ISSN: 2074-9007 (Print)
ISSN: 2074-9015 (Online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs
Website: https://www.mecs-press.org/ijitcs
Published By: MECS Press
Frequency: 6 issues per year
Number(s) Available: 135
IJITCS is committed to bridge the theory and practice of information technology and computer science. From innovative ideas to specific algorithms and full system implementations, IJITCS publishes original, peer-reviewed, and high quality articles in the areas of information technology and computer science. IJITCS is a well-indexed scholarly journal and is indispensable reading and references for people working at the cutting edge of information technology and computer science applications.
IJITCS has been abstracted or indexed by several world class databases: Scopus, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, CrossRef, Baidu Wenku, IndexCopernicus, IET Inspec, EBSCO, VINITI, JournalSeek, ULRICH's Periodicals Directory, WorldCat, Scirus, Academic Journals Database, Stanford University Libraries, Cornell University Library, UniSA Library, CNKI Scholar, J-Gate, ZDB, BASE, OhioLINK, iThenticate, Open Access Articles, Open Science Directory, National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences, The HKU Scholars Hub, etc..
IJITCS Vol. 17, No. 1, Feb. 2025
REGULAR PAPERS
Wildfires are increasingly destructive natural disasters, annually consuming millions of acres of forests and vegetation globally. The complex interactions among fuels, topography, and meteorological factors, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind, govern wildfire ignition and spread. This research presents a framework that integrates satellite remote sensing and numerical weather prediction model data to refine estimations of final wildfire sizes. A key strength of our approach is the use of comprehensive geospatial datasets from the IBM PAIRS platform, which provides a robust foundation for our predictions. We implement machine learning techniques through the AutoGluon automated machine learning toolkit to determine the optimal model for burned area prediction. AutoGluon automates the process of feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning, evaluating a diverse range of algorithms, including neural networks, gradient boosting, and ensemble methods, to identify the most effective predictor for wildfire area estimation. The system features an intuitive interface developed in Gradio, which allows the incorporation of key input parameters, such as vegetation indices and weather variables, to customize wildfire projections. Interactive Plotly visualizations categorize the predicted fire severity levels across regions. This study demonstrates the value of synergizing Earth observations from spaceborne instruments and forecast data from numerical models to strengthen real-time wildfire monitoring and postfire impact assessment capabilities for improved disaster management. We optimize an ensemble model by comparing various algorithms to minimize the root mean squared error between the predicted and actual burned areas, achieving improved predictive performance over any individual model. The final metric reveals that our optimized WeightedEnsemble model achieved a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.564 km2 on the test data, indicating an average deviation of approximately 1.2 km2 in the predictions.
[...] Read more.Open Source Software (OSS) has gained significant traction in the government sector due to its potential to reduce costs, enhance security, and offer diverse benefits. This study focuses on the adoption of OSS within the Madinah Development Authority (MDA), a Saudi Arabian governmental agency. It aims to explore the OSS adoption process, identify challenges, and propose solutions to maximize its benefits. Employing a hybrid approach, data were collected through preliminary interviews with managers and a structured questionnaire survey among MDA employees. A SWOT analysis was conducted to evaluate the organization's IT environment and staff capabilities. The study’s key contribution is the development of a phased strategy tailored for MDA to successfully adopt OSS, addressing identified challenges and optimizing the benefits of open-source solutions for government operations.
