Active suspension force control with electro-hydraulic actuator dynamics

Musa Mohammed Bello, Adamu Y. Babawuro and Sado Fatai

The purpose of vehicle suspension system is to keep-off the vehicle main body from any road geometrical irregularities thereby improving the comfort as well as maintaining a good handling stability. This work aim at designing a double loop PID control of generated force and vehicle suspension parameters using a four degree of freedom, nonlinear, half vehicle active suspension system model with hydraulic actuator. The loops arrangement is made up of an inner hydraulic actuator PID force control loop and an outer suspension parameters PID control loop. Simulation study was carried out; comparisons were made between the nonlinear active PID base suspension systems with a nonlinear passive system. Results obtained show a better performance improvement in the active system when compared to the passive system at the expense of cost and power consuming.

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Design and development of a compressed air machine using a compressed air energy storage system

M. A. Aziz, Arifuzzaman, Fahmida Shams, M. M. Rashid and Md. Nasir Uddin

The world is in an ongoing energy crisis. Fossil fuel reserves are in critical condition and the environment is being bombarded with all kinds of pollution. Therefore, it is easy to see why any technology that brings solutions to these problems is considered to be a bounty. Among the solutions is compressed air driven machine technology. This solution does not require any type of fossil fuel and is driven by compressed air as a fuel source. A general four stroke petrol engine (IC engine) is converted to a two stroke air compressed machine. The power output is examined by supplying compressed air from the air compressor. This method will demonstrate the concept of a green, environmentally-friendly new engine technology for future generations. The experimental results show a promising maximum efficiency percentage of 23.60 under 4.5 bar pressure under a maximum load condition.

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Fair scheduling algorithm in LTE-Advanced networks

Mohammed Abduljawad M. Al-Shibly, Mohamed Hadi Habaebi, Md. Rafiqul Islam, Jalel Chebil , Alhareth Zyoud, and Mohammed I. M. Alfaqawi

The Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) transmission bandwidth can be expanded by Carrier Aggregation (CA), where CA technology expands effective bandwidth supported to User Equipment (UE) by utilizing of radio resources across multiple carriers. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the radio resource allocation with CA. However, most of these studies are based on Proportional Fair (PF) packet scheduling algorithms. Indeed, these algorithms are not adequate to meet the requirements for supporting mixture real-time applications; they ignored channel condition; and finally, they are unable to support real-time application with delay constraint. Therefore, this paper proposes novel Packet Scheduling (PS) condition algorithm that attractively enhances the average system throughput by designing a weighting factor to modified largest weighted delay first PS algorithm. The novel algorithm is implemented in a PS module for LTE-Advanced via system level simulations. The results demonstrate that the effectiveness of enhanced Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (M-LWDF) algorithm in improving throughput.

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Multi-response optimizations for high speed ductile mode machining of soda lime glass

Nasima Bagum, A.K.M. Nurul Amin, Mohamed Konneh and Noor Fathiah

Ductile regime end milling of soda lime glass needs consideration from commercial standpoints as well as in research and development. High speed machining is capable to obtain ductile mode at an increased material removal rate and at the same time tool wear rate can be optimized at higher value of cutting speed. This paper presents a simple and workable approach to process parameters optimization, to achieve ductile mode machining of soda lime glass applying high speed using the experiment design and parameter optimization capabilities of Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The particular ranges of cutting parameters were chosen based on initial tests conducted to ensure ductile mode machining during the experiments. The machining parameters such as cutting speed, depth of cut, and feed rate were varied from 30000 to 50000 rpm, 20 to 50 5m and from 45 to 75 mm/min (0.45 to 1.25 5m per tooth) respectively. Based on the experimental results empirical mathematical models relating the machining parameters to response parameters, namely, surface roughness, tool wear and tool life, were first developed. Multi-criteria optimization was conducted applying the desirability function of RSM based on the developed models, with the aim of determining the combination of machining parameters that would lead to optimal settings of responses. The quality criteria considered to establish optimal parameters were the minimization of surface roughness (Ra), tool wear (Tw) and maximization of tool life (Tl). Obtained results demonstrated that optimal combination of the response parameters, 0.78 5m Ra, 107 5m (Tw) and 0.56 min (Tl) were achieved with maximum desirability 77%, at the lowest depth of cut 20 5m at spindle speed of approximately 40000 rpm with feed rate of 69 mm/min.

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A proposed rain attenuation prediction method for free space optical link based on rain rate statistics

Ahmed Basahel, Islam Md.Rafiqul, Mohamad Hadi Habaebi and A. Z. Suriza

Free Space Optics technology has gained acceptance in telecommunication industry mostly in enterprise campus network. However in tropical regions, rainfall is the dominant factor that degrades the FSO link performance and its availability. In this paper, a method is proposed to estimate the total path attenuation due to rain for Free Space Optical communication links for all percentage of availabilities and any path length. Path length reduction factor for FSO has been derived using reduction factors models developed for microwave under measurement in tropical climate. Regression analysis has been applied and model is derived using best fit curve. Comparison between derived and measured reduction factors has been made for validation. Derived reduction factor seems to have strong agreement with both models which were derived based on measurements. This method can provide estimation of total path rain attenuation for FSO for all percentage of time with any path lengths.

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Development and control of a 3DOF upper-limb robotic device for patients with paretic limb impairment

Sado Fatai, Shahrul N. Sidek, Yusof M. Hazlina, Latif M. Hafiz and Adamu Y. Babawuro

Rehabilitation therapy after stroke is crucial to helping patients regain as much as possible the use of their pareticlimbs. The major challenges, however, in conventional post-stroke rehabilitation therapy is that the therapy is labour-intensive, time demanding, and therefore, expensive with consequent reduction in the amount of training session required for optimal therapeutic outcome. In recent times, the use of robotic devices for rehabilitation training has been widely favoured. Robot-assisted rehabilitation therapy is cost-effective, fatigue-free, and has the potential to improve the efficiency of the rehabilitation process. More so, positive outcome of improved motor control abilities for patients undergoing robot-assisted therapy have been widely recorded. This paper presents the development and control of a portable three degree of freedom (3-DOF) end-effector-type robotic device for upper-extremity rehabilitation of paretic stroke patients. The device has three active DOFs consisting of two revolute joints and one prismatic joint (R-R-P) designed to allow 3-dimensional range of motion (ROM) exercise for elbow and shoulder rehabilitation. A novel adaptive hybrid impedance control framework has been developed for the device to allow safe robot-patient dynamic interaction during planned repetitive range of motion exercises and to keep track of patients motor recovery based on an embedded Modified Ashworth Scale assessment criteria. Experimental results performed, using a healthy subject, to test and evaluate the ability of the device to track a planned simple flexion/extension range of motion exercise for the elbow joint showed position and force tracking accuracy to a maximum root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.024m and 0.343N respectively which indicate the possibility of use of the device for real patients.

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Analytical approximate solutions for the Helmholtz-Duffing oscillator

Md. Alal Hosen and M. S. H. Chowdhury

In the present paper, a new analytical technique is introduced for obtaining approximate periodic solutions of Helmholtz-Duffing oscillator. Modified Harmonic Balance Method (MHBM) is adopted as the solution method. A classical harmonic balance method does not apply directly for solving Helmholtz-Duffing oscillator. Generally, a set of difficult nonlinear algebraic equations is found when MHBM is applied. Investigating analytically for such kinds of nonlinear algebraic equations is a tremendously difficult task and cumbersome especially for large oscillation. In this study, the offered technique eradicates this aforementioned limitation and avoids numerical complexity. Using iterative homotopy perturbation method, only two or three iteration produces desired results even for large oscillation. It is remarkably important that a second-order approximate solution gives excellent agreement compared to exact ones.

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Phased array antenna design for 5G mobile networks

Mohamed Hadi Habebi, MohanadJanat and MD. Rafiqul Islam

In the next few years, the demands and challenges for the 4G (and its derivatives ie LTE-A) alternative must be addressed to meet the prime objectives of the upcoming 5G mobile networks such as increased capacity, improved data rate, low latency, and better quality of service. To achieve these objectives, drastic improvements need to be made in cellular network architecture and the antenna configuration that is used for this purpose. This paper presents the results of a detailed survey on the fifth generation (5G) cellular network architecture and some of the key emerging technologies that are helpful in improving the architecture and meeting the evasively increasing demand of users. In this detailed survey, the prime focus is on the 5G cellular network architecture, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology, and millimetre wave beamforming technologies. In this paper, a general probable 5G cellular network phased array antenna concept is proposed, which shows that a combination of multiple input multiple output and the beamforming can be utilized at the same time to overcome the limitation of either systems.

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Design of dual band notched ultra wideband antenna using (U-W) shaped slots

Mohammed Shihab Ahmed, Md. Rafiqul Islam, and Sheroz Khan

The Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communications have become a hot topic for researchers. To mitigate the interference with the existing WiMAX (3.3 GHz 3.6 GHz) and WLAN (5.15 GHz 5.825 GHz) systems, a Dual Band-Notched antenna for Ultra-Wideband applications is proposed. The antenna consists of rectangular patch, a 50 ? Microstrip line and partial grounding. By etching a nested inverted U-Shaped and W-Shaped slots in the radiating patch, band rejection filtering properties for WiMAX and WLAN were achieved. The simulation results were obtained using electromagnetic simulation software (CST Microwave Studio). Simulation results shows that the return loss for the frequency band from 2.87 GHz to 11.48 GHz is below -10dB, which is considered operational. The antenna also has band-notched functions in the range from 3.24 GHz to 3.65 GHz and from 5.01 GHz to 6.01 GHz. Thus the interference between WiMAX, WLAN and Ultra-Wideband can be avoided.

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Investigation of metamaterial unit cells based on dispersion characteristics

Abdirashid Mohamed Nur, Mimi Aminah Wan Nordin, Md Rafiqul Islam and Mohamed Hadi Habaebi

Metamaterials are artificial effectively-homogenous electromagnetic structures with properties that are not readily available in nature, they are periodic structures made up of unit cells. While the field of metamaterial is receiving much interest, not too many researches have been done to characterize the metamaterial. A few metamaterial unit cells are chosen to characterize and investigate the propagation of EM waves inside the metamaterial, eigen mode solver in Computer Simulation Technology Microwave studio (CST MWS) has been used to derive the dispersion diagram. We found that some unit cells produce pure left-hand (LH) propagation while the others produced composite right/left-handed (CRLH) propagation. It is also proposed for the unit cells that can be used for wireless applications.

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Performance evaluation of drilling tools during machining plain carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP)

Mohamed Konneh and Mohamad Hamzi Zaini

The demand of CFRP have been arises because of their capabilities and high strength to weight ratio properties. It has been remarkably used in most field nowadays as an example in aerospace industries as it provide weight reduction and reduce the fuel consumption at the same time. However, the inherent anisotropy, inhomogeneous properties of CFRP and low bonding strength within the laminates make machining of these composite materials results in several undesirable effects such as delamination, burr and chipping. This experimental study was conducted on drilling CFRP using 3mm-diameter ball nose Diamond coated, Titanium Aluminum Nitride (TiAlN) coated and uncoated tool. Relationship between the machining variables and the output variables is analyze and the tool that performs better were selected so that the experiments can be continue to prove the findings. It was observed that minimal delamination at entry and exit is achieved when using TIAlN at high spindle speed and feed.

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Upgrading of small sewage treatment plants for ammonia removal- case of a University campus

Md. Nuruzzaman, Abdullah Al Mamun and Md. Noor Bin Salleh

Fourteen small sewage treatment plants (STPs) are constructed to treat the sewage generated from the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) Gombak campus. These plants are required to fulfill the effluent Standard B of the revised environmental quality act of Malaysia. Effluent quality data of these plants was evaluated to check the compliance with the revised effluent quality standards set by the Department of Environment (DOE), Malaysia. Secondary data (monthly) of the STPs was analyzed for this study. Performance of the STPs were evaluated in terms of ammoniacal nitrogen (AN) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). The statistical analyses of the data revealed that the median effluent concentration of AN from all the plants usually fails to meet the allowable concentration of 20 mg/L set for Standard B. However, all of the plants are able to meet the BOD standard of 50 mg/L. This study recommends additional aeration for extended time to reduce AN concentration from the effluents of the existing plants. Another alternate solution is to construct a centralized treatment plant, preferably a sequenced batch reactor (SBR), to provide further treatment of effluent released from the existing small plants, which are unable to meet the standard set for allowable AN concentration.

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Parametric study of sputtering microchannels via focused ion beam (FIB)

S. F. M. Shahar, I. H. Jaafar and M. Y. Ali

Focused ion beams (FIB) are used in microfabrication and have certain advantages compared to photolithography and other micromachining technologies. The main advantage is that it can be used for direct writing/patterning of the target material. FIB can create a variety of geometric features, has the ability to process without masks, and can accommodate the patterning of a variety of materials. In high aspect micromilling, the beam current, beam diameter as well as the dwell time are some of the parameters that need to be taken into account. In this research, different beam currents with respective beam diameters were used to investigate the optimum parameters that can be achieved in milling microchannels. The target material that was used in this experiment was Silicon <100>. The wafer used had 250 5m thicknesses. The results observed were the channel width, gap between the channels, and the channel depth. The main trend observed was that when the beam current increases, the depth and the channels width also increase whereas the channels gap decreases. Defects such as side wall tapering effect and swelling were noticed from the experiments that used the unsuitable parameters because the values of beam current are not enough to sputter the silicon surface. The best beam current use that give the nearest result to the actual pattern is around 7.0-8.0 pA. Extended research need to be conducted to see the effect on the surface roughness of the channels.

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Application of LQR control technique to offshore jacket platform subjected to earthquake

Abbas Ahmed Syed Khaja and Deepak Kumar

Offshore structures are different than onshore structures in several sense. Very importantly they differ in Natural frequency and Mass distribution. Natural frequency of onshore structures is much higher than offshore structures. Generally, onshore structures have distributed mass, while offshore structure has the mass concentrated on the top of the platform. Such offshore structures are prone to extreme environmental conditions. Under extreme environmental conditions, offshore structures are vulnerable to damages because of higher response. Structural workability conditions get affected due to damage. Hence the vibratory behaviour needs to be tackled with available damping techniques. Among the available techniques Semi-active control insures that structure should not exceed the response limit for a wider frequency range. This can be achieved by properly modeling the control parameters. Efficiently chosen parameter guaranties the minimization of responses for all types of environmental forces. In this study a 50 mts offshore structure is considered. Linear control of the structure has been modeled for the earthquake force. The structure is subjected to El-Centro earthquake force. The response of the structure was well controlled by the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) Methodology.

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Survey on energy harvesting cognitive radio network

Mohammed I. M. Alfaqawi, Mohamed Hadi Habaebi, Mohammad Umar Siddiqi, Md. Rafiqul Islam, Alhareth Zyoud and Mohammed Al-Shibly

Energy harvesting network (EHN) is a trending topic among the recent researches. This substantial attention is due to the limitations, operational cost and risks of the conventional power suppliers, such as fossil fuel and batteries. Moreover, EHN are expected to enhance energy efficiency by harvesting energy of RF and renewable sources. In contemporary research works, EHN is applied to CR technology. This energy harvesting cognitive radio network (EH-CRN) is expected to utilize both energy and electromagnetic spectrum efficiently. However, EH-CRN is facing enormous challenges related to technical design. Some of these challenges are reviewed in recent surveys. However, other challenges such as optimizing the network throughput and EH-CRN implementation models were not the focus of these researches. Therefore, the aim of this survey is to review EH-CRN research works by focusing the survey perspective on maximizing the network throughput and the implementation models.

