Privacy Aware Parallel Computation of Skyline Sets Queries from Distributed Databases

A skyline query finds objects that are not dominated by another object from a given set of objects. Skyline queries help us to filter unnecessary information efficiently and provide us clues for various decision making tasks. However, we cannot use skyline queries in privacy aware environment, since we have to hide individual's records values even though there is no ID information. Therefore, we considered skyline sets queries. The skyline set query returns skyline sets from all possible sets, each of which is composed of some objects in a database. With the growth of network infrastructure data are stored in distributed databases. In this paper, we expand the idea to compute skyline sets queries in parallel fashion from distributed databases without disclosing individual records to others. The proposed method utilizes an agent-based parallel computing framework that can efficiently compute skyline sets queries and can solve the privacy problems of skyline queries in distributed environment. The computation of skyline sets is performed simultaneously in all databases which increases parallelism and reduces the computation time

スカイライン問合わせを利用した大規模データベースの情報選別

Conventional SQL queries take exact input and produce complete result set. However, with massive increase in data volume in different applications, the large result sets returned by traditional SQL queries are not well suited for the users to take effective decisions. Therefore, there is an increasing interest in queries like top-k queries and skyline queries those produce a more concise result set. Top-k queries rely on the scores of the objects to evaluate the usefulness of the objects. In this type of queries, users require to define their own scoring function by combining their interests. Based on the user defined scoring function, the system sorts the objects by their scores and outputs the top-k objects in the ranking list as the result. However, defining a scoring function by the users is a major draw of the top-k queries as in the large data sets where there are many conflicting criteria exist, it is very difficult for the users to define the scoring functions by themselves.……広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(工学)Engineeringdoctora

Legislature and Governance A Comparative Study between Bangladesh and Japan

This study shades light on the legislative structure and practices of Japan and that of Bangladesh with a view to comparing the state of governance of these two countries. This study has been conducted based on purely qualitative approach with content analysis. As per myriad of study legislative practices of Japan is successful to discharge good governance as the economic growth of Japan is termed as miracle. This study find that the legislative practices of Japan incorporated all the values of governance through its provision of two-house diet where lower house preserve substantial power over upper house, floor crossing, responsiveness of the legislatures, and strong role of parliamentary committees. After comparing the legislative practices of Japan with that of Bangladesh, this study basically found distinctions in structure and practiced value. The parliamentarian of Japan can vote against party decision to preserve the national interest while this is restricted in Bangladesh by the constitution. Japanese parliamentarian even prime minister often stepped down from the government confessing their faults. In Bangladesh we can’t even think of it. Although every parliament in Bangladesh forms myriad of committees to oversight the work of ministers but visible and vibrant role of these committees is rare in both in giving policy input and in discharging oversight activities. Bangladesh, a democratic state wants to uphold the principles of good governance, may imitate some legislative principles both from structure and values of Japanese style of legislature.Keywords: legislature; governance; good governance; Japan; Banglades

Towards developing a framework to analyze the qualities of the university websites

The website of a university is considered to be a virtual gateway to provide primary resources to its stakeholders. It can play an indispensable role in disseminating information about a university to a variety of audience at a time. Thus, the quality of an academic website requires special attention to fulfil the users’ need. This paper presents a multi-method approach of quality assessment of the academic websites, in the context of universities of Bangladesh. We developed an automated web-based tool that can evaluate any academic website based on three criteria, which are as follows: content of information, loading time and overall performance. Content of information contains many sub criteria, such as university vision and mission, faculty information, notice board and so on. This tool can also perform comparative analysis among several academic websites and generate a ranked list of these. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first initiative to develop an automated tool for accessing academic website quality in context of Bangladesh. Beside this, we have conducted a questionnaire-based statistical evaluation among several universities to obtain the respective users’ feedback about their academic websites. Then, a ranked list is generated based on the survey result that is almost similar to the ranked list got from the University ranking systems. This validates the effectiveness of our developed tool in accessing academic website

An effective hotel recommendation system through processing heterogeneous data

Recommendation systems have recently gained a lot of popularity in various industries such as entertainment and tourism. They can act as filters of information by providing relevant suggestions to the users through processing heterogeneous data from different networks. Many travelers and tourists routinely rely on textual reviews, numerical ratings, and points of interest to select hotels in cities worldwide. To attract more customers, online hotel booking systems typically rank their hotels based on the recommendations from their customers. In this paper, we present a framework that can rank hotels by analyzing hotels’ customer reviews and nearby amenities. In addition, a framework is presented that combines the scores generated from user reviews and surrounding facilities. We perform experiments using datasets from online hotel booking platforms such as TripAdvisor and Booking to evaluate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed framework. We first store the keywords extracted from reviews and assign weights to each considered unigram and bigram keywords and, then, we give a numerical score to each considered keyword. Finally, our proposed system aggregates the scores generated from the reviews and surrounding environments from different categories of the facilities. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed recommendation framework

Prevalence of risk factors for hypertension: a cross-sectional study in an urban area of Bangladesh

BACKGROUND: Hypertension is a major risk factor for several cardiovascular diseases (CVD). The prevalence of hypertension is increasing in Bangladesh, especially in urban areas. The objective of this study was to estimate the prevalence of hypertension and its risk factors in an urban area of Bangladesh. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional survey involving participants aged ≥ 25 years in an urban area in Dhaka between June-December 2012, using multi-stage random sampling. Data on socioeconomic status, tobacco use, physical activity, diet, extra-salt use, family history of hypertension, CVD, anthropometric measurements and blood pressure were collected using modified WHO-STEPS protocol. Hypertension and pre-hypertension were defined according to JNC-7. Multiple logistic regressions models were used to identify risk factors associated with hypertension. RESULTS: The overall age-adjusted prevalence hypertension and pre-hypertension among 730 participants was 23.7% and 19%, respectively, which was higher among males compared to females (23.6% vs 21.71% and 21.7% vs 17.0%, respectively). Bivariate analysis showed significant relationship of hypertension with age, BMI, no physical activity, tobacco use, extra salt intake and family history of stroke/cardiovascular disease. In the multivariate model, factors significantly associated with hypertension were older age (OR 19.18, 95% CI 13.58-28.11), smoking (OR 3.47, 95% CI 2.85-5.19), extra salt intake (OR 1.13, 95% CI 1.04-2.21), and high waist circumference (OR 3.41, 95% CI 2.81-5.29). CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of hypertension and pre-hypertension was high among our study participants. Population-based intervention programs and policies for increased awareness about the risk factors, and life-style modification are essential for prevention of hypertension

A Rule-based Skyline Computation over a dynamic database

Skyline query which relies on the notion of Pareto dominance filters the data items from a database by ensuring only those data items that are not worse than any others are selected as skylines. However, the dynamic nature of databases in which their states and/or structures change throughout their lifetime to incorporate the current and latest information of database applications, requires a new set of skylines to be derived. Blindly computing skylines on the new state/structure of a database is inefficient, as not all the data items are affected by the changes. Hence, this paper proposes a rule-based approach in tackling the above issue with the main aim at avoiding unnecessary skyline computations. Based on the type of operation that changes the state/structure of a database, i.e. insert/delete/update a data item(s) or add/remove a dimension(s), a set of rules are defined. Besides, the prominent dominance relationships when pairwise comparisons are performed are retained; which are then utilised in the process of computing a new set of skylines. Several analyses have been conducted to evaluate the performance and prove the efficiency of our proposed solution