[...] Read more.Literature confirms that the low success rate of eHealth systems is closely linked to inadequate computer knowledge. Therefore, this study aimed to assess knowledge and utilization of computers among healthcare workers in Benue South. An institution-based quantitative cross-sectional study design was conducted in 120 health facilities, including primary healthcare centres, and private clinics. This study involved 430 healthcare workers. Using Python programming, descriptive and multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess the level of computer knowledge and utilization among participants, as well as to identify factors influencing their computer knowledge and utilization. Of the 430 participants, 233 (54.19%) of healthcare workers passed the computer knowledge test, 216 (50.23%) of health workers have access to computers, and 221 (51.40%) of them had undergone formal computer training. The findings revealed that 263 (61.16%) of healthcare workers exhibit good computer utilization, while 167 (38.84%) demonstrated poor utilization. Access to a computer (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.83, 95% CI 0.48-1.60), and prior computer training (AOR=3.34, 95% CI 0.65-1.76) were found to be significantly associated with computer knowledge, while Access to a computer (AOR=2.98, 95% CI 0.48-1.70), Sex (AOR=2.23, 95% CI 0.28-1.32), Department (AOR=1.06, 95% CI 0.00-0.11), and prior computer training (AOR=5.53, 95% CI 1.10-2.32) were found to be significantly associated with computer utilization. These findings imply that improved access to computers and comprehensive computer training for healthcare professionals is vital for improved service delivery.
[...] Read more.This medical image segmentation plays a fundamental role in the diagnosis of diseases related to the correct identification of internal structures and pathological regions in different imaging modalities. The conventional fuzzy-based segmentation approaches, though quite useful, still have some drawbacks regarding handling uncertainty, parameter optimization, and high accuracy of segmentation with diverse datasets. Because of these facts, it generally leads to poor segmentations, which can give less reliability to the clinical decisions. In addition, the paper is going to propose a model, FTra-UNet, with advanced segmentation of medical images by incorporating fuzzy logic and transformer-based deep learning. The model would take complete leverage of the strengths of FIS concerning the handling of uncertainties in segmentation. Besides, it integrates SSHOp optimization technique to fine-tune the weights learned by the model to ensure improvement in adaptability and precision. These integrated techniques ensure faster convergence rates and higher accuracy of segmentation compared to state-of-the-art traditional methods. The proposed FTra-UNet is tested on BRATS, CT lung, and dermoscopy image datasets and ensures exceptional results in segmentation accuracy, precision, and robustness. Experimental results confirm that FTra-UNet yields consistent, reliable segmentation outcomes from a practical clinical application perspective. The architecture and implementation of the model, with the uncertainty handled by FIS and the learning parameters optimization handled by the SSHOp method, increase the power of this model in segmenting medical images.
[...] Read more.Code-switching, which is the mixing of words or phrases from multiple, grammatically distinct languages, introduces semantic and syntactic complexities to sentences which complicate automated text classification. Despite code-switching being a common occurrence in informal text-based communication among most bilingual or multilingual users of digital spaces, its use to spread misinformation is relatively less explored. In Kenya, for instance, the use of code-switched Swahili-English is prevalent on social media. Our main objective in this paper was to systematically re- view code-switching, particularly the use of Swahili-English code-switching to spread misinformation on social media in the Kenyan context. Additionally, we aimed at pre-processing a Swahili-English code-switched dataset and developing a misinformation classification model trained on this dataset. We discuss the process we took to develop the code- switched Swahili-English misinformation classification model. The model was trained and tested using the PolitiKweli dataset which is the first Swahili-English code-switched dataset curated for misinformation classification. The dataset was collected from Twitter (now X) social media platform, focusing on text posted during the electioneering period of the 2022 general elections in Kenya. The study experimented with two types of word embeddings - GloVe and FastText. FastText uses character n-gram representations that help generate meaningful vectors for rare and unseen words in the code-switched dataset. We experimented with both the classical machine learning algorithms and deep learning algo- rithms. Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (BiLSTM) algorithm showed the best performance with an f-score of 0.89. The model was able to classify code-switched Swahili-English political misinformation text as fake, fact or neutral. This study contributes to recent research efforts in developing language models for low-resource languages.