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Development of an angle sensor using optical polarizer

Masud Rana, M. A. Syraf, M. Razib, T. Saleh and Asan G. A. Muthalif

This paper presents an effective technique to measure angle of rotation using optical polarizer. In this case combination of single wavelength partially polarised laser beam and a linear polarizer are used for the rotational angle measurement. The power of the transmitted partially polarized light was found varied according to the angle variation of the polarizer. This concept can be used to sense the angle of rotation. High and low measurement of the transmitted power was obtained at 90: interval for the entire range of angle 1800. To ensure the precision, accuracy and reliability of the sensor, the experiments were repeated and error percentage was captured in accordance of predicted model. From all experimental investigations, it has been concluded that varying the output power according to the polarizer s angle rotation could be an indicator to an angle successfully. The experiment was conducted using polarized laser source, iris, attenuator, polarizer and a photo detector to measure the transmitted polarized power coming through a polarizer. The major advantages of this type of angle sensor are its compact size, cost effectiveness, passive type without extra circuit, no effect of electromagnetic noise and flexibility in using at long distance.

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Development of a quality check station in a pharmaceutical industry to achieve zero defect production using PDCA cycle

K. S. Mahmud, M. N. A. Nasry, I. Hilmy and M. D. Yusof

This paper reports the result of a research in a pharmaceutical industry in Malaysia. The data have been collected and analyzed because of the some issues occurred in company X. There is need of adding a check station in the company. Moreover, the issues on the health of human eyes sight that required to be considered during quality check. In order to avoid the rejection of capsule, the quality check station is developed. The inspection table and the standard light intensity on the inspection table must be taken into account for better capsule production result. This also directly affects the health of human eyes and should be considered. The objective of this research is to enhance the production and avoid the rejection parts. There is one strategy for the continuously improvement. The lean manufacturing approach has been carried out in problem solving using the PDCA technique. The finding reveals that application of lean manufacturing using PDCA helps in solving the problem in the process. Thus, the inspection table has two sides of lights. The inspection table has to be equipped with a reflector in order to achieve the standard light intensity for human eyes. Consequently, this will reduce rejection of parts and aids in faster inspection.

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Energy consideration in pharmaceutical factory layout

N. A. Nasry, K. S. Mahmud, I. Hilmy, M. D. Yusof and R. H. Basri

This paper focuses on energy consumption in a pharmaceutical industry. The efficient energy consumption depends on energy layout planning. Materials handling consideration may save the energy. The wastage of energy resources leads to wastage of money. The proposed new layout has been designed for the company X for energy efficiency. The energy efficiency calculation is based on total weekly energy usage in the company X. After the research, the work flow analysis can be planned for ease material handling. The saving of the energy consumption leads in saving 20% of electricity bills. In the other way, it save money and environment friendly because energy consumption used is less.

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Gamma shaped monopole patch antenna for tablet PC

Islam Md. Rafiqul, Mohammad Shawkat Habib and Khaizuran Abdullah

With the increasing demand of using multiple services in a single device, instead of using multiple antennas, current trend is to use single antenna capable of communicating in multiple frequency bands. For the devices like tablet PC, the need of accommodating the physical infrastructure through single multiband antenna is greatly useful. For the multiband operation, a gamma shaped structure is proposed for tablet PC. Gamma shaped monopole structure is designed and simulated using the Computer Simulation Technology (CST) Microwave Studio. The Gamma shape monopole is derived by modification from the original T shaped monopole and the first three resonant frequencies are found to be well improved than the T shaped one. The typical frequencies at 789.5 MHz, 988.1 MHz, 2.088 GHz and 2.376 GHz are having peak gain of 2.94 dBi, 2.11 dBi, 5.81 dBi, 4.84 dBi and radiation efficiencies of 95.57 %, 87.32 %, 96.67 % and 95.36 %, respectively. Compared to the T shaped monopole antenna, the modified Gamma shaped monopole antenna is performing better for the first three resonant frequencies in terms of return loss. This work has achieved to accommodate the multiple frequency bands of GSM750, GSM850, GSM900, LTE800, LTE2300, PCS-1900 and UMTS. Proposed antenna size is 40 mm x 15 mm that is suitable to fit inside the commercially available tablet PCs.

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The Development of Human Biometric Identification using Acceleration Plethysmogram

Khairul Azami Sidek, Nur Izzati Zainal, Siti Nurfarah Ain Mohd Azam and Nur Azua Liyana Jaafar

This study explicates the practicability of using acceleration plethysmogram (APG) signal in biometric identification. The introduction of APG signal is initiated from the congenital of photo plethysmogram (PPG) signal since APG signal has been widely known as the second derivative of PPG signal. Previous researchers claimed that APG signal elucidates more information as compared to PPG signal. For this reason, the robustness and reliability of APG signal as biometric recognition is demonstrated. A total of 10 subjects obtained from MIMIC II WAFEFORM Database (MIMIC2WDB) which provides PPG signals with a 125 Hz sampling frequency are used as test samples. The signals are then differentiated twice to obtain the APG signals. Then, discriminative features are extracted from the APG morphology. Finally, these APG samples were classified using commonly known classification techniques to identify individuals. Based on the experimentation results, APG signal when using Multilayer Perceptron gives an identification rate of 98% as compared to PPG signal of 76% for the same waveform. This outcome suggests the feasibility and robustness of APG signals as a biometric modality as an alternative to current techniques.

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Finding the best feeding point location of patch antenna using HFSS

S. E Jasim, M. A. Jusoh, M. H. Mazwir and S. N. S. Mahmud

This paper describes about the finding of an optimal location of feeding location for patch antenna by using Ansoft HFSS software. The dimensions of patch antenna were calculated based on the three essential parameters. The operation frequency of patch antenna was designed at 2.4 GHz. The LaAlO3 was chosen as a substrate material for the designed patch antenna with a dielectric constant of 23.5, and a height of 1.5 mm. The materials were chosen as a perfect conductor for patch and ground plane with a cut off area from a substrate block. The centre of the patch as well as substrate is located at the origin coordinates of x-y plane, and the height of substrate at z-direction. The objective of this paper is to find the best feed point location, which achieves the highest performance for the designed antenna. The best feed point is located at (Xm, Yn) from the origin. The simulation was done for all feed point locations. The return loss was calculated, and it has the highest value of return loss at a constant y-axis point along the length of patch antenna. The results demonstrated that the use of such a design will achieve high directivity, gain, efficiency, and performance.

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Exponential-based spiral dynamic algorithm for modeling of a flexible manipulator system

This paper presents an exponential-based spiral dynamic algorithm (SDA) as an improved version of the original SDA. A simple structure with a unique feature of a spiral model in SDA leads the algorithm achieving fast convergence speed and short computation time. However, adopting a constant radius and a constant angle into the spiral model of SDA causes the algorithm to trap into local optima solution. To overcome the problem, both radius and angle of the spiral model is adaptively varied throughout the search process. It can be done by incorporating an exponential-based radius and an exponential-based angle into the spiral model of SDA. The algorithm is applied to solved dynamic modeling problem of a single-link flexible manipulator system. Results of the dynamic model show the proposed algorithm and the original SDA estimate adequate model and capture good dynamic behaviour of the system. However, the proposed algorithm acquires better model for the system compared to its predecessor algorithm.

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Evaluation algorithm- based on PID controller design for the unstable systems

PID controller consists of proportional, integral and derivatives controllers and it's widely used in industrial control system to provide optimal and excellent performance for any system. In term of controlling, unstable system exist when the system doesn’t reach a steady-state value and will instead head towards infinity. This may cause damage to the system and might bid danger in certain systems. Evaluation algorithm develop to tune the PID controller for a better performance. In this project, the evaluating PSO algorithm based on PID controller design for unstable system was proposed. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is computation method by simulation of swarms behaviour in performing their tasks. In the implementation of PSO in the PID controller, the swarm will travel to search the best value of parameter Kp, Ki and Kd. In this project, the stability impact of implementation of PSO in PID controller is being investigate. This implementation offers the stability effects to the unstable system by reducing the error and provides better performance of the system.

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Development of a gate drive with overcurrent protection circuit using IR2110 for fast switching half-bridge converter

This paper presents a gate drive with overcurrent protection circuit using IR2110 for MOSFETs and IGBTs, which have fast switching capability and simple control scheme. The proposed gate drive circuit is able to achieve fast switching thanks to high speed operation devices with lower reverse recovery time. Apart of fast switching operation capability, an overcurrent protection circuit is also implemented for the power switches, hence ensuring reliability and high robustness of the proposed circuit. This paper also evaluates a dead-time circuit that is used to prevent commutation problem during high side and low side switches transitions. The advantages of the proposed gate drive circuit are; it is capable to drive two power switches using a single driver circuit, while providing an isolation between high side and low side power switches. A test prototype circuits for a single-phase half-bridge DC to AC converter with the proposed gate drive circuit was developed to investigate its operation and behaviour. Experimental results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed circuit.

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Development of a portable solar-powered traffic light control system for a remote single lane bridge

The uncertainties of terrain in some rural area in Malaysia makes the building of a bridge a real challenge. When the construction of a bridge is built over railways, space is a matter of concern. This paper proposed a stand-alone traffic light solution for the drivers and motorist in Kampung Batang Benar, Negeri Sembilan who need to cross the railways via a single lane bridge. The single lane bridge can only accommodate one vehicle at one time and motorists have to wait for their turn to cross to the other end. Having a single lane bridge with no traffic light to control the traffic definitely contributes to congestion. On a peak hour, cars and motorcycles start to queue and there is no ruling on which end should go first. It will be a costly and not reliable approach to station a traffic controller personnel at such a place. This project develops a portable stand-alone traffic light which uses Arduino microcontroller and Xbee wireless communication system. Since the system is using a wireless communication and portable, its usage can be extended to any remote road in the rural area to assist the traffic flow. The system is also equipped with solar photovoltaic and a battery bank to ensure the operation is continuous even during the night. The implementation of this system is perceived to put the traffic under control with minimal assistance from human operator.

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GUI based energy saving controller for lighting and air-conditioning application in lecture hall via power line communication module

This paper presents a system that can control electricity for lighting and air-conditioning using power line communication (PLC) module. The control system is developed based on a case study done in UMP lecture hall. The case study has shown that numerous air-conditioner and lighting have been left on without any occupant. Thus, better control strategies are needed to reduce energy wastage. This paper will concentrate on development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) based energy saving controller and analysis of PLC module’s performance for the system. Conceptually, the PLC module is used for communication between GUI to the controller. The GUI-based electricity control system is programmed as a zero-crossing switching device for the lighting and air-conditioning system. Once the GUI is connected to the PLC module over existing power cables, the GUI is able to activate and deactivate the lighting and air-conditioning remotely. It is expected that by using this software, the users can simply control the lighting and air-conditioning manually or remotely via computer. The performance of PLC is reliably enough to transfer the data with high accuracy. The system has been built and tested at wiring bay and will be install in UMP lecture room for further analysis in energy saving application in UMP lecture room. For market potential, the control system can also be used in domestics, industrial and office building.

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Enhanced face recognition method performance on android vs. windows platform

Android is becoming one of the most popular operating systems on smartphones, tablet computers and similar mobile devices. With the quick development in mobile device specifications, it is worthy to think about mobile devices as current or - at least - near future replacement of personal computers. This paper presents an enhanced face recognition method. The method is tested on two different platforms using Windows and Android operating systems. This is done to evaluate the method and to compare the platforms. The platforms are compared according to two factors: development simplicity and performance. The target is evaluating the possibility of replacing personal computers using Windows operating system by mobile devices using Android operating system. Face recognition has been chosen because of the relatively high computing cost of image processing and pattern recognition applications comparing with other applications. The experiment results show acceptable performance of the method on Android platform.

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Price predictive analysis mechanism utilizing grey wolf optimizer-least squares support vector machines

A good selection of Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LSSVM) hyper-parameters' value is crucial in order to obtain a promising generalization on the unseen data. Any inappropriate value set to the hyper parameters would directly demote the prediction performance of LSSVM. In this regard, this study proposes a hybridization of LSSVM with a new Swarm Intelligence (SI) algorithm namely, Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). With such hybridization, the hyper-parameters of interest are automatically optimized by the GWO. The performance of GWO-LSSVM is realized in predictive analysis of gold price and measured based on two indices viz. Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSPE). Findings of the study suggested that the GWO-LSSVM possess lower prediction error rate as compared to three comparable algorithms which includes hybridization models of LSSVM and Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms.

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Implementation of speech recognition home control system using Arduino

Electronically control of household activities has long been explored in various ways. From electronic remote control using infra-red sensors, to voice-controlled application, we are continuously trying to find a better way to control electrical and electronic devices to ease our daily life. This paper presents the development of a low cost remote home control system using speech recognition. The system focused on controlling fan and lamp wirelessly by applying speech recognition into the system, with Arduino Uno as the controller. Two different units were developed: the main control unit which also act as the transmitter and the receiver unit which controls the fan and lamp. The main control unit accept voice command from the user and convert it into text by using Easy VR shield. The signal is then transmitted to the receiver using RF signal. With the use of RF technology, the system is able to work wirelessly. This system is hoped to be able to help people to use the electronics devices effectively besides provide improved convenience and comfort to user especially for elderly and disabled who live alone and help them to be more independent.

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Sliding mode control of an X4-AUV

This paper presents a design method for attitude control of an autonomous underwater vehicle(X4-AUV) based sliding mode control. We are interested in the dynamic modeling of X4-AUV because of it complexity. The dynamic model is used to design a stable and accurate controller to perform the best tracking and attitude results. To stabilize the overall systems, each sliding mode controller is designed based on the Lyapunov stability theory. The advantage of sliding mode control is it’s not being sensitive to model errors, parametric uncertainties and other disturbances. Lastly, we show that the control law has a good robust and good stability through simulation.

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Development of hexaquad robot: Modeling and framework

This paper presents a proposed reconfigurable multi-legged robot named Hexapod-to-Quadruped (Hexaquad) robot. Reconfigurable legged robot is one of the robotics research area that is generally focused on optimizing the usage of leg during locomotion. Until recent years, most of the researches emphasized on leg reconfigurable design in order to solve the fault tolerant, stability, multi-tasking and energy efficiency. However, the emphasis of the Hexaquad robot is on providing optimum leg usage, actuation configuration as well as satisfying the legged robot stability criterion in reconfiguration mechanism. Inspired from several living creatures, such as insects, crustacean and peristaltic creatures, Hexaquad is designed and modeled to perform flexible spine for leg adjustment and foot-to-gripper transformation. The design also implements the indirect and parallel actuation configuration on leg-joint motion for optimum torque on the joint of each leg without motor/actuator mass affect that commonly happens in multi-limbed system with direct drive configuration. The minimum torque on each joint of the leg is calculated using the static torque calculation on multi-link structure before the actuator/motor is selected, and verification is done by performing fundamental testing on the leg’s movement and standing using direct switching and supply voltage. Further testing and analysis were conducted on the gripper by performing gripping tests using materials of different weight and shape versus total load current on the leg’s actuators. Stress and displacement testing and analysis were also done on the foot-to-gripper (FTG) structure of Hexaquad robot. The results show that the FTG is able to hold 50N forces without any breaking point being detected as well as able to maintain its shape, strength and position upon receiving the forces (surpassing the main objective to lift a 5kg load).

