Dissertation by portfolio : an alternative to the traditional thesis

Both the absolute numbers and proportion of international students in the student cohorts of postgradute computing and engineering courses rose dramatically between 2005 and 2009. One of the hardest tasks these students have to perform is the production of a dissertation in English. This paper will concentrate on experiences with students studying computing masters level courses. This paper asks the question whether we are assessing a student's skills with academic English or their ability to meet the learning outcomes of the dissertation module. It will present an alternative to the traditional written dissertation in the form of a portfolio model which is applicable in highly technical research projects. The lessons learned from a pilot project which introduced portfolio dissertations to the Department of Computing at Sheffield Hallam University will be presented along with plans for the next stage of implementation

FAQchat as in Information Retrieval system

A chatbot is a conversational agent that interacts with users through natural languages. In this paper, we describe a new way to access information using a chatbot. The FAQ in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds has been used to retrain the ALICE chatbot system, producing FAQchat. The results returned from FAQchat are similar to ones generated by search engines such as Google. For evaluation, a comparison was made between FAQchat and Google. The main objective is to demonstrate that FAQchat is a viable alternative to Google and it can be used as a tool to access FAQ databases

Efficient Seeds Computation Revisited

The notion of the cover is a generalization of a period of a string, and there are linear time algorithms for finding the shortest cover. The seed is a more complicated generalization of periodicity, it is a cover of a superstring of a given string, and the shortest seed problem is of much higher algorithmic difficulty. The problem is not well understood, no linear time algorithm is known. In the paper we give linear time algorithms for some of its versions --- computing shortest left-seed array, longest left-seed array and checking for seeds of a given length. The algorithm for the last problem is used to compute the seed array of a string (i.e., the shortest seeds for all the prefixes of the string) in $O(n^2)$ time. We describe also a simpler alternative algorithm computing efficiently the shortest seeds. As a by-product we obtain an $O(n\log{(n/m)})$ time algorithm checking if the shortest seed has length at least $m$ and finding the corresponding seed. We also correct some important details missing in the previously known shortest-seed algorithm (Iliopoulos et al., 1996).Comment: 14 pages, accepted to CPM 201

Chinese Wall Security Policy

This project establishes a Chinese wall security policy model in the environment of cloud computing. In 1988 Brewer and Nash proposed a very nice commercial security policy in British financial world. Though the policy was well accepted, but the model was incorrect. A decade later, Dr. Lin provided a model in 2003 that meets Brewer & Nash’s Policy. One of the important components in Cloud computing is data center. In order for any company to store data in the center, a trustable security policy model is a must; Chinese wall security policy model will provide this assurance. The heart of the Chinese Wall Security Policy Model is the concept of Conflict of Interest (COI). The concept can be modeled by an anti-reflexive, symmetric and transitive binary relation. In this project, by extending Dr. Lin’s Model, we explore the security issues in the environment of cloud computing and develop a small system of the Chinese Wall Security Model