Open Education Resources and Mobile Technology to Narrow the Learning Divide

As the world becomes more digitized, there will be an increasing need to make available learning resources in electronic format for access by information and communication technologies. The question education will face is whether these learning resources will be available for learners to access at no cost or affordable cost so that there will be equity in access by anyone regardless of location, status, or background. With initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals and Education For All by the United Nations (United Nations, 2011) learning materials must be available as open education resources to achieve the goals. Currently, most learning materials are available at a cost for people to purchase to learn, or they have to travel to a specific location (school or library) to access learning materials. In some parts of the world, especially in developing countries, these costs are prohibitive, preventing learners from achieving a basic level of education so that they can be productive in society and improve their quality of life (Bhavnani et al., 2008). Some would say that people in remote locations and developing countries do not have computers to access learning materials. It is true that many do not have desktop or laptop computers to access learning materials, but they have mobile devices and are now obtaining tablets with wireless capability to allow them to access learning materials from anywhere and at any time. These countries are bypassing the wired desktop stage and moving directly to wireless mobile technology (Bhavnani et al., 2008). Storing open education resources (OER) in electronic repositories will allow learners to access the resources using mobile technology. With mobile technologies, learners can complete coursework and assessments from anywhere and send their work to their tutors electronically and receive feedback (GSMA, 2011)

Developing a Platform for Mobile Learning Using mLearn

This paper presents preliminary findings of a research study surrounding the development of an integrated architecture for a mobile learning platform. The study builds on prior design specification architecture for mLearn already appearing in the literature. In this development stage, the findings indicate that the use of the mLearn architecture and its approach when applied to a workplace-learning environment suggests benefits to learning. The results are in harmony with experimental expectations

Analysis of Application Delivery Platform for Software Defined Infrastructures

Application Service Providers (ASPs) obtaining resources from multiple clouds have to contend with different management and control platforms employed by the cloud service providers (CSPs) and network service providers (NSP). Distributing applications on multiple clouds has a number of benefits but the absence of a common multi-cloud management platform that would allow ASPs dynamic and real-time control over resources across multiple clouds and interconnecting networks makes this task arduous. OpenADN, being developed at Washington University in Saint Louis, fills this gap. However, performance issues of such a complex, distributed and multi-threaded platform, not tackled appropriately, may neutralize some of the gains accruable to the ASPs. In this paper, we establish the need for and methods of collecting precise and fine-grained behavioral data of OpenADN like platforms that can be used to optimize their behavior in order to control operational cost, performance (e.g., latency) and energy consumption.Comment: E-preprin

SCADA System Testbed for Cybersecurity Research Using Machine Learning Approach

This paper presents the development of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system testbed used for cybersecurity research. The testbed consists of a water storage tank's control system, which is a stage in the process of water treatment and distribution. Sophisticated cyber-attacks were conducted against the testbed. During the attacks, the network traffic was captured, and features were extracted from the traffic to build a dataset for training and testing different machine learning algorithms. Five traditional machine learning algorithms were trained to detect the attacks: Random Forest, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes and KNN. Then, the trained machine learning models were built and deployed in the network, where new tests were made using online network traffic. The performance obtained during the training and testing of the machine learning models was compared to the performance obtained during the online deployment of these models in the network. The results show the efficiency of the machine learning models in detecting the attacks in real time. The testbed provides a good understanding of the effects and consequences of attacks on real SCADA environmentsComment: E-Preprin

Security Services Using Blockchains: A State of the Art Survey

This article surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy and access control list (ACL), data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources along with their ownership and utilization over the network. Integrity helps in verifying that the data has not been modified or altered. These services are currently managed by centralized controllers, for example, a certificate authority. Therefore, the services are prone to attacks on the centralized controller. On the other hand, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can help resolve many of the problems with centralization. The objectives of this paper are to give insights on the use of security services for current applications, to highlight the state of the art techniques that are currently used to provide these services, to describe their challenges, and to discuss how the blockchain technology can resolve these challenges. Further, several blockchain-based approaches providing such security services are compared thoroughly. Challenges associated with using blockchain-based security services are also discussed to spur further research in this area

Security services using blockchains: A state of the art survey

This paper surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy and access control list, data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources along with their ownership and utilization over the network. Integrity helps in verifying that the data has not been modified or altered. These services are currently managed by centralized controllers, for example, a certificate authority. Therefore, the services are prone to attacks on the centralized controller. On the other hand, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can help resolve many of the problems with centralization. The objectives of this paper are to give insights on the use of security services for current applications, to highlight the state of the art techniques that are currently used to provide these services, to describe their challenges, and to discuss how the blockchain technology can resolve these challenges. Further, several blockchain-based approaches providing such security services are compared thoroughly. Challenges associated with using blockchain-based security services are also discussed to spur further research in this area. - 2018 IEEE.Manuscript received August 29, 2017; revised February 18, 2018 and June 14, 2018; accepted July 17, 2018. Date of publication August 7, 2018; date of current version February 22, 2019. This work was supported in part by the NPRP award from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of The Qatar Foundation) under Grant NPRP 8-634-1-131, and in part by NSF under Grant CNS-1547380. (Corresponding author: Tara Salman.) T. Salman, M. Zolanvari, and R. Jain are with the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130 USA (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).Scopu