Computer Science

In today's business environment where the security of accepting checks can sometimes be a burden, many businesses are turning to verification services to provide security for funds accepted as checks. In this paper we propose a new recognition system for processing the optical code, the magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) code. located at the bottom of bank checks and in some security documents. The proposed method is based on the use of a novel fuzzy descriptive feature using cross correlation to classify the characters. This method is fast robust and is not affected by shift or distortion of characters after thresholding. A 100% recall rate for the trained patterns and a recognition rate of 100% for distorted and skewed patterns with less than 1° skewness were obtained.

Arabic text recognition offers unique technical challenges and has been addressed more recently in the document analysis research field than other languages. Automatic Arabic/Indian numeral Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for postal services are used in many countries, but still there are problems in such systems where machines still provide errors in reading the crucial information needed to distribute the mail efficiently. The need to investigate fast and efficient recognition methods is important so as to correctly read the postal codes from mail envelopes. The significance of this study is to recognize essential information, e.g., postal codes from the mail envelopes, by applying the OCR methods. The proposed system is a hybrid of three different feature extraction methods and classification methods. The proposed system, systematically compares the performance of each and every method, and makes sure that the numeral is recognized or rejected. The results provide a recognition rate of 99.4%.

The use of e-learning management systems is considered a modern technology in teaching and learning, which helps students gain access to educational resources anywhere and anytime with ease and comfort. E-Learning systems have a significant impact in creating a learning environment suitable for the learner. E-Learning systems are available, some of which are open source and others closed source. Many of these systems were developed to suit the learner's educational environment. In this research, tools and features are developed and plugged into an open-source e-Learning Management System (LMS) in order to help the learner and provide him with the proper environment, which will contribute to facilitate improvements in the educational process. Dokeos LMS was selected for adding these tools and features which may not be found in most LMS. These tools are suitable for students in Arab societies or any other society: translation tool, the Islamic calendar, student attendance sheet, SMS tool, and adding a new test type i.e. sound test. Therefore, adding these proposed tools to any e-learning management system will help increase the level of communication in the learning environment as well as raise the academic level of university students.

Communications Technologry (ICT) students and their coping strategies in dealing with English as the medium of instruction during their university studies. A semi-structured administered survey was conducted using a sample of 267 male students of a Computer Science college from a midsize Middle Eastern university The study also used a phenomenological approach with semi-structured interviews carried out with ten students in order to clarify some qfthefindings qfthis study. Since the research topic is based on student's stress perceptions, the phenomenological analysis of transcribed student's interviews was also an appropriate tool for this study. Phenomenology enables participants to express their feelings about a particular situation or incident in their own point afvieiv which may not be easy to express on a survey. All students who took part in this study thought that they had been stressed at one time or another due to having English as the medium of instruction without a Preparatory Year English Program (PYEP) befbre entering ICT courses. 62% of the students maintained that they have had episodeS of stress due to the English language during their studies at one time or another. The students use different mechanisms to Taibah University, KSA, [email protected],sa Kingston University, UK TRIM V 5 (2) July-December 2009 111 ICT Students, Stress and Coping .,. Alginahi.Ahmed.Tayan. Siddigi. Shard.; Alharby. and Nour cope up with stress outside the university by engaging themselves in sports, surfing the web, Meditation, hanging out with, friends, sleeping or going in to isolation. The students demand interactive' English language courses, 11101e leisure time activities on campus, proper guidance in English language courses to ease their ICT course-studies. advisory services and peer counsel ling on campus to reduce their stress.

With the Internet penetration in the Middle East exceeding the world's average penetration and the growth of Internet users exceeding the 2000% in the last decade, the number of Arabic documents online has seen an exponential growth. Therefore, with the increase of Arabic online publications, the presence of Qur'anic quotations in online articles is becoming more notable. However, very few online documents use complete diacritics and Tajweed symbols for all words. Therefore, the verification of the quoted Quran text, the diacritics and the Tajweed symbols is essential for verse authenticity checking. In this paper, a verification algorithm, is proposed in order to verify the authenticity of Qur'anic quotes/verses (including full and partial verses). The system developed was tested, using Qur'an quotes found in online Arabic documents and proved to be effective in detecting any tampering or unintentional mistakes during the dissemination of such documents.

The advantages of fast and simple digital information exchange over the Internet has attracted problems and threats in the form of digital attacks that could compromise information integrity, protection and authentication. Such issues are more prominent for text-content due to the dominance of textual-data sent online. Any compromise on integrity and security is clearly intolerable for the case of sensitive textual-content being propagated. This paper addresses mechanisms for ensuring intact integrity and authentication of samples of sensitive textual-content disseminated over the Internet through the use of zero-watermarking. In this work, two robust zero-watermarking approaches (Method A and B) are proposed which are capable of detecting any content-modifications while avoiding any embeddings/modifications on the original text to be disseminated. The proposed methods provide a good indication of the relative sensitivities of each approach to third-party modifications during the key-extraction phase. The contribution of this paper includes a comparative analysis of the newly proposed methods against the existing relevant state of the art techniques based on two cost functions specifically applicable to our target application domain with promising results. Finally, the derived system was capable of achieving a pivotal requirement by ensuring that the textual-content could be traced back to its original publisher for authentication purposes, or otherwise, had detected document-tampering, as in the case of third-party modifications. [Tayan O, Alginahi Y.M, Kabir M.N. Performance Assessment of Zero-Watermarking Techniques for Online Arabic Textual-Content. Life Sci J 2013;10(4):93-100] (ISSN:1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 13

An IoT data system is a time constraint in which some data needs to be serviced on or before its deadline. Distributed processing is one of the most latent sources in such systems and is considered a vital design concern. Many sources of delay in the IoT can affect the availability of data from different resources, which may cause missing data deadlines, resulting in a catastrophic effect. In fact, such systems are inherently distributed in nature and use distributed processing. The distributed processing permits different nodes to obtain the information from remote sites, which may take a long time to access the required data. Therefore, it is considered one of the most latent sources in such systems, which is considered a vital design concern. The typical recommended solution for this problem is to commit distributed transactions locally. Therefore, replication techniques are used to enhance the availability of data and consequently avoid the resulting latency. However, the use of...

