Accelerating Research in Africa through Sustainable Virtual Research Communities

Despite the commendable efforts by African NRENs to interconnect universities and research institutions, research capacity in Africa is still a major challenge. In particular African universities and research institutions phases the challenges of training, retaining and attracting competent researchers due to limited resources. Other limitations include cultural barriers, insecurity, government bureaucracy and technological resource limitations among others. However the introduction of modern communications techniques resulting from innovative information and communication technological transformations will go a long way to address these challenges. It is expected that improved connectivity will influence a paradigm shift in research approach in Africa. In order to remain relevant in the current competitive knowledge economy, African researchers ought to take advantage of the improved connectivity to reengineer their research approach by embracing current information and communication technology innovations. This study investigates how modern collaborative tools can be exploited to ensure effective brain circulation within Africa and attract young talents into research careers so as to boost Africa’s research capacity. In the context of the expected paradigm shift from traditional research methods to e-research, the study examines the role of virtual research communities in addressing Africa’s research challenges and hence accelerating research in Africa. The study takes into account the expected transformations of the scientific communication and points out the virtual communities’ role in the current social context. By scrutinizing existing collaborative research projects with specific emphasis on application of ICTs, the study identifies specific approaches that can be exploited to establish virtual organizations which can then form virtual research communities. Long term sustainability of Virtual research communities is also addressed to ensure that established VRCs remain viable. By conducting desktop/web review of grey and published literature and a systematic review of existing well established virtual research communities, the study examines the key drivers and the critical success factors of these communities relevant to the African continent. In particular the study presents a review of the model used to establish virtual research communities within the European grid infrastructure and attempts to propose one for Africa through the African NRENs. Taking into consideration the drivers and the critical success factors, the study further proposes an adoption conceptual model for the new ICT based research paradigm

Harnessing our ICT Skill Set and Research Efforts for Sustainable Development

For some time now, ICTs have become ubiquitous, making them a common place phenomenon in modern society. Almost all electronics are ICT enabled to date, with most people who can read and write having interacted with ICTs one way or the other. For example, mobile phones which have changed the way we think, socialize and do business, are ICT-enabled. According to Statista, a German Company specializing in market and consumer data, The number of mobile subscriptions in Kenya rose from 0.13 million in the year 2000 to 61.41 million in 2020. This makes sense when you consider that many Kenyans walk with two or more mobile devices wherever they go. Countries that have had the highest infusion of ICT in their sectors have reaped the most benefits. These benefits can generally be seen alongside the developed vs developing countries divide. ICTs are seen as a powerful solution to the problems affecting developing countries. Indeed, ICTs have the potential of making developing countries to catch up and even overtake developed countries much faster than originally thought. This paper challenges us to harness ICT skill set through: 1. enhancement of our computing curricula by thinking through how they are designed and implemented. 2. Enhancement of research efforts by addressing four key problems that characterize research in this sector so as to come up with novel and sustainable solutions to challenges that affect our developing economies

Assessment Framework for Cyber Security

The capabilities and opportunities the Internet provides have caused transformation in many business activities, increasing the speed and ease for conducting transactions while also lowering many of the costs. As a consequence, the national economy and welfare have grown critically dependent on the cyber network infrastructure. In a digital world, information access is expected anytime and from anywhere, but this accessibility can create vulnerabilities that threaten the security of the information and leave organizations open to various forms of malicious attack. Thus the increased use of automated attack tools by cybercriminals has overwhelmed some current methodologies used for tracking cyber attacks and vulnerabilities. The main aim of this book is to develop an assessment framework for cyber security. It recommends the adoption of the proposed framework by all government ministries as well as the third party cyber security service providers, it provides information for decision makers on the cyber security assessment of individual organizations and nations. It further provides a basis of knowledge, development and study for scholars in the Information Technology field

A New Complexity Metric for BPEL Processes based on Weighted Structured Activities and Invokes

As is the case with traditional software, business processes created using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) have an inherent structural complexity that increases whenever the processes are modified. High complexity is known to negatively affect process quality and must be measured using metrics to control it. This paper presents a new metric called Weighted Structured Activities and Invokes (WSAI). In order to establish WSAI’s level of intuition, it is employed in measuring five scenarios of real-life BPEL processes created using the OpenESB Studio. The metric is then validated theoretically using the complexity category of Briand's Framework as well as Weyuker’s properties with the aim of establishing its theoretical soundness. Results indicate that the new metric is both intuitional and sound, implying that it is a good metric for measuring the complexity of BPEL processes