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A complete investigation of using weighted kernel regression for the case of small sample problem with noise

Weighted kernel regression (WKR) is a kernel-based regression approach for small sample problems. Previously, for the case of small sample problems with noise, we have done preliminary studies which investigated different learning techniques and different learning functions, separately. In this paper, a complete investigation of using WKR for the case of noisy and small training samples is presented. Analysis and discussion are provided in detail.

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Feature-fusion based audio-visual speech recognition using lip geometry features in noisy environment

Humans are often able to compensate for noise degradation and uncertainty in speech information by augmenting the received audio with visual information. Such bimodal perception generates a rich combination of information that can be used in the recognition of speech. However, due to wide variability in the lip movement involved in articulation, not all speech can be substantially improved by audio-visual integration. This paper describes a feature-fusion audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) system that extracts lip geometry from the mouth region using a combination of skin color filter, border following and convex hull, and classification using a Hidden Markov Model. The comparison of the new approach with conventional audio-only system is made when operating under simulated ambient noise conditions that affect the spoken phrases. The experimental results demonstrate that, in the presence of audio noise, the audio-visual approach significantly improves speech recognition accuracy compared with audio-only approach.

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A computational method for protein domain prediction by using double stage neural network

Protein domains are basic unit of protein structure that can develop its self by using its own shape and their own function. Protein domain prediction is important for multiple reasons, which include predicting the protein function in order to manufacture new protein with new function. However, there are several issues that need to be addressed in protein domain prediction which the protein domain can exist in more than one categories of single or multiple domain. Therefore, this study proposed a computational method to predict protein domain using double stage neural network in order to handle these issues. The proposed computational method consists of three phases: dataset generating, profile descriptor for PDP and classification. The pre-processing phase involves datasets generation, splitting protein sequence into subsequence, perfume multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and extracting the MSA. All these process are introduce in order to increase the domain signal. The profile descriptor for PDP phase used several measures such as entropy, correlation, protein sequence termination, contact profile, physio-chemical properties and intron-exon boundaries to generate protein structure information in order to show clear domain signal. The classification phase involves classification by double stage neural network (DNN) and performance evaluation. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy on single domain and multiple-domain using dataset SCOP 1.75. The results showed that the proposed method achieved better results compared with single neural network (SNN) in single domain and multi domain predictions.

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MLPSO: Multi-leader particle swarm optimization for multi-objective optimization problems

The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, which uses the best experience of an individual and its neighborhood to find the optimum solution, has proven useful in solving various optimization problems, including multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems. In MOO problems, existing multi-objective PSO algorithms use one or two leaders to guide the movement of every particle in a search space. This study introduces the concept of multiple leaders to guide the particles in solving MOO problems. In the proposed Multi-Leader PSO (MLPSO) algorithm, the movement of a particle is determined by all leaders that dominate that particle. This concept allows for more information sharing between particles. The performance of the MLPSO is assessed by several benchmark test problems, with their convergence and diversity values are computed. Solutions with good convergence and diversity prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm over MOPSOrand algorithm.

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Fuzzy logic technique for congestion line identification in power system

Congestion problem is a significant issue in power system due to the increasing demand in this vicinity. Failure in properly managing the issue may lead to insecure power delivery to the consumer. Flexible Alternating Current Transmission (FACTs) can be a possible solution for the compensating purposes. This requires proper decision making so that proper sizing can be identified which in turns reducing monetary losses. This paper presents fuzzy logic technique for congested line identification as a decision tool. A pre-developed line voltage stability index, termed as fast voltage stability index (FVSI) is chosen as the incorporating instrument in this study. A sensitivity analysis equation is formulated termed as Fuzzy Congestion Index (FCI). Validation was conducted using the IEEE 30-Bus Reliable Test System (RTS). Results from the study revealed that the proposed technique managed to correctly identify the congested line. FCI was compared FVSI, indicating that the proposed technique revealed the suitability for identifying the congested line. This technique is also feasible for further implementation in larger and practical system.

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Inverse definite overcurrent relay discrimination algorithm and its application in industrial power systems

In a normal electrical network, it is crucial to design a system complete with protection to prevent any abnormalities or fault occurrence to disturb the whole source of electrical to be shut down. Only a portion of effected area should be closed and fault duration at high current value should be closely monitored. Overcurrent protection device discrimination play vital roles to ensure protective relay will react accordingly. This paper introduces a systematic overcurrent discrimination algorithm which is based on standard formulation and constant value by IEC 60255-4 and IEEE Std C37.112-1996. The proposed algorithm has been tested to an 11kV industrial power system. Two bus data have been tested and the tests result of the network was studied, analysed and discussed. The algorithm has proven successfully fulfilled the discrimination requirement.

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Ultraviolet plasma for cyanobacteria treatment application

Plasma has been used widely in health and science application as deactivator agent. One of the plasma applications in health is in water treatment. The study was focused on generating ultraviolet (UV) plasma to substitute the method of chlorination in water treatment due to harmful effect of chlorination toward living things. UV plasma was successfully generated via Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) in mercury-free electrodeless discharge tubes filled with non-toxic element such as argon and nitrogen gases. This is an alternative material as most of commercially available UV lamp is the one from mercury radiation, and mercury is known as a toxic material. Other than that, by using DBD as one type of electrodeless discharge (without internal electrode), the lamp lifetime can be improved as there is no chemical reaction between the electrodes and filling material as being applied in conventional type of discharge lamp. The study is conducted to observe the effectiveness of UV plasma radiation as an agent in deactivating cyanobacteria (Oscillatoria sp.) in a fresh water ecosystem. The effect of UV radiation on cyanobacteria (Oscillatoria sp.) was qualitatively observed. The UV plasma that produced need to meet the effective range of UV radiation which is thought at wavelength between 200 nm and 400 nm, and has higher intensity in order to help in deactivate the cyanobacteria (Oscillatoria sp.) effectively. The effect of UV plasma exposed towards the algae of cyanobacteria (Oscillatoria sp.) is studied morphologically at certain period of exposure. Experimental results showed that the UV plasma using mercury-free material give well-higher intensity and affect the most in deactivation of cyanobacteria (Oscillatoria sp.) compared to mercury-based lamp.

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Development of touch screen operated electric wheelchair for dwarfism community

Current mass production Electric Powered Vehicle (EPW) only caters for X-axis and Y-axis movement only. A Z-axis EPW available in the market is used to provide a stand-up position function and does not cater for elevation in a sitting position. The sitting position elevation function in an EPW is needed for a dwarfism student to access common table in a classroom. This paper will detail out the development of a sitting position elevation function EPW which will be known as ZUMP 4. A development of EPW for the X-axis, Y-axis and Z-axis movement are modeled through 16 I/O PLC system applications. This ZUMP 4 is developed for the dwarfism community with body height weakness suitable for in house and outdoor usage. For this reasoning, a capability of 24V BLDC motor with reduction gear and in order to support forward, backward, turning right or turning left. For this buggy, AC Asynchronous Machine (0.5HP) supplied with single phase voltage and ball screw concepts have been applied to support the elevation function. More specifically, the application of touch screen as medium concept for an input signal of the system to move the wheelchair in this multi direction is an added function to provide ease of maneuvering. The integration and fabrication process of mechanical system, electrical and control system are done to get the best design that can suit the actual application for Zull Hanif Abdul Halim, a dwarfism student in UMP. As far as the author’s knowledge, this type of EPW has not been developed yet.

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HF-Fuzzy logic based mobile robot navigation: A solution to finite escape time

This paper deals with H8 Filter (HF)-Fuzzy logic based mobile robot localization and mapping as an approach to prevent the Finite Escape Time (FET) problem in HF. The FET problem has been limiting the HF capabilities in estimation for decades and has been one of the important aspects to be considered to ensure HF performs well during mobile robot observations. The proposed technique focuses on the HF innovation stage by including very few Fuzzy Logic rules, and fuzzy sets. The design is generally divided into two stages; firstly, the analysis of HF innovation characteristics and then the implementation of Fuzzy Logic technique into the system. The analysis also presents the preliminary study on different membership functions to discover the best possible technique to combine with HF based mobile robot localization. The simulation results proved that Fuzzy Logic can be used to avoid the FET from occurred while at the same time improving the estimation of both mobile robot and landmarks.

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A new technique for maximum load margin estimation and prediction

This paper presents the application of Fast Artificial Immune System (FAIS) for maximum load margin estimation and hybrid Fast Artificial Immune Support Vector Machine (FAISVM) for maximum load margin prediction. The newly developed techniques are marked by its significant fast computation time. A new developed index, Voltage Stability Condition Indicator (VSCI) was used as the fitness function for FAIS and FAISVM in order to evaluate the stability condition of load bus in the system. In FAIS, various mechanisms techniques of AIS were investigated and intensive comparisons were made in order to obtain the best implementation of AIS for maximum load margin estimation. The mechanisms were investigated and compared on three main AIS principles; cloning, mutation and selection. In addition, FAISVM is another new hybrid technique developed for maximum load margin prediction that integrates the application of FAIS and Support Vector Machine (SVM). For validation, FAISVM was compared with Evolutionary Support Vector Machine (ESVM) that uses Evolutionary Programming (EP) as the search algorithm. Based on the results, it shows that FAISVM outperforms ESVM with a higher accuracy prediction value.

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Exploration of unknown environment with Ackerman mobile robot using robot operating system (ROS)

In this paper, authors present a series of work in order to explore unknown environment consists of path and obstacles with the Ackerman model of wheeled mobile robot (car-like). Robot operating system (ROS) is used as a basic operation platform to handle the entire of operation, such as sensor interfacing, 2D/3D mapping, and path planning. ROS is an open source framework and huge constructions consist of methods. The Ackerman mobile robot is a car-like robot as commonly sees, and techniques that have been done in this experiment can be applied to the commercial vehicles as a part of autonomous navigation system which is emerge as big issue nowadays. In this work, we had composed robust existing methods to solve the mapping problem with Ackerman mobile robot. It was concluded that the performance of the proposed work is robust for large mapping within unknown construction building.

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MOBITOP: Interactions employed by users when using a collocated Ad-Hoc collaboration application

This paper presents a Collocated Ad-hoc Collaboration (CAC) application -- the MobiTop system which is a multi-mobile system that allows users to come together with their mobile devices in an ad-hoc manner, and integrates together as one seamless display surface with multi-touch capabilities. It has transformed the society into a more hands-on environment with the innovation of this system. Our findings show that users tend to settle and compromise when working collaboratively, for instance setting with an inverted orientation of the screen rather than dynamically positioning themselves around the MobiTop system. Consequently, users tend to draw an 'upside-down' object orientated towards other users rather than towards themselves. Several reasons contributed towards this form of interaction are such as the complexity of the objects, the bezel on the tablet and group-like behavior. With this understanding, we believe that MobiTop system can provide the next step in the evolution of collaboration beyond the expensive tabletops systems for the society.

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A proposed framework for standardizing information technology professional skills and evaluation schema for new IT employees

Educational and training institutions must restructure themselves to better prepare the arriving new workforce. Nowadays, hiring the right IT candidate and assign them to the proper position is becoming more of a challenge to companies & business owners. One effective tool for restructuring the hiring process is standardizing IT skills set. This paper will shed some lights on some of the IT skills evaluation elements. Therefore, related cases have been selected & studied to determine some the main elements affecting IT skills evaluation. Thus the proposed framework came to existence. The Impact of an IT skill standardized framework will create a common base framework for educators, industry, and other stakeholders to develop jointly the educational and training tools necessary to prepare students and current workers for today’s workplace challenges as well as those that lie ahead.

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Research study on enhancing the service quality of interactive health portals: The cognitive to action theory perspective

Currently, Interactive Health Portals (IHPs) are considered to be suitable mediums for interaction between patients and physicians. In fact, as health care organizations apply more effective levels of electronic service quality (e-SQ), more patients have been using the IHP technology. However, developing countries are still falling behind developed countries in regards to this technology trend. Indeed, developing countries should establish a comprehensive approach to applying e-SQ, which will consequently result in a gradual increase of patients’ attraction, trust and loyalty to the system. Therefore, by utilizing the relevance of the cognitive, affective, cognitive and action theories as the theoretical models of loyalty, the researchers have proposed a framework of a research agenda within the IHP discipline.

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Risk assessment model for organizational information security

Information security risk assessment (RA) plays an important role in the organization’s future strategic planning. Generally there are two types of RA approaches: quantitative RA and qualitative RA. The quantitative RA is an objective study of the risk that use numerical data. On the other hand, the qualitative RA is a subjective evaluation based on judgment and experiences which does not operate on numerical data. It is difficult to conduct a purely quantitative RA method, because of the difficulty to comprehend numerical data alone without a subjective explanation. However, the qualitative RA does not necessarily demand the objectivity of the risks, although it is possible to conduct RA that is purely qualitative in nature. If implemented in silos, the limitations of both quantitative and qualitative methods may increase the likelihood of direct and indirect losses of an organization. This paper suggests a combined RA model from both quantitative and qualitative RA methods to be used for assessing information security risks. In order to interpret and apply the model, a prototype of RA for information security risks will be developed. This prototype will be evaluated by information security risk management experts from the industry. Feedback from the experts will be used to improve the proposed RA model. The implementation of an appropriate model ensures a successful RA method and prevent the organization from the natural and causal risks that are related to securing information assets.

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An initial model for telemedicine adoption in developing countries

Telemedicine has proven to be a success in some developed countries. This assumption has been backed by over 12,000 reviewed articles which have been published during the past 25 years. Unfortunately, despite being a useful and thriving area of Information Systems research, Telehealth has not been fully implemented in the developing countries owing to several factors which have militated against it. In this paper, we adapted to using combinational approaches and guidelines to provide a systematic way to establish factors affecting telemedicine adoption for health workers and establish suitable theoretical model for telemedicine adoption. Although there are a quite number of guidelines for conducting such reviews in other research fields, few entirely meet the unique needs of Information Systems research. In response to this shortage of guidelines, we present here the attributes and significance of telemedicine adoption model in the context of IS domain. The outcome of the study is expected to establish a suitable theoretical model that will investigate the obvious barrier affecting telemedicine implementation and provide recommendation for health care providers.

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Business process based requirements modeling of radiological trauma triage capacity planning framework

Prior investigations indicated that Malaysian radiation and nuclear emergency plan stakeholders were not satisfied of having two-quarter of organizational issues in organizing and managing the indicated disaster scenario. Therefore, any organizational enhancement and improvement along the current radiation and nuclear emergency plan will give a positive and immediate impact on the public acceptance of the localized nuclear power program implementations. The policies and procedure issues must not be considered lightly because it may affect public adoption even though the nation has compromised on it for social and economic development. Moreover, any defect in the managerial and organizational structure might be a hindrance to the nuclear safety regulatory assurance. The structure of the respective emergency planning framework had to be tested and validated thoroughly in a structured manner to overcome this problem. This study proposed a hypothesis to build a current regulatory framework through empirical interpretive case study and computer simulation development. The hypothesis of the research framework was found to be useful and significantly accepted as it is interdependent and correlated with statistical measures and supported with the demonstrations of the agent based social simulation prototype. It has the potential to develop a structured and thorough emergency planning framework by interpreting and integrating mixed-method analyses and models through information systems theoretical lenses. Most probably, future works may imply them as strategized, condensed, concise, and comprehensive public disaster preparedness and response guidelines, and to be physically deemed as a useful and effective computer simulation.

