Content pricing in mobile social network: a collective bidding approach

Paper presented at the 5th Strathmore International Mathematics Conference (SIMC 2019), 12 - 16 August 2019, Strathmore University, Nairobi, KenyaAs smart mobile devices and phones become more ubiquitous and pervasive with wide array of sensors and communication techniques, we can develop mobile social network (MSN) apps that enable these devices to automatically create virtual communities where contents can be shared implicitly. For instance, your smartphone could assist you have a productive encounter with other MSN users by informing you about their interests and valuable contents that they may share with you. Example of such application is Whozthat which uses MSN to enrich offline social interactions among strangers by suggesting topics of common interest. Thus, MSNs enable users to discover and share contents with each other, especially at ephemeral events such as exhibitions and conferences. Nevertheless, the incentive of users to actively share their contents in MSNs may be lacking if the corresponding cost is high. In this paper, we propose a content pricing and sharing framework in MSN that is built on users’ collective bidding and content cost sharing. The content sharing problem is formulated as a distributed system that achieves cooperative outcome while preserving non-cooperative decision making among the users through the proposed collective bidding and broadcast nature of wireless communication. That is, co-located peers individually propose payments to their encounters whose contents they are interested in based on their perceived values of the contents. The respective content owners share their contents if the proposed payments can collectively compensate the cost of sharing their contents with these peers. We show that this guarantees individual rationality and promotes content sharing among the opportunistic encounters in the network. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism reduces the time and cost to collect contents of interest in the network and significantly improves network utilization.School of Information Science & Technology, Kisii University, Kenya

Records Management Policy in Enhancing Governance in Homa Bay County Headquarters, Kenya

Globally, records management plays major role in enhancing governance. The study objective was to examine the role of records management policy in enhancing governance at Homa Bay (HB) County Headquarters, Kenya. Target population comprised of 306 employees who are the custodians of records within the County Headquarters. Stratified technique was used to classify employees into strata. Yamane simplified formula was used to obtain a sample size of 174 respondents, which was proportionately distributed per department using random sampling technique. Structured questionnaires and interview schedules were pretested to determine validity and reliability and thereafter employed to collect data. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics with the aid of IBM – SPSS (Version 23), presented in a table and interpreted in mean, frequencies, percentages, and standard deviation. Qualitative data was analysed using content analysis. The finding showed that records management policy was available in HB, though some employees were unaware. The study concluded that records managers in HB County should instill awareness among staff on the importance of records management policy. Based on the finding and conclusion, the study recommends, firstly, that HB records managers should ensure records management policy is properly documented and shared with all employees managing records with a view of increasing efficiency in the information flow thus enhancing governance and secondly, HB would identify areas of weakness in records management policy and focus on improvement

Adopting Digital Solutions for Large Scale Surveillance of Crop Pests and Diseases in Developing Countries—A Review

Crop pests and diseases are ranked as some of the world’s leading threats to agricultural productivity. The need to improve adoption of digital solutions prompted a review on the applicability of emerging digital solutions in large-scale surveillance of crop pest and diseases. This study presents findings on key requirements for achieving digitized large-scale pest surveillance, fitness for purpose of common autonomous biosecurity surveillance technologies, and prospects of smartphones as an alternative surveillance solution. Firstly, the research identified appropriateness of the solution, availability of supporting infrastructure and level of stakeholder involvement in solution formulation as some of the key determinants of digital solution adoption. Although most common autonomous biosecurity surveillance technologies are promising, their adoption in developing nations are limited by operational costs, legal requirements, skillsets, and operational environments among others. Thirdly, recent advancements in smartphones and wide spread ownership among farmers provide a unique opportunity for advancing Mobile Crowd-Sensing solutions in achieving large-scale pest surveillance. Lastly, we recommend designing an incentive mechanism to motivate farmers’ participation in a surveillance solution

