As the software technology evolves the focus of users are shifting form devices for data or information. This transformation requires reliable and scalable computing paradigms which satisfy the users processing and storage requirements. Service based, distributed, grid and web 2.0 are some of the most famous computing technologies. Conversions are occurring towards less managements and maintenance issues and despite of that the usage experience should be increased. But there are some security concerns like security, access control, privacy & isolation based trusted service delivery raises due to the data in an outsourced environment. Thus, several policies are created to define its boundaries. Also the type of user accessing the data and the service provided by the cloud needs to be verified. Thus the uses trust over the system can go down if the interoperability and security of services are satisfactory. To providing confidentiality to users data encryption is the traditional options which require decryption for reading or retrieving the data. But in outsourced environment the user is frequently accessing its data which may increase the overhead of performing such frequent encryption and then decryptions. Also for performing any operations the data need to be decrypted. It is something treating as a complex usage boundary. Thus, Homomorphic encryption is used to deal with such situations. This paper proposes a novel Third Party and Homomorphic Encryption (TPA-HE) based mechanism for secure computing. In this third party auditor and service provider is used for authentication and authorization of services & user profiles. It has three basic entities TPA, Cloud Service Provider, Encryption & Monitoring service to regularly analyze the security breaches in access & data transfer mechanism. To prove the effectiveness of suggested approach some of the results are taken which are better than the existing mechanism.

Recording of ground motions with high amplitudes of acceleration and velocity play a key role for designing engineering projects. Here we try to represent a reasonable prediction of peak ground acceleration which may create more than gacceleration in different regions. In this study, applying different structures of Neural Networks (NN) and using four key parameters, moment magnitude, rupture distance, site class, and style of faulting which an earthquake may cause serious effects on a site. We introduced a radial basis function network (RBF) with mean error of 0.014, as the best network for estimating the occurrence probability of an earthquake with large value of PGA ≥1g in a region. Also the results of applying back propagation in feed forward neural network (FFBP) show a good coincidence with designed RBF results for predicting high value of PGA, with Mean error of 0.017.

One of the important learning objectives of our bachelor course on “Techniques in Decision Support Systems” is to develop understanding of core decision making process in real-life business situations. The conventional teaching methods are unable to explain complexities of real-life business. Although the classroom discussions can be effective to understand general factors, such as opportunity cost, return on investment, etc. affecting business decisions, the effects of factors like dynamic business environment, incomplete information, time pressure etc. can not be truly explained through such simple discussions. In this paper, we describe our experience of adopting student-centered, role-based, case study to deal with this situation. The interactive case-based study not only provided students with experiential learning, but also gave them liberty to test their thoughts. As a result, we observed improved students’ learning as well as improved grades. In addition, this approach made classes more dynamic and interesting.

Various agile software development methodologies, since their commencement, encouraged the development of high quality software product. Quality of a product is the compelling trait that plays a vital role in any product’s success. Usability engineering and User centered design are user-centered approaches, covering the customer’s concerns. The way these approaches are understood and carried out with agile practices is not properly understood and adopted till now. For software applications to be usable and valuable it is necessary to understand the correct user requirements in order to develop the interface that is usable and valuable to the customer. In this research work, we are discussing the scrum approach of agile development and integrate this with the usability engineering and user centered design approaches which helps the agile development team to understand usability demand of users and develop a product according to their expectations.

A multi-orbit hybrid image encryption scheme based on discrete chaotic dynamical systems is proposed. One generalized Arnold map is adopted to generate three orbits for three initial conditions. Another chaotic dynamical system, tent map, is applied to generate one pseudo-random sequence to determine the hybrid orbit points from which one of the three orbits of generalized Arnold map. The hybrid orbit sequence is then utilized to shuffle the pixels’ positions of plain-image so as to get one permuted image. To enhance the encryption security, two rounds of pixel gray values’ diffusion is employed as well. The proposed encryption scheme is simple and easy to manipulate. The security and performance of the proposed image encryption have been analyzed, including histograms, correlation coefficients, information entropy, key sensitivity analysis, key space analysis, differential analysis, etc. All the experimental results suggest that the proposed image encryption scheme is robust and secure and can be used for secure image and video communication applications.

Medical Image Watermarking has been considered as an appropriate method for enhancing the data security and content verification in medical science. For the purpose of achieving better security it is recommended to hide the data in the medical image itself that will improve the reliability of medical information system. In our paper, the work is divided in two main stages, first of all image is divided into two parts: Region of Interest that is defined as informational part of image and Region of Non Interest that is defined as non-informational part. In our work we have used Region of Non Interest to hide the data so that the informational part of the image kept safe. Watermark is encrypted by using RSA. A Discrete Wavelet Transform based approach is used for embedding the encrypted data in Region of Non Interest part of image for enhancing data security. The experimental result shows that watermark embedded by the proposed algorithm provides better security and can survive successfully under different attacks.

Pioneering ideas from the software engineering discipline have factually affected every sphere of life. Agile software development approach has been promoted since its commencement and stipulates strategies that improve the quality of software product. To consummate fast and reliable development processes, several agile approaches are charted and are quite popular. For quality improvement and to achieve defect free system, the concept of Cleanroom Software Engineering (CSE) is ingrained into agile development life cycle. For embedding users concerns, it is important to distinguish three approaches to quality: Quality of Service (QoS), User-perceived QoP, and Quality of Experience (QoE). QoS is technology centered approach, so by using Incremental Planning of CSE, it shall facilitate the customer’s clarification of system requirements and will control the technical complexity. Usage Specification and Usage Modelling will be used during the Certification phase of CSE which will help to achieve QoP and QoE, being user centered approaches. Results collected from Survey conducted, explains above mentioned factors improvement.

Job scheduling is one of the thrust research area in the discipline of Grid computing. Scheduling in the Grid environment is not only complicated but also known to be NP-Complete problem and that is all due to its unique characteristics. Thus, there are limited opportunities to find an optimal solution. In recent past, many eminent researchers reported a variety of Scheduling Heuristics that can have a substantial impact on the performance of the Grid systems. Unfortunately, it gives rise to difficulty in evaluating and keeping track of those solutions. Therefore, the motivation of this comprehensive study is to present firstly, an in-depth review of the topic under discussion mostly in the perspective of Grid Scheduling environment, and secondly, a proposal for a new state-of-the-art classification of the existing Scheduling Heuristics. All these Heuristics in each category have been further studied based on significant parameters frequently used in Scheduling Heuristics. The final part of this study includes a fair assessment of those mostly used dominating parameters. This report deals with the key concepts behind existing Scheduling Heuristics including Objectives, Types of Job Scheduling, Functionality of Grid, Nature of Grid, and the importance of the proposed classification.