Feasibility Analysis for Deploying a Centralized Information Exchange Infrastructure in Pakistan

The state of the art technologies today have revolutionized the business processes of an organization by providing effective storage, retrieval and communication mechanisms. The most desirable feature of this technology is the secure data sharing among various business partners. Most of the organizations today rely on standard communication channels to share information among interacting partners. These standalone systems provide the intended benefits to some extent; but the communication between two heterogeneous work processes is a difficult task. To cope with the issue, developed countries like Germany, France, Sweden, Estonia and Denmark have developed centralized communication infrastructures for government and private/business organizations. Such infrastructure serves as a backbone for secure information exchange between G2G (Government to Government) and G2B (Government to Business). In developing countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka although the communication system is based on IT but segregated systems/processes are being used for information sharing among various organizations. The communication between governmental and private organizations is done in a traditional manner, which requires a cumbersome process of data formatting and information exchange. In this paper, we will explore and analyze the opportunities and constraints to develop/deploy the centralized communication infrastructure (CIPS: Centralized Information Processing System) in a developing country perspective. The paper presents the case study from Pakistan and analyzes the constraints and opportunities to develop such centralized infrastructure for information exchange

A critical analysis of mobility management related issues of wireless sensor networks in cyber physical systems

Mobility management has been a long-standing issue in mobile wireless sensor networks and especially in the context of cyber physical systems; its implications are immense. This paper presents a critical analysis of the current approaches to mobility management by evaluating them against a set of criteria which are essentially inherent characteristics of such systems on which these approaches are expected to provide acceptable performance. We summarize these characteristics by using a quadruple set of metrics. Additionally, using this set we classify the various approaches to mobility management that are discussed in this paper. Finally, the paper concludes by reviewing the main findings and providing suggestions that will be helpful to guide future research efforts in the area

A deep learning approach for context-aware citation recommendation using rhetorical zone classification and similarity to overcome cold-start problem

In the recent decade, the citation recommendation has emerged as an important research topic due to its need for the huge size of published scientific work. Among other citation recommendation techniques, the widely used content-based filtering (CBF) exploits research articles’ textual content to produce recommendations. However, CBF techniques are prone to the well-known cold-start problem. On the other hand, deep learning has shown its effectiveness in understanding the semantics of the text. The present paper proposes a citation recommendation system using deep learning models to classify rhetorical zones of the research articles and compute similarity using rhetorical zone embeddings that overcome the cold-start problem. Rhetorical zones are the predefined linguistic categories having some common characteristics about the text. A deep learning model is trained using ART and CORE datasets with an accuracy of 76 per cent. The final ranked lists of the recommendations have an average of 0.704 normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) score involving ten domain experts. The proposed system is applicable for both local and global context-aware recommendations

Big Data in the construction industry: A review of present status, opportunities, and future trends

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd The ability to process large amounts of data and to extract useful insights from data has revolutionised society. This phenomenon—dubbed as Big Data—has applications for a wide assortment of industries, including the construction industry. The construction industry already deals with large volumes of heterogeneous data; which is expected to increase exponentially as technologies such as sensor networks and the Internet of Things are commoditised. In this paper, we present a detailed survey of the literature, investigating the application of Big Data techniques in the construction industry. We reviewed related works published in the databases of American Association of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and Elsevier Science Direct Digital Library. While the application of data analytics in the construction industry is not new, the adoption of Big Data technologies in this industry remains at a nascent stage and lags the broad uptake of these technologies in other fields. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no comprehensive survey of Big Data techniques in the context of the construction industry. This paper fills the void and presents a wide-ranging interdisciplinary review of literature of fields such as statistics, data mining and warehousing, machine learning, and Big Data Analytics in the context of the construction industry. We discuss the current state of adoption of Big Data in the construction industry and discuss the future potential of such technologies across the multiple domain-specific sub-areas of the construction industry. We also propose open issues and directions for future work along with potential pitfalls associated with Big Data adoption in the industry

Grille sémantique autonome : un intergiciel pour l'interopérabilité d'agents et services web

