Adopting Continuing Personal and Professional Development to Improve Quality of Teaching (Personal Experience)

Quality of teaching is an essential issue in developing a significant academic quality. Continuing personal and professional development is a procedure of improving teaching quality. It helps the teacher to spot weaknesses and overcome them by adopting and developing individual learning plan. This paper introduces the different teaching theories to follow in the teaching process and how these theories affect positively personal teaching experience. The paper also recommends the adoption of the process of continuing professional and developing program to create a new culture of personal development through accepting observations from line manager or colleagues to raise strengths and weaknesses of teaching and consequently improving the quality of teaching and then improve the academic qualit

Coaching, Tutoring and Mentoring in the Higher Education as a solution ‎to retain students in their major and help them achieve success.

This paper introduces new concepts of mentoring and tutoring which can be applied in the higher education institutions to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the Palestinian Universities especially the IT faculties where the students retention rates and performance are low as they face lots of problems and could not find solutions but to change their major and try another faculty or stay more than four years before graduation or withdrew from the faculty and leave education because of failure. These concepts are quite important for both students and teachers and consequently for the university. Teachers should utilize from these concepts and be close to the students, listen to their problems and concerns and propose actions to improve the overall performance

Optimization Water Leakage Detection using Wireless Sensor Networks (OWLD)

This paper presents a technical method to monitor the water distribution pipelines against leakage and to control the pump when the water level decreases in the tank. Water leakage is the most popular cause of water wasted in the domestic water distribution systems. Nowadays most people have their smartphone nearby them; therefore, adding an interface on the smartphone to control an automated system is a big plus. Energy saving is a benefit of the Optimization Water Leakage Detection (OWLD) system. It enables us to save energy, time and cost by having smart leakage detection in pipelines, measuring the water level in the tank and controlling the pump when the water level is low. This paper focuses mainly on two parts: The first part is an alarm based on Global System for Mobile technology (GSM) to send a Short Message Service (SMS) to the owner. This is made up of the following components: sensors, GSM Module, Arduino and relays to control the device. The second is the controlling part; it uses android application mobile to control the pump. The proposed system can effectively improve the efficiency of operation, reduce delay time and cost of maintenance pipelines after leakage detection

New Face Representation Using Compressive Sensing

In this paper we present a new descriptor for representing face images. We used compressive sensing concept to prepare a Gaussian Random or Binary Random Measurement Matrix (GRMM). We simply project the face images to new space using GRMM. Classification is then performed using nearest neighbor classifiers. System performance is very promising and comparable with the well-known algorithms in the literature

An Improved dynamic Load Balancing Algorithm applied to a Cafeteria System in a University Campus

Load-balancing algorithms play a key role in improving the performance of practical distributed systems that consist of heterogeneous nodes. The performance of any load-balancing algorithms and its convergence-rate is affected by the structural factors of the network that executes the algorithm. The performance deteriorated as the number of system nodes, the network-diameter, the communication-overhead increased. Moreover, additional technical-factors of the algorithm itself significantly affect the performance of rebalancing the load among nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach that improves the performance of load-balancing algorithms by considering the load-balancing technical-factors and the structure of the network executes the algorithm. We applied the proposed method to a cafeteria system in a university campus and compared our approach with two significant methods presented in the literature. Results indicate that our approach considerably outperformed the original neighborhood approach and the nearest neighbor approach in terms of response time, throughput, communication overhead, and movements cost

Soft βc-Generalized Closed Sets

Previously, we introduced and studied the concept of soft open sets in soft topological spaces. This paper is a continuation study of this concept. We introduce and investigate the notion of soft generalized closed sets. We discuss some soft properties of this type of soft sets. Also, we introduce the concepts of soft  space and soft  space. In addition, we introduce the notion of soft Kernel of a soft set and use it to get a characterization of soft sets to be soft generalized closed sets

Phase retrieval of sparse signals from Fourier Transform magnitude using non-negative matrix factorization

Signal and image reconstruction from Fourier Transform magnitude is a difficult inverse problem. Fourier transform magnitude can be measured in many practical applications, but the phase may not be measured. Since the autocorrelation of an image or a signal can be expressed as convolution of x(n) with x(-n), it is possible to formulate the inverse problem as a non-negative matrix factorization problem. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on the sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF) to estimate the phase of a signal or an image in an iterative manner. Experimental reconstruction results are presented. © 2013 IEEE

A Novel Digital Signature Scheme for Advanced Asymmetric Encryption Techniques

Digital signature schemes are practical mechanisms for achieving message integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation. Several asymmetric encryption techniques have been proposed in the literature, each with its proper limitations. RSA and El Gamal prove their robustness, but are unsuitable in several domains due to their computational complexity. Other asymmetric encryption schemes have been proposed to provide a cloud homomorphic encryption service, where the researchers focused only on how to ensure the homomorphic property. This paper proposes a new digital signature scheme dedicated to a family of encryption techniques. The proposal consists of two parts: the first focused on the secret key, and the second focused on the public key. Signature validity checking was performed by multiplying these two parts to reform again the sender’s public key, then comparing the result with the decrypted message. The validation of the decrypted message guarantees data integrity, where the signer public key is used to ensure authenticity. The proposed scheme takes a shorter execution time for the entire signature operation, including signing and verification, compared to other modern techniques. The analysis showed its robustness against private key recovery and forgery attacks. The implementation results of the proposed scheme showed promising performance in terms of complexity and robustness. The results confirmed that the proposed scheme is efficient and effective for signature generation and verification

A Multi-Key with Partially Homomorphic Encryption Scheme for Low-End Devices Ensuring Data Integrity †

In today’s hyperconnected world, the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing complement each other in several areas. Cloud Computing provides IoT systems with an efficient and flexible environment that supports application requirements such as real-time control/monitoring, scalability, fault tolerance, and numerous security services. Hardware and software limitations of IoT devices can be mitigated using the massive on-demand cloud resources. However, IoT cloud-based solutions pose some security and privacy concerns, specifically when an untrusted cloud is used. This calls for strong encryption schemes that allow operations on data in an encrypted format without compromising the encryption. This paper presents an asymmetric multi-key and partially homomorphic encryption scheme. The scheme provides the addition operation by encrypting each decimal digit of the given integer number separately using a special key. In addition, data integrity processes are performed when an untrusted third party performs homomorphic operations on encrypted data. The proposed work considers the most widely known issues like the encrypted data size, slow operations at the hardware level, and high computing costs at the provider level. The size of generated ciphertext is almost equal to the size of the plaintext, and order-preserving is ensured using an asymmetrical encryption version

A Flexible Encryption Technique for the Internet of Things Environment

IoT promises a new era of connectivity that goes beyond laptops and smart connected devices to connected vehicles, smart homes, smart cities and connected healthcare. The huge volume of data that is collected from millions of IoT devices raises information security and privacy concerns for users. This paper presents a new scalable encryption technique, called Flexible encryption Technique (FlexenTech), to protect IoT data during storage and in transit. FlexenTech is suitable for resource constrained devices and networks. It offers a low encryption time, defends against common attacks such as replay attacks and defines a configurable mode, where any number of rounds or key sizes may be used. Experimental analysis of FlexenTech shows its robustness in terms of its multiple configurable confidentiality levels by allowing various configurations. This configurability provides several advantages for resource constrained devices, including reducing the encryption computation time by up to 9.7% when compared to its best rivals in the literature