Zubair A. Shaikh

A review of wireless sensors and networks' applications in agriculture

Due to advancement in technologies and reduction in size, sensors are becoming involved in almost every field of life. Agriculture is one of such domains where sensors and their networks are successfully used to get numerous benefits. Selection of sensors and their effective utilization to solve agricultural domain problems has been an arduous task for novice users due to unavailability of conglomerated information in literature. The aim of this paper is to review the need of wireless sensors in Agriculture, WSN technology and their applications in different aspects of agriculture and to report existing system frameworks in agriculture domain.

Building a Smart University Using RFID Technology

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is getting popularity among identification technologies owing to its low cost, light weight, reduced size and inexpensive maintenance. Due to the recognition of RFID in the area of manufacturing, retail, pharmaceuticals and logistics, it is now in consideration for use in many different areas like ubiquitous computing, health care, agriculture, transport and security. Now a days security, power conservation and scalability are among the top issues that are in consideration for designing projects. In this paper, we contemplate the said issues and present how emerging technology of RFID can be used for building a smart university. Prototype is developed considering major use cases involved in a smart university. The system is taking care of maintaining attendance record, switching control of electrical items and security locks of rooms. Results show that consumption of energy and object tracking time is decreased while security of rooms and credibility of attendance record are increased.

SWISE: Semantic Web based intelligent search engine

Most of the search engines search for keywords to answer the queries from users. The search engines usually search web pages for the required information. However they filter the pages from searching unnecessary pages by using advanced algorithms. These search engines can answer topic wise queries efficiently and effectively by developing state-of-art algorithms. However they are vulnerable in answering intelligent queries from the user due to the dependence of their results on information available in web pages. The main focus of these search engines is solving these queries with close to accurate results in small time using much researched algorithms. However, it shows that such search engines are vulnerable in answering intelligent queries using this approach. They either show inaccurate results with this approach or show accurate but (could be) unreliable results. With the keywords based searches they usually provide results from blogs (if available) or other discussion boards. The user cannot have a satisfaction with these results due to lack of trusts on blogs etc. To get the trusted results search engines require searching for pages that maintain such information at some place. This requires including domain knowledge in the web pages to help search engines in answering intelligent queries. The layered model of Semantic Web provides solution to this problem by providing tools and technologies to enable machine readable semantics in current web contents.

A Conceptual Framework for Smart Workflow Management

Workflow technology is an effective means of modeling and management of complex interacting business processes and is now being employed in other diversified domains. Although the workflow technology is already quite mature and commercial workflow management products are readily available, it has been observed that the technology lacks certain context related components and concepts when applied to domains like e-commerce, mobile and pervasive computing. The context-aware or smart workflows are those that operate as per context information gathered from environment or domain knowledge. In order to make workflow management context-aware, extensions and modifications are required in existing architectures and standards of workflow management systems. This paper describes a framework for designing and managing context-aware workflows that encompasses different aspects of context change. It indicates the changes and extensions required in the current technology for smooth integration of context in workflows to enable their smart execution. We present a simplified technique of workflow representation with the introduction of context-activity architecture as the basis of our framework.

Security Issues in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) are infrastructure-less networks characterized by lack of prior configuration and the hostile environments. Their unique properties make them a natural candidate for situations where unplanned network establishment is required. However this flexibility leads to a number of security challenges. Security in MANET is a very complex job and requires considerations on the issues spanning across all the layers of communication stack. This chapter reviews the security problem in MANET. It provides an updated account of the security solutions for MANET with detailed discussions on secure routing, intrusion detection system and key management problems. The chapter is concluded with a comprehensive security solution for MANET.

Semantic Web: Choosing the right methodologies, tools and standards

Semantic Web is a succession of the current world wide web in which all the contents, resources and services over the web will have well-defined meanings. Due to this well-defined semantics, semantic web will enable the automated processing of web contents by machines. To achieve this vision; a number of methodologies, tools and standards for semantic web have been proposed during last few years. In this paper, a critical review of these constituents of semantic web has been presented. In particular, a comparative analysis of ontology languages, ontology tools, ontology development methodologies and semantic web services is done. In addition, some missing research areas have also been also highlighted in which further research work should be carried out.

Towards an automated multiagent system to monitor user activities against insider threat

The major problems faced by the networks are the hurdles generated by the native users. Survey has proved that the professional security measures are mainly focusing outside threats instead of the insiders. The traditional insider threat protection models do not work efficiently. There is need of an autonomous, robust and flexible model against insider threat. This paper presents an Agent-based User- Profiling model that monitors behaviour of the authorized users in an organization to avoid the risk. The profiling agents in the model record all actions of the authorized user and present all recorded behaviour to the manager agent for further processing. The manager agent creates and updates profiles of the enterprise users to monitor the behaviour so that the threat may be avoided, detected or recovered.

Crop irrigation control using Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN)

Physical and environmental sensing is benefitting several domains to solve real time problems. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) are emerging as the new generation of sensor networks and providing a boost towards the development of autonomous systems. Use of WSAN towards crop irrigation is one of the top most utilization in the area of Agriculture. In this paper we have presented the crop irrigation control to better utilize water resource which is getting scarce. The one of the major hindrances on the way of WSAN adaptation in the third world countries like Pakistan is the factor of hardware/system cost. To cope up with cost factor, there is a need of the indigenous development of sensor and actuator motes. In addition to crop irrigation control, we also presented our efforts of indigenous design and development of WSAN and its protocol.

Segmentation of Arabic Text into Characters for Recognition

One of the steps of character recognition systems is the segmentation of words/sub-words into characters. The segmentation of text written in any Arabic script is a most difficult task. Due to this difficulty, many systems consider sub-words instead of a character as the basic unit for recognition. We propose a method for the segmentation of printed Arabic words/sub-words into characters. In the proposed method, primary and secondary strokes of the sub-words are separated and then segmentation points are identified in the primary strokes. For this, we compute the vertical projection graph for each line, which is then processed to generate a string indicating relative variations in pixels. The string is scanned further to produce characters from the sub-words. In the proposed method we use Sindhi text for segmentation into characters as its character set is the super set of Arabic. This method can be used for any other Naskh-based Arabic script such as Persian, Pashto and Urdu.

Towards the development of Community Ontology

Human beings are part of different communities. Communities can be analyzed to extract valuable information. Communities will be hold in some proper frame structure (ontology). Therefore, there is a need to develop community ontology. Analyzing different levels of ontology from meta-, domain to instance ontologies, from which a level needed to be selected. At the same time, one needs to have profile ontology for registering individuals in a community. As time passes, there will be need to add or delete (update) concepts (attributes) and relations in these ontologies, which will be done by maintaining the ontology. We will use community ontology in our on going research on community algorithm development.