[...] Read more.Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine disorder that affects women of reproductive age, leading to hormonal imbalances and ovarian dysfunction. Early detection and intervention are vital for effective management and prevention of complications. This study compares PCOS prediction using the XGBoost machine learning model against four traditional models: Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Trees (DT), and Random Forests (RF). LR and SVM achieve accuracies of 95% and 96%, respectively, demonstrating strong predictive capabilities. In contrast, DT had a lower accuracy (82%), indicating limitations in PCOS data complexity. RF showed competitive performance with 96% accuracy, underscoring its effectiveness in ensemble learning. XGBoost achieves 98% accuracy with its parameter configuration. The scale pos weight parameter adjusts the positive class weight in imbalanced datasets, addressing under representation by assigning more weight to the minority class, and thereby improving the training focus. The gradient boosting framework incrementally builds models to address complex feature interactions and dependencies, enhancing the accuracy and stability in predicting intricate PCOS dataset. This analysis highlights the importance of advanced machine learning models such as XGBoost for accurate and reliable PCOS predictions. This research advances PCOS prediction, demonstrates the potential of machine learning in healthcare, and clarifies the strengths and limitations of different algorithms with complex medical datasets.
[...] Read more.CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Human and Computer Apart. The main purpose of CAPTCHA is to differentiate between human and automated machine during online transaction. Text, image, audio and video are types of CAPTCHAs. However, text-based CAPTCHAs are available in the market in different languages i.e., English, Arabic, Urdu and Chinese but accented character-based text CAPTCHA system namely NAIJACAPTCHA is a newly introduce text-based CAPTCHA developed using Latin characters and accented characters from two Nigerian language: Yorùbá and Igbo. The usability of sixteen accented character-based CAPTCHAs was tested to see if they were suitable for human usage. The usability performance was measured using response time, solving time, accuracy, and success rate. A total of two hundred and twenty-two participants were selected for the study, and 1108 CAPTCHA codes were generated. The response time for Text Distortion with Coloured Background was the fastest, with 1.18×103 ms, while Coloured Texts with No Background (CTNB) had the least response time of 1.09 ms. With a solving time of 2.52×104 ms, Character Fragmentation with No Background was the fastest. The result showed that CTBN's response and problem-solving time is highly promising; as a result, its website application for authentication during online transactions to distinguish between humans and machines will be simple for human beings to solve and user requests will also be swiftly attended to. Lastly, the security aspect of the developed NAIJACAPTCHA will be looked into determine its vulnerability.
[...] Read more.One area that has seen rapid growth and differing perspectives from many developers in recent years is document management. This idea has advanced beyond some of the steps where developers have made it simple for anyone to access papers in a matter of seconds. It is impossible to overstate the importance of document management systems as a necessity in the workplace environment of an organization. Interviews, scenario creation using participants' and stakeholders' first-hand accounts, and examination of current procedures and structures were all used to collect data. The development approach followed a software development methodology called Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Methodology. With the help of Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools, a web-based electronic document management system (WBEDMS) was created. Its database was created using MySQL, and the system was constructed using web technologies including XAMPP, HTML, and PHP Programming language. The results of the system evaluation showed a successful outcome. After using the system that was created, respondents' satisfaction with it was 96.60%. This shows that the document system was regarded as adequate and excellent enough to achieve or meet the specified requirement when users (secretaries and departmental personnel) used it. Result showed that the system developed yielded an accuracy of 95% and usability of 99.20%. The report came to the conclusion that a suggested electronic document management system would improve user happiness, boost productivity, and guarantee time and data efficiency. It follows that well-known document management systems undoubtedly assist in holding and managing a substantial portion of the knowledge assets, which include documents and other associated items, of Organizations.
[...] Read more.A sizeable number of women face difficulties during pregnancy, which eventually can lead the fetus towards serious health problems. However, early detection of these risks can save both the invaluable life of infants and mothers. Cardiotocography (CTG) data provides sophisticated information by monitoring the heart rate signal of the fetus, is used to predict the potential risks of fetal wellbeing and for making clinical conclusions. This paper proposed to analyze the antepartum CTG data (available on UCI Machine Learning Repository) and develop an efficient tree-based ensemble learning (EL) classifier model to predict fetal health status. In this study, EL considers the Stacking approach, and a concise overview of this approach is discussed and developed accordingly. The study also endeavors to apply distinct machine learning algorithmic techniques on the CTG dataset and determine their performances. The Stacking EL technique, in this paper, involves four tree-based machine learning algorithms, namely, Random Forest classifier, Decision Tree classifier, Extra Trees classifier, and Deep Forest classifier as base learners. The CTG dataset contains 21 features, but only 10 most important features are selected from the dataset with the Chi-square method for this experiment, and then the features are normalized with Min-Max scaling. Following that, Grid Search is applied for tuning the hyperparameters of the base algorithms. Subsequently, 10-folds cross validation is performed to select the meta learner of the EL classifier model. However, a comparative model assessment is made between the individual base learning algorithms and the EL classifier model; and the finding depicts EL classifiers’ superiority in fetal health risks prediction with securing the accuracy of about 96.05%. Eventually, this study concludes that the Stacking EL approach can be a substantial paradigm in machine learning studies to improve models’ accuracy and reduce the error rate.
