Rukshan Athauda

A holistic review of cloud-based e-learning system

Cyber education is an emerged term for the new approach of teaching and learning. It is a general term for e-learning and refers to web based learning. Various technologies have been applied in order to support and enrich the usage of e-learning. Recently, research has focused on building collaborative and interactive e-learning systems. Cloud computing is increasingly providing the underlying technology that supports, and hosts such systems. This paper provides a review of some proposed cloud-based e-learning initiatives along with the expected benefits and challenges. Based on the review, a future vision of e-learning is given.

Smart Fridges with Multimedia Capability for Better Nutrition and Health

Due to the development of computer technology and the wide use of the Internet, intelligent appliances with multimedia capability have been emerging into our daily life. Kitchen is one of the places where such intelligent appliances have been used. Since modern life style is driving people spending less time on cooking healthy food at home, an enjoyable and healthy life style can be assisted with an intelligent kitchenware such as a smart fridge. In this paper we introduce a novel application for a smart fridge with intelligent multimedia capability. It is designed for managing items stored in it and advising its users with cooking methods depending on what kind of food is stored. It can also perform other functions such as dietary control, nutrition monitoring, eating habit analysis, etc. We are confident that such a smart fridge will be an important component in future smart homes.

Comparing a hybrid branch and bound algorithm with evolutionary computation methods, local search and their hybrids on the TSP

Benchmarking is one of the most important ways to investigate the performance of metaheuristic optimization algorithms. Yet, most experimental algorithm evaluations in the literature limit themselves to simple statistics for comparing end results. Furthermore, comparisons between algorithms from different “families” are rare. In this study, we use the TSP Suite - an open source software framework - to investigate the performance of the Branch and Bound (BB) algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). We compare this BB algorithm to an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA), an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) approach, as well as three different Local Search (LS) algorithms. Our comparisons are based on a variety of different performance measures and statistics computed over the entire optimization process. The experimental results show that the BB algorithm performs well on very small TSP instances, but is not a good choice for any medium to large-scale problem instances. Subsequently, we investigate whether hybridizing BB with LS would give rise to similar positive results like the hybrid versions of EA and ACO have. This turns out to be true - the “Memetic” BB algorithms are able to improve the performance of pure BB algorithms significantly. It is worth pointing out that, while the results presented in this paper are consistent with previous findings in the literature, our results have been obtained through a much more comprehensive and solid experimental procedure.

Modeling Decentralized Reputation-Based Trust for Initial Transactions in Digital Environments

The advent of digital environments has generated significant benefits for businesses, organizations, governments, academia and societies in general. Today, over millions of transactions take place on the Internet. Although the widespread use of digital environments has generally provided opportunities for societies, a number of threats have limited their adoption. The de-facto standard today is for certification authorities to authenticate the identity of service providers while trust on the provided services is implied. This approach has certain shortcomings, for example, single point of failure, implied trust rather than explicit trust and others. One approach for minimizing such threats is to introduce an effective and resilient trust mechanism that is capable of determining the trustworthiness of service providers in providing their services. Determining the trustworthiness of services reduces invalid transactions in digital environments and further encourages collaborations. Evaluating trustworthiness of a service provider without any prior historical transactions (i.e. the initial transaction) pose a number of challenging issues. This article presents TIDE - a decentralized reputation trust mechanism that determines the initial trustworthiness of entities in digital environments. TIDE improves the precision of trust computation by considering raters’ feedback, number of transactions, credibility, incentive to encourage raters’ participation, strategy for updating raters’ category, and safeguards against dynamic personalities. Furthermore, TIDE classifies raters into three categories and promotes the flexibility and customization through its parameters. Evaluation of TIDE against several attack vectors demonstrates its accuracy, robustness and resilience.

