ABSTRACT:
With offshore computing becoming more prevalent, it is essential that we increase our students’ employability by providing new and relevant experiences in software development and project management; giving them valuable skills that are essential in an ever-increasing and changing global market. What is new about the work we discuss here is how collaborative technologies have facilitated a year-long cross-site software engineering project between Durham University and Newcastle University students. Our use of various collaboration technologies such as online discussion forums, video-conferencing, company repositories, version control software etc., as part of the collaborative team project has not only encouraged students to develop technical ‘transferable’ skills but also gain an understanding, through realistic experiences, of how the use of these technologies involves more than just learning their technical aspects and operation, but that it is essential to develop and implement the soft processes and skills required to use them successfully and effectively and hence optimize their cross-site working partnerships and productivity. In this paper we describe the project, the technologies employed by the student teams and the results and anecdotal evidence of staff and students that show the successes and, it must be admitted, occasional failures of this work. We discuss how we have tried to manage the expectations of the students throughout the project, how the technologies we have provided have affected the students’ experience of cross-site collaboration and the impact of crosssite collaboration on our assessment strategies and curriculum design.

ABSTRACT:
During the last decades software has become an important part of our everyday life in the form of various information processing intensive products and services. The competition between software companies has risen considerably and at the same time the importance of cost efficient and value creating software development has been recognized in many companies. Value Engineering has been a usable to method for developing high value products for several years. Earlier it has been applied successfully to software process as well as to software product development. Normally the development of high value products contains also several risks. Combination of efficient value management practices and risk management is one possibility to try to avoid the most dangerous risks to realize for planned value. This research combines Value Engineering and risk management practices into a usable new method in order to better respond to the challenges that risks might cause to the value of software products and their development. This is done in part by defining the concepts of value, worth and cost and in part by defining the Value Engineering process with necessary risk management practices. Three practical industrial cases show that proposed two-dimensional method works in practise and is useful to assessed companies.

ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this paper is to identify the major global trends in social computing/ collaborative computing as they seem to evolve under the ‘web 2.0’ heading, evaluate possible future trends seen from a technology point of view as well as from a socio-economic perspective and compare these trends to the current state and need for eGovernment. Finally, some general guidelines, ideas and projections for eGovernment will be proposed and discussed.

ABSTRACT:
We introduce three graph operations corresponding to polyhedral operations. By applying these operations, thirteen Archimedean graphs can be generated from Platonic graphs that are used as seed graphs.

ABSTRACT:
This paper provides an extensive literature review and list of references on the background of web mining as applied specifically to hotel customer survey data. This research applies the techniques of web mining to actual text of written comments for hotel customers using Megaputer PolyAnalyst®. Web mining functionalities utilized include those such as clustering, link analysis, key word and phrase extraction, taxonomy, and dimension matrices. This paper provides screen shots of the web mining applications using Megaputer PolyAnalyst®. Conclusions and future directions of the research are presented.

ABSTRACT:
This paper presents Distance Learning Platform used by Silesian University of Technology. Distance Learning Platform is based on modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment, represents LMS (Learning Management Systems) technology, a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Currently on Distance Learning Platform at Silesian University of Technology are available over 520 online courses created for students of twelve University’s faculties. Number of Distance Learning Platform users exceeds 12000. Distance Learning Platform works as typically asynchronous e-learning service, but in the future more synchronous e-learning services will be added. Distance Learning Platform has great potential to create a successful elearning experience by providing a plethora of excellent tools that can be used to enhance conventional classroom instruction, in hybrid courses, or any distance learning arrangements.

ABSTRACT:
The literature on the effectiveness of e-government in developing countries towards improving public service delivery is littered with failure stories. Notwithstanding, the failures have not stopped most governments in developing countries from increasingly turning to ICT, most notably internet based models, as the preferred channel for citizen-centered service delivery. This paper investigated e-government within the developing country context of South Africa. We used the interpretive paradigm primarily because we wanted to increase our understanding of the phenomenon of e-government for public service delivery within the local South African context. The investigation focused on one of the governments primary service delivery programmes – social grants. The analysis of findings suggest that egovernment in South Africa is not aligned to the service delivery philosophy, Batho Pele, and is hence not effective in delivering on the public service delivery mandate. Batho Pele which literally means “people first” is similar to the UNDP Human Development Indicators for development. The contribution of this research can be extended to both practice and IS theory. The research highlights the need for ICT4D, particularly e-government in developing contexts, to firstly be aligned to the current over-arching government philosophies if they are to have any effective impact on service delivery. The practical contribution of the research is a possible framework that could be used to align e-government in South Africa to the government philosophy of service delivery.

