Identifying skylines in cloud databases with incomplete data

Skyline queries is a rich area of research in the database community. Due to its great benefits, it has been integrated into many database applications including but not limited to personalized recommendation, multi-objective, decision support and decision-making systems. Many variations of skyline technique have been proposed in the literature addressing the issue of handling skyline queries in incomplete database. Nevertheless, these solutions are designed to fit with centralized incomplete database (single access). However, in many real-world database systems, this might not be the case, particularly for a database witha large amount of incomplete data distributed over various remote locations such as cloud databases. It is inadequate to directly apply skyline solutions designed for the centralized incomplete database to work on cloud due to the prohibitive cost. Thus, this paper introduces a new approach called Incomplete-data Cloud Skylines (ICS) aiming at processing skyline queries in cloud databases with incomplete data. This approach emphasizes on reducing the amount of data transfer and domination tests during skyline process. It incorporates sorting technique that assists in arranging the data items in a way where dominating data items will be placed at the top of the list helping in eliminate dominated data items. Besides, ICS also employs a filtering technique to prune the dominated data items before applying skyline technique. It comprises a technique named local skyline joiner that helps in reducing the amount of data transfer between datacenters when deriving the final skylines. It limit the amount of data items to be transferred to only those local skylines of each relation. A comprehensive experiment have been performed on both synthetic and real-life datasets, which demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach in comparison to the current existing approaches. We argue that our approach is practical and can be adopted in many contemporary cloud database systems with incomplete data to process skyline queries

The Ethical Dilemma of Software Piracy: An Inquiry from an Islamic Perspective

Software piracy in the Muslim countries is a prevailing issue. It has been estimated based on BSA by 2009 that more than 90% of software in Yemen is pirated, followed by Libya 88%, Indonesia 86%, and Iraq 85%. UAE has the lowest rate for software piracy, which is 36%. While in the Middle East area, the piracy rate is around 59% with total commercial value of $2,887 Million. Furthermore, the software piracy remains a critical issue in Asia Pacific, with the region accounting for the highest dollar losses in the world from the use of unlicensed software. The survey of software piracy around the world, which is collaboration between the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC, indicates that software piracy on personal computers in the Asia Pacific region in November 2009 was 61 percent, worth 15,000 million U.S. dollars (BSA, 2009; IDC Global PC). The purpose of this study is to understand the software piracy from Islamic perspective and finding the recommendations, solutions ofthis problem to deter software piracy as much as possible. Focusing on the Islamic rule, evidence and argument relating to copyright infringement especially software piracy in the Islamic world; additionally, the effect of software pirac

BLOGGING: A NEW PLATFORM FOR SPREADING RUMORS!

Blogs are a popular way to share personal journals, discuss matters of public opinion, pursue collaborative conversations, and aggregate content on similar topics. Blogs can be also used to disseminate new content and novel ideas to communities of interest. In this paper we present about the use of blogging in spreading rumors. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message to each other through widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Topical content such as news and political commentary spreads quickly by the hour and then quickly disappears, while non-topical content such as music and entertainment propagates slowly over a much long period of tim

Evaluation of Usability Problems of Labor Portal in Saudi Arabia Authors

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the quality of Labor portal. Ministry of Labor focused on over the past years to establish a database of the labor market in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The data includes workers in Saudi private sector, whether Saudis or expatriates where mechanization included all labor of 39-office work in various regions. The governorates of the Kingdom operates IT management to develop this rule to get the information and data related to the labor market quickly and accurately. 7 experts evaluated the quality portal of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Labor using self-developed instrument containing eight factors from the literature review on 5-likert scale. The result of the study shows that, the Labor portal quality is fairly good by 78.2 % and it needs further improvement and development by 21.8%. Suggestions were made to the Saudi government, particularly, the Saudi Ministry of labor that, there is a need to further test the portal empirically based on the experts ’ evaluation

Teaching and learning qur'anic Arabic utilizing adaptive and intelligent systems for collaborative learning (EDW B13-084-0969)

About 80 percent of the world's Muslim populations are non-native speakers of the Arabic language. Since ‎it ‎is ‎‎obligatory for all Muslims to recite the Qur'an in Arabic ‎during regular prayers, ‎an ‎extraordinary ‎‎social phenomenon has taken place ‎in some parts of the ‎Muslim ‎world: Muslims, men and women, learn the complex phonological rules of the Arabic language in the context of the Qur'an and recite the "sounds" of the Qur'an often understanding very little of what they are reciting. This has given rise to a Muslim demographic segment of adult learners whose main learning goal is to recall an idiomatic translation while reading or listening to the Qur'an. Despite the availability of conventional resources for this purpose, according to our detailed investigation, no empirical research has explored the possibilities of emerging adaptive and intelligent systems for collaborative learning to address this challenge. The goals of this research are: (a) to determine the applicability of learner corpus research through automated pattern extraction from available Qur'anic corpora (b) to investigate declarative memory modeling approaches in order to develop a quantitative algorithm to maximize learning and (c) to explore the possibilities of utilizing existing social networks to enhance learner motivation

