Volume 3, Issue 8, August 2011

Evaluation of an Anthropomorphic User Interface in a Travel Reservation Context and Affordances

Pietro Murano, Anthony Gee, Patrik O'Brian Holt

This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number of years in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine the effectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback in various domains. The results are of use to all interactive systems designers, particularly when dealing with issues of user interface feedback design. There is currently some disagreement amongst computer scientists concerning the suitability of such types of feedback. This research is working to resolve this disagreement. The experiment detailed, concerns the specific software domain of Online Factual Delivery in the specific context of online hotel bookings. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphic feedback. Statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that the non-anthropomorphic feedback was more effective. The results for user satisfaction were however less clear. The results obtained are compared with previous research. This suggests that the observed results could be due to the issue of differing domains yielding different results. However the results may also be due to the affordances at the interface being more facilitated in the non-anthropomorphic feedback.

MusicPedia: Retrieving and Merging- Interlinking Music Metadata

Pipina T. Nikolaidou, Stavros N. Shaeles, Alexandros S. Karakos

The rapid change of computers from isolated machines to networks and the need of people to exchange information lead us to the World Wide Web (WWW). Nowadays a lot of people are spending lot of hours in WWW searching information for every aspect of life. This increase of information in WWW, increase also the difficulty to find and access the information required. In response to this problem is Semantic Web, which is the field of web data from which actual meaning can be derived through analysis and machine learning. It is based on machine – comprehensible information enriched with metadata and uses the Xml technology. While music is one of the most famous domains on web searches, music metadata would play a determinative role on music web searches. Music industry was traditionally known for its poor market research and analysis, but Semantic Web will improve its knowledge base. A very important issue on this domain is the fact that a music metadata standard does not exist and this leads to many significant problems, unresolved until today. We propose an approach to retrieve and merge dynamically music metadata from different databases in order to have more accurate and completed results. The retrieved metadata are written in Xml, which is a format widely used on Semantic Web. This paper describes a Semantic Web – based application so as to retrieve and merge online music information from three different music metadata databases.

Using Clustering and DEA for evaluation and ranking university majors

Peyman Gholami, Azadeh Bazleh, Mahdis Salehi

Although all university majors are prominent, and the necessity of their presence is of no question, they might not have the same priority basis considering different resources and strategies that could be spotted for a country. Their priorities likely change as the time goes by; that is, different majors are desirable at different time. If the government is informed of which majors could tackle today existing problems of world and its country, it surely more esteems those majors. This paper considers the problem of clustering and ranking university majors in Iran. To do so, a model is presented to clarify the procedure. Eight different criteria are determined, and 177 existing university majors are compared on these criteria. First, by k-means algorithm, university majors are clustered based on similarities and differences. Then, by DEA algorithm, we rank central point of each one clusters for evaluation and calculate the efficiency each clusters groups.

A Secret Key Cryptographic Algorithm

Sheetal Saigal, Saloni, Surbhi Akshat Sharma

Cryptography is the field concerned with linguistic and mathematical techniques for securing information, particularly in communications. Historically, cryptography was concerned only with encryption, i.e., means of transforming information from its normal, comprehensible form into an incomprehensible state, making it unreadable without the key. Encryption was used initially to ensure secrecy in critical information sharing, such as those of spies, defense communications, and diplomats. The field of cryptography has expanded its horizons: modern cryptography provides tools and tricks for more than just keeping secrets and has a variety of new and important applications, for example, authentication, digital signatures, electronic voting and digital cash. Cryptography is now an interdisciplinary subject, collating from several fields. Older forms of cryptography were majorly concerned with patterns in language and diagrams. Now, the emphasis has moved, and cryptography makes extensive use of mathematics, particularly discrete mathematics, and topics from number theory, information theory, computational complexity, statistics and combinatorics. The paper discusses about the history, means and the innovations in cryptography, we will be discussing about the various symmetric key algorithms in detail and also propose a new secret key algorithm for a considerably secret code and the key for the transmission of the messages and information.

Audio Steganography Using Mod 4 Method (M4M)

Souvik Bhattacharyya, Arko Kundu, Kaushik Chakraborty, Gautam Sanyal

Steganography is an emerging area which is used for secured data transmission over any public media. Considerable amount of work has been carried out by different researchers on steganography. In this work the authors propose a novel steganographic method for hiding information in an audio file. The proposed approach is developed based on M16M [10] approach on image steganography whih works on wav and mp3 format of audio files. The proposed approach works by selecting the embedding positions using some mathematical function and maps each two bit of the secret message in each of the selected positions in a specified manner. A pseudo random number generator is used here to locate the embedding positions of the message bits randomly. This solution is independent of the nature of the data to be hidden and produces a stego audio with minimum degradation.

