Abdulrahman A. Mirza

Students’ Perceived Barriers to In-Class Participation in a Distributed and Gender Segregated Educational Environment

Education in Saudi Arabia has always been segregated based on gender as a result of the close governmental and societal adherence to Islamic traditions. This segregation causes a problem at the level of higher education due to the shortage of female faculty throughout the country. This problem has lead to the adaptation of several techniques by which higher‐level education is delivered to female students by male faculty. This paper presents a modern approach for course delivery adopted by a new Saudi University that combines old techniques with modern telecommunications technologies. This approach makes use of smart classrooms in delivering courses by male instructors to both male and female students in separate but adjacent lecture halls. One of the main goals for conducting this study was the authors perceived low‐level in‐class participation by female students in one of the courses of the Masters of Health Informatics program offered by the new University. This paper aims to present the perceptions of students regarding this modern approach of education. It also seeks to determine whether the presence (listening‐in) of students of the opposite gender plays a major role in limiting students’ level of in‐class participation. Findings of this study show that students in general are favorable of the modern course delivery approach, and that the greater barrier to participation had more to do with the technology rather than the presence of members of the opposite gender.

MR imaging enhancement and segmentation of tumor using fuzzy curvelet

Medical image segmentation is a very important issue in medical imaging. An automatic brain MR image segmentation method has been proposed for tumor detection in this paper. Discretize local window and wrapping based Curvelet transform has been used to remove rician noise. A modified fuzzy C-mean algorithm is used for segmentation of brain MR image. Proposed system has been tested on different datasets of MR Images. Proposed system performs well on all types of MR images including T1, T2 and PD brain MR images. Key words:

Information Assurance in Saudi Organizations – An Empirical Study

This paper presents selective results of a survey conducted to find out the much needed insight into the status of information security in Saudi Arabian organizations. The purpose of this research is to give the state of information assurance in the Kingdom and to better understand the prevalent ground realities. The survey covered technical aspects of information security, risk management and information assurance management. The results provide deep insights in to the existing level of information assurance in various sectors that can be helpful in better understanding the intricate details of the prevalent information security in the Kingdom. Also, the results can be very useful for information assurance policy makers in the government as well as private sector organizations. There are few empirical studies on information assurance governance available in literature, especially about the Middle East and Saudi Arabia, therefore, the results are invaluable for information security researchers in improving the understanding of information assurance in this region and the Kingdom.

Research area classification using wikipedia and information retrieval

The research areas1 of researchers can be identified using their publication that reflects their current interest. However, the full text of these publications is not always available. Other data regarding these publications, such as titles, are available in many bibliographic databases, but these data are usually short, sparse, and multidimensional. In this paper, we propose an approach for identifying the research areas of faculty members using some of their publication, information retrieval and Wikipedia content. Wikipedia is one of the largest encyclopedias to date. It is collaboratively written and kept up to date. A prototype system was implemented and evaluated using real data. Accuracy of 89.3% was achieved. The results are encouraging and show that keywords achieve the highest accuracy in identifying research areas.

E-commerce alarming security symptoms review and discussion of attacks indicators in e-commerce

The research in the field of e-commerce security and cyber frauds is continually arising. Many measures were taken to facilitate dealing with security attacks to protect the e-commerce system as a whole. However, most of these measures work only after the attack took place. In this research, we take a new approach in identifying some symptoms relating to the e-commerce website, web-server or network that might be an alarming indicator that the e-commerce system is at risk. The correlation of the existence of these symptoms with security attacks is relatively high as we show in this study and is highly crucial for e-commerce websites operators to protect their e-commerce system as a whole. The preliminary contribution of this paper is being one of the first to investigate such alarming symptoms in the field of e-commerce to ultimately detect vulnerabilities causing security breaches to the e-commerce system before their occurrence.

Advertisement Through the Most Popular Twitter Users Based on Followers in Saudi Arabia

Advertising is a major commercial activity in the Internet. Nowadays, online social networks present a new way of disseminating advertisements. This new way is considered the fastest way to reach large groups of customers. Even so, there has been little research focus on advertising through users in social networks. In this research paper, a focus was made on one of today’s most popular social networks which is Twitter. Our intention is to assess the extent of the utilization of the most followed Saudi Arabian Twitter users in making advertisements. This study employs a survey method that measures the paper goal.

An Investigation on User Preferences of Mobile Commerce Interface Design in Saudi Arabia

Mobile commerce user interface has different issues affecting overall attitude towards the participation in mobile commerce shopping. There is a lack in the literature that has identified problems, elements, and characteristics of user interface preferences in mobile commerce from the Saudi Arabian customers’ point of view. Although some research has proposed user interface frameworks and models, the problem is in the incompatibility of these current models to the new era of mobile technology especially in Saudi Arabia. In addition, the new platforms of smartphones have the ability to adapt with user’s needs which add a kind of challenge for mobile commerce developers. In this paper, we will present a framework consisting of basic elements for successful Mobile commerce interface design. Methodology used in collecting users’ requirements and preferences was conducted by distributing a questionnaire to a group of people from Saudi Arabia who are active mobile commerce shoppers.

When Sentry Goes Stealing: An Information Systems Security Case Study in Behavioural Context

In this paper we describe a case where the top management of a small holding company is involved in a love-hate relationship with its own IT department. The top management firmly believes that IT staff is involved in leaking out company’s secrets. However, having no expertise in IT and even lesser grasp on the complexity of IT architecture resulting from recent mergers and acquisition, the top management finds itself crucially dependent on its IT systems, yet unable to trust them fully. The theories of deterrence and reasoned action are used to explain the otherwise objectionable behaviour of the perpetrator.

Efficient Securing of Iris Image Template by Using Grayscale Level Incremented/Decremented Method

The proposed techniques in the paper is based on grayscale level incremented/decremented method. In this paper we used CASIA dataset for experimentation. Efficient results were achieved with respect to image hiding validated by entropy. Graphical results are also shown at the end to visualize our results.

Enhanced Technique for Secure Wireless Sensor Routing with Respect to Energy Conservation

This paper presents a routing protocol architecture based on recursive group algorithm. This algorithm apply Group Verification Tree approach which makes the sensor network secure and make it safer from malicious intrusions and illegitimate users. The proposed approach will give a new dimension to the fast and secure routing in the sensor networks with less energy to be consumed. Based on the analysis and simulation the proposed strategies yield better results than the existing results.