Hazrina Hassan

The use of mobile phones by older adults: a Malaysian study

Mobile phone has become essential parts of personal and business life. The recent growth of mobile phone usage is an observable fact that crosses all age and gender boundaries. It can potentially play a significant role in assisting older people in many ways especially in terms of maintaining social relationship, providing sense of safety and accessibility. However, older people seem to be a neglected user group in the design of mobile phone devices and services. Hence, this paper attempts to report the issues which are related with the design of mobile devices and services for older people aged 56 years old and over in Malaysia. The findings may serve as a reference to mobile device manufacturers and service providers when designing mobile devices and services for older Malaysians. This research uses a survey instrument to gather data from older peoples across all the states in Malaysia with the total of 176 older peoples responded. The questionnaires were mainly distributed to older persons who use mobile phones independently in their daily routines

Incorporating software agents in automated personal software process (PSP) tools

The PSP-Expert Visualization Agent (EVA) is designed for software engineers specifically to introduce the agent-oriented concept, as well as to automate all the processes and fields involved in PSP. Currently, some developers of PSP automated tools include the agents element in their system that focuses on sensor-based tracking of lines of code. However, none of them fully utilize this element for other purposes or provide the agent with a personal assistant for the software engineer. This sensor-based tracking is limited to Eclipse environments such as Java and is not compatible with the use of web platforms as a PSP automated tool. The PSP-EVA system is required to perform several tasks. There are three agents that exist within the system: Interface Agent (IA), TaskAgent (TA), and SearchAgent (SA). By incorporating the multi-software agent in this automation system, PSP-EVA is able to have ready-access to applications and also to provide a visual representation of performance to the user. Additionally, evaluation of software engineers and team performance can be easily derived and evaluated statistically.

Thread-Level Parallelism & Shared-Memory Pool Techniques for Authorization of Credit Card System

Nowadays, credit card is a famous trend used by millions of people around the world as a form of payment. This paper presented an architectural framework and prototype of credit card authorization system using thread-level parallelism and shared memory pool techniques in order to support dynamic tuning of the size of the thread pool at runtime. Normally, single threaded were chosen by software developer in current credit card authorization whereby authentication process takes longer time to respond and its limitation of handling huge number of simultaneous transactions at the same time. As a result, the performance of the authorization system was affected during peak hours. Through thread-level parallelism technique or usually known as multi-threading, each worker thread will be assigned with several child threads to perform online fraud validation concurrently, depending on numbers of cryptographic elements presented in transaction message while the work thread itself performed card restriction validation based on the card information stored in cards shared memory pool.