintenance strategy to pursue prey and try to keep its velocity constant to maintain the safe (mean) distance. This study can lead researchers to enhance the new and exciting algorithm which can be applied on Unmanned arial vehicles (UAV).
[...] Read more.We address the challenge of optimizing the interaction between medical personnel and treatment stations within mobile and flexible medical care units (MFMCUs) in conflict zones. For the analysis of such systems, a closed queuing model with a finite number of treatment stations has been developed, which accounts for the possibility of performing multiple tasks for a single medical service request. Under the assumption of Poisson event flows, a system of integro-differential equations for the probability densities of the introduced states has been compiled. To solve it, the method of discrete binomial transformations is employed in conjunction with production functions. Solutions were obtained in the form of finite expressions, enabling the transition from the probabilistic characteristics of the model to the main performance metrics of the MFMCU: the load factor of medical personnel, and the utilization rate of treatment stations. The results show the selection of the number of treatment stations in the medical care area and the calculation of the appropriate performance of medical personnel.
[...] Read more.One area that has seen rapid growth and differing perspectives from many developers in recent years is document management. This idea has advanced beyond some of the steps where developers have made it simple for anyone to access papers in a matter of seconds. It is impossible to overstate the importance of document management systems as a necessity in the workplace environment of an organization. Interviews, scenario creation using participants' and stakeholders' first-hand accounts, and examination of current procedures and structures were all used to collect data. The development approach followed a software development methodology called Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Methodology. With the help of Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools, a web-based electronic document management system (WBEDMS) was created. Its database was created using MySQL, and the system was constructed using web technologies including XAMPP, HTML, and PHP Programming language. The results of the system evaluation showed a successful outcome. After using the system that was created, respondents' satisfaction with it was 96.60%. This shows that the document system was regarded as adequate and excellent enough to achieve or meet the specified requirement when users (secretaries and departmental personnel) used it. Result showed that the system developed yielded an accuracy of 95% and usability of 99.20%. The report came to the conclusion that a suggested electronic document management system would improve user happiness, boost productivity, and guarantee time and data efficiency. It follows that well-known document management systems undoubtedly assist in holding and managing a substantial portion of the knowledge assets, which include documents and other associated items, of Organizations.
[...] Read more.A sizeable number of women face difficulties during pregnancy, which eventually can lead the fetus towards serious health problems. However, early detection of these risks can save both the invaluable life of infants and mothers. Cardiotocography (CTG) data provides sophisticated information by monitoring the heart rate signal of the fetus, is used to predict the potential risks of fetal wellbeing and for making clinical conclusions. This paper proposed to analyze the antepartum CTG data (available on UCI Machine Learning Repository) and develop an efficient tree-based ensemble learning (EL) classifier model to predict fetal health status. In this study, EL considers the Stacking approach, and a concise overview of this approach is discussed and developed accordingly. The study also endeavors to apply distinct machine learning algorithmic techniques on the CTG dataset and determine their performances. The Stacking EL technique, in this paper, involves four tree-based machine learning algorithms, namely, Random Forest classifier, Decision Tree classifier, Extra Trees classifier, and Deep Forest classifier as base learners. The CTG dataset contains 21 features, but only 10 most important features are selected from the dataset with the Chi-square method for this experiment, and then the features are normalized with Min-Max scaling. Following that, Grid Search is applied for tuning the hyperparameters of the base algorithms. Subsequently, 10-folds cross validation is performed to select the meta learner of the EL classifier model. However, a comparative model assessment is made between the individual base learning algorithms and the EL classifier model; and the finding depicts EL classifiers’ superiority in fetal health risks prediction with securing the accuracy of about 96.05%. Eventually, this study concludes that the Stacking EL approach can be a substantial paradigm in machine learning studies to improve models’ accuracy and reduce the error rate.