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A measurement model of risk perception in internet banking based on Malaysian context

Internet banking risks continue to intensify as accessibility to banking transactions around the world expands. Banks in Malaysia are faced with among the largest number of cyber-threats in the world. Considering these factors, the understanding of internet banking risks is important to enable banks to develop appropriate counter-measures. However, studies on internet banking in Malaysia have not examined risk factors in a comprehensive manner. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to test a measurement model for perceived risk in Internet banking using structural equation modeling analysis. This study extends the Technology Acceptance Model by incorporating seven risk constructs into the model to understand the impact of risks on intention to use internet banking in Malaysia. The survey method was used in the study and the data collection instruments were questionnaires, which were distributed through the drop-off and pick-up (DOPU) technique, to bank branch managers. The purposive sampling technique was employed to determine the respondents, individuals using Internet banking services in Peninsular Malaysia. A total of 413 questionnaires were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with the Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) software. The results clearly indicate that perceived risk dimensions are strong determinants of intention to use internet banking. Furthermore, the seven dimensional measure of perceived risk is supported by acceptable fit indices. All dimensions showed modest but not high intercorrelations, as such, a second order measure of risk was ruled out. The distinctiveness of different risk measures were confirmed by the satisfactory discriminant validity assessment. This research draws together the key risk factors that need to be addressed by internet banking providers in Malaysia to ensure effective adoption and highlights the need to use risk as a multi-dimensional measure in future internet banking studies.

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Evaluating the level of knowledge management capability in medical tourism industry of Malaysia

The aim of this study was to evaluate the current level of knowledge management capabilities in Medical Tourism industry of Malaysia in compare with desirable level. The study was descriptive. Statistical population were Malaysian Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC) center of Malaysia, Medical Tourism Center of KPJ (Kumpulan Perubatan Johor) and Gleneagles Hospitals. Participants were 200 of managers and employees who were selected using random sampling method. All of them have completed the knowledge management capabilities scale. Data were analyzed by SPSS software and one-sample T-test. The results of the analysis showed that Knowledge Management Capabilities and its dimensions (Lessons Learned, Expertise and Knowledge Documents) have been assessed above the acceptable level (Q2) in the Medical Tourism industry of Malaysia. But they have been evaluated below desirable level (Q3) in the Malaysian Health Tourism. Finally, the results show that there are positive and significant relationship between knowledge management capabilities and Lessons Learned, Expertise and Knowledge Documents.

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Research topics recommendation system for novice researchers

Recently, recommender systems (RSs) are making great stride in academic arena for researchers. There exist some true potential for recommender systems to assist novice researchers in instigating their preliminary activities. Providing personalized recommendation on research topics is of great help for beginners to enter the area of their research interest. To select a suitable topic is one of the most common difficulties faced by novice researchers. As a result, in most of the cases, they ended up with futile endeavor after spending substantial amount of time and effort. In this paper, we present a model for RS that will recommend novice researchers a list of active topics in their chosen field of research. Two bibliometric measures – citation count and yearly publication rate are applied in the recommendation process. In the core of this proposed model is the usage of these two measures to identify active and inactive research topics. The ultimate goal of this study is to assist novice researchers in taking early decision on research topic by recommending them active research topics.

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A review of threat modeling and its hybrid approaches to software security testing

As organizations seek to fulfill their objectives in the 21st century, they have come to immensely depend on reliable and secure software as a core component of their organizational asset to achieve their set goals. Irrespective of the size, nature or sector of these firms, securing the software asset has gained momentum given major software security issues in the form of incessant cyber-attacks to sensitive and confidential data which could bring huge losses to both the organization and her customers. However, a critical approach to defending the organization’s software infrastructure is anticipating the nature of the exploits from the attacker’s perspective before they occur and strategizing mitigation plans in order to prevent these attacks from being successful. This is called Threat Modeling. The objective of this paper is to identify existing challenges in this research field and establish the grounds for a credible research activity therefore the researchers present a review of literatures on threat modelling activities overs the years and the subsequent hybrids developed to cater for the weaknesses of the techniques used. It was discovered that software applications suffered from analysis paralysis due to over-specification of security requirements while using hybrid threat modeling techniques. Furthermore, we discuss briefly our proposed approach to using hybrid threat modeling using a set of coherent modeling techniques in tackling a particular security vulnerability plaguing web applications while avoiding analysis paralysis.

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A strategy to develop the computerized framework for implementation of OBE in University Kuala Lumpur

Implementation of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) on Higher Education is a requirement by Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA), one important aspect of the approach is measurement of learning outcomes attainment which is called Course Learning Outcomes (CLO) and Program Learning Outcomes (PLO). CLO measurement is key to analyzing student and course attainment in each semester, further it will be an essential component to assess and evaluate the attainment of a programme. Implementation of OBE providing a more complicated way to measure learning outcomes. Since the curriculum changes to the OBE approach which is required by the education authorities of Malaysia has made campuses develop an OBE framework. The framework is a model which is used to assist in a comprehensive implementation of OBE according to the principles contained in the approach. The framework covers not only theoretical aspects but also includes aspects of IT, to build a computerized framework that can be applied, it needs the right strategy which is should be validation by experts. This paper discuss about authors experiences of implementing the strategy to be used to develop the computerized framework in order to provide suitable ways for Higher Education to implement OBE approach. Strategy used involves several phases and more detailed description, each phase giving a certain contribution to the development of computerized framework. Explanation equipped with some figures that are conceptually clearer and easier to understand.

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A comparative study for risk analysis tools in information security

Identifying potential information security risk is a challenging task. This is due to the evolution of Information Communication Technology in daily business which may introduce possible digital threats. Many studies have attempted to develop risk analysis tools, yet it is unable to produce the best factors for information security threats. Failure in identifying various types of information security risks will affect the development of effective countermeasure. It has been highlighted in many studies that conventional techniques used to analyze risks can be divided into two categories known as quantitative and qualitative methods. The limitation of the tools introduced in previous research which provide insufficient information may consequently contribute to threat in information security. In addition, the rapid growth of the Internet technology may also increase possible threats to information security. The main focus of this study is to compare the risk analysis tools available in the market, identify their method and summarize their factors. A comparative analysis covers performance of analysis and security services. The result shows that current information security risk analysis tools introduced various types of risk factors. None of the tools however can consider qualitative and quantitative data in parallel. It is believed that qualitative information could increase the dimension of risk factors and produce better accuracy in the analysis. Further investigation is highly required to solve the outlined issue. This paper describes different approaches in several risk analysis tools, which methods are used in different steps and presents the risk factors identified by previous selections of studies.

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Non-linear and linear postulations of technology adoption determinants

Using polynomial regression and response surface analysis to examine the non-linearity between variables, this study demonstrates that better analytical nuances are required to investigate the relationships between constructs when the underlying theories suggest non-linearity. By utilising the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), Ettlie’s adoption stages as well as employing data gathered from 162 owners of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), our findings reveal that subjective norms and attitude have differing influences upon behavioural intention in both the evaluation and trial stages of the adoption.

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A pilot study of using diaries method for collecting spiritual experiences data among older adults

The increasing number of aging populations worldwide versus vast developments in mobile technology creates questions on how older adults adapt and apply mobile technology in their daily life. As older adults is said to be more spiritually inclined, thus, mobile spiritual applications can work as medium of serving the older adults spiritual needs. A lot of HCI work still need to be done to ensure the development of spiritual apps is tailored to older adults needs. Therefore, the objective of this study is to evaluate, from an older adult’s perspective, the most workable diary design to collect spiritual experiences data by using an Android mobile application known as Quran Bahasa Melayu. Older adult participants were selected based on snowball sampling technique to use mobile spiritual application’s using a tablet PC for seven consequent days. The participants were asked to fill up three different types of diary which are daily diary, structured diary and also 3E diary to find out the diary design that works well with older adults. Daily diary appears to be a good tool in describing older adult daily activities in detail, while structured diary fails to achieve any target. 3E diary manages to record very rich data pertaining older adults feeling, emotions and experiences in terms of facial expressions from the drawing and written text. Therefore, this case study suggests that 3E diary is the most workable diary design in capturing spiritual experiences data among group of older adults while engaging mobile spiritual applications and interview method could be used as complement method to the diary.

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The different perceptions of factors that influence user satisfaction among mobile communication subscribers: Study in Kuwait

Mobile phone related services are growing tremendously all around the world including Kuwait. Due to limited population and multiple service providers, there is enormous competition among major telecommunication service providers in Kuwait. There are three major companies operating simultaneously in the country. In such a highly competitive environment the major telecommunication service provides need to focus upon services they provide to the user in order to survive. User satisfaction is one apex gadget that can hold company on its user segment longer and sustainable. There is no such study available so far that looked in to this aspect user satisfaction, satisfaction plays an essential role for maintaining old clients and attract new ones. According to an estimate the population of Kuwait is more 4 million and the number of service subscriptions is 6.269 million. Meaning each user, on average has 1.5 subscriptions. Currently all three service providers namely (Zain, Ooredoo, and Viva) have online services that provide instant services to their customers, such as paying bills and checking details, new promotions and downloading media, and access to the social networks. In this research a multidimensional model, consisting of three aspect; information quality, system quality, and service quality is proposed and telecom service user’s satisfaction is measured. In this regards the data was collected from three different segments of the population, the users working in banking sector, university students, and oil sector employees in Kuwait. Considering that these employees are the potential users who are clients of telecommunications service providers and experiencing user online services. The analysis shows some differences among different users and satisfaction for different services from all three service providers and results are reported in detail in result sections.

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Regression analysis on e-assessment acceptance by lecturers from security perspective

The role of technology in education system has enriched the teaching and learning process, be it from preschool to higher universities education. The development of online education systems such as e-learning and e-assessment provide many advantages to the users especially the flexibility in teaching and learning. The online education system has the capability to improve the quality of delivery education. However, security risks have been the major weakness in the acceptance of technology in education field which limits the user acceptance of the online education system. Even though there are other studies providing solutions for identified security threats in online education usage, there is no particular model which addresses the factors that influences the acceptance of e-assessment system by lecturers from security perspective. The aim of this study is to explore security aspects of e-assessment in regard to the acceptance of technology by lecturers. A conceptual model of secure acceptance of e-assessment is proposed considering both human and perceived security aspects. The data for this study was collected through online survey and paper-based survey. The conceptual model is analyzed using multiple regressions to identify the predictive power between dependent variable and independent variable. The final result of this study demonstrates how security factors influence lecturers’ attitudes towards the acceptance of e-assessment from security perspective with a strong significant contribution to the e-assessment acceptance by lecturers. This study will be useful in providing more insightful understanding regarding the factors that influence the lecturers’ acceptance of e-assessment system from security perspective.

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Evaluation of Islamic websites’ content reliability

Internet is an open platform for anyone to publish and share information without being subjected to the authenticity of information. For Muslims, religious information crucially should be reliable due to the very reason that many Muslims consider the Internet as a source in getting Islamic knowledge. Unfortunately, the assessment on reliability of the information provided by the Internet is complex. The huge amounts of data available and lack of knowledge among Muslims contribute to the users’ incapability to recognize existences of unreliable information. Focusing on the reliability of information, this paper presents a software prototype, which uniquely automates and processes the reliability evaluation through inspections of references and scholars that are cited in the Islamic websites. Those references indicate that the Islamic websites derived their information from reliable religious sources.

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Theoretical model for green information technology adoption

Currently, Green Information Technology (IT) has become an active research field in the information system discipline. Green IT adoption is one of the most used approaches for organizations to handle the current environmental issues. In the Green IT adoption studies, decision makers’ intention to Green IT adoption have been ignored. While decision makers make decisions, few studies have considered this issue. The lack of a theoretical framework for Green IT adoption based on decision maker's intention in the organizations is considered as a main gap in the Green IT literature. In this regard, a research framework was developed through integrating two theories, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Norm Activation Theory (NAT). This study contributes to existing knowledge in the field of information systems, monitoring the decision maker's intention for the adoption of Green IT and sustainability through the development of a theoretical framework that identifies the key factors for the adoption of green information technology.

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A theoretical extension and empirical investigation for continuance use in social networking sites

Social commerce is a relatively new stream mediated by the proliferation of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and the popularity of social media. The social commerce wave has opened up vast opportunities in emerging markets through online communities’ participation. Knowledge sharing and learning through online communities are made possible with the active collaboration and interaction among groups of individuals. This study investigates on the role of social media in facilitating online communication of consumers through related theories and constructs, leading to online social support. A conceptual model integrating constructs of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Social Support Theory (SST), perceived value and satisfaction is developed to augment our understanding on the continuance participation from the intention and behavioral perspectives. The study therefore introduces a continuance participation model that integrates the emotional and informational constructs from the SST, TPB, perceived value and satisfaction in SNSs to establish a theoretical foundation for the study of continuance participation in online communities. A survey conducted on users of SNSs with a total of 285 final respondents empirically tests the continuance model constructs with ten hypotheses using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) approach and Partial Least Square (PLS) methods to which all nine theorized hypotheses are achieved. The results indicate that social interaction through social support has an intense influence on perceived value and satisfaction resulting in an increased continuance participation intention and behavior in online communities. Additionally, the model reveals that the constructs perceived behavioural control, subjective norms, and attitude from the Theory of Planned Behaviour alongside with Social Support constructs, satisfaction and a perceived value construct significantly influence online communities’ continuance participation intention and behaviour. This paper also seeks to enlighten our knowledge on online communities and tap into the social commerce capabilities particularly looking into continuance participation from the intention and behavioral perspectives. The findings of this study contributes to the social commerce school of thought by theoretically developing research in online communities by proposing social constructs from a social psychology theory in increasing our understanding on continuance model. The theoretical base of this study is the primary contribution of this research. In addition, it complements the minority theoretical background that surfaces in the area of social commerce distinctly looking at online communities.

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A pre-hospital emergency response framework for better work coordination

Coordination is a significant factor for any emergency medical team in delivering an effective and efficient service to its community. Despite the perceived importance on coordination, there is a lack of studies on its role in most pre-hospital emergency responses. In this research, we observed and studied the process flow of an often-crowed medical center for about a year. Towards the end, we suggested a framework involving the paramedics, nurses and technicians. The framework is later tested if it could reduce the patient treatment time in emergency cases. Hence, a survey study involving paramedics and technicians was conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our proposed framework where authors studied the effect after applying the framework. Only responses completed with pre-hospital care time were analyzed for the total time differences. Interviews were extended to the experts to further confirming the validity of this framework. As a result, 400 dispatches for pre-hospital care treatment were analyzed. Among these, 200 pre-hospital cases were compared to the remaining 200 cases after grouping the data following N-X-O design. It is found that there are statistically significant differences between the two groups. Interview reviewed that the treatment time become better and better services deliver to the patients. It could be conclude that the proposed framework could help the paramedics to deliver a faster service to patients. This conformed to our earlier hypothesis about coordination. The coordination as suggested in the PRIER framework is rare but generally useful for any emergency medical center where paramedics aimed to take faster and appropriate actions on surviving patients. This helps to conclude that a framework based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) could improve a service quality for better coordination.

