Editorial
Board
Prof. P.Ekel (Brazil),
Prof. Y.Li (Taiwan),
Prof. V.Mladenov (Bulgaria),
Prof. G.Bognar (Hyngary),
Prof. A.Zemliak (Mexico),
Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh (USA),
Prof. Leonid Kazovsky (USA),
Prof. Nikos Mastorakis (GR),
Prof. S. Kartalopoulos (USA),
Prof. Z.Bojkovic (Serbia),
Prof. Ana Madureira (Portugal),
Prof. M.Sugeno (Japan),
Prof. J.C.Quadrado (Portugal),
Prof. A.Caballero (USA),
Prof. Lin Feng (Singapore),
Prof. M.Garcia-Planas
(Spain)
Topics
All aspects of contemporary computers and communications and their
applications are covered including technology, multimedia systems, hardware and
software systems, networking, wireless communications, microwaves, antennas,
radar, propagation, scaterring, in general applied electromagnetics, signal
processing, microcomputer applications such as engineering, science, business,
management, robotics, manufacturing, medicine, bioinformatics, systems biology
and personal computers. It appears quarterly.
Special Issues are specially encouraged.
Format
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Issue 1, Volume 6, 2012
Tele-market Modeling of Fuzzy Consumer Behavior
by R. Bashaand, J. Ameen
Abstract:
Just like any other aspect of human life on our planet, the advancements in
internet technology over the past decades have greatly influenced the way we
live, changing the socio-political structure of the nations as it can clearly be
seen in the Middle East and northern African countries. In specific terms, they
have influenced our behavior in the way that we conduct marketing extending it
beyond traditional boundaries both from business actions and consumer’s
behavior. With ease of access and the vast amount of information that can be
observed on the internet, consumers are lost for choice. These have increased
the challenges that both consumers and business people face manifold. The
survival conditions for both sides require more information in order to build
new models that can respond to these challenges and help the decision making
process in line with these changes and making them more efficient. This paper
attempts to assess the fuzzy actions of buying behavior from a multinational
viewpoint using data that have been collected on consumer risk assessment while
attempting to buy a product on the internet. The survey covered a sample of
270male and female participants of different nationality with different levels
of income and education. In a hierarchical modeling attempt, Logistic regression
is used to identify factors that are significant in the action of purchasing
leading to a sensitivity of 0.94 and specificity of 0.81. The resulting
significant components from the first stage model are used as inputs in the
application of AnswerTreeand more specifically, Classification Regression Tree
(CRT) model to formulate what-if decision scenarios to help decision makers
improve their targeting and selling options. The sensitivity and specificity of
the latter approach were 0.93 and 0.83 respectively and led to the establishment
of a set of decision rules each with their probability of success ranging from
0.67 to 1. None of the factors of gender, geographic location or income were
significant in the process.
Keywords:
Tele-marketing, Customer behavior, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree
Full Paper, pp. 1-8
Will Cloud Computing Change Standards in IT Service
Management?
by Marc Jansen
Abstract:
One of the latest hypes in IT is the well-known Cloud Computing paradigm. This
paradigm that showed up in recent years is a paradigm for the dynamic usage of
computational power, memory and other computational resources. With respect to
hypes, the author strongly believes that the Cloud Computing paradigm has the
potential to survive the hype and to become a usual technology used for the
provision of IT based services. Therefore, it will be necessary to deploy Cloud
Computing based infrastructures in a professional, stable and reliable way. This
would lead to the idea that the Cloud Computing paradigm needs to be concerned
with respect to IT Service Management, since cloud based infrastructures have to
be managed differently in comparison to a usual infrastructure. This paper
discusses, based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), as the de-facto
standard for IT Service Management, whether this de-facto standard might also be
able to manage Cloud Computing based infrastructures, how the according
processes might change and whether ITIL supports a division of labor between the
customer and the service provider of a Cloud Computing based infrastructure.
Keywords:
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Cloud Computing, Infrastructure, Services,
Processess
Full Paper, pp. 9-16
Designing Systems for Control and Verifying the
Authenticity of Products Using RFID Technology
by Eleonora Tudora, Adriana Alexandru,
Marilena Ianculescu
Abstract:
In contrast to the typical utilization of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)
technology today in warehouse management and supply chain applications, the
focus of this paper is an overview of the structure of RFID systems used by RFID
technology and it also presents a solution based on the application of RFID for
brand authentication, traceability and tracking, by implementing a production
management system and extending its use to traders.