[...] Read more.Universities across the globe have increasingly adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, a software that provides integrated management of processes and transactions in real-time. These systems contain lots of information hence require secure authentication. Authentication in this case refers to the process of verifying an entity’s or device’s identity, to allow them access to specific resources upon request. However, there have been security and privacy concerns around ERP systems, where only the traditional authentication method of a username and password is commonly used. A password-based authentication approach has weaknesses that can be easily compromised. Cyber-attacks to access these ERP systems have become common to institutions of higher learning and cannot be underestimated as they evolve with emerging technologies. Some universities worldwide have been victims of cyber-attacks which targeted authentication vulnerabilities resulting in damages to the institutions reputations and credibilities. Thus, this research aimed at establishing authentication methods used for ERPs in Kenyan universities, their vulnerabilities, and proposing a solution to improve on ERP system authentication. The study aimed at developing and validating a multi-factor authentication prototype to improve ERP systems security. Multi-factor authentication which combines several authentication factors such as: something the user has, knows, or is, is a new state-of-the-art technology that is being adopted to strengthen systems’ authentication security. This research used an exploratory sequential design that involved a survey of chartered Kenyan Universities, where questionnaires were used to collect data that was later analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Stratified, random and purposive sampling techniques were used to establish the sample size and the target group. The dependent variable for the study was limited to security rating with respect to realization of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and usability while the independent variables were limited to adequacy of security, authentication mechanisms, infrastructure, information security policies, vulnerabilities, and user training. Correlation and regression analysis established vulnerabilities, information security policies, and user training to be having a higher impact on system security. The three variables hence acted as the basis for the proposed multi-factor authentication framework for improve ERP systems security.
[...] Read more.Artificial Neural Network is a branch of Artificial intelligence and has been accepted as a new computing technology in computer science fields. This paper reviews the field of Artificial intelligence and focusing on recent applications which uses Artificial Neural Networks (ANN’s) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It also considers the integration of neural networks with other computing methods Such as fuzzy logic to enhance the interpretation ability of data. Artificial Neural Networks is considers as major soft-computing technology and have been extensively studied and applied during the last two decades. The most general applications where neural networks are most widely used for problem solving are in pattern recognition, data analysis, control and clustering. Artificial Neural Networks have abundant features including high processing speeds and the ability to learn the solution to a problem from a set of examples. The main aim of this paper is to explore the recent applications of Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence and provides an overview of the field, where the AI & ANN’s are used and discusses the critical role of AI & NN played in different areas.
[...] Read more.One of the main reasons for mortality among people is traffic accidents. The percentage of traffic accidents in the world has increased to become the third in the expected causes of death in 2020. In Saudi Arabia, there are more than 460,000 car accidents every year. The number of car accidents in Saudi Arabia is rising, especially during busy periods such as Ramadan and the Hajj season. The Saudi Arabia’s government is making the required efforts to lower the nations of car accident rate. This paper suggests a business process improvement for car accident reports handled by Najm in accordance with the Saudi Vision 2030. According to drone success in many fields (e.g., entertainment, monitoring, and photography), the paper proposes using drones to respond to accident reports, which will help to expedite the process and minimize turnaround time. In addition, the drone provides quick accident response and recording scenes with accurate results. The Business Process Management (BPM) methodology is followed in this proposal. The model was validated by comparing before and after simulation results which shows a significant impact on performance about 40% regarding turnaround time. Therefore, using drones can enhance the process of accident response with Najm in Saudi Arabia.
[...] Read more.The Marksheet Generator is flexible for generating progress mark sheet of students. This system is mainly based in the database technology and the credit based grading system (CBGS). The system is targeted to small enterprises, schools, colleges and universities. It can produce sophisticated ready-to-use mark sheet, which could be created and will be ready to print. The development of a marksheet and gadget sheet is focusing at describing tables with columns/rows and sub-column sub-rows, rules of data selection and summarizing for report, particular table or column/row, and formatting the report in destination document. The adjustable data interface will be popular data sources (SQL Server) and report destinations (PDF file). Marksheet generation system can be used in universities to automate the distribution of digitally verifiable mark-sheets of students. The system accesses the students’ exam information from the university database and generates the gadget-sheet Gadget sheet keeps the track of student information in properly listed manner. The project aims at developing a marksheet generation system which can be used in universities to automate the distribution of digitally verifiable student result mark sheets. The system accesses the students’ results information from the institute student database and generates the mark sheets in Portable Document Format which is tamper proof which provides the authenticity of the document. Authenticity of the document can also be verified easily.