ABSTRACT:
Many international standards exist in the field of IT security. This research is based on the ISO/IEC 15408, 15446, 19791, 13335 and 17799 standards. In this paper, we propose a knowledge base comprising a threat countermeasure model based on international standards for identifying and specifying threats which affect IT environments. In addition, the proposed knowledge base system aims at fusing similar security control policies and objectives in order to create effective security guidelines for specific IT environments. As a result, a knowledge base of security objectives was developed on the basis of the relationships inside the standards as well as the relationships between different standards. In addition, a web application was developed which displays details about the most common threats to information systems, and for each threat presents a set of related security control policies from different international standards, including ISO/IEC 27002.

ABSTRACT:
Internet worms pose a serious threat to computer security. Traditional approaches using signatures to detect worms pose little danger to the zero day attacks. The focus of malware research is shifting from using signature patterns to identifying the malicious behavior displayed by the malwares. This paper presents a novel idea of extracting variable length instruction sequences that can identify worms from clean programs using data mining techniques. The analysis is facilitated by the program control flow information contained in the instruction sequences. Based upon general statistics gathered from these instruction sequences we formulated the problem as a binary classification problem and built tree based classifiers including decision tree, bagging and random forest. Our approach showed 95.6% detection rate on novel worms whose data was not used in the model building process.

ABSTRACT:
Like any other software system quality attribute, usability places requirements on software components. In particular, it has been demonstrated that certain usability features have a direct impact throughout the software process. This paper details an approach that looks at how to deal with certain usability features in the early software development stages. In particular, we consider usability features as functional usability requirements using patterns that have been termed usability patterns to elicit requirements. Additionally, we clearly establish the responsibilities of all the players at the usability requirements elicitation stage.

ABSTRACT:
High quality and comfortable online delivery of governmental services often requires the seamless exchange of data between two or more government agencies. Smooth data exchange, in turn, requires interoperability of the databases and workflows in the agencies involved. Interoperability (IOP) is a complex issue covering purely technical aspects such as transmission protocols and data exchange formats, but also content-related semantic aspects such as identifiers and the meaning of codes as well as organizational, contractual or legal issues. Starting from IOP frameworks which provide classifications of what has to be standardized, this paper, based on an ongoing research project, adopts a political and managerial view and tries to clarify the governance of achieving IOP, i.e. where and by whom IOPstandards are developed and established and how they are put into operation. By analyzing 32 cases of successful implementation of IOP in E-Government services within the European Union empirical indicators for different aspects of governance are proposed and applied to develop an empirical taxonomy of different types of IOP governance which can be used for future comparative research regarding success factors, barriers etc.

ABSTRACT:
The optical flow of high interest points in images of an uncalibrated scene is used to recover the camera orientation of an eye-in-hand robotic manipulator. The system is completely automated, iteratively performing a sequence of rotations and translations until the camera frame is aligned with the manipulator’s world frame. The manipulator must be able to translate and rotate its end-effector with respect to its world frame. The system is implemented and being tested on a Stäubli RX60 manipulator using an off-the-shelf Logitech USB camera.

ABSTRACT:
Mobile phones have been proclaimed as the new service frontier. Nowadays, in addition to traditional mobile services, new mobile commerce services are ready to be used by customers based on 3G-related technologies. However, little is known about the reasons why different groups of customers adopt mobile commerce services. By means of a sample of 542 Dutch consumers, we analyze the acceptance of these services by four different groups of customers. We finish our work providing interesting conclusions for academics as well as practitioners

ABSTRACT:
Eportfolios are becoming increasingly important in HE in the UK and have tended to move towards web-based versions which are either institutionally owned, or hosted by a commercial company. Whilst there are certainly advantages with these models there are important considerations over the transferability and ownership of students’ work. This paper reports on the design and implementation of an alternative model, using a set of portable applications as ePortfolio tools for use by initial teacher education students. The work focuses on adding a range of small stand alone applications to USB flash drives along with a set of files and templates focusing on the students’ studies. To this we have given a generic name - ‘FlashPort’ - and developed a specific version for trainee teachers that we have called ‘eLiPort’. The research takes the form of an intervention, following the introduction of eLiPort to a group of trainee teachers on a one year Secondary (High School) teaching course in the UK. Findings of the initial research are discussed along with how the challenges were addressed, its use in practice and the implications for the future.

ABSTRACT:
This study presents an experimental method of porosity evaluation and a predictive thermal-hydraulic analysis with packed spheres in a nuclear reactor core. The porosity experiments were carried out in both a fully shaken state with the closest possible packing and in a state of non-vibration. The predictive analysis considering the fixed porosity value was applied as a design condition for an Ultra High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX). The thermal-hydraulic computer code was developed and identified as PEBTEMP. The highest outlet coolant temperature of 1316 oC was achieved in the case of an UHTREX at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which was a small scale UHTR. In the present study, the fuel was changed to a pebble type, a porous media. In order to compare the present pebble bed reactor and UHTREX, a calculation based on HTGR-GT300 was carried out in similar conditions with UHTREX; in other words, with an inlet coolant temperature of 871oC, system pressure of 3.45 MPa and power density of 1.3 w/cm3. As a result, the fuel temperature in the present pebble bed reactor showed an extremely lower value compared to that of UHTREX.