Smart community: The Malaysian perspective

Countries globally are becoming information literate.Future communities should be able to create, distribute, and access information or manage knowledge using current information and communication technologies.Communities such as these are known as smart communities.The question is: Can such a smart community to bridge the digital divide be built in Malaysia? This paper discusses about knowledge management, the smart community projects both globally and locally, Malaysia’s readiness for a smart community, and suggests a model for smart communities in Malaysia.The paper will very briefly talk about the Smart Communities International Network (SCIN) and compares initiatives made by the SCIN partners

Increasing competitiveness of the construction sector by adopting innovative clustering

Companies in today's world need to become and stay competitive. This means, among other things, that they have to create new ideas and turn them into innovative products and processes. Appropriate innovation management strategies, including creation of various kinds of alliances with other business entities, need to be adopted within the company. Clustering is one of such possibilities. The paper discusses the main features of clusters and the benefits for their members; in addition, it identifies specific features of the construction sector that require specific approaches to establish a cluster.\ud The methodology Innovative Cluster Model with 3x3x3 mail elements (ICM333) is proposed and used to initiate and develop a cluster in the construction sector. In the cluster development three stages are identified: emergence, development and maturity of the cluster. Actions associated with these three stages tackle four areas (in each stage): rationale, organization, resources, and implementation. All areas are thoroughly elaborated and discussed in the paper. In the first step, the emerging cluster, the key element is identification, assessment and dissemination of development opportunities. It can run parallel with the cluster initiation, which is followed by the operation. Within the steps to be taken in the stage of the developing cluster, visions nad the goals have to be defined first, followed by the definition of the cluster organisation. The mature cluster stage has to focus on performance measurement and management, and take appropriate measures to garantee its sustainability and adequate innovative character.\ud Implementation of the proposed cluster development methodology has the potential of greatly facilitating the betterment of a construction sector in a particular country. It can be a valuable tool, when available to policymakers, chambers of commerce and trade, and other stakeholders that wish to foster the development of such clusters.\ud The paper reports on the results of the 7th Framework project FP7-REGIONS-2007-1 RegCon – Support Action for Innovation Driven Clusters in Construction.\u

BIJEG S "VIRTUALNOG KORZA" – NOVI TRENDOVI PRIPADNIKA GENERACIJE „Z“ U KORIŠTENJU DRUŠTVENIH MREŽA

The aim of this paper is to determine whether the younger population in Croatia is following the dominant world trends in the use of social networks as extremely widespread communication platforms. Namely, although the Facebook community currently consists of as many as two billion users and is still convincingly the most popular social network in the world, it has already been noted that members of the so-called generation Z (people born after 1995) across the world are increasingly abandoning or minorizing Facebook and turning to other social networks. To this end, the authors used the comparative method to investigate the use of several contemporary social networks and current trends in the world and Croatia, using the necessary theoretical framework. Also, during May of 2017, the authors conducted a research into online habits and attitudes on social networks – which has not yet been done in Croatia, in the authors\u27 knowledge – by means of an online survey among secondary school students, members of generation Z, in several major and smaller Croatian cities: Zagreb, Osijek, Krk and Korčula. The results of the research confirmed the initial hypotheses of the authors: young people are increasingly leaving Facebook as a “virtual promenade”, largely because older generations began using it, including their parents; they are mostly turning to social networks that offer a prevalence of photographs over text, primarily Instagram and Snapchat. In addition, no significant differences were found between members of generation Z in larger urban areas on the continent and smaller urban areas on the Adriatic islands, when it comes to their preferences.Cilj ovoga rada jest utvrditi prati li i mlađa populacija u Hrvatskoj vladajuće svjetske trendove u pogledu korištenja društvenih mreža kao iznimno raširenih komunikacijskih platformi. Naime, premda Facebook zajednica trenutno okuplja čak oko dvije milijarde korisnika i još uvijek je uvjerljivo globalno najpopularnija društvena mreža, u svjetskim razmjerima već je zabilježena pojava da pripadnici tzv. Generacije „Z“ (osobe rođene nakon 1995. godine) sve više napuštaju ili minoriziraju Facebook i okreću se drugim društvenim mrežama. U tu svrhu, uz iznošenje nužnog teorijskog okvira, autori su uporabom komparativne metode napravili usporedbu pojedinih suvremenih društvenih mreža te aktualnih kretanja u svijetu i Hrvatskoj u pogledu njihova korištenja. Također, tijekom mjeseca svibnja 2017. godine provedeno je istraživanje internetskih navika i stavova o društvenim mrežama – kakvo, po saznanjima autora rada, još nije provedeno u Hrvatskoj - putem metode online ankete među učenicima srednjih škola, članova Generacije „Z“, u nekoliko većih i manjih hrvatskih gradova: Zagrebu, Osijeku, Krku i Korčuli. Rezultati istraživanja potvrdili su početne postavke autora rada: mladi sve više napuštaju Facebook kao „virtualni korzo“, dobrim dijelom i jer su ga učestalo počele koristiti starije generacije, među kojima i njihovi roditelji; a većinom se okreću društvenim mrežama koje im nude prevlast slike nad tekstom, u prvom redu Instagramu i Snapchatu. Osim toga, utvrđeno je kako ne postoje osjetne razlike između preferencija članova Generacije „Z“ u većim urbanim sredinama na kontinentu te u manjim urbanim sredinama na jadranskim otocima