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Exploring students perceptions of teaching, social, cognitive presences, effectiveness for teamwork and learning outcomes

The three elements of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Model which is known as teaching, social and cognitive presences can lead to successful educational experiences in a computer mediated online environment. However, current research has shown mixed-findings and little empirical evidences in supporting these elements leads to deep and meaningful learning outcomes. This study aims at investigating the relationships among students’ perceptions of CoI elements, effectiveness for teamwork and students learning outcomes through pre-post-tests. Experimental research design consisting of experimental and control groups were conducted through the use of an e-collaboration environment and traditional-in-class-collaboration respectively by the two groups. Data was collected using CoI and effectiveness questionnaires, pre-test and post-test questions. The results from multiple regression and correlation analyses show that the values of the Pearson’s correlation of five variables, R and R2 are positive and statistically significant. These results confirmed the statistical relationship among the five variables to be positive and significant. The results also demonstrated that the linear combination of the four predictors’ variables strongly predicts the learning outcomes. These results have confirmed the relationship among the three elements of CoI, effectiveness for teamwork and student’s learning outcomes.

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A semantic web based framework for preschool cognitive skills tutoring system

Intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a contribution of the artificial intelligence domain, which supports the pedagogical activities. The development of a constructive intelligent tutoring system following psychology, intelligence, interactivity, creativity and personalization for any real domain is highly complex. To address this complexity, a semantic web based framework, called MySekolah was presented in this paper. The proposed framework comprise of integrated set of models using ontologies i.e. domain model, student model, assessment and expert models. The goal of the proposed framework is to provide an overall structure for the construction of an intelligent tutoring system. More specifically, to model the domain knowledge and generate learning contents through the use of expert based reasoning technique. As a sample, modeling of the preschool cognitive skills is demonstrated. A prototype application is developed to validate the framework. Finally, evaluation shows the correctness of the cognitive skills learning content generated from the modeled ontology.

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The role of SME’s frontlines in mobile advertising based on consumer attitude

Information technology (IT) formed the commerce and the marketing strategy for the companies. One side of the marketing that is affected by IT is the advertising. Short Messaging Service (SMS) is one of the channels that is using for marketing. It is becoming important to reach the possible customers via mobile phones. The attitude towards mobile advertising strongly depends on the message characteristics. Therefore, too much work needs to be performed concerning the advertising by using SMS to make it more attractive, creative and effective. The lack of studies which give rich knowledge about the role of the frontlines in SMS messaging and how can affect the consumer attitude toward mobile advertising is very remarkable. This study reviewed the existing factors that affecting the consumer attitude towards mobile advertising, and proposed a research model regarding the factors that affect the SMS’s frontlines in mobile advertising based on consumer attitude. This model was based on systematically analyzing and extracting all the factors affecting the attitude towards mobile advertising and then developed the model according to these models and the understanding of the researcher from the literature. To effectively evaluate the research model, a quantitative research was adopted. Data was collected by survey questionnaires from 153 respondents. The SmartPLS tool was used for data analysis. In sum, the results of this research show that all factors have a significant impact on the attitude towards mobile advertising in the domain of SMS’s frontline. The proposed model will be beneficial to the marketers and researchers by understanding the main factors influencing the consumer attitude towards mobile advertising concerning the frontlines of the SMS. Moreover, it will encourage more researchers in this field to uncover the lacks and find the better solutions.

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Analyzing log in big data environment: A review

Log Analysis is a crucial process in most system and network activities where log data is used for various reasons such as for performance monitoring, security auditing or even for reporting and profiling. However, as years passed by, the volume of log data increases along with the size of the system as well as the number of users involved. Traditional or existing log analyzer tools are not able to handle the massive amount of data. Therefore, Big Data is the solution to overcome this issue. The main purpose of this paper is to present a review of log file analysis in Big Data environment based on previous research works. This paper also highlights the characteristics of Big Data as well as Hadoop Framework that has been widely used as Big Data application. Results from the papers reviewed shows that majority researchers applied MapReduce as the main component of Hadoop for analyzing the log files and HDFS as the data storage. Previous researchers have also used other tools and algorithms together with the Hadoop Framework for analysis purposes. The findings of this paper will provide a comprehensible review of Hadoop usage performance in analyzing different types of log files and recommend understandable results for end users to use in future work.

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Structuring knowledge on house price volatility through a metamodel

House Price (HP) valuation involves highly complex decision making. This requires collaborating with other parties to plan and organize activities and gathering knowledge from various sources that are distributed across time, space and people. In other words, not all situational knowledge is immediately available and no one person is positioned to make all the decisions. To gather the knowledge of HP systematically, observations were made, but we found that the utilization of the information system model for house price volatility domain is still limited. This paper suggests a unified way to gather the knowledge of House Price Volatility (HPV) in the form of a metamodel. Through the metamodelling technique, an artifact called a ‘metamodel’ is produced; it is capable of gathering and generalizing all house price determinant concepts and their relationships. Particularly for this House Price Volatility domain, the House Price Volatility Metamodel (HPVM) is developed by using a Design Science Research methodology. By combining the qualitative and quantitative method, the 8-Step of Metamodelling Creation Process and content analysis method was adopted in this research. In this paper, we are presenting the HPVM as a way to gather the information of HPV. The metamodel developed in this paper is validated by using in a case study: House Price in Penang State. The validation found that the HPVM can be applied in the Penang’s current house price determinant. It is believed that the HPVM would benefit many housing authorities such as government, investors, economists, buyers and practitioners. HPMV can widen the views of housing authorities regarding their investment activities and enhance their vision when making decisions on policies involving house price volatility. Representing HPVM in the Unified Modeling Language (UML)-based diagram and transferring the domain information is easier nowadays, as many practitioners are familiar with the language.

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Applying thematic analysis in discovering public E-service sustainability criteria

Thematic analysis is lack of attention, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within information systems study. It is a process of sifting and arranging data obtained from interview transcripts, field notes and other material collected to increase the understanding of the data to enable the presentation of what have been discovered. In this paper, the investigators outline what thematic analysis is and provide clear guidelines to those wanting to start thematic analysis or conduct it in a more deliberate and rigorous way. Memoing was also discussed where it serves to assist the investigators in making conceptual leaps from raw data to those abstractions that explain research phenomena in the context of study. The analysis concludes with fourteen elements identified within three major dimensions: institutional; technological; and environmental. Apart from that, this paper also concludes by supporting thematic analysis as a useful and flexible method for qualitative research in and beyond information systems study.

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Bringing order in segments for a robust network in mobile services

Common overlay network arranges nodes in a particular topology such as a ring, a tree or a hyper-tree on top of its’ physical network and takes advantage of its structure to improve network efficiency. The structured overlay network may provide efficient routing but the constructed structured network may not consider physical proximity in the physical network. The construction of any structured network requires nodes to be topologically sorted. Topologically sorting nodes is not a difficult task, however, to keep nodes in a correct state where transient faults exist like the overlay network created on top of the mobile network can be daunting. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to improve the performance of an overlay network by ensuring physical proximity. Furthermore, the linearized nodes will self-stabilize to a correct state as soon as the transient fault stops. A segment based self-stabilizing linearizing algorithm that creates a linear overlay network (topologically sorting) over the mobile network is proposed.

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A preliminary study on learning orientation, information technology infrastructure flexibility and agility

Of late, information technology (IT) is considered as a key component in every organization. Improving IT competence to become agile and retain its competitive advantage is an important part of any organization's strategy. Organization Integration of IT and learning is very crucial. Continuous learning enables organizations to enhance their performance. Learning Orientation (LO) is a pillar of strength in every organization. LO is also a vital part in organizational learning, which explains organisation’s values of learning culture, shared goals and sharing knowledge. The research issue highlighted in prior studies emphasised on the link that relates organizational performance, competitive advantage, and agility. Agility refers to the response characteristic of the organization, which implies organisations’ quick response internally and externally and capability to gain an advantage in cost and time. Consequently, the aims of this research are to investigate the relationship of LO, IT Infrastructure Flexibility (ITIF) and organizational agility in the context of Malaysian organizations. Specifically, this paper discusses the pilot study procedures conducted and findings from surveys. Data collected from 50 participants were analyzed statistically using SPSS 23.0 and SmartPLS 3.0. The results indicated that the research instruments are reliable and valid for a larger sample size. The descriptive statistics also show the existence of a learning culture and IT capability in Malaysia in enhancing organizational responsiveness.

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A systematic review of factors affecting the adoption of cloud computing for e-government implementation

e-Government refers to the use of information and communication technology by the government agencies to electronically deliver their services to citizens. Despite the huge benefits and synergies it grants to governments and societies, many obstacles and challenges arise in the successful implementation of e-Government, especially, in the developing countries. Cloud computing is a promising technology that has been proposed to overcome the challenges to implement e-Government. This paper systematically reviews factors that affect the adoption of cloud computing for e-Government and public sectors. Salient factors based on their frequencies were identified. Related studies found in different databases such as IEEE Xplore, Emerald, and Science Direct were identified for the review. On the whole, fifty-nine factors were identified and the results show that the following seven factors appear most frequently: compatibility, relative advantage, complexity, top management support, security, trust, and technology readiness. Most of the influential factors are seen to be related to technology. This review will be useful to decision makers in governments and public sectors who intend to leverage on cloud computing to overcome the challenges they face in implementing e-Government successfully.

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Web 2.0 collaborative tools for SMEs: A survey

Organizations today operate in a complex, unpredictable, competitive and global business environment. These demand utilizing Internet-based tools to support more collaborative activities and allow the integration of business processes and the sharing of information. It is often that large organizations have more financial and technical resources compared to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to leverage the availability of free web 2.0 collaborative tools. Web 2.0 tools provide an efficient and accessible means of encouraging and supporting team members working together on shared objectives. This study investigates twenty available web 2.0 collaborative tools that illustrate different way of collaboration and different set of features. We then organize these features by four major function categories: communication, information sharing, electronic calendar and project management, in order to identify which of the collaborative tools would be suitable for a particular organization. Specifically, this study will increase SMEs to be aware what the current available Web 2.0 collaborative tools have to offer and also help them in selecting the right tools based on their organizational needs.

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Mobile network operators’ needs in collaborative mobile money service provision

Recently, the developing countries are considering the development of mobile money ecosystems that supports more inclusive financial systems to overcome the high financial exclusion of their population. Such ecosystems can be enabled by facilitating the collaboration between diverse stakeholders from different sectors: financial, telecommunication, regulatory bodies and IT service providers. This development of mobile money ecosystem emphasized on the identification of main stakeholders’ needs and conflicting interests. The aim of this paper is to understand mobile network operator’s needs when participating in collaborative mobile money ecosystem. The Sudanese national mobile money project was used as case study in this research. Qualitative interpretive interviews were conducted to collect data from different stakeholders in different sectors in Sudan. The data was analyzed using qualitative data analysis approach. The results of the analysis focus on representing the multiple perspectives of stakeholders on each mobile network operators’ (MNO) need. Findings contribute toward better understanding to the mobile money ecosystem in Sudan from MNOs’ perspective. This understanding can facilitate building successful value propositions between mobile money stakeholders which can results in better financial services.

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Evaluating a visual tool for systematic data collection and analysis for design students

In creating a successful product it is important to understand consumers’ perceptions of a product early in the design process. Often, design students lack the necessary data collection and user testing skills to support effective design decision-making. Consequently, their products might not be acceptable to the intended consumers and are thus likely to fail in the marketplace. For design students to acquire those skills, design curricula should incorporate statistical courses teaching the concepts of data and user testing. We addressed this challenge by developing an automated tool named DACADE, assisting design students to systematically collect and analyze data. This paper reports the user acceptance study of DACADE designed to determine its level of user satisfaction and aesthetic appeal. The results confirmed a need for a formal introduction to systematic sampling, collection of performance data as well as of opinion data, data analysis, interpretation, and application of statistics to product design.

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A comparative study on IT outsourcing models for Malaysian SME's E-business transformation

Today business state has become more dynamic and venturing into e-business is one of business requirements that promote business efficiency and opportunities. This has also affected the SMEs which are known to have limitations in terms of resources and skills to develop in-house IT applications. Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) could be one of the solutions to accelerate the adoption process among the SMEs. Thus, the aim of this research is to investigate the factors affecting the decision to deploy ITO services among the Malaysian SMEs for e-Business implementation. A qualitative approach is used to explore the level of awareness, potential and implication of implementing the ITO among the SMEs. The focus of this study is companies that within Halal Industries. This paper discusses the comparative study on existing e-business and ITO models and current practices to identify factors and research gaps in this area. Findings from this comparative study are the reference model and the factors to being considered for this research. The considered factors will be used to construct data instruments and as a basis for the proposed model for this research.

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A conceptual framework for the implementation process of enterprise application integration (EAI) in Government

Although there have been several studies on Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) in recent years, they only focus upon the initial phase of the implementation process. The implementation literature indicates that there are scant studies regarding the EAI implementation process as a whole. Therefore, this paper fills this gap by presenting a conceptual framework for the implementation process of EAI. The paper not only consolidates, but also extends the existing literature on the technology implementation process for complex organization-wide technologies. Based on a content analysis of the reviewed literature, this paper identifies thirty (30) factors contributing to the implementation process of EAI. These factors are categorized based on the Technology, Organizational and Environmental (TOE) Model. The factors subsequently were mapped to the Lewin’s Change Model, to outline the structure of EAI implementation process framework. The proposed conceptual framework contributes to the understanding of the EAI implementation process, which may support practitioners in implementing the EAI technology in their organizations.

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Correlation between precursor emotion and human stress by using EEG signals

Stress is an emergency mode of the body’s reaction caused by the physical and mental pressure. Stress could also happen among teacher since they have abundance of work in school. In this experiment, the teacher has been given a task to teach students with the new developed technology. Thus, in order to identify either the teacher managed to uphold the task, we conduct an experiment to analyze the stress level of the teacher. Analyzing and understanding human stress has motivated many electroencephalograms (EEG) based studies in this area. As it has been used in many researches on human emotions before, EEG machine will be able to gather the brain signals more accurately than merely guessing the emotion state of the respondents by just looking at them. However, not many researches use EEG as a tool in understanding mental stress, even though EEG device is portable and inexpensive as compared to other devices. This research aims to understand the pattern/signatures of EEG signal for human stress. The study begins by conducting two experiments; first experiment is profiling the subject with the basic emotions - happy, calm, fear and sad, and the second experiment will be inducing stress by answering the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS21). Ten healthy participants (five males and five females) are recruited for the study. For feature extraction, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients MFCC will be used in this analysis. Then, we use the features to recognize the emotion of the subjects by using multi layer perceptron (MLP) as classifier. The result shows that there is correlation between precursor emotion and human stress. Then, the subject is having stress based on DASS21 and EEG signals that has been analyzed. Research result of this study can be beneficial to draw a clearer relationship between basic emotions and stress; thereby it can develop a better healing process to tackle mental stress in future.

