Rohiza Ahmad

An improved security framework for data warehouse: A hybrid approach

The implementation of data warehouses (DWs) for the huge databases has become one of the major needs of the current times. Large organizations having different small databases need a proper integration of their small databases and development of data warehouses. The development of data warehouse for an organization helps in storing the statistical information that can be helpful in decision making process later on. This statistical information needs to be stored with proper security and confidentiality. At the same time, this information also needs to be readily available to all authorized users, in order to ensure the accuracy and consistency of data. Though, so far, a lot of work has been done towards the development of data warehouses, but not much attention has been given towards improved and optimal implementation of security measures in data warehouses. This paper highlights some of the security approaches, like classical security models and implementation of filter over data before they are kept in statistical form in a data warehouse. The comparison of these approaches and introduction of a hybrid approach of the security implementation in data warehouses is the main focus of this paper.

Usability study of mobile learning course content application as a revision tool

Mobile learning (m-learning) is a learning tool in which it can be operated on mobile devices. Mobile System Analysis and Design (MOSAD) have been developed with the content of a topic from the System Analysis and Design (SAD) course conducted at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP). This paper presents the results of usability study that has been conducted for MOSAD application. Two methods of usability test have been used; questionnaire and observation. Both methods have been chosen in order to get more reliable data of usability since both results will support each other. The usability questionnaire has been distributed to 66 students from SAD course whereas 12 of them were chosen to participate in usability observation. There are five usability factors involved in this usability test; consistency, learnability, flexibility, minimal action and minimal memory load. The usability questionnaire result shows that all tested usability factors have been given the score of 3.5 and above which is higher than Likert scale mean (2.5). Besides, the usability observation result has supported the result of usability questionnaire which indicates that the MOSAD application usability level is good and it can be a useful revision tool for the students of higher education.

Mobile learning course content application as a revision tool: The effectiveness and usability

The use of mobile phone technologies in the education sector is getting more attention nowadays. This is due to the advancement of technologies equipped in majority of the mobile phones which makes the devices become more capable of supporting the learning and teaching activities. Mobile learning (m-learning) is a learning tool which can be run on mobile devices. Mobile System Analysis and Design (MOSAD) has been developed with the content of a topic from the System Analysis and Design (SAD) course conducted at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP). This paper presents the results of the testings conducted for MOSAD application. A heuristic test involving 5 experts in the area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) was conducted after the first version of MOSAD was completed to strengthen its functionality and usability. Then, Post Test Quasi Experimental Design (QED) was conducted to 116 UTP second year students who took the SAD course to test the effectiveness and usability of MOSAD after it has been revised. The results show that the students who had used MOSAD (66 out of the 116 students) as their revision tool for answering ten quiz questions performed better the other group of students (50 out of the 116 students) who used traditional methods of revision. The usability test was adopted from Purdue Usability Testing tested on consistency, learnability, flexibility, minimal action and minimal memory load of MOSAD. Both results indicate that MOSAD is effective and usable as a revision tool for the higher education students.

A semi-apriori algorithm for discovering the frequent itemsets

Mining the frequent itemsets are still one of the data mining research challenges. Frequent itemsets generation produce extremely large numbers of generated itemsets that make the algorithms inefficient. The reason is that the most traditional approaches adopt an iterative strategy to discover the itemsets, thats require very large process. Furthermore, the present mining algorithms cannot perform efficiently due to high and repeatedly database scan. In this paper we introduce a new binary-based Semi-Apriori technique that efficiently discovers the frequent itemsets. Extensive experiments had been carried out using the new technique, compared to the existing Apriori algorithms, a tentative result reveal that our technique outperforms Apriori algorithm in terms of execution time.

