1,721,017 research outputs found
Harnessing our ICT Skill Set and Research Efforts for Sustainable Development
No full textFor some time now, ICTs have become ubiquitous, making them a common place phenomenon in modern society. Almost all electronics are ICT enabled to date, with most people who can read and write having interacted with ICTs one way or the other. For example, mobile phones which have changed the way we think, socialize and do business, are ICT-enabled. According to Statista, a German Company specializing in market and consumer data, The number of mobile subscriptions in Kenya rose from 0.13 million in the year 2000 to 61.41 million in 2020. This makes sense when you consider that many Kenyans walk with two or more mobile devices wherever they go.
Countries that have had the highest infusion of ICT in their sectors have reaped the most benefits. These benefits can generally be seen alongside the developed vs developing countries divide. ICTs are seen as a powerful solution to the problems affecting developing countries. Indeed, ICTs have the potential of making developing countries to catch up and even overtake developed countries much faster than originally thought.
This paper challenges us to harness ICT skill set through: 1. enhancement of our computing curricula by thinking through how they are designed and implemented. 2. Enhancement of research efforts by addressing four key problems that characterize research in this sector so as to come up with novel and sustainable solutions to challenges that affect our developing economies
Assessment Framework for Cyber Security
No full textThe capabilities and opportunities the Internet provides have caused transformation in many business activities, increasing the speed and ease for conducting transactions while also lowering many of the costs. As a consequence, the national economy and welfare have grown critically dependent on the cyber network infrastructure. In a digital world, information access is expected anytime and from anywhere, but this accessibility can create vulnerabilities that threaten the security of the information and leave organizations open to various forms of malicious attack. Thus the increased use of automated attack tools by cybercriminals has overwhelmed some current methodologies used for tracking cyber attacks and vulnerabilities. The main aim of this book is to develop an assessment framework for cyber security. It recommends the adoption of the proposed framework by all government ministries as well as the third party cyber security service providers, it provides information for decision makers on the cyber security assessment of individual organizations and nations. It further provides a basis of knowledge, development and study for scholars in the Information Technology field
A New Complexity Metric for BPEL Processes based on Weighted Structured Activities and Invokes
No full textAs is the case with traditional software, business processes created using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) have an inherent structural complexity that increases whenever the processes are modified. High complexity is known to negatively affect process quality and must be measured using metrics to control it. This paper presents a new metric called Weighted Structured Activities and Invokes (WSAI). In order to establish WSAI’s level of intuition, it is employed in measuring five scenarios of real-life BPEL processes created using the OpenESB Studio. The metric is then validated theoretically using the complexity category of Briand's Framework as well as Weyuker’s properties with the aim of establishing its theoretical soundness. Results indicate that the new metric is both intuitional and sound, implying that it is a good metric for measuring the complexity of BPEL processes
Social Attackability Metrics for Software Systems
No full textSoftware based system have become ubiquitous in modern day activities. Software system based system are being increasing attacked, leading to the need for software system administrators, and managers to have some metrics at predicting the social engineering attackability of a such system. Researchers have identified seven human traits/attributes that make human susceptible to social engineering attacks. Yet they did not model nor come up metrics. The author has published a conceptual a holistic predictive attackability metric model and corresponding metrics to assist the system designers. The model considers the technical metrics based on cohesion, coupling and complexity as used to predict attackability. It also consider the social metrics based on human traits that make the human operators become susceptible to social engineering attacks. The identified human traits are dishonesty, social compliance, Kindness,Time pressure, Herd mentality, greed/need and distraction. This paper considers only the social metrics part of the model.To measure human traits the authors relies on the HEXACO model and Big Five personality trait models. In these model the personality trait are measured using a ranking scale based on Lickert scale. Hence each trait is measured as a percentile. However, for purpose of this paper, to postulate the metric the author considered the discrete case. Why the value of trait take either a value of “1” or “0”. To determine the relationship between traits between and attackability experts were asked to assess the trait versus attackability from which after aggregating for all traits a social attackability metrics was determined. To determine the predictive social attackability metrics each trait was considered to be equally likely to occur and hence a probability of 1/7 and this acts as factor to transform the social attackability metric into predictive attackability metrics
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Accelerating Research in Africa through Sustainable Virtual Research Communities
No full textDespite the commendable efforts by African NRENs to interconnect universities and research
institutions, research capacity in Africa is still a major challenge. In particular African universities
and research institutions phases the challenges of training, retaining and attracting competent
researchers due to limited resources. Other limitations include cultural barriers, insecurity,
government bureaucracy and technological resource limitations among others. However the
introduction of modern communications techniques resulting from innovative information and
communication technological transformations will go a long way to address these challenges. It is
expected that improved connectivity will influence a paradigm shift in research approach in Africa.
In order to remain relevant in the current competitive knowledge economy, African researchers
ought to take advantage of the improved connectivity to reengineer their research approach by
embracing current information and communication technology innovations. This study investigates
how modern collaborative tools can be exploited to ensure effective brain circulation within Africa
and attract young talents into research careers so as to boost Africa’s research capacity. In the
context of the expected paradigm shift from traditional research methods to e-research, the study
examines the role of virtual research communities in addressing Africa’s research challenges and
hence accelerating research in Africa. The study takes into account the expected transformations of
the scientific communication and points out the virtual communities’ role in the current social
context. By scrutinizing existing collaborative research projects with specific emphasis on
application of ICTs, the study identifies specific approaches that can be exploited to establish virtual
organizations which can then form virtual research communities. Long term sustainability of Virtual
research communities is also addressed to ensure that established VRCs remain viable. By
conducting desktop/web review of grey and published literature and a systematic review of existing
well established virtual research communities, the study examines the key drivers and the critical
success factors of these communities relevant to the African continent. In particular the study
presents a review of the model used to establish virtual research communities within the European
grid infrastructure and attempts to propose one for Africa through the African NRENs. Taking into
consideration the drivers and the critical success factors, the study further proposes an adoption
conceptual model for the new ICT based research paradigm
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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