Experimental Approach as a Methodology in Teaching Physics in Secondary Schools

Abstract Use of experiment as a teaching methodology for Physics in secondary school is crucial for successful concept delivery by the subject teachers and concept mastery by the learners. Delivering quality content in Physics in most schools in Kenya, nevertheless, has been met with a number of challenges such as inadequate trained teachers, lack of infrastructure (for instance, Physics laboratory, laboratory apparatus, and lack of Laboratory Assistants etc. For instance, in 2014 Gem Disctrict (in Kenya) 52% of teachers of Physics are untrained (that is, they lack basic training to qualify them as teachers of Physics). The contribution of this study is to establish the influence of teacher-based factors on the use of experiments in teaching Physics in secondary schools in Kenya (case of schools in Gem District). Specifically, the study addresses the following objectives: firstly, it determines the influence of the teacher's professional qualification on the use experiments in teaching Physics; secondly, it establishes the influence of teacher experience on the use of experiments in teaching Physics and the influence of teaching load on the use of experiments in teaching Physics; and lastly, it establishes the influence of the lesson preparation on the use of experiments in teaching Physics. The study employs both descriptive survey and correlation design approaches with a population of 32 participants. Data is collected using questionnaires and interviews. A pilot study is done in 3 secondary schools to test the reliability of the data instruments (achieving Pearson's r value of 80%) We use both descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, percentages frequencies and Pearson's r to analyse the quantitative data while qualitative data is transcribed, organized and categorized according to themes and sub-themes. The study results shows that teaching experience, teacher's preparation, lesson planning and teaching load affect the quantity and quality of experiments carried out by Physics teachers

Farmer Centered Large Scale e-Surveillance and Control of Crop Pests in Kenya

With advancement of mobile technology and the property of mobile phones of being ubiquitous and pervasive, innovative applications in agriculture that are context specific and individualized to farmers’ needs can now be developed. This is because mobile phone based agricultural innovations are readily leveraged to provide farmers with information ranging from farm preparation and pre-harvest to post harvest and farm produce marketing. In this regard, this paper proposes a farmer centric pest e-surveillance solution framework, a digital platform that uses mobile devices, image processing and crowdsourcing to assist smallholder farmers in low income countries to effectively identify and control crop pest invasion, and to connect them with local agro-vet stores and extension service providers for assistance. This way, we can assist small holder farmers in rural Africa to learn about crop pests, to detect and respond to pest invasion, and to control the effects of such pest invasion by providing timely, accurate, relevant and readily consumable information in the local languages of the farmers. This also makes it easy to perform large-scale pest surveillance in the rural farming community

An Enhanced Data Transmission in Mobile Banking Using LSB-AES Algorithm

The advent of mobile banking applications has transformed the way customers’ access banking services from brick-and-mortar to remote banking. The ubiquitous nature of this innovation has encouraged its adoption. This is because of improved banking services and accessibility to the services on a 24/7 basis using the internet. However, mobile banking applications are susceptible to numerous security threats and vulnerabilities that adversaries take advantage of to siphon money from bank customers. The aim of this study is to design and evaluate least significant bit and advanced encryption standard cryptography (LSB-AES) hybrid algorithm to protect data on transmission in mobile banking. This study employs data science research design, and performance evaluations demonstrated through simulations using MATLAB. Findings of this study can be applied to banks offering mobile banking across the world. This study utilized six color images from University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute (USC-SIPI) dataset which were stored in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Contemporary steganographic systems utilize a minimum of 2 to 10 images for test simulations. Visual quality analysis of cover images and stego images was done using the following evaluation metrics: Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and histogram analysis. Security of the proposed algorithm was done using entropy analysis. MSE values of cover and stego images should be closer to zero and indicate that cover image is of good quality for embedding data. On the other hand, PSNR values should be more than 40 decibel (dB) which indicates good imperceptibility. Histogram analysis should demonstrate no visible distortions between the cover and stego image for it to be free from statistical attacks. Entropy analysis should yield values close to 8 for the algorithm to be robust. Results from the proposed LSB-AES hybrid algorithm evaluation metrics reveals that Mean Squared Error (MSE) values ranges from 0.0001297 to 0.0005646 while Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values ranges from 80.65 to 87.71 and entropy values ranges from 6.295 to 7.762. Histogram analysis reveals that the cover and stego images are almost similar. These results infer that the proposed algorithm has good quality images with good imperceptibility and that the proposed algorithm is reliable, robust and secure for mobile banking. Entropy and histogram analysis results show that the proposed algorithm is resistant to Man-in-the-Middle attacks. This study recommends that legislation evaluates and amends security of mobile banking policies so that the proposed LSB-AES hybrid algorithm can be adopted as a secure solution for mobile banking