SECURING AND GOVERNING ACCESS IN AD-HOC NETWORKS OF INTERNET OF THINGS

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) brings tremendous benefits and opportunities for individuals and businesses. However, there exist several challenges that need to be addressed before a full realization of IoT can be achieved. Fundamentally, IoT enables constant transfer and sharing of data between several “things” (i.e. humans and objects) in order to achieve particular objectives. In such sharing environments, security and privacy of data and messages become important. Authentication, authorization. access control, non-repudiation are important to ensure secure communication in an IoT environment. The lack of computing resources (such as processing power, storage, etc.) and ad-hoc nature of such networks requires researcher to re-think existing techniques to adopt to such environments. In this paper, we propose a framework for authentication, authorization and access control for an IoT environment using capability tokens, PKI and encryption which aims to use minimal computing resources.

TIDE: measuring and evaluating trustworthiness and credibility of enterprises in digital ecosystem

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness and appropriateness of several existing trust management systems for a Digital Ecosystem (DE) environment. DE is characterized as an open and dynamic environment where the interaction and collaboration between its entities are highly promoted. A major requirement to promote such intensive interaction and collaboration is the ability of an entity to measure the trustworthiness of other entities in performing honest transactions. However, most of the proposed trust management solutions do not provide an adequate mechanism for computing the trustworthiness values into its exact measurement. In addition, the appropriateness of these solutions to meet the unique DE characteristics is still in deficient level. Therefore, we propose a distributed trust model for individual enterprises to effectively derive the trustworthiness value of an entity. This would allow them to decide which entities are trustworthy and which entities are not. This model also allows the enterprises to progressively understand the credibility of their recommender entities.

Light curve solutions for eclipsing binaries in NGC 188

We present light curve solutions for the W UMa-type eclipsing binaries EP, EQ, ER, ES, and V369 Cep in the old open cluster NGC 188. Using light curve solution parameters combined with reasonable mass estimates, we determine the distance modulusV-Mvof the cluster. Our aim is to examine if current uncertainties in the clusters distance and age can be resolved. Three binaries yield distance moduli close to 10.m80 (±0.m08), two others give values around 11.m40(±0.m09). Depending on the amount of reddening, we find a weighted mean distance modulus for all five binaries between 11.m01 and 11.m05 (±0.m06), which lends modest support for the lower distance (1.65 kpc) and older age (10 Gyr) of the cluster.

Securing an EHR in a health sector digital ecosystem

This paper examines the challenges in maintaining system security in the dynamic environment of eHealth where there are system components scattered among private and public organisations and used by a spectrum of professionals, each with different needs. The need for more interoperability between these systems has strained the ability of system administrators to maintain compliance with security protocols by staff working in these environments.

A community based authentication and authorisation mechanism for digital ecosystem

In this paper, we present a distributed mechanism for elevating resource protection in a Digital Ecosystem environment. The dynamic interaction and collaboration between Digital Ecosystem entities poise several main challenges in protecting the resources and information. First, a strong mechanism is needed to ensure only the authentic entities that are able to access the resources. Second, this mechanism must also maintain the confidentiality and integrity of resources over the untrusted network. Unfortunately, the existing mechanisms which focus on providing a centralized protection facade several issues ranging from single point failure to huge administrative burden. Therefore, we present a distributed mechanism to address these challenges. The inclusivity of community based trust approach in our mechanism further promotes its applicability to the Digital Ecosystem environment, on which it is heavily driven by the interacting entities. Public Key Infrastructure is employed to provide a strong protection during its access workflow.

Determining Trustworthiness and Quality of Mobile Applications

The growth of “smart” mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has been exponential over the past few years. Such growth was mainly attributed to the development of mobile applications. To date, mobile applications have been increasingly used to improve our productivity and also to provide the entertainment contents. However, with a huge number of mobile applications that appear in the application stores; in particular those that provide similar functionalities, users are often confused with the selection of trustworthy and high quality mobile applications. At the current state, there is a limited research embarked to provide solutions for measuring the trustworthiness of mobile applications prior to download. Thus, the aims of this paper are to review the current research in this area and to discuss several issues in measuring the trustworthiness of mobile applications. In addition, this paper also proposes MobilTrust, a similarity trust measurement method to solve the identified issues.