Risk Management and Insurance Practices in Protecting the GCC Economies: Impact of Climate Change

Climate change can extremely influence the progress of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations by aggravating the burden on these states, hence, preventing them from accomplishing their economic progression. The extreme hotness and abridged precipitation will aggravate the water shortage and upsurge the occurrence of droughts. This would unfavorably influence the food production and deteriorate the present condition of food security and other related issues. The GCC area is anticipated to have more unembellished effects of Sea Level Upsurge than any other state. The current global warming has the potential of putting 6-25 million people and vital economic activities to coastal flooding. The area is one of the highly built-up states of the world. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges that humanity is facing, as it is not only a threat on biodiversity and food security, but is also impeding economic performance and growth. It is worth saying that climate threats are all interlinked. Good examples of the effects of climate change are: global temperature rise, warming oceans shrinking ice sheets, glacial retreat, decreased snow cover, rise in sea level, declining arctic sea, ice ocean acidification, and desertification. This paper focuses on giving attention to decision makers on the seriousness of these risks and to point out how risk management and insurance techniques can help in the survival of their economies. Furthermore, it also opened avenues for universities to get involved in this research area

Quantum Inspired Genetic Programming Model to Predict Toxicity Degree for Chemical Compounds

Cheminformatics plays a vital role to maintain a large amount of chemical data. A reliable prediction of toxic effects of chemicals in living systems is highly desirable in domains such as cosmetics, drug design, food safety, and manufacturing chemical compounds. Toxicity prediction topic requires several new approaches for knowledge discovery from data to paradigm composite associations between the modules of the chemical compound; such techniques need more computational cost as the number of chemical compounds increases. State-of-the-art prediction methods such as neural network and multi-layer regression that requires either tuning parameters or complex transformations of predictor or outcome variables are not achieving high accuracy results.  This paper proposes a Quantum Inspired Genetic Programming “QIGP” model to improve the prediction accuracy. Genetic Programming is utilized to give a linear equation for calculating toxicity degree more accurately. Quantum computing is employed to improve the selection of the best-of-run individuals and handles parsimony pressure to reduce the complexity of the solutions. The results of the internal validation analysis indicated that the QIGP model has the better goodness of fit statistics and significantly outperforms the Neural Network model

Risk and Knowledge in the context of Organizational Risk Management

This paper helps us to understand the emerging concept of knowledge management by exploring the relation between risk and knowledge. It tries to determine whether a logical relation between risk and knowledge indeed exists or not. The preliminary work on the above question reveals that such a relation does exist; however, there are some indications that worry the decision makers. Therefore, in this regard, various authors/scholars from other disciplines like Informatics, Economics, Organizational Behavioral Sciences, and Social Psychology, have importantly emphasized on the scrutiny of relationship between risk and knowledge management. Similarly, experts of information technology engage themselves in finding out risks involved in data mining, information exploration, and knowledge. Thus it is essential to express that the data and knowledge is being captured at all levels to measure risk management. Key word: Risk, Risk Management, Knowledge, Organizational Risk Management

The Role of Universities in Developing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): Future Challenges for Bahrain

The role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in world economy has been momentous, especially in increasing GDP and enhancing employment opportunities. SMEs have played and are still playing an outstanding role in the development of several developed and developing countries mainly due to the fact that SMEs comprise a major part in the industrial and economic activities in the economies of these countries. It must be emphasized that the role of SMEs is considerably high in the economic development irrespective of the fact whether it is a developed country or a developing one. Furthermore, not only the financially subsidized promotion but the strategic implementation becomes very important for the sustainable development of SME sector as well. Key words: SME’s; Universities; Human capital; Entrepreneur

Opportunities, Challenges And Risks Of Transition Into Renewable Energy : The Case Study Of Arab Gulf Cooperation Council

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states have abounded underground fossil fuel resources and high potentials for renewable energy (RE). However, given the Peak Oil Theory and the international climate change regulations and protocols, investments in RE became a first-class candidate. The current conceptualized study investigates barriers, risk, and opportunities associated with the transition to RE generation in member states of GCC. The study deploys secondary data extracted from published statistics and related literature. Via an interpretive, exploratory and explanatory approach, we conclude that there is a long-term need to expand uptake of RE technologies in order to meet the possible medium to long-terms energy and economic securities. Bureaucratic inefficiency and fuel subsidies along with absence of both suitable investment framework and supporting energy policies for investments in RE were found to be significant barriers to RE deployment in the GCC states. The current paper argues that the GCC has a specific climate advantage for RE. Therefore, if RE options are utilised ideally by the GCC member states they can play a significant role in substituting conventional energy sources and in sustaining energy and economic securities of the GCC member state

Design and Analysis of an Intelligent Integrity Checking Watermarking Scheme for Ubiquitous Database Access

As a result of the highly distributed nature of ubiquitous database accessing, it is essential to develop security mechanisms that lend themselves well to the delicate properties of outsourcing databases integrity and copyright protection. Researchers have begun to study how watermarking computing can make ubiquitous databases accessing more confident work environments. One area where database context may help is in supporting content integrity. Initially, most of the research effort in this field was depending on distortion based watermark while the few remaining studies concentrated on distortion-free. But there are many disadvantages in previous studies; most notably some rely on adding watermark as an extra attributes or tuples, which increase the size of the database. Other techniques such as permutation and abstract interpretation framework require much effort to verify the watermark. The idea of this research is to adapt an optimized distortion free watermarking based on fake tuples that are embedded into a separate file not within the database to validate the content integrity for ubiquitous database accessing. The proposed system utilizes the GA, which boils down its role to create the values of the fake tuples as watermark to be the closest to real values. So that it's very hard to any attacker to guess the watermark. The proposed technique achieves more imperceptibility and security. Experimental outcomes confirm that the proposed algorithm is feasible, effective and robust against a large number of attacks

Innovative Roles in Leading Community Engagement and Cooperation with employers: Case Study from a Bahraini University

This paper adds to academic practice in a specific context – the Kingdom of Bahrain. Researchers give specific attention to the two case studies prepared, the first focusing on “Community Engagement Leadership” and the second on “Promoting Cooperative Relationships with Local Employers”. They are weaving through this qualitative work aiming at scrutinizing challenges related to creating innovative change to enhance and develop the work of the university leadership in its socio-cultural interplanetary. This work gives insight into attaining experience from the practice of others and perhaps inspire them to effect change on their own. The two cases reflecting on personal experience and researched here would help practitioners in education to follow some role models that can contribute to adopting distinguished creative ideas in performing their educational tasks

Innovative Roles in Leading Community Engagement and Cooperation with employers: Case Study from a Bahraini University

This paper adds to academic practice in a specific context – the Kingdom of Bahrain. Researchers give specific attention to the two case studies prepared, the first focusing on “Community Engagement Leadership” and the second on “Promoting Cooperative Relationships with Local Employers”. They are weaving through this qualitative work aiming at scrutinizing challenges related to creating innovative change to enhance and develop the work of the university leadership in its socio-cultural interplanetary. This work gives insight into attaining experience from the practice of others and perhaps inspire them to effect change on their own. The two cases reflecting on personal experience and researched here would help practitioners in education to follow some role models that can contribute to adopting distinguished creative ideas in performing their educational tasks