Emmanuel R. Adagunodo

Theory, Practice and Policy: An Inquiry into the Uptake of HCI Practices in the Software Industry of a Developing Country

ABSTRACT With almost four decades of existence as a community, human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has yet to diffuse into a large range of software industries globally. A review of existing literature suggests that the diffusion of HCI practices in software organizations lacks theoretical guidance. Although many studies have tried to facilitate HCI uptake by the software industry, there are scarce studies that consider HCI practices as innovations that software organizations could or should adopt. Furthermore, there appears to be a lack of structure in the facilitation of HCI methodological development within the specialized emerging regions field such as Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to address this gap, an exploratory investigation regarding the state of uptake of HCI practices in Nigeria is conducted. The aim of this article is to improve our understanding regarding the state of HCI uptake in developing countries and the challenges prevailing. The findings show that HCI practice still remains within its infancy stage in most software companies. Universities are also lacking the required knowledge transfer of HCI to the students, and in effect themselves contributing to the lack of HCI skills in industry. Furthermore, government policies are in need of refinement and end-users’ involvement in software development is not prioritized.

Improving Prioritized Handover Performance for Mobile WiMAX by Dynamic Guard Channel Allocation and RSS Quality Factor

In cellular communication, guard channel has been used to provide priority to ongoing call traffic crossing cell boundaries in handover process but the major concern is that most guard channel allocation scheme are fixed channels. System congestion problems arising from traffic pattern in the real world is another major concern relating to fixed allocation of guard channels let alone the huge traffic that will emanate from user mobility in the envisaged converged traffic of 4G networks. Hence, dynamic guard channel (DGC) allocation based on traffic intensity or channel utilization of each traffic type was used in this research and it reduced the new call blocking probability better than the fixed prioritized guard channel (PGC) and non-prioritized channel allocation scheme. Its performance in terms of call dropping probability reduction is comparable with the PGC and slightly better off at poor signal condition. It was revealed that DGC averaged QoS better than the existing channel assignment schemes. An investigation into the RSS quality factor (QF) proposed also, showed that at high quality RSS the blocking and dropping probability of the traffic were reduced for the Mobile WiMAX wireless technology network with mobile assisted handover.

HCI Practices in the Nigerian Software Industry

In this paper we explore the state of HCI practices in the Nigerian software industry. Our societies have evolved quickly into an information age, and the criticality of software and humans as components of socio-technical systems becomes more worthy to address. In Nigeria, the level of HCI practices is not yet known. We understand clearly, the role of software systems and services to strengthen information societies, and we decided to run a survey of the local software organizations. The results from the survey indicate some level of HCI awareness. Therefore, we conducted some semi-structured interviews in order to deepen our understanding of HCI practices in the industry. The results show there is a knowledge limit regarding HCI practices in the industry. We present a preliminary report of the results obtained from our studies of software organizations in Nigeria.

Optimizing Bandwidth Usage and Response Time Using Lightweight Agents on Data Communication Network

In this paper we propose light-weight-agent as an efficient and effective tool for implementing data communication network bandwidth optimization and response time. The routing model for the agents is based on TSP algorithms. Performance comparison was carried out among RPC, Single Mobile Agent and tiny agents otherwise referred to as lightweight agents on the basis of bandwidth usage and response time. The performance evaluation shows the superiority of lightweight agents over the other schemes in terms of bandwidth usage and the response time.

Empirical Study On Information And Communication Technology And Youth In A Developing Country: Nigeria As A Case

The phenomenal growth of information and communication technology (ICT) especially the Internet has affected youths in developed and developing countries alike. Although progressing at a slower rate in developing countries than in any other parts of the world, Internet connectivity is also transforming the face of Africa.This paper presents a study that examines what Nigerian youths use Internet for and which of the Internet use has adverse effect on the youths social life. It reveals that majority of youths use Internet for e-mail, making use of Yahoo followed by Hotmail, and the study also reveals that over 50% of youths interviewed visit pornographic sites.