[...] Read more.Artificial Neural Network is a branch of Artificial intelligence and has been accepted as a new computing technology in computer science fields. This paper reviews the field of Artificial intelligence and focusing on recent applications which uses Artificial Neural Networks (ANN’s) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It also considers the integration of neural networks with other computing methods Such as fuzzy logic to enhance the interpretation ability of data. Artificial Neural Networks is considers as major soft-computing technology and have been extensively studied and applied during the last two decades. The most general applications where neural networks are most widely used for problem solving are in pattern recognition, data analysis, control and clustering. Artificial Neural Networks have abundant features including high processing speeds and the ability to learn the solution to a problem from a set of examples. The main aim of this paper is to explore the recent applications of Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence and provides an overview of the field, where the AI & ANN’s are used and discusses the critical role of AI & NN played in different areas.
[...] Read more.One of the main reasons for mortality among people is traffic accidents. The percentage of traffic accidents in the world has increased to become the third in the expected causes of death in 2020. In Saudi Arabia, there are more than 460,000 car accidents every year. The number of car accidents in Saudi Arabia is rising, especially during busy periods such as Ramadan and the Hajj season. The Saudi Arabia’s government is making the required efforts to lower the nations of car accident rate. This paper suggests a business process improvement for car accident reports handled by Najm in accordance with the Saudi Vision 2030. According to drone success in many fields (e.g., entertainment, monitoring, and photography), the paper proposes using drones to respond to accident reports, which will help to expedite the process and minimize turnaround time. In addition, the drone provides quick accident response and recording scenes with accurate results. The Business Process Management (BPM) methodology is followed in this proposal. The model was validated by comparing before and after simulation results which shows a significant impact on performance about 40% regarding turnaround time. Therefore, using drones can enhance the process of accident response with Najm in Saudi Arabia.
[...] Read more.The Marksheet Generator is flexible for generating progress mark sheet of students. This system is mainly based in the database technology and the credit based grading system (CBGS). The system is targeted to small enterprises, schools, colleges and universities. It can produce sophisticated ready-to-use mark sheet, which could be created and will be ready to print. The development of a marksheet and gadget sheet is focusing at describing tables with columns/rows and sub-column sub-rows, rules of data selection and summarizing for report, particular table or column/row, and formatting the report in destination document. The adjustable data interface will be popular data sources (SQL Server) and report destinations (PDF file). Marksheet generation system can be used in universities to automate the distribution of digitally verifiable mark-sheets of students. The system accesses the students’ exam information from the university database and generates the gadget-sheet Gadget sheet keeps the track of student information in properly listed manner. The project aims at developing a marksheet generation system which can be used in universities to automate the distribution of digitally verifiable student result mark sheets. The system accesses the students’ results information from the institute student database and generates the mark sheets in Portable Document Format which is tamper proof which provides the authenticity of the document. Authenticity of the document can also be verified easily.
