Ahmad Zaki Abu Bakar

Strategies for community based crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is about outsourcing a task or job to group of people or community, whereas community based crowdsourcing involve the community members in the early stage of planning and design to the implementation. The main motivation of writing this paper is to identify strategies that could be used in crowdsourcing projects. Study need to be done on how to maintain the crowd and how to get new people to join the crowd Therefore, in this paper, the strategies on how to encourage or motivate community members to contribute are identified.

Comparative performance of TCP variants on self-similar traffic

Network traffic of Internet will continue to expand in terms of both volume and users, and transmission control protocol (TCP) is accounting for more than 90% the Internet traffic. In addition to this, it is well known that Internet traffic exhibits self-similarity, which cannot be described by traditional Markovian models such as the Poisson process. In this paper we focus on experimental quantitative comparisons of four TCP variants namely Tahoe, NewReno, Vegas, and SACK running over self-similar traffic. With the aid of network simulator, NS2, aggregated network traffic of self-similarity behavior is simulated and will act as the background traffic. The impact of one TCP microflow will be observed, and data analysis such packets dropped, packets retransmitted, throughput, and the behavior of the data received over time is analyzed. In measuring the degree of self-similarity we employed optimization method to determine Hurst parameter, H. From our analysis, Vegas out performed other TCP variants at high traffic load and all TCP variants tend to demonstrate self-similar traffic flow even though initially the departure rate of TCP packets is constant.

The forgotten majority of computing have-nots

People have falsely regarded the computing working environment as dedicated to the confines of a building with availability of electricity, high-speed info-structure, and the latest computer technology. In reality, there are many computing have-nots in the real world living in challenged computing environments. Current computing curricula are designed to prepare graduates for more urban and best-case business scenarios where learning takes place within campus boundaries. To prepare computing graduates better to survive in harsh environments and to contribute meaningfully to society, their learning should also take place out of the classroom and into challenged computing environments where active and experiential learning could take place. Confronted with the harsh realities of life, students learn quickly to adapt themselves for survival and for their future career. Many generic skills can be reinforced here to make computing graduates more versatile, entrepreneurial, effective, and ever ready to face the real world.

Proposed emergency incident management using Extreme Project Management

Accidents are unpredictable and unexpected but trigger a certain level of emergency. During an emergency, the situation is chaotic, risky and unknown. Managing an emergency require a different approach compared to traditional methods of managing day to day situations. In the framework proposed, an emergency is viewed as an extreme project. Hence, this paper proposes the use of Extreme Project Management (XPM) as the methodology for managing minor outdoor emergency incidents through a mobile application. Confronted by an emergency, the application user is guided to act accordingly based on the programmed scenarios. Currently we have programmed a few emergency scenarios and the XPM is able to handle the incidents better than traditional methods.

The Sign Tales of Hurst Parameter: A Revisit

Network traffic measurement studies have shown the presence of self-similar behavior in both local area and wide area traffic traces. In this study we investigated the magnitude of the self-similarity behavior of network traffic and its Hurst measurement, H. Our study has revealed several characteristics of H based on the network traffic changes. From the finding, H can be used as traffic load indicated only if the sampling size is large. On the other hand for a smaller sampling size, H can be used to indicate the change in traffic pattern. However network traffic does not always exhibit self-similarity property. Activities such as peer-to-peer can steer the traffic to lose this property.