The importance of being owned: microfinance institutions in Tanzania

Non-governmental organisations operating in Tanzania and seeking to transform themselves into regulated microfinance institutions are currently facing the difficult task of establishing who the owners of their organisations are – a crucial factor that is limiting their ability to secure transformation and hence to get access to further funding. As an integral part of the Leverhulme-funded research project “Optimising the Dual Goals of Microfinance” this briefing paper presents preliminary results of field research undertaken in Tanzania during August 2009.1 One of the major findings is that gaining access to equity capital is the primary concern of many of these organisations and hence identifying the best strategies to institute shareholding partnerships is paramount

Deriving explanations from partial temporal information

The representation and manipulation of natural human understanding of temporal phenomena is a fundamental field of study in Computer Science, which aims both to emulate human thinking, and to use the methods of human intelligence to underpin engineering solutions. In particular, in the domain of Artificial Intelligence, temporal knowledge may be uncertain and incomplete due to the unavailability of complete and absolute temporal information. This paper introduces an inferential framework for deriving logical explanations from partial temporal information. Based on a graphical representation which allows expression of both absolute and relative temporal knowledge in incomplete forms, the system can deliver a verdict to the question if a given set of statements is temporally consistent or not, and provide understandable logical explanation of analysis by simplified contradiction and rule based reasoning

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Towards the ensemble: IPCBR model in investigating financial bubbles

Asset value predictability remains a major research concern in financial market especially when considering the effect of unprecedented market fluctuations on the behaviour of market participants. This paper presents preliminary results toward the building a reliable forward problem on ensemble approach IPCBR model, that leverages the capabilities of Case based Reasoning(CBR) and Inverse Problem Techniques (IPTs) to describe and model abnormal stock market fluctuations (often associated with asset bubbles) using datasets from historical stock market prices. The framework uses a rich set of past observations and geometric pattern description and then applies a CBR to formulate the forward problem, Inverse Problem formulation is then applied to identify a set of parameters that can statistically be associated with the occurrence of the observed patterns. This research work presents a formative strategy aimed to determine the causes of behaviour, rather than predict future time series points which brings a novel perspective to the problem of asset bubbles predictability, and a deviation from the existing research trend. The results depict the stock dynamics and statistical fluctuating evidence associated with the envisaged bubble problem

Temporal pattern recognition in video clips detection

Temporal representation and reasoning plays an important role in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, particularly, in mining and recognizing patterns with rich temporal information. Based on a formal characterization of time-series and state-sequences, this paper presents the computational technique and algorithm for matching state-based temporal patterns. As a case study of real-life applications, zone-defense pattern recognition in basketball games is specially examined as an illustrating example. Experimental results demonstrate that it provides a formal and comprehensive temporal ontology for research and applications in video events detection

Predicting fraud in mobile money transfer using case-based reasoning

This paper proposes an improved CBR approach for the identification of money transfer fraud in Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) environments. Standard CBR capability is augmented by machine learning techniques to assign parameter weights in the sample dataset and automate k-value random selection in k-NN classification to improve CBR performance. The CBR system observes users’ transaction behaviour within the MMT service and tries to detect abnormal patterns in the transaction flows. To capture user behaviour effectively, the CBR system classifies the log information into five contexts and then combines them into a single dimension, instead of using the conventional approach where the transaction amount, time dimensions or features dimension are used individually. The applicability of the proposed augmented CBR system is evaluated using simulation data. From the results, both dimensions show good performance with the context of information weighted CBR system outperforming the individual features approach

Quantum error-correcting output codes

Quantum machine learning is the aspect of quantum computing concerned with the design of algorithms capable of generalized learning from labeled training data by effectively exploiting quantum effects. Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) are a standard setting in machine learning for efficiently rendering the collective outputs of a binary classifier, such as the support vector machine, as a multi-class decision procedure. Appropriate choice of error-correcting codes further enables incorrect individual classification decisions to be effectively corrected in the composite output. In this paper, we propose an appropriate quantization of the ECOC process, based on the quantum support vector machine. We will show that, in addition to the usual benefits of quantizing machine learning, this technique leads to an exponential reduction in the number of logic gates required for effective correction of classification error

An efficient deep learning model for intrusion classification and prediction in 5G and IoT networks

A Network Intrusion Detection System is a critical component of every internet-connected system due to likely attacks from both external and internal sources. Such Security systems are used to detect network born attacks such as flooding, denial of service attacks, malware, and twin-evil intruders that are operating within the system. Neural networks have become an increasingly popular solution for network intrusion detection. Their capability of learning complex patterns and behaviors make them a suitable solution for differentiating between normal traffic and network attacks. In this paper, we have applied a deep autoencoded dense neural network algorithm for detecting intrusion or attacks in 5G and IoT network. We evaluated the algorithm with the benchmark Aegean Wi-Fi Intrusion dataset. Our results showed an excellent performance with an overall detection accuracy of 99.9% for Flooding, Impersonation and Injection type of attacks. We also presented a comparison with recent approaches used in literature which showed a substantial improvement in terms of accuracy and speed of detection with the proposed algorithm

BMQE system: a MQ equations system based on ergodic matrix

In this paper, we propose a multivariate quadratic (MQ) equation system based on ergodic matrix (EM) over a finite field with q elements (denoted as F^q). The system actually implicates a problem which is equivalent to the famous Graph Coloring problem, and therefore is NP complete for attackers. The complexity of bisectional multivariate quadratic equation (BMQE) system is determined by the number of the variables, of the equations and of the elements of Fq, which is denoted as n, m, and q, respectively. The paper shows that, if the number of the equations is larger or equal to twice the number of the variables, and qn is large enough, the system is complicated enough to prevent attacks from most of the existing attacking schemes

Seen the villains: detecting social engineering attacks using case-based reasoning and deep learning

Social engineering attacks are frequent, well-known and easy-toapply attacks in the cyber domain. Historical evidence of such attacks has shown that the vast majority of malicious attempts against both physical and virtual IT systems were based or been initiated using social engineering methods. By identifying the importance of tackling efficiently cybersecurity threats and using the recent developments in machine learning, case-based reasoning and cybersecurity we propose and demonstrate a two-stage approach that detects social engineering attacks and is based on natural language processing, case-based reasoning and deep learning. Our approach can be applied in offline texts or real time environments and can identify whether a human, chatbot or offline conversation is a potential social engineering attack or not. Initially, the conversation text is parsed and checked for grammatical errors using natural language processing techniques and case-based reasoning and then deep learning is used to identify and isolate possible attacks. Our proposed method is being evaluated using both real and semi-synthetic conversation points with high accuracy results. Comparison benchmarks are also presented for comparisons in both datasets