The field of using Data Mining (DM) techniques in educational environments is typically identified as Educational Data Mining (EDM). EDM is rapidly becoming an important field of research due to its ability to extract valuable knowledge from various educational datasets. During the past decade, an increasing interest has arisen within many practical studies to study and analyze educational data especially students’ performance. The performance of students plays a vital role in higher education institutions. In keeping with this, there is a clear need to investigate factors influencing students’ performance. This study was carried out to identify the factors affecting students’ academic performance. K-means and X-means clustering techniques were applied to analyze the data to find the relationship of the students' performance with these factors. The study finding includes a set of the most influencing personal and social factors on the students’ performance such as parents’ occupation, parents’ qualification, and income rate. Furthermore, it is contributing to improving the education quality, as well as, it motivates educational institutions to benefit and discover the unseen patterns of knowledge in their students' accumulated data. 

Code smells are the indicators of the flaws in the design and development phases that decrease the maintainability and reusability of a system. A system with uneven distribution of responsibilities among the classes is generated by one of the most hazardous code smells called God Class. To address this threatening issue, an extract class refactoring technique is proposed that incorporates both cohesion and contextual aspects of a class. In this work, greater emphasis was provided on the code documentation to extract classes with higher contextual similarity. Firstly, the source code is analyzed to generate a set of cluster of extracted methods. Secondly, another set of clusters is generated by analyzing code documentation. Then, merging these two, a final cluster set is formed to extract the God Class. Finally, an automatic refactoring approach is also followed to build newly identified classes. Using two different metrics, a comparative result analysis is provided where it is shown that the cohesion among the classes is increased if the context is added in the refactoring process. Moreover, a manual inspection is conducted to ensure that the methods of the refactored classes are contextually organized. This recommendation of God Class extraction can significantly help the developers in minimizing the burden of refactoring on own their own and maintaining the software systems.

Information security threats exploit vulnerabilities in communication networks. Remote access vulnerabilities are evident from the point of communication initialization following the communication channel to data or resources being accessed. These threats differ depending on the type of device used to procure remote access. One kind of these remote access devices can be considered as safe as the organization probably issues it to provide for remote access. The other type is risky and unsafe, as they are beyond the organization’s control and monitoring. The myriad of devices is, however, a necessary evil, be it employees on public networks like cyber cafes, wireless networks, vendors support, or telecommuting. Virtual Private Network (VPN) securely connects a remote user or device to an internal or private network using the internet and other public networks. However, this conventional remote access security approach has several vulnerabilities, which can take advantage of encryption. The significant threats are malware, botnets, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Because of the nature of a VPN, encryption will prevent traditional security devices such as a firewall, Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and antivirus software from detecting compromised traffic. These vulnerabilities have been exploited over time by attackers using evasive techniques to avoid detection leading to costly security breaches and compromises. We highlight numerous shortcomings for several conventional approaches to remote access security. We then adopt network tiers to facilitate vulnerability management (VM) in remote access domains. We perform regular traffic simulation using Network Security Simulator (NeSSi2) to set bandwidth baseline and use this as a benchmark to investigate malware spreading capabilities and DDoS attacks by continuous flooding in remote access. Finally, we propose a novel approach to remote access security by passive learning of packet capture file features using machine learning and classification using a classifier model.

Accurate mobility prediction enables efficient and faster paging services in these networks. This in turn facilitates the attainment of higher bandwidths and execution of activities such as handovers at low latencies. The conventional mobility prediction models operate on unrealistic assumptions that make them unsuitable for cellular network mobile station tracking. For instance, the Feynman-Verlet, first order kinetic model and Random Waypoint assume that mobile phones move with constant velocity while Manhattan, Freeway, city area, street unit, obstacle mobility, and pathway mobility postulate that mobile station movement is restricted along certain paths. In addition, obstacle mobility model speculate that the mobile station signal is completely absorbed by an obstacle while random walk, random waypoint, Markovian random walk, random direction, shortest path model, normal walk, and smooth random assume that a mobile station can move in any direction. Moreover, the greatest challenge of the random direction model is the requirement that a border behavior model be specified for the reaction of mobile stations reaching the simulation area boundary. In this paper, a protocol that addresses the border behavior problem is developed. This protocol is shown to detect when the subscriber has moved out of the current tracking area, which is crucial during handovers.

Geospatial imaging technique has opened a door for researchers to implement multiple beneficial applications in many fields, including military investigation, disaster relief, and urban traffic control. As the resolution of geospatial images has increased in recent years, the detection of geospatial objects has attracted a lot of researchers. Mask R-CNN had been designed to identify an object outlines at the pixel level (instance segmentation), and for object detection in natural images. This study describes the Mask R-CNN model and uses it to detect objects in geospatial images. This experiment was prepared an existing dataset to be suitable with object segmentation, and it shows that Mask R-CNN also has the ability to be used in geospatial object detection and it introduces good results to extract the ten classes dataset of Seg-VHR-10.