[...] Read more.The numerical value of k in a k-fold cross-validation training technique of machine learning predictive models is an essential element that impacts the model’s performance. A right choice of k results in better accuracy, while a poorly chosen value for k might affect the model’s performance. In literature, the most commonly used values of k are five (5) or ten (10), as these two values are believed to give test error rate estimates that suffer neither from extremely high bias nor very high variance. However, there is no formal rule. To the best of our knowledge, few experimental studies attempted to investigate the effect of diverse k values in training different machine learning models. This paper empirically analyses the prevalence and effect of distinct k values (3, 5, 7, 10, 15 and 20) on the validation performance of four well-known machine learning algorithms (Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN)). It was observed that the value of k and model validation performance differ from one machine-learning algorithm to another for the same classification task. However, our empirical suggest that k = 7 offers a slight increase in validations accuracy and area under the curve measure with lesser computational complexity than k = 10 across most MLA. We discuss in detail the study outcomes and outline some guidelines for beginners in the machine learning field in selecting the best k value and machine learning algorithm for a given task.
[...] Read more.The healthcare system is a knowledge driven industry which consists of vast and growing volumes of narrative information obtained from discharge summaries/reports, physicians case notes, pathologists as well as radiologists reports. This information is usually stored in unstructured and non-standardized formats in electronic healthcare systems which make it difficult for the systems to understand the information contents of the narrative information. Thus, the access to valuable and meaningful healthcare information for decision making is a challenge. Nevertheless, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been used to structure narrative information in healthcare. Thus, NLP techniques have the capability to capture unstructured healthcare information, analyze its grammatical structure, determine the meaning of the information and translate the information so that it can be easily understood by the electronic healthcare systems. Consequently, NLP techniques reduce cost as well as improve the quality of healthcare. It is therefore against this background that this paper reviews the NLP techniques used in healthcare, their applications as well as their limitations.
[...] Read more.Density based Subspace Clustering algorithms have gained their importance owing to their ability to identify arbitrary shaped subspace clusters. Density-connected SUBspace CLUstering(SUBCLU) uses two input parameters namely epsilon and minpts whose values are same in all subspaces which leads to a significant loss to cluster quality. There are two important issues to be handled. Firstly, cluster densities vary in subspaces which refers to the phenomenon of density divergence. Secondly, the density of clusters within a subspace may vary due to the data characteristics which refers to the phenomenon of multi-density behavior. To handle these two issues of density divergence and multi-density behavior, the authors propose an efficient algorithm for generating subspace clusters by appropriately fixing the input parameter epsilon. The version1 of the proposed algorithm computes epsilon dynamically for each subspace based on the maximum spread of the data. To handle data that exhibits multi-density behavior, the algorithm is further refined and presented in version2. The initial value of epsilon is set to half of the value resulted in the version1 for a subspace and a small step value 'delta' is used for finalizing the epsilon separately for each cluster through step-wise refinement to form multiple higher dimensional subspace clusters. The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested on various bench-mark and synthetic datasets. It outperforms SUBCLU in terms of cluster quality and execution time.
[...] Read more.Stock market prediction is a process of trying to decide the stock trends based on the analysis of historical data. However, the stock market is subject to rapid changes. It is very difficult to predict because of its dynamic & unpredictable nature. The main goal of this paper is to present a model that can predict stock market trend. The model is implemented with the help of machine learning algorithms using eleven technical indicators. The model is trained and tested by the published stock data obtained from DSE (Dhaka Stock Exchange, Bangladesh). The empirical result reveals the effectiveness of machine learning techniques with a maximum accuracy of 86.67%, 64.13% and 69.21% for “today”, “tomorrow” and “day_after_tomorrow”.
