Trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments

In the Internet-age, the geographical boundaries that have previously impinged upon inter-organisational collaborations have become decreasingly important. Of more importance for such collaborations is the notion and subsequent nature of trust - this is especially so in Grid-like environments where resources are both made available and subsequently accessed and used by remote users from a multitude of institutions with a variety of different privileges spanning across the collaborating resources. In this context, the ability to dynamically negotiate and subsequently enforce security policies driven by various levels of inter-organisational trust is essential. In this paper we present a dynamic trust negotiation (DTN) model and associated prototype implementation showing the benefits and limitations DTN incurs in supporting n-tier delegation hops needed for trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments

Fingerprint recognition system using hybrid matching techniques

With an increasing emphasis on the emerging automatic person identification application, biometrics based, especially fingerprint-based identification, is receiving a lot of attention. This research developed an automatic fingerprint recognition system (AFRS) based on a hybrid between minutiae and correlation based techniques to represent and to match fingerprint; it improved each technique individually. It was noticed that, in the hybrid approach, as a result of an improvement of minutiae extraction algorithm in post-process phase that combines the two algorithms, the performance of the minutia algorithm improved. An improvement in the ridge algorithm that used centre point in fingerprint instead of reference point was also observed. Experiments indicate that the hybrid technique performs much better than each algorithm individually. <br /

Rerouting Technique for Faster Restoration of Preempted Calls

In a communication network where resources are shared between instantaneous request (IR) and book-ahead (BA) connections, activation of future BA connections causes preemption of many on-going IR connections upon resource scarcity. A solution to this problem is to reroute the preempted calls via alternative feasible paths, which often does not ensure acceptably low disruption of service. In this paper, a new rerouting strategy is proposed that uses the destination node to initiate the rerouting and thereby reduces the rerouting time, which ultimately improves the service disruption time. Simulations on a widely used network topology suggest that the proposed rerouting scheme achieves more successful rerouting rate with lower service disruption time, while not compromising other network performance metrics like utilization and call blocking rate

Answering English queries in automatically transcribed Arabic speech

There are several well-known approaches to parsing Arabic text in preparation for indexing and retrieval. Techniques such as stemming and stopping have been shown to improve search results on written newswire dispatches, but few comparisons are available on other data sources. In this paper, we apply several alternative stemming and stopping approaches to Arabic text automatically extracted from the audio soundtrack of news video footage, and compare these with approaches that rely on machine translation of the underlying text. Using the TRECVID video collection and queries, we show that normalisation, stopword- removal, and light stemming increase retrieval precision, but that heavy stemming and trigrams have a negative effect. We also show that the choice of machine translation engine plays a major role in retrieval effectiveness

Enhancing Strategic Information Security Management in Organizations through Information Warfare Practices

Today’s organizations use control-centred security management systems as a preventative shield against a broad spectrum of attacks. However, these have proven to be less effective against the customized and innovative strategies and operational techniques used by Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). In this short paper we argue that to combat APTs, organizations need a strategic-level shift away from a traditional prevention-cantered approach to that of a response-cantered one. Drawing on the information warfare (IW) paradigm in military studies, and using Dynamic Capability Theory (DCT), this research examines the applicability of IW capabilities in the corporate domain. We propose a research framework to argue that conventional prevention-centred response capabilities; such as incident response capabilities and IW-centred security capabilities can be integrated into IW-enabled dynamic response capabilities that improve enterprise security performance

The Information Systems Academic Discipline in Australia

This paper reports a descriptive case study of the IS academic discipline in Australia. One in a series of nine papers comprising a special issue of Communications of the AIS (CAIS) titled The Information Systems Academic Discipline in Pacific Asia, this sub-study sought to establish the beginnings of a cumulative and ongoing effort to track and report on, and reflect upon the evolution and state of the IS academic discipline in Australia (and Pacific Asia and ultimately other world regions). This paper clarifies the role of the Australian study as a preliminary to the larger Pacific Asia study, and draws upon a series of case studies of Australian states and territories to present the Australian situation. The case study protocol, based in Ridley\u27s [2006] framework on the evolution of disciplines, suggests an inverse relationship between the impact of local contingencies and a discipline\u27s degree of professionalism and maturity. Analysis of Australian data reveals considerable diversity in IS research and teaching across the nation, reflecting the wide geographic spread of universities in Australia. Although in general IS research is not highly contingent upon local exigencies and environmental pressures, the topics researched often reflected personal interests and are only weakly coordinated across research sites. At this time IS in Australia does not possess a unique symbol system that allows unambiguous communication between initiates within the field

Adoption of Digital Technologies and Decision Support Systems in Horticulture Supply Chains

This paper presents key factors affecting the adoption of digital technologies and decision support technologies in horticulture supply chains. Using the case study method, in-depth interviews were conducted with decision-makers of three distinctive horticulture supply chains, complemented by site observations. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is the theoretical foundation guiding this qualitative study. The findings indicate the constructs perceived ease of use, usefulness, attitudes, behavioural intentions, trust, social influence, and costs affecting adoption. The study contributes to the literature by presenting an integrated TAM model that can be used to understand adoption in horticulture supply chains. It strengthens TAM by providing evidence of its applicability to real-life industry settings and further creates a link to the unique adoption problems in industry. The practical contribution to ICT developers, industry peak bodies, and governments is that the inter-firms’ interactions need to be considered when designing decision support technologies and implementing improvement programs

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) and User Performance: A Literature Review

Organizations spend billions of dollars and countless hours implementing Enterprise Resources Planning systems (ERPs) to attain better performance. However, the failure rate of ERP implementation is very high, with subsequent research interests focussing mainly on understanding the failure factors. With the spotlight of prior research mainly focussed on success and failure factors other important aspects have not been given enough attention. This paper starts from the proposition that users can evaluate the benefits of the ERP systems and users can judge whether or not ERPs provide reasonable payoff and outcomes for organizations. This premise is based on the view that the user creates the benefits through the accomplishment of tasks leading to the achievement of goals. The study consists of comprehensive literature review bringing to light previous investigations on the impacts of ERP on user performance and presents how ERP research utilises IS theory to investigate ERP in different settings