Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Ride Sharing Organization for Transferable and Non-Transferable Services

Ride-sharing allows multiple persons to share their trips together in one vehicle instead of using multiple vehicles. This can reduce the number of vehicles in the street, which consequently can reduce air pollution, traffic congestion and transportation cost. However, a ride-sharing organization requires passengers to report sensitive location information about their trips to a trip organizing server (TOS) which creates a serious privacy issue. In addition, existing ride-sharing schemes are non-flexible, i.e., they require a driver and a rider to have exactly the same trip to share a ride. Moreover, they are non-scalable, i.e., inefficient if applied to large geographic areas. In this paper, we propose two efficient privacy-preserving ride-sharing organization schemes for Non-transferable Ride-sharing Services (NRS) and Transferable Ride-sharing Services (TRS). In the NRS scheme, a rider can share a ride from its source to destination with only one driver whereas, in TRS scheme, a rider can transfer between multiple drivers while en route until he reaches his destination. In both schemes, the ride-sharing area is divided into a number of small geographic areas, called cells, and each cell has a unique identifier. Each driver/rider should encrypt his trip's data and send an encrypted ride-sharing offer/request to the TOS. In NRS scheme, Bloom filters are used to compactly represent the trip information before encryption. Then, the TOS can measure the similarity between the encrypted trips data to organize shared rides without revealing either the users' identities or the location information. In TRS scheme, drivers report their encrypted routes, an then the TOS builds an encrypted directed graph that is passed to a modified version of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to search for an optimal path of rides that can achieve a set of preferences defined by the riders

Attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control on entrepreneurial intention of Nigerian postgraduates in UUM

The study used descriptive quantitative survey in order to examine the entrepreneurial intention among Nigerian postgraduate students of Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) in relation to attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control. Data of the study were collected through a survey questionnaire of 156 Nigerian postgraduate candidates, covering masters (50) and PhD (106) students who are studying under the College of Business, College of Arts and Sciences and College of Legal, Government and International studies. Descriptive analysis has been used to give an insight on the respondent profiles, while inferential statistics have been used to make conclusions. Then, reliability test was performed using the cronbach Alpha method which shows all variables are reliable with a value of > 0.80. Later, correlation and VIF analysis were derived with result of Pearson correlation having < 0.9 value and VIF having < 10 indicating that the data is free from multicollinearity issue. Regression analysis was also used to determine the relationship and predictive capability of the variables to entrepreneurship intention. The findings showed that attitude towards entrepreneurship (β =.475, p < .000), and perceived behavioral control (β = .349, p < .000) are positively and significantly related to entrepreneurial intention among UUM Nigerian postgraduate students. However, subjective norm, is insignificant to entrepreneurial intention (β = .112, p > .051). Considering the Beta values, attitude is the strongest factor that influences the entrepreneurial intention among UUM Nigerian postgraduate students. The Nigerian government is therefore recommended to make more effort in redesigning its entrepreneurship development policies to fit the findings of this study

THE SMART CITY INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT & MONITORING

The smart city infrastructure is the introductory step for establishing the overall smart city framework and architecture. Very few smart cities are recently established across the world. Some examples are: Dubai, Malta, Kochi (India), Singapore. The scope of these cities is mainly limited to construct a technology park converting the industrial real estate to state of the art information technology using the evolution in the telecom and IP networks including insignificant asset management automation system. The development background is to create an operational platform that would manage the power consumption and operational resources in order to reduce the overall running operational cost. This paper will debate the smart infrastructure development framework and the surveying positional accuracy of locating the assets as a base of the smart city development architecture integrated with all the facilities and systems related to the smart city framework. The paper will discuss also the main advantages of the proposed architecture including the quantifiable and non quantifiable benefits.Smart Infrastructure, GIS, Smart City, Geopsatial application, Infrastructure Development, Infrastructure Monitoring.

Penetration testing model for mobile cloud computing applications / Ahmad Salah Mahmoud Al-Ahmad

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) technology possess features mitigating mobile limitations and enhancing cloud services. MCC application penetration testing issues are complex and unique which make the testing difficult for junior penetration testers. It is complex as MCC applications have three intersecting vulnerability domains, namely mobile, web, and cloud. The offloading process adds uniqueness and complexity to the MCC application penetration testing in terms of generating, selecting and executing test cases. To solve these issues, this thesis constructs a model for MCC application penetration testing that reduces the complexity, tackles the uniqueness and assists junior testers in conducting penetration tests on MCC applications more effectively and efficiently. The main objectives of this thesis are to discover the issues in conducting penetration testing on MCC applications and to construct and evaluate MCC application penetration testing model. Design science research methodology is applied with four phases: (i) Theoretical framework construction phase (ii) Model construction phase entails designing the components and processes of MCC application penetration to reduce the complexity and address offloading; (iii) Model implementation phase implements the components and processes of the model into model guidelines and integrated tool called PT2-MCC. This tool manages the repositories, generates and selects test cases, and implements the mobile agent component; (iv) Model evaluation phase applies case study approach and uses an evaluation framework to evaluate the model against selected testing quality and performance attributes. In model evaluation phase, a junior penetration tester conducted two case studies on two MCC applications built by extending two open source native mobile applications

Factors Affecting the Entrepreneurial Intention of PhD Candidates: A study of Nigerian International Students of UUM

The increase number of unemployment and understanding of the importance of entrepreneurship in job creation among scholars and policy makers has led to the postulation that entrepreneurial intentions would spur entrepreneurship activities. This paper examines the entrepreneurial intention of Nigerian PhD candidates due to the lack of studies on the connection between entrepreneurship and the PhD candidates. Studying the entrepreneurial intent of the PhD candidates will, therefore, be very important considering their knowledgeability and potentialities. This is because, entrepreneurship represents the opportunity to spawn employment, wealth, and revenue. A survey data of 130 usable questionnaires were conducted and the data were analyzed using SPSS. The finding reveals the sufficiency of the TPB in predicting the entrepreneurial intentions of the PhD’s. A significant positive relationship was found between attitude, subjective norm and perceived behaviour control on entrepreneurial intentions. The Policy implication and direction of future studies were discussed. Keywords: Theory of Planned Behaviour, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behaviour control, entrepreneurial intentions, and Nigeria