[...] Read more.A sizeable number of women face difficulties during pregnancy, which eventually can lead the fetus towards serious health problems. However, early detection of these risks can save both the invaluable life of infants and mothers. Cardiotocography (CTG) data provides sophisticated information by monitoring the heart rate signal of the fetus, is used to predict the potential risks of fetal wellbeing and for making clinical conclusions. This paper proposed to analyze the antepartum CTG data (available on UCI Machine Learning Repository) and develop an efficient tree-based ensemble learning (EL) classifier model to predict fetal health status. In this study, EL considers the Stacking approach, and a concise overview of this approach is discussed and developed accordingly. The study also endeavors to apply distinct machine learning algorithmic techniques on the CTG dataset and determine their performances. The Stacking EL technique, in this paper, involves four tree-based machine learning algorithms, namely, Random Forest classifier, Decision Tree classifier, Extra Trees classifier, and Deep Forest classifier as base learners. The CTG dataset contains 21 features, but only 10 most important features are selected from the dataset with the Chi-square method for this experiment, and then the features are normalized with Min-Max scaling. Following that, Grid Search is applied for tuning the hyperparameters of the base algorithms. Subsequently, 10-folds cross validation is performed to select the meta learner of the EL classifier model. However, a comparative model assessment is made between the individual base learning algorithms and the EL classifier model; and the finding depicts EL classifiers’ superiority in fetal health risks prediction with securing the accuracy of about 96.05%. Eventually, this study concludes that the Stacking EL approach can be a substantial paradigm in machine learning studies to improve models’ accuracy and reduce the error rate.
[...] Read more.One area that has seen rapid growth and differing perspectives from many developers in recent years is document management. This idea has advanced beyond some of the steps where developers have made it simple for anyone to access papers in a matter of seconds. It is impossible to overstate the importance of document management systems as a necessity in the workplace environment of an organization. Interviews, scenario creation using participants' and stakeholders' first-hand accounts, and examination of current procedures and structures were all used to collect data. The development approach followed a software development methodology called Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Methodology. With the help of Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools, a web-based electronic document management system (WBEDMS) was created. Its database was created using MySQL, and the system was constructed using web technologies including XAMPP, HTML, and PHP Programming language. The results of the system evaluation showed a successful outcome. After using the system that was created, respondents' satisfaction with it was 96.60%. This shows that the document system was regarded as adequate and excellent enough to achieve or meet the specified requirement when users (secretaries and departmental personnel) used it. Result showed that the system developed yielded an accuracy of 95% and usability of 99.20%. The report came to the conclusion that a suggested electronic document management system would improve user happiness, boost productivity, and guarantee time and data efficiency. It follows that well-known document management systems undoubtedly assist in holding and managing a substantial portion of the knowledge assets, which include documents and other associated items, of Organizations.
[...] Read more.Universities across the globe have increasingly adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, a software that provides integrated management of processes and transactions in real-time. These systems contain lots of information hence require secure authentication. Authentication in this case refers to the process of verifying an entity’s or device’s identity, to allow them access to specific resources upon request. However, there have been security and privacy concerns around ERP systems, where only the traditional authentication method of a username and password is commonly used. A password-based authentication approach has weaknesses that can be easily compromised. Cyber-attacks to access these ERP systems have become common to institutions of higher learning and cannot be underestimated as they evolve with emerging technologies. Some universities worldwide have been victims of cyber-attacks which targeted authentication vulnerabilities resulting in damages to the institutions reputations and credibilities. Thus, this research aimed at establishing authentication methods used for ERPs in Kenyan universities, their vulnerabilities, and proposing a solution to improve on ERP system authentication. The study aimed at developing and validating a multi-factor authentication prototype to improve ERP systems security. Multi-factor authentication which combines several authentication factors such as: something the user has, knows, or is, is a new state-of-the-art technology that is being adopted to strengthen systems’ authentication security. This research used an exploratory sequential design that involved a survey of chartered Kenyan Universities, where questionnaires were used to collect data that was later analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Stratified, random and purposive sampling techniques were used to establish the sample size and the target group. The dependent variable for the study was limited to security rating with respect to realization of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and usability while the independent variables were limited to adequacy of security, authentication mechanisms, infrastructure, information security policies, vulnerabilities, and user training. Correlation and regression analysis established vulnerabilities, information security policies, and user training to be having a higher impact on system security. The three variables hence acted as the basis for the proposed multi-factor authentication framework for improve ERP systems security.