RESTORING TONE-MARKS IN STANDARD YORÙBÁ ELECTRONIC TEXT: IMPROVED MODEL

Diacritic Restoration is a necessity in the processing of languages with Latinbased scripts that utilizes letters outside the basic Latin alphabet used by English language. Yoruba is one such languages, marking underdot (dot-below)on three characters and tone marks on all seven vowels and two syllabic nasals. The problem of restoring underdotted characters has been fairly addressed using character as linguistic units for restoration. However, the existing characterbased approaches and word-based approach has not been able to sufficiently address restoration of tone marks in Yoruba. We address in this study tone marks restoration as a subset of diacritic restoration. We proposed using the syllable (derived from word) as the linguistic token for tone marks restoration. In our experimental setup, we used Yoruba text collected from various sources as data with total word count of 250,336 words. These words, on syllabification, yielded 464,274 syllables. The syllables were divided into training and testing data in different proportions ranging from 99% used for training and 1% used for testing to 70% used for training and 30% used for testing. The aim of evaluation different proportions was to determine how the ratio of training-to-test data affect the variations that may occur in the result. We applied Memory-based learning to train the models. We also set up a similar experiment using character token to be able to compare the performance. The result showed that using syllable was able to increase accuracy at word level to 96.23% and an average of almost 15% over that gotten from using character. We also found out that using 75% of data for training and the remaining 25% for testing gives the results with the least variation in a ten-fold cross validation test. Hybridizing the syllable „based approach with other methods like lexicon lookup might likely lead to improvement over the current result.

Effect of Increasing Buffer Size on Prioritized Guard Channels with Queue during Call Traffic Congestion

Prioritized guard channel (PGC) assignment with queue was designed to reduce call dropping probability associated with a base station congested with handover call traffic. The Markov chain was used in the analysis of the PGC scheme and queuing discipline was FIFO for a PGC+MAHO scheme. Simulation was carried out using MATLAB. The results showed that increasing buffer size reduces call dropping probability which becomes discontinuous at some value of traffic arrival rate for each buffer size. It was found out that some queuing parameters such as queue product form becomes undefined at an arrival rate for a large buffer size. This limits the extent to which buffer size can be increased. System computational speed was also a contributory factor.

Performance Evaluation of Dynamic Guard Channels Assignment with Queue and Prioritized Schemes

It has been said that dynamic guard channel (DGC) assignment scheme based on traffic intensities averages QoS and performs better than the prioritized guard channel assignment scheme with queue (QPGC) during traffic congestion. This work has extended the investigation to DGC with queue (QDGC) and carried out its comparison with other call traffic channel assignment schemes. Mathematical analysis of the models was done using Markov chain and simulation was carried out in MATLAB. When traffic arrival rates were symmetric, the QPGC had the lower call blocking probability than the QDGC but became the same when the system was congested. However, the performance of the two queuing schemes was the same when handover call traffic was more than new calls traffic.

Analytical Modelling of Fluid Credit Congestion Control Scheme in MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) Networks

The service needs of the present and future Internet requires Quality of Service (QoS) provisions and Traffic Engineering (TE) with minimal congestion capabilities. Congestion is a common feature of networks caused by low bandwidth, buffer overflow etc. Internetworks have grown colossally from delivering best effort QoS services to support new traffic classes which require minimal delay and high throughput with more variations in load. This created the need for effective traffic management with the required QoS. MPLS, a label swapping and connection-oriented switching mechanism with high-performance offers new possibilities with its cutting-edge traffic control mechanisms but not without the need to manage congestion. This proposal presents a fluid credit congestion control scheme which manages traffic in MPLS internetwork and predicts congestion.

Item's Characterization for Model's Development in Information Retrieval System Evaluation

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of Item’s Characterization (IC) in the search for usable measures for use at the user-centered level of the evaluation of IR systems. However, after identifying items for use to assess measures either to evaluate the system or propose them for use in the system’s evaluation as done in this study, it is appropriate to adequately characterize the items using the right method. The survey and Factor Analytic (FA) methods were used in this experiment. Results obtained from the experiment underscored the robustness of the concept of IC as well as the FA method used. It also showed that both IC and FA will impact on the process of IR system evaluation especially from user’s perspective. But a larger sample size and a parallel method of data collection are required for future study, in order to further confirm the model’s validity.