Keywords:
Authentication, Electronic Product Code (EPC), EPC network, Object Naming
Service (ONS), RFID, RFID Tag, Traceability
Full Paper, pp. 17-25
Extending Kosovo Civil Registry String Searching Algorithm
by Blerim Rexha, Valon Raça, Agni Dika
Abstract:
Offering e-Government services to citizens is linked primarily to civil registry
data. Searching for a citizen’s data in civil registry is a common service
carried out by string search algorithms using unique keywords such as citizen’s
name and surname. Similar pronunciation of some Albanian language consonants
challenges search on citizen’s data, names of which are similarly pronounced,
despite different spelling.
This paper presents a novel approach for extending string searching algorithm
based on Albanian names in Kosovo Civil Registry. This paper compares
Levenshtein distance, American Soundex and extended Soundex algorithm results in
a database of 271.000 citizens of Prishtina municipality. The extended algorithm
accommodates basic rules of pronunciation in Albanian language and its accuracy
and efficiency is better than Levenshtein distance and American Soundex.
Keywords:
Civil Registry, Levenshtein, Soundex, String Matching, String Searching
Full Paper, pp. 26-34
Steganographic Software: Analysis and Implementation
by Akram M. Zeki, Adamu A. Ibrahim,
Azizah A. Manaf
Abstract:
Steganography is the method of hiding data in such a way that no one, except the
sender and the intended recipient, expects the existence of the hidden data.
Thus the goal here is always to conceal the very existence of the secret data
embedded in an innocent data in such a way that it will be undetectable, robust
and the innocent data should be able to accommodate high capacity of the secret
data. Unfortunately, these goals were not commonly seen in most of the
techniques. This paper studied different Steganographic techniques and
undertakes an experiment using five Steganographic software in order to explore
their capabilities. Benchmarking tool for identifying different performance
aspects of the Steganographic techniques and Steganographic software like visual
quality, performance indices, memory requirement and the evaluation of the
maximum capacity for each software under this study. Experimental results show
that all the software under this study performs above optimal level, although
there are some differences of features and capabilities observed.
Keywords:
Steganography, Steganographic Software, Information Hiding, Steganographic
tools, PSNR
Full Paper, pp. 35-42
Connections among CRM, Cloud Computing and Trading Income
of Selected Companies
by Jan Němeček, Lucie Vaňková
Abstract:
This article is focused to time period 2007-2010. It was time before and during
the economic crisis. In this article the readers can found how the selected
companies doing business in the Czech Republic are using information technology
and business strategy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and how it have
impact to the Trading Incomes. This article also found the answer to the
question whether the companies use complete solutions of CRM as purchase and
installation of software or whether they use the CRM system only as part of
services which are provided through Cloud Computing technology. Also there try
to find connections between implementing CRM and Trading Income of companies.
Apparently also because of ending of the economic crisis is CRM in the Czech
Republic beginning more use. The main goal of implementing CRM is to help to
company increase quality of relationship and communication with customers. In
this article there are described types of Cloud Computing and most common
definition of CRM. The analysis of using of CRM and Cloud Computing in the
selected companies, which are grouped by number of employees, is described, too.
After that it is comparing Trading Incomes of companies grouped by number of
employees. At the end of this article is summary of analysis results and
assumptions and found contributions of CRM and Cloud Computing.
Keywords:
Business Strategy, Cloud Computing, CRM, Customer Relationship Management,
Information Technology, Trading Income
Full Paper, pp. 43-50
Teachers’ Professional Development in Free Software for
Education in Taiwan
by Jui-Chen Yu, Hung-Jen Yang,
Lung-Hsing Kuo, Hsieh-Hua Yang
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to identify the status of promoting teachers to
use free software as educational resource. In this information age, using
computer software to support learning had become a reality. On campus, teachers
lead our students to learn. Teachers’ knowledge of applying computer software in
education initiates and leads next generations of using information technology.
There is a need to understand how education system helps teachers to learn up to
date information about educational software. An investigation method was applied
in this study. The population of this study was 7540 from 2002 to July, 2011.
343 courses were sampled for reaching 95% confidence and 5% confidence interval.
By applying statistical tests, investigation results were revealed. Based upon
statistical results, conclusions of research problems were reached. The
increasing frequency of promoting courses is identified. The life cycle of
courses offered for learning about free software is also concluded.
