Students and Teachers’ Perceptions into the Viability of Mobile Technology Implementation to Support Language Learning for First Year Business Students in a Middle Eastern University

Advancements in technology have enabled us to learn, adapt and exploit our skills and knowledge in new ways.  Appreciating the potential of technology may yet give growth and enrich the process of language education, particularly through a student-centred mobile learning environment. Consequently, a constructivist approach to learning can create tremendous possibilities for both language learners and teachers. By exploiting the affordances of mobile technologies and the Internet, a new platform of learning or Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) can be realised, through which learners truly learn to learn.  Yet, while many of today’s language institutions and places of learning have begun to understand the potential presented by mobile technology as a tool and resource to content and language development, apprehension may still exist among educational practitioners, learners and senior management.  Such apprehension may stem from a lack of understanding in fully appreciating the opportunities and affordances posed by MALL in creating a support structure to learning and teaching excellence. This may be particularly true within developing countries such as those found in the Middle East. Consequently, set in a Saudi university context, the purpose of this study is to investigate learners’ and teachers’ perceptions towards the proposed implementation of a MALL programme, while exploring whether the promotion of mobile technologies could assist learning and become a viable support structure in teaching English as a second language.  Interviews were conducted with three English instructors who teach on the first year Business English programme at the university. The study also analysed 191 student participants who completed a Likert scale questionnaire designed to explore their mobile learning experiences, attitudes and perceptions towards the proposed MALL programme in their educational context. The findings from the student questionnaire and teacher interviews generally highlight positive attitudes and a receptiveness towards mobile learning implementation. This is perhaps due to the possibility of new pedagogical scaffoldings being created through MALL in their learning/teaching environment. The results further highlighted opportunities MALL presented in facilitating communication and affording learners greater motivation to engage in independent learning, thus facilitating learner autonomy and allowing for greater collaboration within a richer learner environment. However, while analysis highlighted a proposed MALL implementation could be a useful tool to support language acquisition for ESP/ESL learners (English for Specific Purposes/English as a Second Language), technical issues, network sustainability and comprehensive training were still significant factors of concern.

Analysis of a Transportation System with Correlated Network Intersections: A Case Study for a Central Urban City With High Seasonal Fluctuation Trends

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) providing efficient road-transportation strategies have recently become a very active research area. Efficient transportation of visitors to/from highly congested sites is one of the most important challenges addressed by ITS. A transportation-system analysis is presented here and is applied on an urban city ring road network that encompasses a major attraction site characterized by correlated network-intersections and large vehicle-pedestrian movement conflicts. The presented model analysis first examines the influences exerted by network-correlations at intersection-points, and second, presents case-study evacuation scenarios examined under varying circumstances and flow-requirements within each segment of the modeled network. The significance of this paper is clearly evident in emergency/evacuation scenarios or in design considerations in which the influence of correlated network-intersections must be known beforehand. As a main contribution, a mathematical model was developed with simulations evaluating the current system using real-life data as statistical input to our model. Results had demonstrated the counter-propagation effect between adjacent intersections along the ring road of an urban congested city. Furthermore, the study modeled and investigated two emergency-evacuation scenarios within chosen segments at road network sites entering and exiting the central area in order to demonstrate how efficient evacuation can be conducted during an emergency scenario. It is expected that the results of this model can also be extended and applied for evacuation analyses for other sites with similar practical conditions or in other congested cities in which correlated intersections have a significant presence that must be included in the real-life analysis of a transportation system

A Hybrid Digital-Signature and Zero-Watermarking Approach for Authentication and Protection of Sensitive Electronic Documents