A Review of Agile Software Effort Estimation Methods

Software cost estimation is an essential aspect of software project management and therefore the success or failure of a software project depends on accuracy in estimating effort, time and cost. Software cost estimation is a scientific activity that requires knowledge of a number of relevant attributes that will determine which estimation method to use in a given situation. Over the years various studies were done to evaluate software effort estimation methods however due to introduction of new software development methods, the reviews have not captured new software development methods. Agile software development method is one of the recent popular methods that were not taken into account in previous cost estimation reviews. The main aim of this paper is to review existing software effort estimation methods exhaustively by exploring estimation methods suitable for new software development methods

A New Complexity Metric for UML Sequence Diagrams

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) has been promoted as a way to produce high-quality software while increasing developer productivity through code reuse. Software systems and underlying designs get more extensive and more complicated while maintaining a high degree of quality. One of the widely accepted standards for describing software architectures is the UML Sequence Diagram. A sequence diagram depicts the interaction of two-dimensional chart players by showing messages delivered and received between them. This research aims to develop and validate a metric for complexity evaluation in software design architectures through UML Sequence diagrams. The study included design science, which included metric specification, the creation of a measurement tool, and conceptual and factual verification of the metrics. The metrics use diagram-centric complexity measurements shown to be meaningful when used to determine the difficulty of two example sequence diagrams. Furthermore, conceptual affirmation of the stated metrics was achieved through Weyuker's nine characteristics, which demonstrated that they are computationally efficient. The metric was empirically authenticated, and the findings show that measuring the complexity of sequence diagrams is expedient

Interoperability of ERP Software

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-7678-5.ch003Even though most organizations are using enterprise resource planning applications, very few people understand the underlying interoperability nature within them. Interoperability is the ability of systems to provide services to and accept services from other systems, and to use the services exchanged so as to operate together in a more effective manner. The fact that interoperability can be improved means that the metrics for measuring interoperability can be defined. For the purpose of measuring the interoperability between systems, an interoperability assessment model is required. A comparative analysis among these models is provided to evaluate the similarities and differences in their philosophy and implementation. The analysis yields a set of recommendations for any party that is open to the idea of creating or improving an interoperability assessment model

Improving Student Enrollment Prediction Using Ensemble Classifiers

In the recent years, data mining has been utilized in education settings for extracting and manipulating data, and for establishing patterns in order to produce useful information for decision making. There is a growing need for higher education institutions to be more informed and knowledgeable about their students, and for them to understand some of the reasons behind students’ choice to enroll and pursue careers. One of the ways in which this can be done is for such institutions to obtain information and knowledge about their students by mining, processing and analyzing the data they accumulate about them. In this paper, we propose a general framework for mining student data enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) using performance weighted ensemble classifiers. We train an ensemble of classification models from enrollment data streams to improve the quality of student data by eliminating noisy instances, and hence improving predictive accuracy. We empirically compare our technique with single model based techniques and show that using ensemble models not only gives better predictive accuracies on student enrollment in STEM, but also provides better rules for understanding the factors that influence student enrollment in STEM disciplines

Challenges in achieving interoperability in distributed systems: a survey of literature

As need for collaboration and distributed systems among organizations increase, there is the challenge of different standards in almost all communication issues. This calls for scrutiny of systems used by different organizations or units of the same organization in an effort to achieve distributed systems. Available literature on this topic is limited and there is lack of an assessment framework to determine which system has attained what level of interoperability. We discuses four strategies or approaches used in achieving some degree of interoperability, as well as issues in distributed systems interoperability. This paper conducts a detailed literature review on interoperability in distributed systems and then proposes a ranking framework to assess interoperability. Currently XML is widely used implementing systems that need to communicate with others. However technical challenges such as semantics, security and legacy databases, together with many managerial issues remain a hindrance to achieving complete interoperability. Keywords: Interoperability, Distributed systems, Legacy Systems, XML