CCAMS: A Tool for Co-Curricular Activities Management

Muhammad Farhan, Kaleem Razzaq Malik, Amjad Farooq

Learning management systems are widely used and also available in open source repositories for the curricular activities management. In this paper we will explore some learning management systems to check the support of co-curricular activities management. Students learn with the co-curricular activities along with curricular activities. We have implemented a web based system for this purpose and will present its 3-tier structure and some code snippets explaining the basic features of the system. In this paper we will try to show its importance with respect to current trend of learning and management through World Wide Web.

A Survey of Routing Metrics in Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Adebanjo Adekiigbe, Kamalrulnizam Abu Bakar, Simeon Olumide Ogunnusi

Routing metrics that will strike a balanced tradeoff between low computational overheads and high throughput, low delay, load balancing and low interference still remain a greater challenge to researchers in wireless networks. This paper considered various routing metrics that were used in routing protocols of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) and identified the effect of each of these routing metrics on the performance of the protocols to deliver high throughput. The paper show case the performance comparism of cluster based routing protocols to expose the need for more robust network routing metrics to satisfy the requirement of WMNs for a highly scalable network without scarifying the quality of service (QoS) in the network.

Prototype of Haptic Device, Pen Tablet Collaborative Work System

Manabu Ishihara

A number of penmanship instruction systems, and other such systems, using interactive haptic devices connected to networks have been devised, and various experiments have been conducted on their use. Haptic devices utilize reactions to opposing forces (or actions by another party), and thus can be used to create systems that enhance perceptions of realism by providing sensations that convince the user that a helping hand is being provided. However, because fully haptic systems are expensive, in this paper, we report on a prototype system created using a haptic device and pen tablet, as well as a basic penmanship learning system that we created and tested.

Metrics for Measuring Attributes of Virtual Semantic Social Network Members

Imran Mir, Amjad Farooq, Amna Khan, Rizwan Mir

Semantic Social Networks provide virtual semantic community to people for maintaining relations and interactions. It bridges the gap which has been created by our fast paced life where we don’t find time to visit our friends and family frequently. Virtual Semantic Social Networks (VSSN) keep people close with their loved ones while updating them with latest stories of the members of their social circles. Members of these networks can be facilitated with friendship, dating, chatting, emailing, stuff sharing and gaming futures. Each member of the network adhere some attributes in terms of likings, disliking and interests. These attributes of VSSN members can be measured using metrics. Moreover metrics can help in figuring out the need of new features in a particular domain and they can also guide in eliminating the existing rustic features from network. In this paper we propose mathematical metrics for measuring some attributes of a VSSN members.

Simulation Analysis of DSR and TORA: On Demand Wireless Adhoc Routing Protocols

Rahul Malhotra, Gurpreet Singh

Communication has become a lifeline of the fastest moving world. The technology has spread its wings to reduce the need of complex cabling techniques to the emergence of wireless technology. This change has led to the need of secure and reliable communication medium without use of wired infrastructure and emergence of wireless ad-hoc networks. Wireless adhoc networks are a collection of mobile and semi-mobile nodes without an existing infrastructure, forming a temporary network. All the nodes in the network use a wireless Interface and communicate with each other through radio frequency or infrared. An ad-hoc network is a local area network built spontaneously when the devices connect. Dynamic Source Routing protocol is a self-organizing and self-configuring routing protocol and works on the principle of Route Discovery and Route Maintenance. Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm is a distributed routing algorithm based on the concept of link reversal. TORA is implemented where nodes are continuously moving from one place to another. This paper focuses to compare the performances of on-demand routing protocols, DSR and TORA for wireless adhoc networks. The implementation of a network using network simulator OPNET has been done for 50 network nodes and the performance of these two network protocols for traffic sent and received, end to end delay during data communication and download and upload response time have been analyzed. The Dynamic source routing protocol is able to forward 95% of the traffic received. On the other hand, Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm protocol forwards only 39% of the traffic received. The results from the simulation show that dynamic source routing protocol has given comparatively better performance than Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm protocol.