[...] Read more.Universities across the globe have increasingly adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, a software that provides integrated management of processes and transactions in real-time. These systems contain lots of information hence require secure authentication. Authentication in this case refers to the process of verifying an entity’s or device’s identity, to allow them access to specific resources upon request. However, there have been security and privacy concerns around ERP systems, where only the traditional authentication method of a username and password is commonly used. A password-based authentication approach has weaknesses that can be easily compromised. Cyber-attacks to access these ERP systems have become common to institutions of higher learning and cannot be underestimated as they evolve with emerging technologies. Some universities worldwide have been victims of cyber-attacks which targeted authentication vulnerabilities resulting in damages to the institutions reputations and credibilities. Thus, this research aimed at establishing authentication methods used for ERPs in Kenyan universities, their vulnerabilities, and proposing a solution to improve on ERP system authentication. The study aimed at developing and validating a multi-factor authentication prototype to improve ERP systems security. Multi-factor authentication which combines several authentication factors such as: something the user has, knows, or is, is a new state-of-the-art technology that is being adopted to strengthen systems’ authentication security. This research used an exploratory sequential design that involved a survey of chartered Kenyan Universities, where questionnaires were used to collect data that was later analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Stratified, random and purposive sampling techniques were used to establish the sample size and the target group. The dependent variable for the study was limited to security rating with respect to realization of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and usability while the independent variables were limited to adequacy of security, authentication mechanisms, infrastructure, information security policies, vulnerabilities, and user training. Correlation and regression analysis established vulnerabilities, information security policies, and user training to be having a higher impact on system security. The three variables hence acted as the basis for the proposed multi-factor authentication framework for improve ERP systems security.
[...] Read more.The healthcare system is a knowledge driven industry which consists of vast and growing volumes of narrative information obtained from discharge summaries/reports, physicians case notes, pathologists as well as radiologists reports. This information is usually stored in unstructured and non-standardized formats in electronic healthcare systems which make it difficult for the systems to understand the information contents of the narrative information. Thus, the access to valuable and meaningful healthcare information for decision making is a challenge. Nevertheless, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been used to structure narrative information in healthcare. Thus, NLP techniques have the capability to capture unstructured healthcare information, analyze its grammatical structure, determine the meaning of the information and translate the information so that it can be easily understood by the electronic healthcare systems. Consequently, NLP techniques reduce cost as well as improve the quality of healthcare. It is therefore against this background that this paper reviews the NLP techniques used in healthcare, their applications as well as their limitations.
[...] Read more.The numerical value of k in a k-fold cross-validation training technique of machine learning predictive models is an essential element that impacts the model’s performance. A right choice of k results in better accuracy, while a poorly chosen value for k might affect the model’s performance. In literature, the most commonly used values of k are five (5) or ten (10), as these two values are believed to give test error rate estimates that suffer neither from extremely high bias nor very high variance. However, there is no formal rule. To the best of our knowledge, few experimental studies attempted to investigate the effect of diverse k values in training different machine learning models. This paper empirically analyses the prevalence and effect of distinct k values (3, 5, 7, 10, 15 and 20) on the validation performance of four well-known machine learning algorithms (Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN)). It was observed that the value of k and model validation performance differ from one machine-learning algorithm to another for the same classification task. However, our empirical suggest that k = 7 offers a slight increase in validations accuracy and area under the curve measure with lesser computational complexity than k = 10 across most MLA. We discuss in detail the study outcomes and outline some guidelines for beginners in the machine learning field in selecting the best k value and machine learning algorithm for a given task.
[...] Read more.Density based Subspace Clustering algorithms have gained their importance owing to their ability to identify arbitrary shaped subspace clusters. Density-connected SUBspace CLUstering(SUBCLU) uses two input parameters namely epsilon and minpts whose values are same in all subspaces which leads to a significant loss to cluster quality. There are two important issues to be handled. Firstly, cluster densities vary in subspaces which refers to the phenomenon of density divergence. Secondly, the density of clusters within a subspace may vary due to the data characteristics which refers to the phenomenon of multi-density behavior. To handle these two issues of density divergence and multi-density behavior, the authors propose an efficient algorithm for generating subspace clusters by appropriately fixing the input parameter epsilon. The version1 of the proposed algorithm computes epsilon dynamically for each subspace based on the maximum spread of the data. To handle data that exhibits multi-density behavior, the algorithm is further refined and presented in version2. The initial value of epsilon is set to half of the value resulted in the version1 for a subspace and a small step value 'delta' is used for finalizing the epsilon separately for each cluster through step-wise refinement to form multiple higher dimensional subspace clusters. The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested on various bench-mark and synthetic datasets. It outperforms SUBCLU in terms of cluster quality and execution time.