[...] Read more.This work presents a parallel implementation of a graph-generating algorithm designed to be straightforwardly adapted to traverse large datasets. This new approach has been validated in a correlated scenario known as the word ladder problem. The new parallel algorithm induces the same topological structure proposed by its serial version and also builds the shortest path between any pair of words to be connected by a ladder of words. The implemented parallelism paradigm is the Multiple Instruction Stream - Multiple Data Stream (MIMD) and the test suite embraces 23-word ladder instances whose intermediate words were extracted from a dictionary of 183,719 words (dataset). The word morph quality (the shortest path between two input words) and the word morph performance (CPU time) were evaluated against a serial implementation of the original algorithm. The proposed parallel algorithm generated the optimal solution for each pair of words tested, that is, the minimum word ladder connecting an initial word to a final word was found. Thus, there was no negative impact on the quality of the solutions comparing them with those obtained through the serial ANG algorithm. However, there was an outstanding improvement considering the CPU time required to build the word ladder solutions. In fact, the time improvement was up to 99.85%, and speedups greater than 2.0X were achieved with the parallel algorithm.
[...] Read more.The usefulness of Collaborative filtering recommender system is affected by its ability to capture users' preference changes on the recommended items during recommendation process. This makes it easy for the system to satisfy users' interest over time providing good and quality recommendations. The Existing system studied fails to solicit for user inputs on the recommended items and it is also unable to incorporate users' preference changes with time which lead to poor quality recommendations. In this work, an Enhanced Movie Recommender system that recommends movies to users is presented to improve the quality of recommendations. The system solicits for users' inputs to create a user profiles. It then incorporates a set of new features (such as age and genre) to be able to predict user's preference changes with time. This enabled it to recommend movies to the users based on users new preferences. The experimental study conducted on Netflix and Movielens datasets demonstrated that, compared to the existing work, the proposed work improved the recommendation results to the users based on the values of Precision and RMSE obtained in this study which in turn returns good recommendations to the users.
[...] Read more.Process Mining (PM) and PM tool abilities play a significant role in meeting the needs of organizations in terms of getting benefits from their processes and event data, especially in this digital era. The success of PM initiatives in producing effective and efficient outputs and outcomes that organizations desire is largely dependent on the capabilities of the PM tools. This importance of the tools makes the selection of them for a specific context critical. In the selection process of appropriate tools, a comparison of them can lead organizations to an effective result. In order to meet this need and to give insight to both practitioners and researchers, in our study, we systematically reviewed the literature and elicited the papers that compare PM tools, yielding comprehensive results through a comparison of available PM tools. It specifically delivers tools’ comparison frequency, methods and criteria used to compare them, strengths and weaknesses of the compared tools for the selection of appropriate PM tools, and findings related to the identified papers' trends and demographics. Although some articles conduct a comparison for the PM tools, there is a lack of literature reviews on the studies that compare PM tools in the market. As far as we know, this paper presents the first example of a review in literature in this regard.