Efficient Sorting for Repeated Data

Bhavesh Patel, Nishant Doshi

In repeated data, there are some values which come often or say more than once. Therefore, it may happen that during sorting we may get the already sorted part to sort. The known algorithms like quick sort, merge sort which doing O(nlogn) time for n data items, will not taken care of such thing. Therefore, resulting the sorting time is required more in repeated data. In this paper we had consider only repeated data and try to modify the quick sort to get better efficiency compare to previously proposed sorting algorithms. The proposed algorithms were implemented in C language.

An Efficient Blocking algorithm for Privacy Preserving Data Mining

R. Sugumar, C. Jayakumar, A. Rengarajan

Managing Huge volume of personal data and sharing of these data is proved to be beneficial for data mining application. Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) is one of the newest trends in privacy and security research. In many cases, users are unwilling to provide personal information unless the privacy of sensitive information is guaranteed. Privacy preserving data mining has become an important problem in recent years, because of the large amount of consumer data tracked by automated systems on the internet. In this paper, We design a blocking algorithm to provide better privacy than K-Anonymity method. In the Blocking based algorithms the idea is to substitute the value of an item supporting the rule we want to hide with a meaningless symbol.

Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD), its limits, compensation and effect on optical fiber networks

R. L. Sharma, Ranjit Singh, Vinod Kumar

This paper deals with the polarization mode dispersion (PMD), its limits, which an optical fiber can tolerate, the compensation and the overall effect on optical fiber on high-speed optical networks. The polarization mode dispersion causes pulses broadening. Excessive broadening will cause bits to spread in such a manner that they overlap adjacent bits. The receiver may have difficulty in identifying the correct bits and interpreting adjacent bits, increasing bit error rate. The PMD is a difficult parameter to measure as it changes with time and depends upon environmental conditions. The statistical nature of the PMD has been discussed. Its effect on optical fiber and consequently on the optical networks has been analyzed and discussed.

An Efficient Approach of Fast External Sorting Algorithm in Data Warehouse

Abhishek Purohit, Naveen Hemrajani, Savita Shiwani, Ruchi Dave

Sorting of bulk data in warehouse is possible through external sorting and the effective performance of the external sorting is analyzed in terms of both time and I/O complexities.The proposed method is a hybrid technique that uses quick sort and In place merging in two distinct phases. Both the time and I/O complexities of the proposed algorithm are analyzed here. The proposed algorithm uses special in-place merging technique, which creates no extra backup file for manipulating huge records. For this, the algorithm saves huge disk space, which is needed to hold the large file. This also reduces time complexity and makes the algorithm faster.

Design and Synthesis of High Performance Adder Circuits

Pankaj Sharma, Rahul Malhotra, Mandeep Kaur

Data path units can’t build without using Adders but drawback of the existing adder architectures is the propagation delay. This propagation delay is due to the carry chain/path from the input to the output. In this paper our main focus is to follow the modularity in the design and focus on optimizing the depth of the addition operation by using different adder architectures. A comparison of the area and delay of the different adder architectures is carried out.

A Novel Phonetic Name Matching Technique

Junaid Tariq, Noman Ajmal, Azam Khan

Name is an attribute that is used to search a record almost in every application that keeps records, because name is a must attribute of every object. The practical experiences show that name undergoes lots of changes by time, which makes such searches complex. This paper covers various problems related to name, and shortcomings of existing techniques. It also provides a survey on different phonetic name matching techniques. Phonetic name matching techniques are faster than pattern matching techniques, but phonetic techniques don’t support features of pattern matching. At the end, we have presented a name matching techniques which uses phonetic approach to achieve the features of pattern matching. The proposed technique is flexible, as it handles the changes made to name over time, and also handles ‘single character error’ efficiently

Ranking of Web Search Through The Power Method

Hasan Tahir, Muhammad Tahir

A search engine is a coherent search entity which is designed to facilitate internet users in searching for their required information. The web is expanding at a phenomenal rate, and a typical search engine is required to process every user query and provide results which are accurate, consistent, filtered and ranked according to importance. Besides this a search engine is also required to process a user query quickly. Therefore the importance of a search algorithm that meets all the above goals cannot be negated. This paper presents the power method which forms the basis of most web search algorithms. The power method is an efficient algorithm that attempts to rank sites based on their importance. The algorithm is based on the use of adjacency matrix to identify dominant eigenvalues and dominant eigenvectors.