[...] Read more.The perfect alignment between three or more sequences of Protein, RNA or DNA is a very difficult task in bioinformatics. There are many techniques for alignment multiple sequences. Many techniques maximize speed and do not concern with the accuracy of the resulting alignment. Likewise, many techniques maximize accuracy and do not concern with the speed. Reducing memory and execution time requirements and increasing the accuracy of multiple sequence alignment on large-scale datasets are the vital goal of any technique. The paper introduces the comparative analysis of the most well-known programs (CLUSTAL-OMEGA, MAFFT, BROBCONS, KALIGN, RETALIGN, and MUSCLE). For programs’ testing and evaluating, benchmark protein datasets are used. Both the execution time and alignment quality are two important metrics. The obtained results show that no single MSA tool can always achieve the best alignment for all datasets.
[...] Read more.A sizeable number of women face difficulties during pregnancy, which eventually can lead the fetus towards serious health problems. However, early detection of these risks can save both the invaluable life of infants and mothers. Cardiotocography (CTG) data provides sophisticated information by monitoring the heart rate signal of the fetus, is used to predict the potential risks of fetal wellbeing and for making clinical conclusions. This paper proposed to analyze the antepartum CTG data (available on UCI Machine Learning Repository) and develop an efficient tree-based ensemble learning (EL) classifier model to predict fetal health status. In this study, EL considers the Stacking approach, and a concise overview of this approach is discussed and developed accordingly. The study also endeavors to apply distinct machine learning algorithmic techniques on the CTG dataset and determine their performances. The Stacking EL technique, in this paper, involves four tree-based machine learning algorithms, namely, Random Forest classifier, Decision Tree classifier, Extra Trees classifier, and Deep Forest classifier as base learners. The CTG dataset contains 21 features, but only 10 most important features are selected from the dataset with the Chi-square method for this experiment, and then the features are normalized with Min-Max scaling. Following that, Grid Search is applied for tuning the hyperparameters of the base algorithms. Subsequently, 10-folds cross validation is performed to select the meta learner of the EL classifier model. However, a comparative model assessment is made between the individual base learning algorithms and the EL classifier model; and the finding depicts EL classifiers’ superiority in fetal health risks prediction with securing the accuracy of about 96.05%. Eventually, this study concludes that the Stacking EL approach can be a substantial paradigm in machine learning studies to improve models’ accuracy and reduce the error rate.
[...] Read more.One area that has seen rapid growth and differing perspectives from many developers in recent years is document management. This idea has advanced beyond some of the steps where developers have made it simple for anyone to access papers in a matter of seconds. It is impossible to overstate the importance of document management systems as a necessity in the workplace environment of an organization. Interviews, scenario creation using participants' and stakeholders' first-hand accounts, and examination of current procedures and structures were all used to collect data. The development approach followed a software development methodology called Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Methodology. With the help of Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools, a web-based electronic document management system (WBEDMS) was created. Its database was created using MySQL, and the system was constructed using web technologies including XAMPP, HTML, and PHP Programming language. The results of the system evaluation showed a successful outcome. After using the system that was created, respondents' satisfaction with it was 96.60%. This shows that the document system was regarded as adequate and excellent enough to achieve or meet the specified requirement when users (secretaries and departmental personnel) used it. Result showed that the system developed yielded an accuracy of 95% and usability of 99.20%. The report came to the conclusion that a suggested electronic document management system would improve user happiness, boost productivity, and guarantee time and data efficiency. It follows that well-known document management systems undoubtedly assist in holding and managing a substantial portion of the knowledge assets, which include documents and other associated items, of Organizations.
