283,293 research outputs found
Integration of EFQM excellence model and information systems criterion
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have become key institutions in the knowledge-based economy. Over the past decade, the Malaysian government has placed greater emphasis on improved efficiency and productivity in the HEI as an engine for promoting quality human capital for a knowledge-based economy. Importantly, the government raised the share of research and development in GDP from 1.5% in the Eighth Malaysia Plan (2000-2005) to 4.9% in the Ninth Malaysia Plan (2006-2010) for HEIs. As a result, there is a need to monitor the quality performance of HEIs to see if the governments objectives are being met. The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model was introduced at the beginning of 1992 as the framework for assessing organizations for the European Quality Award. In fact, this model has been claimed to be the most widely used model of the national excellence awards in the European countries. However, it does not have Information Systems (IS) as a single criterion. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the interrelationships between the EFQM excellence model and information systems criterion of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) model in the HEIs of Malaysia. The paper identified ten (10) criteria from the research model: leadership; policy and strategy; people; partnership and resources; information systems; processes; people results; student results; society results and key performance results. We obtained 118 valid responses from person in charge of quality management in Malaysian HEIs. Structural equation model (SEM) is used to analyse the data and results indicate that the relationships among the research model followed the Information Systems-Quality Management theory and TQM theory
Popular and/or Prestigious? Measures of Scholarly Esteem
Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into
account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a
scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige
are not identical measures of esteem. In this study we define popularity as the
number of times an author is cited and prestige as the number of times an
author is cited by highly cited papers. Information Retrieval (IR) is the test
field. We compare the 40 leading researchers in terms of their popularity and
prestige over time. Some authors are ranked high on prestige but not on
popularity, while others are ranked high on popularity but not on prestige. We
also relate measures of popularity and prestige to date of Ph.D. award, number
of key publications, organizational affiliation, receipt of prizes/honors, and
gender.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure
Guest Editorial: Nonlinear Optimization of Communication Systems
Linear programming and other classical optimization techniques have found important applications in communication systems for many decades. Recently, there has been a surge in research activities that utilize the latest developments in nonlinear optimization to tackle a much wider scope of work in the analysis and design of communication systems. These activities involve every “layer” of the protocol stack and the principles of layered network architecture itself, and have made intellectual and practical impacts significantly beyond the established frameworks of optimization of communication systems in the early 1990s. These recent results are driven by new demands in the areas of communications and networking, as well as new tools emerging from optimization theory. Such tools include the powerful theories and highly efficient computational algorithms for nonlinear convex optimization, together with global solution methods and relaxation techniques for nonconvex optimization
Uncovering Randomness and Success in Society
An understanding of how individuals shape and impact the evolution of society
is vastly limited due to the unavailability of large-scale reliable datasets
that can simultaneously capture information regarding individual movements and
social interactions. We believe that the popular Indian film industry,
'Bollywood', can provide a social network apt for such a study. Bollywood
provides massive amounts of real, unbiased data that spans more than 100 years,
and hence this network has been used as a model for the present paper. The
nodes which maintain a moderate degree or widely cooperate with the other nodes
of the network tend to be more fit (measured as the success of the node in the
industry) in comparison to the other nodes. The analysis carried forth in the
current work, using a conjoined framework of complex network theory and random
matrix theory, aims to quantify the elements that determine the fitness of an
individual node and the factors that contribute to the robustness of a network.
The authors of this paper believe that the method of study used in the current
paper can be extended to study various other industries and organizations.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, 14 table
Development of RMJ: A mirror of the development of the profession and discipline of record management
The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the history of Records Management Journal on its 20th anniversary; it aims to review and analyse its evolution and its contribution in the context of the development of the profession and the discipline of records management. The paper seeks to provide the context and justification for the selection of eight articles previously published in the journal to be reprinted in this issue
Channel Capacity under Sub-Nyquist Nonuniform Sampling
This paper investigates the effect of sub-Nyquist sampling upon the capacity
of an analog channel. The channel is assumed to be a linear time-invariant
Gaussian channel, where perfect channel knowledge is available at both the
transmitter and the receiver. We consider a general class of right-invertible
time-preserving sampling methods which include irregular nonuniform sampling,
and characterize in closed form the channel capacity achievable by this class
of sampling methods, under a sampling rate and power constraint. Our results
indicate that the optimal sampling structures extract out the set of
frequencies that exhibits the highest signal-to-noise ratio among all spectral
sets of measure equal to the sampling rate. This can be attained through
filterbank sampling with uniform sampling at each branch with possibly
different rates, or through a single branch of modulation and filtering
followed by uniform sampling. These results reveal that for a large class of
channels, employing irregular nonuniform sampling sets, while typically
complicated to realize, does not provide capacity gain over uniform sampling
sets with appropriate preprocessing. Our findings demonstrate that aliasing or
scrambling of spectral components does not provide capacity gain, which is in
contrast to the benefits obtained from random mixing in spectrum-blind
compressive sampling schemes.Comment: accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 201
Multilevel Coded Modulation for Unequal Error Protection and Multistage Decoding—Part I: Symmetric Constellations
In this paper, theoretical upper bounds and computer simulation results on the error performance of multilevel block coded modulations for unequal error protection (UEP) and multistage decoding are presented. It is shown that nonstandard signal set partitionings and multistage decoding provide excellent UEP capabilities beyond those achievable with conventional coded modulation. The coding scheme is designed in such a way that the most important information bits have a lower error rate than other information bits. The large effective error coefficients, normally associated with standard mapping by set partitioning, are reduced by considering nonstandard partitionings of the underlying signal set. The bits-to-signal mappings induced by these partitionings allow the use of soft-decision decoding of binary block codes. Moreover, parallel operation of some of the staged decoders is possible, to achieve high data rate transmission, so that there is no error propagation between these decoders. Hybrid partitionings are also considered that trade off increased intraset distances in the last partition levels with larger effective error coefficients in the middle partition levels. The error performance of specific examples of multilevel codes over 8-PSK and 64-QAM signal sets are simulated and compared with theoretical upper bounds on the error performance
On Known-Plaintext Attacks to a Compressed Sensing-based Encryption: A Quantitative Analysis
Despite the linearity of its encoding, compressed sensing may be used to
provide a limited form of data protection when random encoding matrices are
used to produce sets of low-dimensional measurements (ciphertexts). In this
paper we quantify by theoretical means the resistance of the least complex form
of this kind of encoding against known-plaintext attacks. For both standard
compressed sensing with antipodal random matrices and recent multiclass
encryption schemes based on it, we show how the number of candidate encoding
matrices that match a typical plaintext-ciphertext pair is so large that the
search for the true encoding matrix inconclusive. Such results on the practical
ineffectiveness of known-plaintext attacks underlie the fact that even
closely-related signal recovery under encoding matrix uncertainty is doomed to
fail.
Practical attacks are then exemplified by applying compressed sensing with
antipodal random matrices as a multiclass encryption scheme to signals such as
images and electrocardiographic tracks, showing that the extracted information
on the true encoding matrix from a plaintext-ciphertext pair leads to no
significant signal recovery quality increase. This theoretical and empirical
evidence clarifies that, although not perfectly secure, both standard
compressed sensing and multiclass encryption schemes feature a noteworthy level
of security against known-plaintext attacks, therefore increasing its appeal as
a negligible-cost encryption method for resource-limited sensing applications.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, accepted for
publication. Article in pres
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