Technological advancements in Web services standards have lead to the development and deployment of a large number of applications in open and dynamic environments. These standards enable the services to be discovered and invoked dynamically. The current Web however lacks the ability to specify the complete semantic annotations and is thus limited, to be utilized by intelligent applications. Semantics can therefore play a vital role in the automation and enhancement of Web services. Agents are intelligent entities that can be integrated with the current infrastructure thus influencing the negotiation, coordination and cooperation among the heterogeneous environments. We believe that the vision of the Semantic Web can be realized if the agents are intelligent enough to process and interpret semantic content based on the understanding which they have developed about the contents through the use of ontologies, since the agents have well defined reasoning, decision making, and interaction mechanisms. Our objective is to propose a new middleware based approach for interactions among Semantic Web services and software agents. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current World Wide Web aimed at marking web contents with richer metadata so that they can be processed by machines without human intervention. The Semantic grid is a new initiative to apply Semantic Web technologies to traditional Grid computing for automating the registration, discovery, composition and orchestration of grid services and resources. Ontologies can play an essential role for providing semantics in the Semantic Web and the Semantic grid and to lay down the foundation for interoperability among heterogeneous distributed systems. Semantics is thus a key component for achieving autonomy in the process of efficient service provision and utilization. Software agents can play an important role in the Semantic grid based on their capabilities to realize virtual organizations and virtual services that are a part of any Grid based system. The main focus of this research is to propose a middleware based approach for the communication of agents and Web Services and to clearly specify the sequence of steps involved in this communication process and how ontologies can play a role in assisting this communication process. These issues have not previously been addressed all together as a single solution. The issues of heterogeneity among these technologies are managed by providing architectural specifications and a prototype implementation in a middleware to achieve semantic interoperability between these technologies without violating the standards for both these technologies (i.e. FIPA and W3C respectively). As the development and implementation of such a complex system is cumbersome, π-ADL a formal language has been used to develop the specifications and formal verification of the overall system at an abstract level using a π-ADL.NET compiler.Le développement des nouveaux paradigmes et technologies comme le Web sémantique, le calcul sur grille et les services Web ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives et défis pour la conception d'une nouvelle génération d'applications. Cette nouvelle génération peut être conçue comme des systèmes multi-agents opérant sur les grilles de calcul tout en s'appuyant sur les services offerts par les services Web sémantiques. D'une part, les avancées dans la standardisation des langages et technologies des services Web ont permis un déploiement rapide d'applications fondées sur l'invocation dynamique de services découverts à la volée. Ainsi, grâce aux services Web, les applications peuvent être vues comme un ensemble de services logiciels, explicitement décrits, découverts et invoqués à l'aide des standards internationaux définis par le W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). D'autre part, le Web sémantique vise à rendre le contenu des ressources du Web accessible et utilisable par les agents logiciels, grâce à un système de métadonnées. Ces métadonnées sont notamment exprimées à l'aide d'ontologies définies en OWL – Web Ontology Language, un langage standardisé par le W3C. L'extension du Web sémantique aux services Web donne ainsi lieu à des services Web sémantiques. Le Web sémantique est également à la base des grilles sémantiques fournissant une infrastructure virtuelle constituée d'un ensemble de ressources potentiellement partagées, distribuées, hétérogènes, délocalisées et autonomes. Ces ressources sont abstraites en tant que services grille. La conjonction des services Web et des systèmes multi-agents déployés sur les grilles sémantiques donne naissance aux grilles sémantiques autonomes. Dans cette vision, des agents logiciels exploitent les services des grilles de calcul mais également utilisent des services Web au-delà de la grille, permettant un usage à très large échelle. Ces systèmes multi-agents sont construits en se reposant souvent sur les standards IEEE de la FIPA (Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents). Néanmoins, un problème se pose : celui de l'interopérabilité des agents logiciels, de nature sémantique, avec les services Web sémantiques, tout en respectant les standards définis par la FIPA et le W3C. Cette thèse s'attaque à cette problématique. L'approche développée dans la thèse est fondée sur la conception d'un intergiciel permettant l'interopérabilité entre agents logiciels et services Web de manière transparente tout en s'appuyant sur les standards actuels promus par la FIPA pour les systèmes multi-agents et pour le W3C pour les services Web sémantiques. Elle définit l'architecture logicielle et implémente en intergiciel pour la médiation entre agents logiciels et services Web sémantiques, en prenant en compte la dimension ontologique. La solution proposée est validée par des études de cas et utilise π-ADL, un langage formel basé sur le π-calcul, pour spécifier l'application des mécanismes développés

Prediction of Personality Profiles in the Pakistan Software Industry–A Study

Psychology says not everyone is able to do all type of tasks assigned to them. This point is valid for people working in the software industries as well. Therefore, when assigning the most suitable tasks to people according to their personality type, a software development company’s succession rate can be proliferated to a remarkable level. In this manner, the main theme of this empirical research is to find relationships that establish links between personality type and their job designation preferences in the software industry. For this purpose, this study is comprised of 44 Pakistan developers, who are working in different software houses and are directly involved in developing software projects. In addition, an MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) test indicator is used for the link establishment. With respect to the reported results, tester, team lead, and project manager are found to be ENFJs, which is the least common type in software developers. However, for web developers and software engineers, ISFJ is found to be the most preferable type, with an edge over ENFJ

Framework for E-Health Systems in IoT-Based Environments

Internet of things technology consists of physical objects that are accessible via the Internet, for example, devices, vehicles, and buildings. Internet of things technology is used to connect these physical objects by utilizing the existing infrastructure of networks. A unique identifier is assigned to identify the objects in IoT environments. Internet of things technology is used to make productive decisions on the sensed data after converting it into information. IoT technology is being used in various life disciplines, such as smart health services delivery, smart traffic management, border management, and governmental control. There is no single standard for IoT technology; thus, interoperability between IoT devices that use different protocols and standards is required. This research was carried out to provide and develop a specialized framework for an IoT-based smart health system by focusing particularly on interoperability problems. Based on different technology standards and communication protocols, the specific requirements of the IoT system were analyzed and served as a basis for the design of the framework. The protocols and standards within the framework utilize existing web technologies, communication protocols, and hardware design. This approach ensures that the specific expectations of the proposed model can be fulfilled with confidence. The experiments showed that interoperability between different IoT devices, standards, and protocols in a smart health system could be achieved using a specialized gateway device and that different web technologies could be used simultaneously in constrained and Internet environments