[...] Read more.One of the main reasons for mortality among people is traffic accidents. The percentage of traffic accidents in the world has increased to become the third in the expected causes of death in 2020. In Saudi Arabia, there are more than 460,000 car accidents every year. The number of car accidents in Saudi Arabia is rising, especially during busy periods such as Ramadan and the Hajj season. The Saudi Arabia’s government is making the required efforts to lower the nations of car accident rate. This paper suggests a business process improvement for car accident reports handled by Najm in accordance with the Saudi Vision 2030. According to drone success in many fields (e.g., entertainment, monitoring, and photography), the paper proposes using drones to respond to accident reports, which will help to expedite the process and minimize turnaround time. In addition, the drone provides quick accident response and recording scenes with accurate results. The Business Process Management (BPM) methodology is followed in this proposal. The model was validated by comparing before and after simulation results which shows a significant impact on performance about 40% regarding turnaround time. Therefore, using drones can enhance the process of accident response with Najm in Saudi Arabia.
[...] Read more.Universities across the globe have increasingly adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, a software that provides integrated management of processes and transactions in real-time. These systems contain lots of information hence require secure authentication. Authentication in this case refers to the process of verifying an entity’s or device’s identity, to allow them access to specific resources upon request. However, there have been security and privacy concerns around ERP systems, where only the traditional authentication method of a username and password is commonly used. A password-based authentication approach has weaknesses that can be easily compromised. Cyber-attacks to access these ERP systems have become common to institutions of higher learning and cannot be underestimated as they evolve with emerging technologies. Some universities worldwide have been victims of cyber-attacks which targeted authentication vulnerabilities resulting in damages to the institutions reputations and credibilities. Thus, this research aimed at establishing authentication methods used for ERPs in Kenyan universities, their vulnerabilities, and proposing a solution to improve on ERP system authentication. The study aimed at developing and validating a multi-factor authentication prototype to improve ERP systems security. Multi-factor authentication which combines several authentication factors such as: something the user has, knows, or is, is a new state-of-the-art technology that is being adopted to strengthen systems’ authentication security. This research used an exploratory sequential design that involved a survey of chartered Kenyan Universities, where questionnaires were used to collect data that was later analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Stratified, random and purposive sampling techniques were used to establish the sample size and the target group. The dependent variable for the study was limited to security rating with respect to realization of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and usability while the independent variables were limited to adequacy of security, authentication mechanisms, infrastructure, information security policies, vulnerabilities, and user training. Correlation and regression analysis established vulnerabilities, information security policies, and user training to be having a higher impact on system security. The three variables hence acted as the basis for the proposed multi-factor authentication framework for improve ERP systems security.
[...] Read more.The usefulness of Collaborative filtering recommender system is affected by its ability to capture users' preference changes on the recommended items during recommendation process. This makes it easy for the system to satisfy users' interest over time providing good and quality recommendations. The Existing system studied fails to solicit for user inputs on the recommended items and it is also unable to incorporate users' preference changes with time which lead to poor quality recommendations. In this work, an Enhanced Movie Recommender system that recommends movies to users is presented to improve the quality of recommendations. The system solicits for users' inputs to create a user profiles. It then incorporates a set of new features (such as age and genre) to be able to predict user's preference changes with time. This enabled it to recommend movies to the users based on users new preferences. The experimental study conducted on Netflix and Movielens datasets demonstrated that, compared to the existing work, the proposed work improved the recommendation results to the users based on the values of Precision and RMSE obtained in this study which in turn returns good recommendations to the users.
[...] Read more.Process Mining (PM) and PM tool abilities play a significant role in meeting the needs of organizations in terms of getting benefits from their processes and event data, especially in this digital era. The success of PM initiatives in producing effective and efficient outputs and outcomes that organizations desire is largely dependent on the capabilities of the PM tools. This importance of the tools makes the selection of them for a specific context critical. In the selection process of appropriate tools, a comparison of them can lead organizations to an effective result. In order to meet this need and to give insight to both practitioners and researchers, in our study, we systematically reviewed the literature and elicited the papers that compare PM tools, yielding comprehensive results through a comparison of available PM tools. It specifically delivers tools’ comparison frequency, methods and criteria used to compare them, strengths and weaknesses of the compared tools for the selection of appropriate PM tools, and findings related to the identified papers' trends and demographics. Although some articles conduct a comparison for the PM tools, there is a lack of literature reviews on the studies that compare PM tools in the market. As far as we know, this paper presents the first example of a review in literature in this regard.