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BEDRUNN3R: An intelligent running alarm clock

The conventional alarm clocks have been serving their purpose to mankind since their inception, to wake people up every single morning. However, the rates of oversleeping are still on the rise and people are having trouble waking up in the morning even with the use of alarm clocks. The snooze button that is available on all conventional alarm clocks provide user with more sleep but at a cost of deteriorating their quality of health and exacerbating sleep inertia at the same time. The objective of this paper is to study the problems associated with sleep that are often faced by people and to develop an intelligent moving alarm clock that implements the application of Artificial Intelligence. The Hypothetico-Deductive method will be used as the research methodology while the development will be following the Rapid Application Development (RAD) model. The developed prototype is tested against conventional alarm clocks and has shown significant improvements in the percentages of oversleeping and snoozing. Recommendations for continuation and future work of this paper are also included.

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Roadside worker detection and alert system using RFID

The project proposes a prototype system to alert drivers of the existence of roadside workers in order to reduce road accident rate involving roadside workers. High fatality rate involving roadside workers can be reduced by pre-alerting the drivers at a safe distance. A distance alert system is proposed to meet the need of alerting the drivers earlier to prevent accidents. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is used to indicate the existence of roadside workers and alert the drivers. The prototype system had been developed to clearly show and demonstrate the idea of giving alert to the driver on the existence of the roadside worker. In order for the prototype system to work effectively, RFID reader has to detect RFID tag and transfer the signal to a buzzer. The buzzer informs to the driver of the existence of nearby roadside workers for them to stay alert, and slows down, or change path if necessary. The objectives of this project are to study the implementation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a simulator in detecting workers at the roadside of a highway and to develop a prototype system that can notify the driver on the presence of the worker at the highway. The significance this project; is to save lives by providing sufficient reaction time for drivers to safely avoid roadside workers.

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Pre-flood warning system based on user mobility

The occurrence of flood causes millions of Ringgit in damages, along with the loss of life and property, and the devastation of agricultural and livestock. Therefore, an effective pre-flood warning system must be developed to mitigate flood losses and lessen the flood effects. However, when developing a warning system for flood disaster, limited communication during the occurrence of floods and the availability of electricity supplies should be taken into account. Thus, this paper proposes a conceptual framework with three (3) main stages: monitor water level, alert flood victims on flood danger status and inform flood victims to relocate to the nearest relief centre with regards to their mobility. This is done by leveraging on the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO), where warning SMS is broadcasted only to the cellular numbers logged at the affected base station. A system architecture has been designed and a prototype system is developed. The prototype system is made up of a medium sized aquarium tank, a hand pump, HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, Arduino UNO R3 and IComsat GSM shield. To validate the proposed prototype system, an experiment with controlled water rising effect is conducted in a lab scale setup. The results prove that the proposed prototype system is reliable as it is able to measure water level accurately and broadcast warning SMS immediately to flood victims. Thus, by having an effective real time pre-flood warning system, immediate action can be carried out in order to save lives and minimize the damages caused by flood disaster.

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The challenges of human factors for implementation of information systems in the healthcare

Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) play an important roles in helping to coordinate activities across units within hospitals through fast access to patients' electronic records. HIS is an initiative taken by Malaysian government to resolve several issues such as increasing number of patients who are in needs of treatment, increasing waiting time for receiving medication etc. HIS adoption is increasing globally, including Malaysia. Malaysia begin to adopt HIS in 1999 which covers both clinical and non-clinical information system. Since its introduction, hospitals are facing with various challenges to achieve objective of its adoption. Understanding factors that detain the success of HIS implementation is a central concern of Healthcare Informatics. Among others, human factors or HIS users (medical practitioners) is one of the issues that important to be considered as they play a significant role in influencing the HIS adoption in hospitals. Human factors are essential in identifying human constraint and needs when interacting with the system for improving work effectiveness and productivity. Any issue encounters by medical practitioners need to be identified earlier to avoid failure of use once the system is launched. Failure of interaction effectively between human and technology might lead to medical errors. Thus, the aim of this study is to provide a review of challenges associated with human factor through the adoption of information system in hospital and to suggest strategies to tackle or minimize issues associated with human factors. Based on the term “Hospital Information System”, “Electronic Health Record”, and “human factor”, articles were retrieved from electronic journal databases using a systematic search techniques. Some inclusive and exclusive criteria such as year of publication, writing language etc. were applied. Based on study, there are constraints on human factors with the adoption of information system in hospital. This paper provides view on human-related issues that are important to be addressed in the implementation of information system.

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A multi-dimensional database model for research performance analysis

Business Intelligence (BI) system mix operational data with analytical tools to represent descriptive and complicated data to groups of decision maker. BI aim to enhance the features and accuracy of data to the decision making process. Nowadays, BI are widely applied in industry as BI aid in decision making and strategic planning. In order to achieve that, BI pulls and gathers information from variety sources of information systems. To make BI data meaningful, a conceptual dimensional database is needed to represent all data stored in one particular BI. Multi-dimensional database (MDB) is one type of database which possessed ability to process database rapidly so the results can be generated in no time. MDB also optimized the functionalities of data warehouse. Although business intelligence and MDB is broadly used in business institutions, research related about them is limited especially in academic performance area. Therefore, this research study aim to develop a BI framework for online reporting system. Hence, the objective of this paper is to review and discuss the relationship of BI with MDB for Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) research performance. In the future, this research study expected to propose a data model of online reporting system for upper management dashboard.

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Automatic WLAN fingerprint radio map generation for accurate indoor positioning based on signal path loss model

The first step in developing a ubiquitous environment, in which the user can interact with any available electronic device, is the existence of an accurate indoor positioning system. WLAN-based indoor positioning system is considered as one of the best choices for indoor positioning due to its low cost, simple configuration and high accuracy. Although the WLAN Received Signal Strength fingerprinting method is the most accurate positioning method, the offline phase of this method known as radio map creation is a time consuming process. On the other hand, in dynamically changing environments, this radio map will be outdated and this will reduce the positioning accuracy. In this paper the Multi-Wall signal path loss model will be used to automatically generate the radio map based on the knowledge of the environment layout. The results of the experiment show that the indoor positioning by using the generated radio map can achieve high accuracy with average distance error reaching up to 1.2m. This promising results means that an accurate indoor positioning system can be easily developed with time saving features.

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Preserving user privacy with anonymous authentication in cloud computing

Cloud computing offers its flexibility and dynamic nature in terms of its access to resources anytime and anywhere. All data and other resources in cloud storage are managed and controlled by the Cloud Service Provider. They provide security and ensure that the data is protected and free from any vulnerability. However, providing privacy through authentication mechanism is a big challenge. Most of the current authentication schemes rely on trusted third party to identify and verify user’s credential which can lead to transparency issue. In order to ensure for a secured transaction, they have to preserve user’s privacy from being exposed. The reveal information of user’s credential will make it easier for attacker to gain the information for accessing to classified data. They can intercept and manipulate user’s identity to gain access to sensitive data of user in the cloud storage. This issue can be solved by introducing anonymity features in the authentication scheme by hiding the user’s information as well as to protect the user’s identity from getting abused. Anonymity will protect user’s identity by hiding the real users’ identity during the authentication process especially when users have to deal with third party in their communication. The threat does not only come from external attacker but also comes from internal party who has full authority access to the server. This paper proposed an anonymous authentication scheme which is a combination of password-based authentication and anonymity feature in order to preserve user’s privacy without involving the trusted third party during the authentication process. As a result, it can guarantee a secured transaction with anonymity features to protect user’s privacy. This paper also presents the description of data privacy and security which can influence user’s trust in using cloud services. Security analysis descriptions of possible attacks to the proposed scheme are also presented in this paper. The Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol is used for this project with some enhancement to algorithm. In the future, the proposed scheme will be tested with some of the possible attack threats to prove that it is secured against the attack. The significant of this research is to preserve user’s privacy with anonymous password-based authentication in the cloud environment without any requirement to trusted third party which can resist from vulnerability to attacks.

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Exploring the common factors influencing electronic document management systems (EDMS) implementation in Government

Many governments today have implemented Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS). The employment of EDMS systems has increased the operational (e.g. document storage and retrieval, auditing, workflow facilities, searching and publishing) effectiveness of governments on daily basis. However, not many studies had been undertaken into the implementation process of EDMS in the government context. Given the complexity of the process of EDMS implementation which involves a combination of technological, organizational and users factors, it is now of vital importance to look from the literature to see if there are common factors that may influence the EDMS implementation projects in government. Based on the content analysis approach, this paper investigates the development of EDMS implementation studies. This study shows that there are fourteen (14) common factors found from the existing studies related to the EDMS implementation process. The identification of these factors, particularly, helpful for further research on EDMS related issues, since this study demonstrates that there are enormous amounts of factors influencing EDMS implementation available in the literature with non division of factors (i.e., technological, organizational and users factors) more dominant to one another.

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Software manipulative techniques of protection and detection: A review

M. A. Ibrahim, Z. Shukur, N. Zainal and Abdo A. A. Al-Wosabi

Over the last decade, many studies have been conducted concerning the protection of software. Software piracy, tampering and stealing became the major concern of various parties such as software developers, suppliers, traders and consumers. This paper summarizes some of the related methods in software security such as steganography, obfuscation and cryptography. Also some of the most applicable techniques in securing software from manipulation such as software watermarking, fingerprinting and software birthmarking are reviewed in this paper.

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A multimodal interaction for map navigation and evaluation study of its usability

Nor Azman Ismail and Yee Yong Pang

To meet the challenges of ubiquitous computing and an increasingly map usage population; researchers have been trying to break away from the traditional modes of interaction. Over the past decade years, researches in this domain suggest that Multimodal User Interfaces (MUI) now provide maturity and affordable opportunities, which may be appropriate for society transformation on the interaction styles. We have developed a MUI prototype application, called MapNI, to help users carrying out everyday activities such as navigating a map. MapNI use user-defined hand gestures to perform a different range of tasks via a map navigation interface. This paper describes the MapNI development and reports its usability evaluation. We conclude that this inclusive technology offers some potential to improve the independence and quality of life of society, although there remain significant challenges to be overcome.

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Perceived benefits, privacy risks and the used of privacy strategies on facebook: An explorative study

Siti Zainab Ibrahim and Maslin Masrom

This explorative study aims to gain insight about which privacy settings and features on Facebook interfaces are commonly used by Facebook users, and how perceived benefits and privacy risks for personal information disclosure on Facebook influences privacy strategies used on the site. Online survey was used to gather user data. Analysis of the survey data revealed the privacy strategies on Facebook were most commonly used for managing profile visibility, networking boundaries, and privacy awareness. Using a point-biserial correlation analysis, the results demonstrated significant relations between the types of privacy strategies used on Facebook and the types of perceived benefits experienced from using Facebook. Significant relations were also observed between the types of privacy strategies and the types of concerns for privacy risks on Facebook. Hence, when the goal of Facebook is to empower users for protecting their privacy, it is important to understand how users make disclosure decisions with the help of these privacy settings and features on user interfaces. This paper concludes with remarks on the importance of understanding users attitudes in educating them about privacy protection in social applications.

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An investigation of motion tracking for Solat movement with dual sensor approach

Nor Azrini Jaafar, Nor Azman Ismail and Yusman Azimi Yusoff

Motion tracking has generated interest in field of computer vision because it has wide range of potential applications. In this paper, we investigate the motion tracking for solat movement which is unexplored area, by using dual Kinect sensors from Microsoft Corporation. Solat in Islam is a part of communication with Allah SWT to fulfil the purpose of human creation and existence. Current technology and knowledge in Human Computer Interaction can improve the relationship between human and God by performing solat perfectly with the assist of computer. To achieve the goal, two Kinect sensors are placed at a pre-defined position and angle to obtain multiple views in single space. The system gets the skeleton information from Kinect Software Development Kit. From the skeleton information provided, the important joint that has significant movement during Solat activity have been selected for the training and testing process. All the movements recorded have been classified using Hidden Markov Model function and stored into database. The system was tested against the trained database and reliable accuracy was recorded. The outcome from this investigation, a new frontier way of learning in Solat can be developed.

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Student behavior analysis using self-organizing map clustering technique

Umi Farhana Alias, Nor Bahiah Ahmad and Shafaatunnur Hasan

E-learning is the resulting product from the evolution of internet technology. It acts as a medium of learning virtually without limitation of time and space and the need for teachers to be present physically. Currently, Moodle which is a learning management system has become an important medium to deliver e-learning easily by providing customized tool for educators to deploy learning materials in various forms, provide online discussion forum, online quizzes, online assignments and online activities among students. Moodle capture the student s interactions and activities while learning on-line using the log files. The data stored in the log files contain meaningful information such as the student s behavior, preferences and knowledge level. This information is very useful for educators to analyze the student s characteristics in order to improve the teaching methods. In addition, the student s progress can be improved by overcome the problem of one-size-fits-all and also to improve student learning experienced while using the system. In this paper, the student s action and behavior while using e-learning system are analyzed in order to identify the significant pattern of the student s behavior using Self-Organizing Map (SOM) clustering technique. The ability of SOM to analyze large amounts of data with variety types of variables and with better visualization of the result give an advantage to this technique. The experiment shows that unsupervised learning using SOM is able to identify several clusters from the student s behavior by visualization of high dimensional data into two-dimensional (2-D) space.

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Putting the tactile feedback to Quranic verses and Tajweed rules

Suziah Sulaiman, Dayang Rohaya Awang Rambli and Fatin Shamimi Mohd Zuki

Technology has enabled many physical books including Al-Quran to be presented in a software form. The digitized holy book comes with a complete colour-coded to assist readers read correctly without having to memorize each letter that forms the Tajweed rules. Unfortunately, those with visual impairment are not able to enjoy fully such a feature because there are not many systems that could support the readers different reading capabilities. Accessibility with regards to information visualization representing the colour-coded Tajweed codes using sensory modalities other than vision is the issue in question. This paper investigates whether by providing tactile feedback to the Quranic verses together with the Tajweed rules could add value to these readers. An interview and, observation on visually impaired readers learning Al-Quran were conducted to understand and capture the design requirements. The initial study findings revealed that those with low vision and very new to reading Al-Quran Braille are in favour of the prototype while the more experienced readers did not find the tactile Tajweed rules necessary. These findings led to the development of a prototype using Braille-line 20. The prototype incorporates tactile feedback into the Al-Quranic Braille and the associated Tajweed rules. A user testing was conducted with a group of visually impaired people to elicit their opinions on the prototype. The study findings signal for the prototype having potential as a promising learning tool.

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Exploring older people's experience with augmented reality (AR) applications

S. A. Malik, M. Azuddin, L. M. Abdullah and M. Mahmud

Latest development of mobile technology has opened another opportunity for augmented reality to be implemented in the mobile device platform. Mobile augmented reality enhances mobile users experience by combining computer generated images in real environment. There have been limited studies which investigate the use of augmented reality among older people. This pilot study aims to explore older people s experience in terms of attitude and potential barriers when they are interacting with augmented reality applications. Qualitative methods including interview, focus groups and observation were used to understand their experiences with augmented reality applications. Results indicated that, there were some barriers faced by older people in engaging augmented reality applications such as AR interface and interaction style, and familiarity with AR applications. Result showed that, they found AR applications could be beneficial for certain occasions or conditions like people in remote areas such as for outdoor and disabled users of mobile applications.