This paper addresses the problems and threats associated with verification of integrity, proof of authenticity, tamper detection, and copyright protection for digital-text content. Such issues were largely addressed in the literature for images, audio, and video, with only a few papers addressing the challenge of sensitive plain-text media under known constraints. Specifically, with text as the predominant online communication medium, it becomes crucial that techniques are deployed to protect such information. A number of digital-signature, hashing, and watermarking schemes have been proposed that essentially bind source data or embed invisible data in a cover media to achieve its goal. While many such complex schemes with resource redundancies are sufficient in offline and less-sensitive texts, this paper proposes a hybrid approach based on zero-watermarking and digital-signature-like manipulations for sensitive text documents in order to achieve content originality and integrity verification without physically modifying the cover text in anyway. The proposed algorithm was implemented and shown to be robust against undetected content modifications and is capable of confirming proof of originality whilst detecting and locating deliberate/nondeliberate tampering. Additionally, enhancements in resource utilisation and reduced redundancies were achieved in comparison to traditional encryption-based approaches. Finally, analysis and remarks are made about the current state of the art, and future research issues are discussed under the given constraints

Analyzing the Crowd Evacuation Pattern of a Large Densely Populated Building

Understanding crowd evacuation behavior is of utmost importance for large buildings in order to achieve efficient crowd monitoring and management. This paper presents the simulation and analysis of crowd evacuation pattern for a large building called Al Masjid An Nabawi, widely known as ‘the Haram,’ in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. Legion Evac software is employed to simulate the crowd evacuation. During simulation, Legion computes various metrics that holistically reflect the crowd evacuation pattern, which captures the crowd evacuation behavior. We analyze the magnitude and temporal variations with respect to the general evacuation patterns (GEP) of the building. The magnitude is analyzed using the t-test, which is a hypothesis testing method. However, the temporal variations are analyzed using cross-correlation analysis. The GEP captures the general crowd evacuation behavior (across all sections) of the building by aggregating the evacuation patterns of each section of the building. The crowd evacuation simulation resulted in an evacuation time of 21 min to evacuate a population of approximately 170,000. The analysis of evacuation patterns shows that the evacuation pattern of different sections of the building differs significantly in magnitude, but has significant temporal similarity with respect to GEP. Finally, insights are derived from the analysis results, which aid in efficient crowd monitoring and management

A Hybrid Digital-Signature and Zero-Watermarking Approach for Authentication and Protection of Sensitive Electronic Documents

This paper addresses the problems and threats associated with verification of integrity, proof of authenticity, tamper detection, and copyright protection for digital-text content. Such issues were largely addressed in the literature for images, audio, and video, with only a few papers addressing the challenge of sensitive plain-text media under known constraints. Specifically, with text as the predominant online communication medium, it becomes crucial that techniques are deployed to protect such information. A number of digital-signature, hashing, and watermarking schemes have been proposed that essentially bind source data or embed invisible data in a cover media to achieve its goal. While many such complex schemes with resource redundancies are sufficient in offline and less-sensitive texts, this paper proposes a hybrid approach based on zero-watermarking and digital-signature-like manipulations for sensitive text documents in order to achieve content originality and integrity verification without physically modifying the cover text in anyway. The proposed algorithm was implemented and shown to be robust against undetected content modifications and is capable of confirming proof of originality whilst detecting and locating deliberate/nondeliberate tampering. Additionally, enhancements in resource utilisation and reduced redundancies were achieved in comparison to traditional encryption-based approaches. Finally, analysis and remarks are made about the current state of the art, and future research issues are discussed under the given constraints

Computational investigation on protein sequence of non-O157 VTEC for potentiality of vaccine production

Computational method can be used for investigation of the protein sequences for developing a vaccine against infections. In this present study, a protein derived from non-O157 Verotoxin-producing E. coli (VTEC) was identified as a potential vaccine candidate that can be used to evaluate their immunogenicity and protective capability against VTEC infections. Identification of potential B-cell epitopes for promising vaccine was carried out by evaluating the protein derived from non-O157 VTEC with the methods of beta turns, hydropathicity, surface accessibility and antigenicity. The methods were implemented in MATLAB. Our test results demonstrated that the VTEC-derived protein has plausible characteristics which provide significant insights for further investigations and will assist in finding potential drug targets/vaccine candidates