Keywords:
Professional Development, Free Software, Educational Software
Full Paper, pp. 51-59
Predicting the Next Page that Will be Visited by a Web
Surfer Using Page Rank Algorithm
by D. Ciobanu, C. E. Dinuca
Abstract:
Predicting the next page to be visited by a web user with increasing accuracy
have many important applications like caching and prefetching web pages to
improve the speed of navigation or creating systems of recommendation to help
users to find faster in the site what they are looking for. We have created a
java program, using Net Beans IDE, that calculates the probability of visiting
the pages using the page rank algorithm and counting links. For exemplification
we used the NASA log file available online at
http://ita.ee.lbl.gov/html/contrib/NASA-HTTP.html and a log file from a
commercial web site http://www.nice-layouts.com. We applied to the entire data
set of sessions the program and we obtained probabilities of visiting the pages.
After that we applied the program only to the subset of sessions which contain
the current page. For data obtained from log files of the NASA website was
obtained an improvement in prediction in the sense of increasing the precentage
from 19,75% to 32,5%. In the case of data obtained from the log files of the
commercial site the improvements for the predictions was smaller from 74,66% to
77,77%. In the chapter with conclusions we present explanations for this
differences of improvments obtained in those two cases.
Keywords:
Clickstream, Link counts, Page Rank, Prediction, Web logs
Full Paper, pp. 60-67
An Application for Clickstream Analysis
by C. E. Dinucă
Abstract:
In the Internet age there are stored enormous amounts of data daily. Nowadays,
using data mining techniques to extract knowledge from web log files has became
a necessity. The behavior of Internet users can be found in the log files stored
on Internet servers. Web log analysis can improve business firms that are based
on a Web site through learning user behavior and applying this knowledge to
target them for example to pages that other users with similar behavior have
visited. The extraction of useful information from these data has proved to be
very useful for optimizing Web sites and promotional campaigns for marketing,
etc. In this paper I will focus on finding associations as a data mining
technique to extract potentially useful knowledge from web usage data. I
implemented in Java programming language, using NetBeans IDE, a program for
identification of pages’ association from sessions. For exemplification, I used
the log files from a commercial web site.
Keywords:
Apriori algorithm, Association rules, Clickstream analysis, Sessions’
identification, Web server logs, Web usage mining
Full Paper, pp. 68-75
Interleaving Commands: a Threat to the Interoperability of
Smartcard Based Security Applications
by Maurizio Talamo, Maulahikmah
Galinium, Christian H. Schunck, Franco Arcieri
Abstract:
Although smartcards are widely used, secure smartcard interoperability has
remained a significant challenge. Usually each manufacturer provides a closed
environment for their smartcard based applications including the microchip,
associated firmware and application software. While the security of this
“package” can be tested and certified for example based on the Common Criteria,
the secure and convenient interoperability with other smartcards and smartcard
applications is not guaranteed. Ideally one would have a middleware that can
support various smartcards and smartcard applications. In our ongoing research
we study this scenario with the goal to develop a way to certify secure
smartcard interoperability in such an environment. Here we discuss and
experimentally demonstrate one critical security problem: if several smartcards
are connected via a middleware it is possible that a smartcard of type S
receives commands that were supposed to be executed on a different smartcard of
type S’. Such “external commands” can interleave with the commands that were
supposed to be executed on S. Here we demonstrate this problem experimentally
with a Common Criteria certified digital signature process on two commercially
available smartcards. Importantly, in some of these cases the digital signature
processes terminate without generating an error message or warning to the user.
Keywords:
Common criteria, digital signature, interoperability, smartcard
Full Paper, pp. 76-83
Improving Authentication and Transparency of e-Voting
System – Kosovo Case
by Blerim Rexha, Vehbi Neziri, Ramadan
Dervishi
Abstract:
Authentication and privacy are central issues for acceptance of any e-Voting
system in particular and growth of e- Services in general. This paper aims to:
(i) to analyze the appropriate architecture and propose new efficient
architecture of electronic voting system in Kosovo, and (ii) to analyze the
threat vectors and their avoidance in such system. The novelty of implemented
solution is based on using dynamic queue list generated based on voters arrivals
and identification at the polling station. The proposed architecture enables
citizens to cast their vote in any polling station, in opposite to paper form
voting where citizen is linked to his predefined polling station. The national
election commission configures the smart card, as part of electronic voting
infrastructure, to allow decryption of number of records that matches the number
of voters in final country wide voting list. The communication between polling
stations and central server is encrypted with server’s public key stored in
digital certificate and every casted vote is digitally signed by ballot box
private key. The developed model is used to compare the costs and efficiency of
e-Voting against the traditional paper based voting system in Kosovo.
Keywords:
Digital Signature, Privacy, Security, Smart Cards, e-Voting, X.509 Digital
Certificates
Full Paper, pp. 84-91