Business Owners’ Feedback toward Adoption of Open Data: A Case Study in Kuwait

The world intention toward open data technology has increased in the past years, and governments started to explore open data technology in the public and private sectors and tried to check its advantages and disadvantages. However, in the Arab world and especially in Kuwait, there is no solid structured attention about the technology in both sectors. As a result, we tried in this paper to determine if business owners in Kuwait have enough knowledge of the open data (OD) concept and if they have the willingness to use it for enhancing their services. The purpose of this research is to measure the acceptance of OD technology in Kuwait and to gather business owners' opinions about the ability to adopt the OD concept. Making online and hardcopy survey was our method for gathering different reactions and points of view about this technology. We intended to focus on the private sector and we targeted people who own a business and wish to introduce better services for their customers. Overall, the results have shown clear features about open data technology in Kuwait and the substantial need of education and awareness of the importance of this technology. The results of this study may positively and directly affect the level of motivation for other existing studies

Hash Function of Finalist SHA-3: Analysis Study Authors

The National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) has suggested different principles for hash functions to avoid the blunders and to choice the ideal quality of hash function, which to be a measurement for the future of hash function generations. Therefore, the goal of the NIST contenders in SHA-3 between the hash functions is to be chosen as the winner in the end of 2012, and the beginning of 2013. Thus, for this reason the paper addresses the comparative and analysis study of the finalist SHA-3 candidates in: complexity of security, design and structure, as well as performance and cost, to measure the robustness of the algorithms in this area, through the Fundamentals Security Measurement Factors of Hash Function (FSMFHF) of Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA). Therefore, main idea from this comparison and analysis study between the finalist of SHA-3 candidates such as (BLAKE, Grostl, JH, Keccak, and Skein) is to investigate the tight security in the suitable designs of lightweight such as JH and Keccak for the future security of hash function. Moreover, they are investigating the high trade-off in (speed/memory) that implemented in Virtex-7 2000T of FPGAs family hardware. Whereas, excluded the rest of hash functions in this finalist, which are not investigated all the measurements of hash function as mentioned above

An Adequate Approach to Image Retrieval Based on Local Level Feature Extraction

Image retrieval based on text annotation has become obsolete and is no longer interesting for scientists because of its high time complexity and low precision in results. Alternatively, increase in the amount of digital images has generated an excessive need for an accurate and efficient retrieval system. This paper proposes content based image retrieval technique at a local level incorporating all the rudimentary features. Image undergoes the segmentation process initially and each segment is then directed to the feature extraction process. The proposed technique is also based on image?s content which primarily includes texture, shape and color. Besides these three basic features, FD (Fourier Descriptors) and edge histogram descriptors are also calculated to enhance the feature extraction process by taking hold of information at the boundary. Performance of the proposed method is found to be quite adequate when compared with the results from one of the best local level CBIR (Content Based Image Retrieval) techniques

Setting-up a sulh-based, community mediation-type of online dispute resolution (ODR) in Malaysia

Islam is a way of life that guides the Muslims from all perspectives, and as portion of Islam, it also promotes peace and conciliation in resolving disputes. The Al-Quran provides guidelines in dispute resolution through a third party called Sulh. Sulh refers to the process of mediation, arbitration and reconciliation that takes place when the parties involved agree on a process of resolving a dispute with a third party mediator, who eventually will ensure that both disputed parties will be satisfied by the outcomes. This work is focused on community mediation, which involved with the disputes between the community members. In Malaysia, Sulh were actually practiced by the Malays prior to the time of the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. The session will be conducted by a third party who normally a respected and elder person in the society, whom also held the position as the headman (Penghulu or Ketua Kampung) or Imam (a religious leader). Nowadays, given the plural society of Malaysia, and the era of Internet, it is crucial for Sulh to be available online. With the use of ICT tools, Sulh can be promoted to society, and if it is a part of e-government efforts, then it will encourage the society to be involved with the government’s mission. The online Sulh will not merely act as an interface for those parties involved. The challenges of making the online system secured, the correct ways of ensuring the data accuracy, understanding on methods that will be used for data propagation (among others), are existed in the domain of Computer Science (CS). There are many possible CS approaches, but the work will focus on Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, with special interest in connectionist model