[...] Read more.The perfect alignment between three or more sequences of Protein, RNA or DNA is a very difficult task in bioinformatics. There are many techniques for alignment multiple sequences. Many techniques maximize speed and do not concern with the accuracy of the resulting alignment. Likewise, many techniques maximize accuracy and do not concern with the speed. Reducing memory and execution time requirements and increasing the accuracy of multiple sequence alignment on large-scale datasets are the vital goal of any technique. The paper introduces the comparative analysis of the most well-known programs (CLUSTAL-OMEGA, MAFFT, BROBCONS, KALIGN, RETALIGN, and MUSCLE). For programs’ testing and evaluating, benchmark protein datasets are used. Both the execution time and alignment quality are two important metrics. The obtained results show that no single MSA tool can always achieve the best alignment for all datasets.
[...] Read more.This work presents a parallel implementation of a graph-generating algorithm designed to be straightforwardly adapted to traverse large datasets. This new approach has been validated in a correlated scenario known as the word ladder problem. The new parallel algorithm induces the same topological structure proposed by its serial version and also builds the shortest path between any pair of words to be connected by a ladder of words. The implemented parallelism paradigm is the Multiple Instruction Stream - Multiple Data Stream (MIMD) and the test suite embraces 23-word ladder instances whose intermediate words were extracted from a dictionary of 183,719 words (dataset). The word morph quality (the shortest path between two input words) and the word morph performance (CPU time) were evaluated against a serial implementation of the original algorithm. The proposed parallel algorithm generated the optimal solution for each pair of words tested, that is, the minimum word ladder connecting an initial word to a final word was found. Thus, there was no negative impact on the quality of the solutions comparing them with those obtained through the serial ANG algorithm. However, there was an outstanding improvement considering the CPU time required to build the word ladder solutions. In fact, the time improvement was up to 99.85%, and speedups greater than 2.0X were achieved with the parallel algorithm.
[...] Read more.Web applications are becoming very important in our lives as many sensitive processes depend on them. Therefore, it is critical for safety and invulnerability against malicious attacks. Most studies focus on ways to detect these attacks individually. In this study, we develop a new vulnerability system to detect and prevent vulnerabilities in web applications. It has multiple functions to deal with some recurring vulnerabilities. The proposed system provided the detection and prevention of four types of vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks, remote code execution, and fingerprinting of backend technologies. We investigated the way worked for every type of vulnerability; then the process of detecting each type of vulnerability; finally, we provided prevention for each type of vulnerability. Which achieved three goals: reduce testing costs, increase efficiency, and safety. The proposed system has been validated through a practical application on a website, and experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting and preventing security threats. Our study contributes to the field of security by presenting an innovative approach to addressing security concerns, and our results highlight the importance of implementing advanced detection and prevention methods to protect against potential cyberattacks. The significance and research value of this survey lies in its potential to enhance the security of online systems and reduce the risk of data breaches.
[...] Read more.The numerical value of k in a k-fold cross-validation training technique of machine learning predictive models is an essential element that impacts the model’s performance. A right choice of k results in better accuracy, while a poorly chosen value for k might affect the model’s performance. In literature, the most commonly used values of k are five (5) or ten (10), as these two values are believed to give test error rate estimates that suffer neither from extremely high bias nor very high variance. However, there is no formal rule. To the best of our knowledge, few experimental studies attempted to investigate the effect of diverse k values in training different machine learning models. This paper empirically analyses the prevalence and effect of distinct k values (3, 5, 7, 10, 15 and 20) on the validation performance of four well-known machine learning algorithms (Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN)). It was observed that the value of k and model validation performance differ from one machine-learning algorithm to another for the same classification task. However, our empirical suggest that k = 7 offers a slight increase in validations accuracy and area under the curve measure with lesser computational complexity than k = 10 across most MLA. We discuss in detail the study outcomes and outline some guidelines for beginners in the machine learning field in selecting the best k value and machine learning algorithm for a given task.
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