A review in feature extraction approach in question classification using Support Vector Machine

Text classification which is an integral part of text mining has caught much attention in various industries and fields recently. The ability is in assigning text documents to one or more pre-defined categories based on content similarity. While most of application of text classification focuses on document level, question classification works at much granular level such as sentence and phrase. There have been numerous studies on question classification in accordance to Bloom taxonomy in assessments to measure cognitive level of learners in higher learning institutions. But it has not been effective yet to resolve overlapping issue of Bloom taxonomy verb keywords being assigned to more than one category of Bloom taxonomy. The presence of this poses a problem in respect of classifying a particular question into a right category of Bloom taxonomy. And feature extraction plays an important role in improving the accuracy of classifier such as Support Vector Machine in question classification. Much of the past related research work focus on feature extraction methods such as bag of word (BOW) and syntactic analysis to classify questions and to address the issue, an improvement in feature extraction is needed. In view of this, this study proposes an integrated approach in feature extraction involving semantic aspect in classifying questions in accordance to Bloom taxonomy. Support Vector Machine classifier is used as it is well known for its high accuracy in text classification. With all this in place, an improved accuracy in classifying questions in accordance to Bloom taxonomy can be expected.

Trust-based partner identification method for e-supply chain (B2B) integrator – a case study of Malaysian construction industry

Lack of trust has been identified as one of the issues that hinder collaboration among business partners. Hence, there is a need to conduct a study in ensuring the entire supply chain components collaborates in a socially trustful environment. Thus, this paper reports on the findings of the study that has been conducted which investigates the trust values perceived by the business community. As a contribution, a trust-based model for trusted partners’ identification is proposed which will be later transformed into an IT implementable expert system. For the purpose of constructing and validating the method, the Malaysian construction industry is chosen as the case study due to its size and importance to the economy. Thus, this paper puts forward the background of the research, some relevant literatures which lead to trust values elements formulation, data collection and a glimpse of the proposed method for trusted partner selection.

SMS-based final exam retrieval system on mobile phones

Due to the wide usage of mobile phones, many software developers have make use of the device to be the platform for their applications. This move is especially crucial when the applications are to be made available anytime, anywhere. In this paper the development of a mobile application for administering the final examination exercise of a Malaysian private university using mobile phones is presented. Problems such as change of venue or time of the exams at the last minutes that cause confusion to both students and invigilators warrant the development of Final Exam Timetable Information Retrieval System (FETIDS) that can be accessible anytime and anywhere. The results from user evaluations after the completion of FETIDS show that the system is acceptable by users. Hence, the framework and development process of the application can be adapted when developing other similar type of mobile applications.

Association among independent and dependent factors of host in volunteer computing

These days, many scientific projects such as: SETI@home and Distributed.net are using computers which are connected to internet from the entire world in order to run their jobs. This large distributed system is a Volunteer Computing (VC) that includes volunteer hosts. An important attribute of volunteer hosts is the volatile behavior that means often they are not available because of the autonomy nature of owners. The volatile behavior of hosts is significant and effective issue on fault tolerance of the system. Therefore, characterization factors of volatile hosts have influence on reliability of jobs schedulers and improve fault tolerance of the VC system. This paper considered on characterization hosts factors in concept of association between dependent and independent factors of hosts. We assumed that CPU interval availability and frequency number of CPU availability are dependent factors, also time zone, location, RAM size and numbers of processors are independent factors. In other words, the main hypothesis is that there is an association between dependent and independent factors. To proof this hypothesis, we used real trace data of volunteers which are taken from SETI@home project. We found that time zone and location have dependency, also processors number have correlation with CPU interval availability while frequency number of CPU availability has correlation with RAM size.

A study of SME private healthcare personnel acceptance of Clinic Information System in Malaysia

This study identifies factors determining intention to use clinic information system among small and medium enterprise private healthcare personnel in Malaysia. A hybrid model was developed and drew upon two intention-based theories of information technology IT adoption; the technology acceptance model and the theory of planned behaviour. This study focuses on examining the technology acceptance in three different contexts: individual, technological and implementation and have been extended to include some exogenous variables, which then tested using structural equation modelling approach. Results indicate that attitude, computer anxiety and perceived behavioural control directly impact personnel intention to use IT. In addition, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, facilitating conditions and computer self-efficacy were found to have strong indirect impact on behavioural intention through the mediator of attitude. The proposed model was able to explain a high proportion of the behavioural intention variance of private healthcare personnel.

Mobile Data availability Similarity between Cooperative Caching and Replication

Mobile technology presents many inherent problems that lead to poor network connectivity, low bandwidth. To overcome poor connectivity, Mobile clients are forced to operate in disconnected and partially connected modes. This paper review a designed method which led to support data availability using data replication and data caching in mobile environment to improving the availability of data and enhancing the performance of data access for users operates in mobile environments.