Guiding principles in developing Shari'ah governance framework for Islamic capital market

Shari’ah compliance is the foundation of the Islamic financial markets, including Islamic capital market. From the beginning, the Islamic capital market (ICM) was developed to support the other two Islamic financial markets such as Islamic Banking and Takaful. Later on, it became the investment avenue for investors looking for Shari’ah compliant investment and financing. Presently, the Shari’ah governance framework and regulations have been implemented for Islamic banks and Takaful. On the contrary, there is lack of similar framework of Shari’ah Governance for the Islamic capital market. Malaysia having positioned itself as a hub of Islamic finance should introduce a Shari’ah governance framework for the Islamic capital market. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide the principles on which the theoretical Shari’ah governance framework for the Islamic capital market can be developed. These principles are Islamic accountability and responsibility, independence and objectivity, competence, confidentiality and commitment, consistency, Shari’ah audit and review, transparency and disclosure, corporate social responsibility and ethicality. In addition, this paper discusses the Shari’ah governance practices in Indonesia, Bahrain, Pakistan, Kuwait and Malaysia. This write-up will be of interest to individual players, regulators, investors and the public

Islamic accountability and waqf towards achieving equitable distribution of wealth within the Islamic economic framework

The creation and distribution of wealth is a daily activity that we face. There are different ways and approaches in handling issues related to wealth. From the Islamic perspective, economic activities should be solved based on the Shari’ah. It is because we are indebted to Allah for bringing us into this existence and for entrusting us with the resources. Allah is the Creator of everything, including us. Hence, He is the absolute Owner while humans have only delegated ownership as the trustees of Allah. Since humans are not the real owners of the resources; rather they need to utilize the resources entrusted according to the will of the Allah. Humans are also accountable for any misuse of resources which is against the will of the real Owner. In order to discharge the responsibility as trustees of Allah in an accountable manner, humans need to meet the objective of Islamic economics, i.e. to achieve socio-economic justice. In addition, Islam encourages charity and donations, whereas waqf is one way of charity to show gratitude to Allah for what He has bestowed upon us. Waqf can fill the need of the society by providing free education, health services and others. It plays a significant role in achieving the objective of Islamic economy. Therefore, the aims of the paper are to highlight how economic problems are solved in the light of Shari’ah and to what extent waqf can play an important in uplifting the wellbeing of the society. The research method of this paper is based on library research. It is written solely based on secondary data, such as articles, books and online resources. This paper will be to the interest of researchers, donators, regulators and the public in general

Combined Human, Antenna Orientation in Elevation Direction and Ground Effect on RSSI in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the combined effect of human, antenna orientation in elevation direction and the ground effect on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) parameter in the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In experiment, we use MICAz motes and consider different scenarios where antenna of the transmitter node is tilted in elevation direction. The motes were placed on the ground to take into account the ground effect on the RSSI. The effect of one, two and four persons on the RSSI is recorded. For one and two persons, different walking paces e.g. slow, medium and fast pace, are analysed. However, in case of four persons, random movement is carried out between the pair of motes. The experimental results show that some antenna orientation angles have drastic effect on the RSSI, even without any human activity. The fluctuation count and range of RSSI in different scenarios with same walking pace are completely different. Therefore, an efficient human activity algorithm is need that effectively takes into count the antenna elevation and other parameters to accurately detect the human activity in the WSN deployment region.Comment: 10th IEEE International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT 12), 201

An Energy-driven Network Function Virtualization for Multi-domain Software Defined Networks

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in Software Defined Networks (SDN) emerged as a new technology for creating virtual instances for smooth execution of multiple applications. Their amalgamation provides flexible and programmable platforms to utilize the network resources for providing Quality of Service (QoS) to various applications. In SDN-enabled NFV setups, the underlying network services can be viewed as a series of virtual network functions (VNFs) and their optimal deployment on physical/virtual nodes is considered a challenging task to perform. However, SDNs have evolved from single-domain to multi-domain setups in the recent era. Thus, the complexity of the underlying VNF deployment problem in multi-domain setups has increased manifold. Moreover, the energy utilization aspect is relatively unexplored with respect to an optimal mapping of VNFs across multiple SDN domains. Hence, in this work, the VNF deployment problem in multi-domain SDN setup has been addressed with a primary emphasis on reducing the overall energy consumption for deploying the maximum number of VNFs with guaranteed QoS. The problem in hand is initially formulated as a "Multi-objective Optimization Problem" based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to obtain an optimal solution. However, the formulated ILP becomes complex to solve with an increasing number of decision variables and constraints with an increase in the size of the network. Thus, we leverage the benefits of the popular evolutionary optimization algorithms to solve the problem under consideration. In order to deduce the most appropriate evolutionary optimization algorithm to solve the considered problem, it is subjected to different variants of evolutionary algorithms on the widely used MOEA framework (an open source java framework based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithms).Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE INFOCOM 2019 Workshop on Intelligent Cloud Computing and Networking (ICCN 2019

Metastatic squamous cell carcinoma in a bone marrow transplant recipient

AbstractWe report a case of 53year old female with history of acute myelogenous leukemia, for which she underwent allogeneic peripheral blood stem cell transplant; her course was complicated by chronic graft versus host disease. Seven years later she presents with squamous cell carcinoma of the skin which metastasize to her heart. Here, in this case we tend to highlight the aggressive nature of the squamous cell carcinoma in an immunocompromised individual