Usages of Semantic Web Services Technologies in IoT Ecosystems and its Impact in Services Delivery: A survey

Internet of things (IoT) has begun to emerge in our daily life through the huge number of smart services provided by the devices that deploy around us.  Vague and uncertainty in attributes that using in describing services, different levels of quality of each service and the limitation in capabilities of IoT devices are affect and hinder the process of discovering or selecting services.   The services in IoT need to be well described to enable users to receive their services that relevant to their query. This survey will investigate the most popular semantic services models and explore the use of these models in enhancing services discovery and services selection in IoT domain. Furthermore, the survey will investigate the evaluation metrics used by each study and compare the results that they obtained.&nbsp

Risk Management in Parallel Projects: Analysis & Best Practices and Implications to Generic DBrain (gDBrain) Research Project

The increased stiffness in competition has dramatically increased the risk occurrence in project delivery. As the number of projects grows, enterprises or project managers have to eventually run simultaneous projects. Risk management in such cases becomes extremely necessary as failure of one project may lead to the near failure of all the parallel projects running under the same supervision. Therefore, it becomes necessary to understand the best practices for risk management in a parallel project operation environment. Though the issue is of high importance, yet not much has been discussed. This study was carried out in an enterprise environment whereby professionals of this field with high experience were interviewed and requested to share their experiences. The research results bear witness to the fact that risk is inevitable and leaves a strong negative impact on all the projects operating in parallel. As such there is a high need to understand the strategies and best practices that are being applied in this field to avoid heavy losses. We seek to apply lessons learned to managing the DBrain research project which has multiple collaborators working in parallel

Impact of parallel projects management

The dramatic increase in the number of projects with the fact of increased stiffness in competition, the strength of enterprises faces a challenge to deliver the expected on time. Enterprises seem to be in dilemma regarding the implications of running simultaneous projects. Yet only a few have investigated the implications of parallel projects. The need of the industry is to formulate a model that will help them to face this challenge without really making changes to their structures. Therefore this paper aims to highlight the influence of parallel project management on project schedule, budget and product’s quality as well. To explore the implication, interviews were conducted among project managers from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) who represented different work sectors. There seems to be a consensus that handling more than one project at a time is a challenge. The findings of this study show that most of project mangers suffer from the problem of change of focus from one project to another. As a result, some projects do not finish on time, lack quality standards, and need extra budget

Awareness of social engineering among IIUM students

Although most organizations around the world currently pay more attention to securing information systems by means of sophisticated security tools, their information systems still remain breachable. The interpretation of this reality is that the hackers resort to the use of social engineering instead of using their technical skills to acquire information. The concept of social engineering is essentially to manipulate the users of a system, that are considered to be the weakest links on the chain, in order to get said information. The objective of this study is to prove that users of information systems are considered to be the real threat themselves. In this study, we assume that the lack of awareness of social engineering among users makes information systems susceptible to numerous kinds of breaches. In addition to that, the study aims to examine whether IT students possess more awareness of social engineering than students from other faculties. To address these problems, the data was collected from 245 students of the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), via an online survey and questionnaire. Moreover, a phishing phone experiment conducted among a small number of students. The exhibited results showing that a total of 114 students were exposed to social engineering attacks during the last six months, and almost 38% of these attacks through E-mail

IT security consultancy in Malaysia: hindrances and impacts

The dramatic progress in information technology has been followed by a remarkable increase in information security risks. Therefore, companies and organizations especially in developed countries have resorted to security consultant firms to secure their information systems and to help them build an effective security strategy. However, the situation is somewhat different in developing countries. Companies and organizations in developing countries tend to rely on their internal staff to handle the security issues instead of hiring IT security consultants. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that hinder Malaysian companies and organizations from hiring information security consultants. Moreover, the study aims to investigate the implications and information security risks that these companies and organizations face. Questionnaires are administered and interviews were conducted amongst Ten Malaysian Companies and organizations from different sectors. The results of this study revealed that 70% of the companies and organizations do not have security consultants compared to 30% of the companies and organizations which hired security consultant firms to handle the critical information security issues