An Empirical Model for Information Retrieval System Evaluation: The User's perspective

The aspect of time has become an issue since computers were introduced into management studies and thus highlights the need for efficient paradigm that will enable easy access to information, with much ease. But this is not the case yet, since finding the desired search engine and learning how to use them for this purpose is still time consuming. The continued dominance of measures for use in the system-centered aspect of IR evaluation, which is weak for use in user-centered IR system evaluation process, remains a challenge. Therefore the purpose of this study is to present usable measures through using an empirical from user's perspective for use in the evaluation of IR system. The survey method, a robust multivariate mathematical model and the factor analytic method were experimented upon. Results showed that the model presented is promising concerning the challenges highlighted. Therefore user's own knowledge, experience and searching abilities could be harnessed and implicated in IR design and evaluation. This study therefore serves as a test bed and guide to studies in this area, which results could contribute immensely to the overall improvement of the system. However, more data and a larger sample size are required to verify the proposed model in future, with other extraction techniques

Towards an Architecture-based Ensemble Methods for Online Social Network Sensitive Data Privacy Protection

Abstract - In 2014, the world woke up to a giant data breach that leveraged users’ personal information that was taken from one of the world’s biggest social network platform. Based on the literature, this was possible because of the Centralised Architectural-based Approach to protecting the privacy of users’ online data. Although the literature is inundated with decentralized approaches, there is none to the best of our knowledge that uses an ensemble of methods and draws on a consensus mechanism to address the challenges caused by the Centralised Architectural-based Approach. This paper presents a decentralized approach that adopts and adapts an ensemble of methods. These methods include cryptographic, hashing, and the plenum byzantine fault tolerance algorithms that present a consensus platform, protocol, and mechanism to use the technology of blockchain in a novel manner as a significant contribution. This paper adopts the descriptive approach in its presentation as the usable implementation of the presented proposal is near completion with issues of computational overhead addressed based on preliminary results that show promise of being able to support agreement up to ≈ 75% in terms of making changes by participants in the chain. </p