Nashwa Abdelbaki

Performance evaluation and comparison of the top market virtualization hypervisors

The virtualization of IT infrastructure enables the consolidation and pooling of IT resources so that they can be shared over diverse applications to offset the limitation of shrinking resources and growing business needs. It provides a logical abstraction of physical computing resources and creates computing environments that are not restricted by physical configuration or implementation. Virtualization is very important for cloud computing because the delivery of services is simplified by providing a platform for optimizing complex IT resources in a scalable manner, which makes cloud computing more cost effective. Hypervisor plays an important role in the virtualization of hardware. It is a piece of software that provides a virtualized hardware environment to support running multiple operating systems concurrently using one physical server. The hypervisor type introduces significant impacts on the virtualization environment performance. The intent of this paper is to quantitatively and qualitatively compare the performance of the latest shipping versions of the VMware ESXi5, Citrix Xen Server 6.0.2 and Hyper-Hyper-V2008R2 Hypervisors at time of this study using customized SQL instance as workload simulating real life situations. This Paper helps both IT decision makers and end users to choose the right virtualization hypervisor and their readiness for enterprise datacenters and cloud infrastructure.

Cluster Head election in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a collection of cheap, easy to deploy Sensor nodes arranged together to fulfill a specific purpose (monitoring, tracking ...etc.). A WSN network is composed of a Base Station (BS) and collection of sensors. There are a lot of approaches for the network construction. Amongst them is the hierarchical structure, where the network is divided into clusters and the node inside this cluster communicates with BS through a chosen leader called Cluster Head (CH). In this paper, we present cluster-Head election algorithms for WSNs. We will discuss the operations of these algorithms, and compare their performance.

Vision capabilities for a humanoid robot tutoring biology

Robots are expected to be the future solution in various fields. One of these fields is education. Teachers, students and robots have to work together to make this assumption true. For this, robots must have the adequate capabilities that can help them succeed. Vision of the robot is an essential tool that the robot uses to perform several tasks. Hence, it has to be taken into consideration, the steps and the expectations for this robot vision system to surpass at least the very basic skills. Detection, recognition, and localization are the basic skills that we are implementing in our experiment. To test our system we used the robot as a tutor in biology teaching and evaluating approach.

Innovative human-robot interaction for a robot tutor in biology game

Robots nowadays, are introduced to many domains and fields. One of these fields is education. We introduce integrating robots and games in education. We have designed a humanoid robot tutoring biology. Our robot is interacting with a student to play a game to enhance and examine the students knowledge. In our game, we developed cognitive capabilities for the robot. We analyzed the features that both the robot and the game have to possess, and we developed a system for organ detection and recognition with the highest possible accuracy and lowest processing time. Our game introduces a multi-theme education rather than the nowadays existing subject oriented learning. Multi-theme learning, in our opinion, helps students digest different subjects and sciences concurrently and prepares them for problem solving environments having multiple inputs and considerations.

Towards IT-Legal Framework for Cloud Computing

As the common understanding of Cloud Computing is continuously evolving, the terminology and concepts used to define it often need clarifying. Therefore, Cloud customers and Cloud Providers are used to dispute about Service Level Agreements, Service Level Objectives and Quality of Service. Simultaneously, SLAs/SLOs/QoS represent other related technical problems such as Security, Privacy, Compliancy and others. Technical problems are usually defined within technical context, where both parties ignore analyzing problem’s legally related causes. In fact, these problems are stemming from the mapping and translating of surrounding laws and regulations into technical terms. In this paper we propose an IT based Legal Framework for Cloud Computing. It helps Cloud customers and Cloud Providers to avoid having such problems. Also it manages the interlocks in the gray area between the IT department and the legal department via setting clear boundaries, resolving conflict of interests and offering segregation of duties.

VoIP performance evaluation over IPv4-6 and manually configured tunnels

IPv4 address space is exhausted. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed IPv6 -the upgrade of IPv4- to satisfy the continual increase of the IP address needs. The Internet is so ramified and enormous that the complete transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is slow. Therefore, their coexistence is inevitable. Manually configured tunnels are an important solution to allow this co-existence that allows transmitting native IPv6 packets over IPv4 networks. Meanwhile, VoIP is also gaining momentum with expectation to occupy considerable percentage of Internet traffic. In this paper, we compare the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network performance delivering Real-Time Quality-of-Service over manually configured tunnels versus conventional IPv4 and IPv6 networks. The measurements are collected out of probing a single call transferred over a network congested with HTTP, FTP or Video. The comparison performance criteria are jitter, network delay, throughput and packet loss percentage. Also the call user satisfaction is assessed by Mean Opinion Score.

Experimental Digital Forensics of Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) Card

SIM cards as part of smart cards are considered one of the elements found in every mobile phone either smartphone or not. They are used to communicate through the telephone network. SIM cards can be used to track the mobile or to extract user’s data like SMS or phonebook. Moreover, criminal cases involving mobile phone activities are increasing. Therefore, mobile security and analysis is important during the investigation.

A Postmortem Forensic Analysis for a JavaScript Based Attack

Nowadays, users and corporates are more and more connected to the web. User accesses her/his sensitive business/non-business applications using a web browser. There are numerous browsers’ based attacks and many of them are implemented using JavaScript. One of these attacks is Drive-by-Download. Security researchers introduced several tools and techniques to detect and/or prevent this serious attack. Few address the browser forensics to identify the attack traces/evidences and reconstruct the executed events of a downloaded malicious content. In this study, we introduce a postmortem forensic methodology that investigates a web browser subjected to Drive-by-Download attack. We develop a Firefox browser extension (FEPFA) to delve into the malicious URLs. The developed system is tested on malicious web pages and successfully identifies the digital evidences of the attack. The majority of the collected evidences were non-volatile evidences that could assist forensic investigator in the postmortem analysis.

Behaviorally-Based Textual Similarity Engine for Matching Job-Seekers with Jobs

Understanding both of job-seekers and employers behavior in addition to analyzing the text of job-seekers and job profiles are two important missions for the e-recruitment industry. They are important tasks for matching job-seekers with jobs to find the top relevant suggestions for each job-seeker. Recommender systems, information retrieval and text mining are originally targeted to assist users and provide them with useful information, which makes human-computer interaction plays a fundamental role in the users’ acceptance of the produced suggestions. We introduce our intelligent framework to help build the knowledge required to produce the most relevant jobs based on processing each job-seeker profile’s text, the behaviorally collected text and the jobs’ profile content. We analyzed the available textual similarity scoring algorithms to find the best suitable relevancy ranking model which is plugged into our developed textual similarity engine. The main purpose is enhancing the recommendation quality in the challenging domain of e-recruitment by finding the textually similar jobs for each job-seeker profile.

Hybrid Information Filtering Engine for Personalized Job Recommender System

The recommendation system, also known as recommender system or recommendation engine/platform, is considered as an interdisciplinary field. It uses the techniques of more than one field. Recommender system inherits approaches from all of machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, information filtering and human-computer interaction. In this paper, we propose our value-added architecture of the hybrid information filtering engine for job recommender system (HIFE-JRS). We discuss our developed system’s components to filter the most relevant information and produce the most personalized content to each user. The basic idea of recommender systems is to recommend items for users to suit their interests. Similarly the project tends to recommend relevant jobs for job-seekers by utilizing the concepts of recommender systems, information retrieval and data mining. The project solves the problem of flooding job-seekers with thousands of irrelevant jobs which is a frustrating and time-wasting process to let job-seekers rely on their limited searching abilities to dig into tons of jobs for finding the right job.