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MyGeo-Explorer: A semantic search tool for querying geospatial information

Subashini Panchanathan, Abba Lawan and Abdur Rakib

We propose a semantic search approach for geospatial information systems to resolve the issue of semantic heterogeneity in metadata catalogues. Using the Malaysian geospatial data infrastructure service portal, MyGDI Explorer, as a comparative case study, a semantic search tool developed in this work is based on the model-view-controller (MVC) approach, which comprises three major components, an ontology component modeled using the Malaysian Geospatial Standard (MS 1759) as a domain, a java-based middleware component using Apache-Jena API and a query-based semantic search engine developed in Java EE. In this paper, we present MyGeo-Explorer, a web application coupled with a semantic search engine for exploring geospatial information and illustrate the use of the tool with some common usage scenarios. We show how ontology-based semantic search provides more relevant search results as compared to traditional keyword search and helps to deal with the problems of semantic heterogeneity inherent in keywords definition.

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3D imaging techniques in documentation of cultural assets in Malaysia

Harlina Md Sharif Hazman Hazumi and Nurfarhanah Saedin

Despite worldwide rapid development in 3D imaging technologies, documentation of 3D cultural assets in Malaysia is still very much reliant upon conventional techniques. There is very little progress towards exploring new methods or advanced technologies to convert 3D cultural assets into 3D visual representation and visualization models that are easily accessible for information sharing. Shortage of expertise in many levels of digital practice and general perception that 3D digital documentation is costly and requiring high investments further hampers digitization efforts. In recent years, however, advent of computer vision (CV) algorithms make it possible to reconstruct 3D geometry of objects by using image sequences from digital cameras, which are then processed by web services and freeware applications. This paper presents an initial stage in an exploratory study that investigates the potentials of using CV automated image-based open-source software and web services to reconstruct and replicate cultural assets. By selecting an intricate wooden boat, Petalaindera, this study attempts to evaluate the efficiency of CV systems and their suitability to be adopted in digital heritage practice in Malaysia. By presenting a brief overview of previous 3D digital documentation efforts undertaken in the field of cultural heritage (CH) in Malaysia, the final aim of this study is to compare the visual accuracy of 3D models generated by CV system, and 3D models produced by terrestrial long-range scanner and structured white light systems. The final objective is to explore cost-effective methods that could provide fundamental guidelines on the best practice approach for digital heritage in Malaysia.

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Enhancement of confidentiality and integrity during big data transmission using a hybrid technique

Shiladitya Bhattacharjee, Lukman Bin Ab. Rahim and Izzatdin B. A. Aziz

The most fundamental issues of any data transmission over the internet are maintaining its confidentiality and integrity. The data integrity may suffer due to unauthentic interferences or various transmission errors. These issues increase when the transmitted file size is extremely large. Many researches have been performed to address these issues individually. However, there is no integrated technique being suggested in previous researches to address both these issues in big data transmission system. Therefore, we have proposed a new error control technique and a unique LSB (Least Significant Bit) based audio steganography technique and combined them to develop a hybrid technique. The proposed control technique is designed to remove all discrete or continuous data errors and to provide a backup system for accidental data loss. The proposed steganography technique is developed to offer high confidentiality, protect various security attacks and to enhance robustness against various errors. The result section shows its capacity to produce robustness against various errors in terms of signal to noise ratio, uncorrectable error rate and percentage of data loss. The confidentiality level is shown by calculating frequency and amplitude difference between the original and stego samples. Its capacity to protect various attacks has been tested by calculating entropy values. All tests are performed in wireless environment using different types and different sizes of input files.

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Identifying the basis of auditory similarity in concatenative sound synthesis users: a study between musicians and non-musicians

Noris Mohd Norowi, Eduardo Reck Miranda and Hizmawati Madzin

This paper identifies the basis of auditory similarity in concatenative sound synthesis users. Concatenative sound synthesis (CSS) system is an existing approach to create new sounds based on a user supplied audio query. Typically, the audio is synthesised based on the least distance between the query sound unit and the available sound units in the database. However, sounds synthesised through this approach often times result in a mediocre level of satisfaction within the users as confusion between various audio perception attributes during the CSS system s matching process causes mismatches to occur. This study aims to determine the dominant perceptual attribute that humans base their judgment of sound similarity on. The study also looks at two categories of CSS system s users: musicians and non-musicians, and observes whether there is a significant difference in the subjective judgments between the two groups with regards to sound similarity. Thirty-eight participants were subjected to the listening test, where six pairwise comparisons from four different audio perceptual attributes (melody, timbral, tempo and loudness) were compared. In general, it was found that the majority of users in the Musicians group (73.3%) based their sound similarity on timbre attribute, whilst the majority of the users in the Non-musicians group (78.3%) based their sound similarity on the melody attribute. This information may be used to help CSS system cater to the expectations of its users and generate the sounds with the closest matching audio perceptual attribute accordingly.

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Web user interface: local websites versus users mental model pattern for ASEAN

Aslina Baharum and Azizah Jaafar

Even though there is a great development of mobile application nowadays, a web-based platform is still the necessary development for accessing information. The web interface is an important part of a web structure or web layout of a website which captures the users eyes at first glance, whether it is appealing and expected or not. Do the developers or designers develop the web user interface (UI) based on users mental model pattern (uMMp)? Or do they realize that experienced and knowledgeable users may have an expected look of the layout or in particular, the localization of the web objects? Every user may have different expectations of the same website, but it may be significantly different when compared to users from other countries. This study will compare and identify the ASEAN uMMp UI with the UI of popular websites in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The aim of the study is to prove that the users may have created their own mental model pattern when looking at a website. This result can hopefully inspire other designers or researchers of the usefulness of web development based on uMMp for web design development improvement in the future.

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A correlation analysis between sentimental comment and numerical response in students feedback

Phuripoj Kaewyong, Anupong Sukprasert, Naomie Salim and Fatin Aliah Phang

This paper aims to study a qualitative measuring of students comments using sentiment analysis to teacher evaluation and investigate its qualitative analysis. A small dataset of students feedbacks was collected from the public website and was utilized in the experimental. We performed the lexicon based sentiment analysis to identify sentiment word and determine overall sentiment polarity of students comment into positive and negative classes based on Opinion Lexicon automatically. A comparison between overall sentiment scores and numerical response scores of teacher evaluation aspects were evaluated and plotted into graphs in order to compare the relationship between each pair of two variables. Especially, we applied the statistical techniques using Pearson s correlation and Spearman s rank to confirm these visual correlation results. The experimental results suggested that there is a significant correlation between overall sentiment scores from its qualitative analysis and numerical response scores of teacher evaluation aspects. Based on this, it might be possible to convert from qualitative to quantitative type of teacher evaluation by performing lexicon based sentiment analysis.

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Implementation issues affecting the business intelligence adoption in public University

Ahmad Fadhil Yusof, Suraya Miskon, Norasnita Ahmad, Rose Alinda Alias, Haslina Hashim, Norris Syed Abdullah, Nazmona Mat Ali and Mohd Aizaini Maarof

Today, the education sector has become fiercely competitive in recruiting students from across the country and around the world. Anecdotal evidence suggests that universities are good candidates for Business intelligence (BI). BI is the process of gathering correct information in the correct format at the correct time; and delivering the results for decision-making purposes. It also has a positive impact on business operations, tactics, and strategies in the enterprises. There have been numerous reports of BI benefits in private and public sector. Yet, issues influencing BI implementation in a public university could be so numerous that they may affect the effectiveness of a BI implementation. Thus, this paper discusses issues faced by public university in implementing Business Intelligence System. Interviews were conducted with the head of the university divisions and faculties representatives to elicit their opinion regarding issues faced in managing university data. Data were collected and analyzed using NVivo 10. There are eight main issues identified from the interviewees and these will be used as the foundation in developing a BI system in the university, suggesting important implications for practice and further research.

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A business intelligence framework for Higher Education Institutions

Nur Ain Zulkefli, Suraya Miskon, Haslina Hashim, Rose Alinda Alias, Norris Syed Abdullah, Norasnita Ahmad, Nazmona Mat Ali, and Mohd Aizaini Maarof

Stakeholders are progressively measuring the success of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in terms of graduation rates. Today, HEIs are under intense pressure to not only recruit students who have the potential to graduate on time, but also to detect and provide at-risk students with necessary remedial measures. However, most top management has difficulty in accessing data in their organization as the number of data increases continuously. Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the tools used widely to help organizations such as HEI to access and manage huge volumes of data. The features provided in BI tools enable managers to make accurate and effective decisions at the appropriate time and in the right format. Through systematic literature review (SLR), this paper discusses formulation of Business Intelligence framework for deploying solutions in HEIs that guides current practice and for the future research.

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Applying the principles of interpretive field research: as example of an IS case study on shared services

Suraya Miskon, Wasana Bandara and Erwin Fielt

All sound research commence with the selection of a research paradigm. The chosen research paradigm is significant in shaping the researcher s perspectives of the world and it is a vital step in any study s research design. There are different paradigms that IS researchers can choose from; amongst which the interpretive paradigm is growing in acceptance.. Though interpretive research has emerged as an important strand in Information Systems (IS), guidelines on how to conduct interpretive research and how to evaluate them have been scarce. Klein and Myers presented seven principles with examples for each from three case examples. While these principles are much valued, there is a lack of support for novice researchers on how to embed these principles in an overall research design, which could help with the aid of a detailed example that has done so. Thus, this paper aims to address this gap, and presents how Klein and Myers s principles were applied within an example study that investigated shared services in the Malaysian Higher Education context. The example study adopted the interpretive paradigm as the most suited approach that fitted their research questions and goals. More details about the selection and adoption of the Klein and Myers s guidelines in the context of the shared services research case study are presented in the paper.

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Gamification in online collaborative learning for programming courses: A literature review

Shahdatunnaim Azmi, Noorminshah A. Iahad and Norasnita Ahmad

The popularity of computer science education triggered a dramatic rise in the number of tertiary institutions offering computer science courses. Nevertheless, many employers complain that graduates do not have the required skills. Lately, the higher education sector has faced a continuous decrease in the number of students choosing to study computer science courses, and some of the reasons for this rejection are related to the difficulties in mastering computer science skills. As core subjects in a computer science major, programming language subjects play an important role in successful tertiary computer science education. The embedding of gamification in programming courses has been identified as a potential technique that could maximize student participation and have a positive impact on learning. This research aims to provide an overview of how the embedding of gamification in online collaborative learning can enhance participation among novice programming students. The main findings from this review include the identification of the important participation elements for programming students in the online collaborative learning environment, a list of game elements embedded in online collaborative learning to facilitate participation among programming students, and suggestions regarding suitable gamification approaches for programming courses.

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The relationship of physicality and its underlying mapping

Masitah Ghazali, Alan Dix and Kiel Gilleade

We understand how physical things work from our experience interacting with them. The cause-effect mapping instills our knowledge of interaction. We extend our knowledge of physical interactions when interacting with computing devices, especially when we do not have prior experience with those devices. But, the mapping of interaction in the digital world is not as straightforward as in the physical world. It is unclear how far the rules of physicality hold in the computing realm when the level and kind of feedback is not necessarily the same with physical effort? How do we cope when the underlying mapping is incoherent in relation to the physical control? In this paper, we report a study on Cruel Design. Its objectives are: i) to investigate the role of physicality in the physical-logical interaction, and ii) to observe the behaviors of users as incoherent mappings occur. Four conditions to illustrate the different design of mappings were presented to users. From the findings, the physical condition plays a more dominant role than having to remember the correct mapping of the logical states, and, inverting an action on the same controller (regardless the type of mapping) is the natural reaction to overshoot.

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Stakeholders’ view on MOOCs sustainability in Malaysian higher education: A preliminary study

Nor Fadzleen Sa don, Rose Alinda Alias and Naoki Ohshima

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has revolutionized the global higher education due to policy innovation towards learning accessibility, heterogenous participation with low or zero cost imposed on end-users. In the context of Malaysian higher education, the Ministry of Higher Education has launched Malaysia MOOC, the first country in the world to implement government-initiated MOOCs for all public universities. The ministry allocates RM500 million for all public universities to offer the MOOC, under the 2016-2020 Eleventh Malaysia Plan. Nonetheless, there is yet study published specifically on MOOCs sustainability in Malaysian higher education. Hence, this paper aims to gauge MOOCs stakeholders’ view on MOOCs sustainability via interviews conducted with ten interviewees who are the primary stakeholders of the Malaysia MOOCs initiative. Four main factors, three constructs and nine elements for MOOCs sustainability in Malaysian higher education have been identified via synthesis of meta-analysis and stakeholders’ view. The findings of this research are hoped to be useful as future reference to policy makers, practitioners and researchers.

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Designing of a basic Arabic sound learning courseware using outcome/change matrix

Siti Nazirah Bt. Muhamad Zainuldin, Aryati Bt. Bakri, Nor Hawaniah Bt. Zakaria, Normal Mat Jusoh and Ng Kien Heng

Nowadays, early childhood education becomes a trend in parenting to optimize the children brain development. It is proven to be important as a child’s brain is experiencing a rapid development during this period. It is important to be able to recognize Arabic letters, in particular to the Moslems; without this it will be difficult for them to perform their daily rituals such as reading the Quran and performing Solah (prayer). Thus it is important to begin introducing and teaching the Arabic language at the early age. However, teaching Arabic language to young children is difficult as they usually have a limited focus time. The objective of this paper is to design the outcome/change matrix that contains motivational elements for early childhood learning. An Arabic learning courseware that includes the identified component in the outcome/change matrix was developed. The courseware was tested among the children between 18 to 36 months old. The post test, pre test and observation were conducted to evaluate the courseware. The finding shows there is significant improvement among the children in recognizing the Arabic basic sound. It’s also proven the courseware is able to motivate and simulate the children’s cognitive and sensory development.

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A comparison of people counting techniques via video scene analysis

Poo Kuan Hoong, Ian K. T. Tan and Chai Kai Weng

Real-time human detection and tracking from video surveillance footages is one of the most active research areas in computer vision and pattern recognition. This is due to the widespread application from being able to do it well. One such application is the counting of people, or density estimation, where the two key components are human detection and tracking. Traditional methods such as the usage of sensors are not suitable as they are not easily integrated with current video surveillance systems. As video surveillance systems are currently prevalent in most places, using vision based people counting techniques will be the logical approach. In this paper, we compared the two commonly used techniques which are Cascade Classifier and Histograms of Gradients (HOG) for human detection. We evaluated and compared these two techniques with three different video datasets with three different setting characteristics. From our experiment results, both Cascade Classifier and HOG techniques can be used for people counting to achieve moderate accuracy results.

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A framework on cloud technology in facilitating design learning

Nur Aziemah Mohamad, Khairul Anwar Mohamed Khaidzir and Roliana Ibrahim

Nowadays, the technology has evolved and its advancement has affected the learning field. People opted to use the cloud technology as it can cater the communication between the instructor and students. In this study, the focused learning field is architectural design learning. Design has a vast disciplines and it is often related to the architecture domain. It comes with three distinct features which are propose, critique and iterate. Hence, communication between instructor and students is crucial in order to get the best design. Most of the types of communication occurred during the critique session. Currently, the instructor found out that it is hard to intervene with the students design during the personal critique session. Thus, cloud technologies can act as a scaffolding tool during the design process. To achieve this study, a proposal on cloud-based design studio to facilitate the communication between instructor and students is done. An in-class observation has been done to see how the cloud technology can fit in facilitating the design process. By adapting the cloud technology in design learning, it gives opportunity for the instructor and students to communicate among each other while improving the design virtually in real-time.

