Towards understanding phishing victims\u27 profile

Today it is known that the weakest link in the cyber security chain is the computer user. Social engineering attacks are commonly used to deceive computer users to perform actions that could leak private information. Such attacks psychologically manipulate the computer users to reveal his/her confidential information. Therefore, the computer user has been carefully studied by security researchers to understand the relationship between cyber security incidents and the victim background. In this paper, we present a breadth-first survey of recent studies that aim to understand the relationship between victims\u27 backgrounds and phishing attacks. We summarize the characteristics of the phishing victims, following a review of their demographic and personality traits. © 2012 IEEE

Optimization of energy consumption in cloud computing datacenters

Cloud computing has emerged as a practical paradigm for providing IT resources, infrastructure and services. This has led to the establishment of datacenters that have substantial energy demands for their operation. This work investigates the optimization of energy consumption in cloud datacenter using energy efficient allocation of tasks to resources. The work seeks to develop formal optimization models that minimize the energy consumption of computational resources and evaluates the use of existing optimization solvers in testing these models. Integer linear programming (ILP) techniques are used to model the scheduling problem. The objective is to minimize the total power consumed by the active and idle cores of the servers’ CPUs while meeting a set of constraints. Next, we use these models to carry out a detailed performance comparison between a selected set of Generic ILP and 0-1 Boolean satisfiability based solvers in solving the ILP formulations. Simulation results indicate that in some cases the developed models have saved up to 38% in energy consumption when compared to common techniques such as round robin. Furthermore, results also showed that generic ILP solvers had superior performance when compared to SAT-based ILP solvers especially as the number of tasks and resources grow in size

Classifying obstructive sleep apnea using smartphones

AbstractObstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a serious sleep disorder which is characterized by frequent obstruction of the upper airway, often resulting in oxygen desaturation. The serious negative impact of OSA on human health makes monitoring and diagnosing it a necessity. Currently, polysomnography is considered the gold standard for diagnosing OSA, which requires an expensive attended overnight stay at a hospital with considerable wiring between the human body and the system. In this paper, we implement a reliable, comfortable, inexpensive, and easily available portable device that allows users to apply the OSA test at home without the need for attended overnight tests. The design takes advantage of a smatrphone’s built-in sensors, pervasiveness, computational capabilities, and user-friendly interface to screen OSA. We use three main sensors to extract physiological signals from patients which are (1) an oximeter to measure the oxygen level, (2) a microphone to record the respiratory effort, and (3) an accelerometer to detect the body’s movement. Finally, we examine our system’s ability to screen the disease as compared to the gold standard by testing it on 15 samples. The results showed that 100% of patients were correctly identified as having the disease, and 85.7% of patients were correctly identified as not having the disease. These preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed system when compared to the gold standard and emphasize the important role of smartphones in healthcare

Teambuilding, Innovation And The Engineering Communication Interface

Recent engineering industry-based research has identified a number of skill deficiencies in graduating engineers. Emphasis on communication and teamwork informed by attributes of self management, problem solving and mutual accountability have been recognized as important needs by The Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET of the United States and are now required in undergraduate course material. The Engineering College at the American University of Sharjah has recognised this reality with the development of a course in language enhancement and professional communication centred on engineering multidisciplinary projects (EMDPs). This paper will outline four innovative practices that together inform this course; team-building, teamwork management, collaborative problem solving, resource management. Brief illustrative descriptions of: team-building through the use of the Belbin Team Role Inventory; management of teamwork development via planning and documentation; personnel and collaborative problem solving and interactive information sources hosted via a LibGuide will elaborate these innovative practices.