[...] Read more.Trust is a basic requirement for the acceptance and adoption of new services related to health care, and therefore, vital in ensuring that the integrity of shared patient information among multi-care providers is preserved and that no one has tampered with it. The cyber-health community in Nigeria is in its infant stage with health care systems and services being mostly fragmented, disjointed, and heterogeneous with strong local autonomy and distributed among several healthcare givers platforms. There is the need for a trust management structure for guaranteed privacy and confidentiality to mitigate vulnerabilities to privacy thefts. In this paper, we developed an efficient Trust Management System that hybridized Real-Time Integrity Check (RTIC) and Dynamic Trust Negotiation (DTN) premised on the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) model of information security. This was achieved through the design and implementation of an indigenous and generic architectural framework and model for a secured Trust Management System with the use of the advanced encryption standard (AES-256) algorithm for securing health records during transmission. The developed system achieved Reliabity score, Accuracy and Availability of 0.97, 91.30% and 96.52% respectively.
[...] Read more.UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs predicted that the world population will increase by 2 billion in 2050 with over 50% from the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Considering the level of poverty and food insecurity in the region, there is an urgent need for a sustainable increase in agricultural produce. However, farming approach in the region is primarily traditional. Traditional farming is characterized by high labor costs, low production, and under/oversupply of farm inputs. All these factors make farming unappealing to many. The use of digital technologies such as broadband, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing, and Big Data Analytics promise improved returns on agricultural investments and could make farming appealing even to the youth. However, initial cost of smart farming could be high. Therefore, development of a dedicated IoT cloud-based platform is imperative. Then farmers could subscribe and have their farms managed on the platform. It should be noted that majority of farmers in SSA are smallholders who are poor, uneducated, and live in rural areas but produce about 80% of the food. They majorly use 2G phones, which are not internet enabled. These peculiarities must be factored into the design of any functional IoT platform that would serve this group. This paper presents the development of such a platform, which was tested with smart irrigation of maize crops in a testbed. Besides the convenience provided by the smart system, it recorded irrigation water saving of over 36% compared to the control method which demonstrates how irrigation is done traditionally.
[...] Read more.Web applications are becoming very important in our lives as many sensitive processes depend on them. Therefore, it is critical for safety and invulnerability against malicious attacks. Most studies focus on ways to detect these attacks individually. In this study, we develop a new vulnerability system to detect and prevent vulnerabilities in web applications. It has multiple functions to deal with some recurring vulnerabilities. The proposed system provided the detection and prevention of four types of vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks, remote code execution, and fingerprinting of backend technologies. We investigated the way worked for every type of vulnerability; then the process of detecting each type of vulnerability; finally, we provided prevention for each type of vulnerability. Which achieved three goals: reduce testing costs, increase efficiency, and safety. The proposed system has been validated through a practical application on a website, and experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting and preventing security threats. Our study contributes to the field of security by presenting an innovative approach to addressing security concerns, and our results highlight the importance of implementing advanced detection and prevention methods to protect against potential cyberattacks. The significance and research value of this survey lies in its potential to enhance the security of online systems and reduce the risk of data breaches.
[...] Read more.One of the main reasons for mortality among people is traffic accidents. The percentage of traffic accidents in the world has increased to become the third in the expected causes of death in 2020. In Saudi Arabia, there are more than 460,000 car accidents every year. The number of car accidents in Saudi Arabia is rising, especially during busy periods such as Ramadan and the Hajj season. The Saudi Arabia’s government is making the required efforts to lower the nations of car accident rate. This paper suggests a business process improvement for car accident reports handled by Najm in accordance with the Saudi Vision 2030. According to drone success in many fields (e.g., entertainment, monitoring, and photography), the paper proposes using drones to respond to accident reports, which will help to expedite the process and minimize turnaround time. In addition, the drone provides quick accident response and recording scenes with accurate results. The Business Process Management (BPM) methodology is followed in this proposal. The model was validated by comparing before and after simulation results which shows a significant impact on performance about 40% regarding turnaround time. Therefore, using drones can enhance the process of accident response with Najm in Saudi Arabia.
[...] Read more.