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Integrating IoT devices into a mobile application for elderly who live alone

Wahidah Husain, Siti Aishah Mohd Zain, Nur Aini Abdul Rashid and Amirah Mohamed Shahiri

Nowadays, the populations of elderly persons who live alone are increasing worldwide. As we all know, the elderly need more support and need someone to regularly take care of them. The situation become worst for elderly who have health problem that needs to be monitored frequently. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to propose a mobile application known as HomeAlone for helping the elderly manage their daily activities easily and independently. The application is developed on android platform combined with Internet of Things (IoT) sensor devices. The Arduino Uno board will be used as the platform that will connect the sensor devices to the internet. HomeAlone primary concern focuses on the monitoring of the security intruders outside the house and the condition of the main entrance door of the house. The health of the elderly can be monitored using pulse, body temperature and blood pressure sensors. Besides that, the movement of the elderly also can be monitored by using motion sensor which can detect the actual condition of the elderly inside the house. By using this application, the elderly can live more safely and independently and can also relief the worries of the caretakers.

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Eye blinks removal in single-channel EEG using Savitzky-Golay referenced adaptive filtering: A comparison with independent component analysis (ICA) method

Faridah Abd Rahman and Mohd Fauzi Othman

Eye blink artifact is one of the major problems in electroencephalograph (EEG) signals which mainly affected a frontal channel. A frontal channel often involved in recent applications of portable EEG devices which require a real time processing including for artifact removal. In this paper, we proposed a new referencing method in adaptive filtering for eye blinks removal of a single-channel EEG. The proposed method adopts Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter to extract the blink components from noisy EEG signals. The extracted component is then employed in adaptive filter as a reference input. We implemented adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) algorithm in adaptive filtering for the blink removal process. The reliability of the proposed method is demonstrated on real EEG dataset. By using the signal to noise ratio (SNR), mean squared error (MSE) and correlation coefficient as performance indicators, the proposed method is compared to independent component analysis (ICA), one of the widely accepted methods for artifact removal. The results show a low correlation between a corrected signal and a measured electrooculograph (EOG) signal, which indicates its efficiency in estimating and removing the blinks from the measured EEG signals. The results also demonstrate an improved performance compared to conventional ICA method.

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The influence of information system success factors towards user satisfaction in Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka

Yusri Arshad, M. Azrin and Siti Nor Afiqah

The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of information system (IS) success factors towards the user satisfaction in UTeM. In the last few decade, the process of linking the information system (IS) with user satisfaction has been currently taking concern in IS research. This knowledge is valuable as it can help in the development of better methods for IS in future and evaluating their impacts on the individual and organization. The rapid changes in information technology (IT) and business environment have challenged the Universities capabilities in planning the appropriate information systems strategies for their organizations. The increased number of user population in the Malaysian Public Universities shows a clear need of improvement in the strategic information system planning used. The main objective of this study is 1) the important factors contributing towards Information system success; 2) to determine IS success factors influencing user satisfaction at UTeM; and 3) to determine the most relevant IS success factors that influences the user satisfaction such as System quality, information quality, service quality and system use. The study adopted quantitative method to collect data and analysis, where 100 respondents from UTeM were chosen to answer the questionnaire survey regarding their satisfaction towards the said factors. From the result, there is a positive relationship between the four factors with the user satisfaction. In order to develop the high user satisfaction, the information system department of UTeM should look into the entire factor that has significantly influenced the user satisfaction. It is also recommended that an extensive research is done to other organizations in Malaysia.

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Business intelligence system adoption theories in SMEs: A literature review

Nurlydia Natasha Md Hatta, Suraya Miskon, Nazmona Mat Ali, Norris Syed Abdullah, Norasnita Ahmad, Haslina Hashim, Rose Alinda Alias and Mohd Aizaini Maarof

Today, business intelligence system (BIS) is universally considered as an essential tool to aid business decision making process. There is consensus that BIS has significant effects on predicting current and prospective views of business operations. These effects will only be realized if, and when, BIS are widely spread and used. An imperative study of BIS adoption theories is crucial in order to understand the determinants of BIS adoption. Previous studies on the BIS adoption theories in the global Small Medium Enterprise (SME) are limited. To fill the gap, this study is aimed to study the BIS adoption theories as reported by prior researchers and propose the BIS adoption model for SME in Malaysia. Through systematic literature review (SLR), this paper discusses two prominent models being adopted in SMEs. These two prominent models; diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory, and the technology, organization, and environment (TOE) framework are discussed in details in this paper. This paper also makes recommendations for future research.

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Understanding factors influencing user experience of interactive systems: A literature review

Ahsanullah, Suziah Sulaiman, Ahmad Kamil Bin Mahmood and Muzafar Khan

In recent years, the notion of User Experience (UX) has gained a greater attention among HCI researchers in academia and industry. Due to its importance, several frameworks and models have been proposed to design and assess UX of interactive systems. These models guide to improve the design and help to determine the quality of interactive systems, products and services. UX is highly subjective, dynamic, and context dependent; it evolves during the interaction with the system. Different factors collectively influence UX and present a challenging task to define, model, measure and validate it. The less attention is paid to understand and underline these factors; this paper is an attempt to understand and underline the core UX factors based on literature review. These factors make UX more complex, diverse and vague in nature. It is recommended to incorporate the management aspect in UX process that may help to overwhelming the issues of complexity, diversity and vagueness.

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The heuristic evaluation on the internet safety guideline for primary school students

Masliza Mohd Yunus, Norziha Megat Mohd. Zainuddin, Nurazean Maarop ,Roslina Ibrahim, Rasimah Che Mohd Yusoff, Ganthan Narayan Samy and Wan Azlan Wan Hassan

Nowadays, the use of Internet is becoming more important in teaching and learning at school. A preliminary study shows that even though Internet has many benefits, it also exposes users to danger, especially concerning online communication. The objective of this research is to develop an Internet safety guideline in order to curb cybercrime, especially for students in primary schools. Expert evaluation has been used in this study. It has been chosen because of its ability to identify more problems. An interview with six experts was conducted in validating the guideline. Several comments were obtained. The findings have showed that the experts’ comments are helpful in improving the guideline and the result of the Content Validity Index is acceptable. Hence, it is hoped that the Internet safety guideline developed can benefits or provide awareness for primary school students and teachers in the process of giving or getting any information through the Internet. Therefore, this study provides primary school students with a guideline in accessing the Internet safely. This is important for them in expanding their knowledge and thus, be successful in their study.

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Purify noisy data from annotated images using montylingua and control redundant term

Rooh Ullah, Jafreez Jaafar and Abas B. Md. Said

Dynamic growths in the field of digital data and new techniques (manual and automatic) are introduced to tag images. Tagging of an object within the image is labeled in different terms base on the user perception. LabelMe is the image datasets that give a user online access to labeled object through by webtool. However, there are a number of noisy terms and errors found in the annotated list. Nevertheless, sometime a user tags the same objects with repeated terms. It requires to pruning the dataset from errors, noisy keywords and reduces to one instance term. This paper uses Montylingua for two purposes. First, it converts the tag term into base form. Second it purifies the irrelevant terms from the list. Next reduce the repeated terms into one instance and display their total count of occurrence. An experiment work, it shows that the purified list of the tagging has successfully removed from the annotated images. The result depicts through tagging ratio as well as degree of retrieval for effective achieved.

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Factors affecting knowledge sharing on innovation in the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)

It is believed that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can enhance Knowledge Sharing (KS) with the integration of individual and organizational factors. As a relatively new field of research, studies on KS based on Information Systems (IS) in developed countries is also on the increase. Unfortunately, KS research in the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developing countries is mostly found to be given trivial considerations. It is even rare to find conceptual research model for KS in HEIs in developing countries that integrate individual, organizational and technological antecedent factors together. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are twofold: (i) to explore the best conceptual KS research frameworks based on existing research models in HEIs; and also (ii) to propose a research model that can help explain better the nature of KS in HEIs. The methodology of this study is subjective/argumentative research i.e. idea generation in IS. The proposed research model has been built on the basis of IS theories and from the review of extant KS literature. The study reveals the antecedents and incorporates in the proposed research models which are: perceived self-efficacy for higher education and training, perceived leadership, social network, perceived ICT tools and technology, perceived organizational rewards, perceived organizational climate and perceived organizational trust. The paper explains the antecedents, relevance and theoretical applicability for the integration of the three theories in KS research for HEIs. The finding of this study reveals that the proposed KS research model seems better compare to other existing KS research framework in HEIs in developing countries. The study also reveals that the IS theories integration with ICT technology can explain better for KS research.

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Digital health informatics to monitor the quality of individual placement and support model of supported employment (IPS-SE) services in Malaysia

There is overwhelming evidence which shows that individual placement and support model of supported employment (IPS-SE) do help in the recovery of mentally ill clients. Presently, IPS-SE implementation is adhoc and non-integrated in nature. Employment services are segregated. On such developmental trajectory, it will be difficult to sustain quality implementation of IPS-SE. This has motivated the Director of Hospital Permai JB Johor to work with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Faculty of Computing to develop a system of digital health informatics via Permai Virtual Hospital Network (DHI-PVHN). Using DHI-PVHN, it will be possible to (a) have a clear and current view of the impact of mental illness on labour force activity, (b) effectively integrate vocational assistance with mental treatment and care, (c) produce accurate financial planning which will make implementation of IPS-SE a sustainable endeavour, and (d) strengthen the intensity and the continuity of individualized help in IPS-SE. This paper describes the DHI-PVHN user centred design pilot project carried out two years ago and describe the criteria used and the theory behind the use of the criteria. The pilot project has indicated that Hospital Permai JB Johor and Hospital Alor Star Kedah have implemented IPS-SE well. Success in the implementation of IPS-SE depends on the relative potential employment opportunity at the locality of the IPS-SE service provider. It also depends on certain management constraints of the IPS-SE service provider.

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Information technology capability as predictor of organizational intelligence in Libyan oil and gas companies

The Libyan oil and gas companies are in dispersed locations, which necessitate an efficient and effective management system to improve their competitiveness. They need to pool resources in the organization to create organizational intelligence as to be competitive. Organizational intelligence is organizational practices which are influenced IT capability. The objective of the study is to investigate how IT capability influences organizational intelligence in the Libyan oil and gas companies. A quantitative research method based on survey questionnaire was used to collect numerical data that were statistically analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics based on Statistical Package of Social Science (SPSS) software and AMOS module. A total of 163 managers in the Libyan oil and gas companies were randomly selected as the respondents. The result of the analysis showed that IT capability and organizational intelligence has a significant correlation and a predictor of OI with the value of p=0.05 and B=1.562. This study contributes towards new knowledge through the insights from the role of IT capability in influencing organizational intelligence in the context of Libyan oil and gas companies. The predictor’s model of IT capability contributes towards better decision making where the oil and gas companies management can decide on their investment for their companies in the future in order to increase their organizational intelligence.

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Website evaluation measures, website user engagement and website credibility for municipal website

This paper attempts to explore website evaluation measures specifically for information driven website such Municipal electronic government website toward website credibility and user engagement. Despite overwhelming of information source in online environment, the role of government website as a prominent government information provider becomes less preferred. Even, rapid development and continuous assessment been done by the government bodies to enhance and make utilize their website by the users, issues such usability problem, low popularity ranking and less user engagement still been reported. Therefore, the first part of this article reviews on existing assessment measures for websites done by scholars and also by practitioners. Then, in the second part of this article presents some finding on self evaluation of ten municipal website around Klang valley, Malaysia in term of popularity ranking and user engagement measure (bounce rate, Daily Pageviews per Visitor, and Daily Time on Site). Through related literatures reviewed, less study done previously includes overall or multiple measures for evaluation of information driven website. Estimation result of popularity ranking and user engagement percentage among municipal website also shows that there is still need some improvement to make the gateway of Malaysia electronic government become more favorable and engaging.

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A systematic literature review of factors influencing acceptance on mixed reality technology

Mixed Reality (MR) is amongst the potential technologies that have attracted attention recently. The MR environment is unique since it combines real and virtual objects, interactive in real time and registered in 3 dimension. Even though proponents of MR put forward many advantages of MR, but there are still lack of studies on the users’ acceptance of the MR technology. Understanding the factors influencing users’ acceptance on the MR technology especially in education helps the developers to produce useful MR applications. The aim of this study is to identify the factors that determine users’ acceptance of MR application. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was carried since it uses a more rigorous and well-defined approach to reviewing the research evidence relevant to the study. Initially, 336 papers were retrieved by a manual search in six databases and 26 primary studies were finally included. Consequently, 27 factors were identified and analyzed. The findings have revealed that there are four types of factors that can be used to examine the acceptance of MR: productivity-oriented; entertainment dimensions; users personal background and overall system evaluation.

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Decision neuroscience modeling of motivation for application in the rehabilitation of people with mental disabilities

Early this century, psychologists such as Linda Bartoshuk, Daniel Kahneman, Elizabeth Loftus and George Miller started to contribute to the cognitive school of psychology by delving into learning, memory and judgment. This has brought about the advancement of the field of decision neuro-science. In fact, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his idea on psychological decision making and a system based model of psychological motivation. Thus studies on decision neuroscience was born driving a new thinking in knowledge information system and information system as a whole. Use of decision neuroscience concept is needed to solve the problem of conventional decision making theories in psychology as it has been found to be inadequate to explain human decision making process to predict selection of beliefs or a course of action. This paper proposes a decision neuroscience model (knowledge information system model) which has been named Positive Affective Cognitive Motivational State (PACMS) which can be used to predict decision making process and motivational drive of mentally ill clients. The proposed model emulates human biological system. It provides better predictive abilities and performs better than the decision making theory model first suggested by Roe, Busemeyer and Townsend [1]. Quantitative tests were carried out to investigate the outcome of the proposed decision neuroscience model using the data from mentally ill clients undergoing supported employment under the care of Hospital Permai JB Johor Malaysia. Two groups of mentally ill clients were compared. These groups were selected according to their responses of Action Decision Making Behaviour Selection (ADMBS) and Spatial Attention Target Tracking Language Understanding (SATTLU). The result has shown that motivation in any human behaviour change can be explained in terms of decision neuroscience by considering that motivation is a two part process consisting of a process of positive affective decision making followed by a cognitive process. PACMS is a system model for decision making and motivation which can be the basis of an embedded system mountable on any knowledge information system. Further work is ongoing to study how the excitation from the senses of touch, ordor, sound and vision as well as the excitation from the eye, limbs and mouth can be used to drive the Behaviour Planner which is responsible for making some form of decision.

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An improved density based k-Means algorithm

Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised data mining technique which is loosely defined as a process of arranging data objects into clusters based on similarity measures, k-Means is one of the most renowned clustering algorithm used across different domains, however k-Means suffers from multiple limitations with its results negatively affected by the presence of outliers. As a result of this limitation, k-Means algorithm has a series of its improvement algorithms among them is Outlier Detection Based on Density Approach k-means algorithm (ODBD-k-Means algorithm). Although this algorithm has better outlier detection accuracy, different results was given with different execution, this usually affect its clustering accuracy. In this paper, an improved algorithm was proposed to overcome the limitation of ODBD-k-Means algorithm. To denote the accuracy of the proposed Improved Density Based k-means algorithm (IDB-k-Means algorithm), an evaluation test was conducted using three different real-world datasets from UCI repository. Our experimental results shows that IDB-k-Means algorithm outperformed ODBD-k-Means algorithm in both the clustering and outlier detection accuracy.

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