A spatial publish subscribe overlay for massively multiuser virtual environments

Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics and Information Engineering, 2010, v. 2, p. 314-318Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have become popular for designing scalable virtual environments (VEs) in recent years. However, one question that remains is whether a single overlay can be flexible enough to support different types of VEs. We present S-VON, a P2P overlay that attempts this goal by providing spatial publish / subscribe (SPS) services. Besides flexibility, S-VON also aims to be practical and efficient by utilizing super-peers and considering the physical topology (i.e., network distance) to reduce latencies. Our simulations show that super-peers provide a unique design space where both bandwidth usage and latencies can be effectively reduced, such that even a crowded Second Life region can be hosted with residential ADSL. © 2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

An Authentication Method for Secure Internet Transaction Using Smart Card and Secure Coprocessor

Authentication is the process of confirming an identity. In the context of network interactions, authentication involves the confident identification of one party by another party. Authentication of users in distributed systems poses special problems because, users lack the ability to encrypt and , decrypt. In most systems today, the user is forced to trust the node he wants to use. In a more satisfactory design, the user carries a smart card with sufficient computing power to assist him. This thesis deals with relatively new methods of authentication using a smart card and secure coprocessor. We analyze two cases to authenticate a client, depending on the smart card usage. The major attacks that affect the smart card and the server are applied to our proposed methods of authentication. The result shows that using the proper system preparation and proper authentication sequence for our methods the effects could be minimized

Structures and Algorithms for Peer-to-Peer Cooperation

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are distributed systems, without any hierarchical organization or centralized control. Peers form self-organizing overlay networks that are on top of the Internet. Both parts of this thesis deal with peer-to-peer overlay networks, the first part with unstructured ones used to build a large scale Networked Virtual Environment. The second part gives insights on how the users of a real life structured peer-to-peer network behave, and how well the proposed algorithms for publishing and retrieving data work. Moreover we analyze the security (holes) in such a system. Networked virtual environments (NVEs), also known as distributed virtual environments, are computer-generated, synthetic worlds that allow simultaneous interactions of multiple participants. Many efforts have been made to allow people to interact in realistic virtual environments, resulting in the recent boom of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In the first part of the thesis, we present a complete study of an augmented Delaunay-based overlay for peer-to-peer shared virtual worlds. We design an overlay network matching the Delaunay triangulation of the participating peers in a generalized d-dimensional space. Especially, we describe the self-organizing algorithms for peer insertion and deletion. To reduce the delay penalty of overlay routing, we propose to augment each node of the Delaunay-based overlay with a limited number of carefully selected shortcut links creating a small-world. We show that a small number of shortcuts is sufficient to significantly decrease the delay of routing in the space. We present a distributed algorithm for the clustering of peers. The algorithm is dynamic in the sense that whenever a peer joins or leaves the NVE, the clustering will be adapted if necessary by either splitting a cluster or merging clusters. The main idea of the algorithm is to classify links between adjacent peers into short intracluster and long inter-cluster links. In a structured system, the neighbor relationship between peers and data locations is strictly defined. Searching in such systems is therefore determined by the particular network architecture. Among the strictly structured systems, some implement a distributed hash table (DHT) using different data structures. DHTs have been actively studied in the literature and many different proposals have been made on how to organize peers in a DHT. However, very few DHTs have been implemented in real systems and deployed on a large scale. One exception is KAD, a DHT based on Kademlia, which is part of eDonkey, a peer-to-peer file sharing system with several million simultaneous users. In the second part of this thesis we give a detailed background on KAD, the organization of the peers, the search and the publish operations, and we describe our measurement methodology. We have been crawling KAD continuously for more than a year. We obtained information about geographical distribution of peers, session times, peer availability, and peer lifetime. We found that session times are Weibull distributed and show how this information can be exploited to make the publishing mechanism much more efficient. As we have been studying KAD over the course of the last two years we have been both, fascinated and frightened by the possibilities KAD offers. We show that mounting a Sybil attack is very easy in KAD and allows to compromise the privacy of KAD users, to compromise the correct operation of the key lookup and to mount distributed denial-of-service attacks with very little resources

The state of peer-to-peer network simulators

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results

Evaluating Connection Resilience for the Overlay Network Kademlia

Kademlia is a decentralized overlay network, up to now mainly used for highly scalable file sharing applications. Due to its distributed nature, it is free from single points of failure. Communication can happen over redundant network paths, which makes information distribution with Kademlia resilient against failing nodes and attacks. This makes it applicable to more scenarios than Internet file sharing. In this paper, we simulate Kademlia networks with varying parameters and analyze the number of node-disjoint paths in the network, and thereby the network connectivity. A high network connectivity is required for communication and system-wide adaptation even when some nodes or communication channels fail or get compromised by an attacker. With our results, we show the influence of these parameters on the connectivity and, therefore, the resilience against failing nodes and communication channels.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, accepted to ICDCS2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0800