Software testing is one of the most important phases of the software development life cycle. However, software testing is traditionally seen as a difficult and time consuming activity that is hard to embed in the software development process. Software and hardware testers concentrate on how to minimize the testing time, as well as ensure that the system is also tested well and made acceptable. Basic combinatorial interaction (i.e. pairwise or 2-way) testing has been one of the commonly used methods in achieving the above goal with 50-97 percent of errors detection. However, empirical evidence has proved that the 2-way interaction testing is a poor strategy for testing highly interactive systems. Therefore there is a need for going beyond pairwise testing to uncover these errors. To speed up the process of solving problems, researchers have applied parallel algorithms to various large computationally expensive optimization problems and have succeeded in solving these problems in an acceptable time. Therefore, in this paper we have enhanced our previous strategy "A tree based strategy for test data generation and cost calculation for pairwise combinatorial interaction testing" to work effectively in parallel and to support a 3-way interaction testing. The correctness of the strategy has been proved, and the performance evaluation shows the efficient of the strategy in reducing test size.

Trust management is one of the most challenging issues in the emerging cloud computing area. Over the past few years, many studies have proposed different techniques to address trust management issues. However, despite these past efforts, several trust management issues such as identification, privacy, personalization, integration, security, and scalability have been mostly neglected and need to be addressed before cloud computing can be fully embraced. In this article, we present an overview of the cloud service models and we survey the main techniques and research prototypes that efficiently support trust management of services in cloud environments. We present a generic analytical framework that assesses existing trust management research prototypes in cloud computing and relevant areas using a set of assessment criteria. Open research issues for trust management in cloud environments are also discussed.

Trust management of cloud services is emerging as an important research issue in recent years, which poses significant challenges because of the highly dynamic, distributed, and non-transparent nature of cloud services. This paper describes Cloud Armor, a platform for credibility-based trust management of cloud services. The platform provides a crawler for automatic cloud services discovery, an adaptive and robust credibility model for measuring the credibility of feedbacks, and a trust-based recommender to recommend the most trustworthy cloud services to users. This paper presents the motivation, system design, implementation, and a demonstration of the Cloud Armor platform.

Arabic has recently received significant attention from corpus compilers. This situation has led to the creation of many Arabic corpora that cover various genres, most notably the newswire genre. Yet, Arabic novels, and specifically those authored by Saudi writers, lack the sufficient digital datasets that would enhance corpus linguistic and stylistic studies of these works. Thus, Arabic lags behind English and other European languages in this context. In this paper, we present the Saudi Novels Corpus, built to be a valuable resource for linguistic and stylistic research communities. We specifically present the procedures we followed and the decisions we made in creating the corpus. We describe and clarify the design criteria, data collection methods, process of annotation, and encoding. In addition, we present preliminary results that emerged from the analysis of the corpus content. We consider the work described in this paper as initial steps to bridge the existing gap between cor...

SystemVerilog assertion (SVA) is widely used for verifying properties of hardware designs. This paper presents a new method of generating SVAs from natural language assertion descriptions. For capturing the temporal semantics in natural language descriptions, we develop a new logical form called simple interval temporal logic (SITL) which can deal formally with temporal constructions such as temporal prepositions. Furthermore,SITL makes the transformations from natural language descriptions to SVAs possible. Thus, we build transformation rules to map our logic into SVAs. Our systematic experimental investigation on AXI bus protocol in ARM (2010) suggest that our method is applicable for generating SVAs from natural language descriptions.

Part of Speech (POS) tagging is one of the most common techniques used in natural language processing (NLP) applications and corpus linguistics. Various POS tagging tools have been developed for Arabic. These taggers differ in several aspects, such as in their modeling techniques, tag sets and training and testing data. In this paper we conduct a comparative study of five Arabic POS taggers, namely: Stanford Arabic, CAMeL Tools, Farasa, MADAMIRA and Arabic Linguistic Pipeline (ALP) which examine their performance using text samples from Saudi novels. The testing data has been extracted from different novels that represent different types of narrations. The main result we have obtained indicates that the ALP tagger performs better than others in this particular case, and that Adjective is the most frequent mistagged POS type as compared to Noun and Verb.

With today’s digital revolution, many people communicate and collaborate in cyberspace. Users rely on social media platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, all of which exert a considerable impact on human lives. In particular, watching videos has become more preferable than simply browsing the internet because of many reasons. However, difficulties arise when searching for specific videos accurately in the same domains, such as entertainment, politics, education, video and TV shows. This problem can be solved through web video categorization (WVC) approaches that utilize video textual information, visual features, or audio approaches. However, retrieving or obtaining videos with similar content with high accuracy is challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel mode for enhancing WVC that is based on user comments and weighted features from video descriptions. Specifically, this model uses supervised learning, along with machine learning classifiers (MLCs) and deep l...

The primary purpose of sequence modeling is to record long-term interdependence across interaction sequences, and since the number of items purchased by users gradually increases over time, this brings challenges to sequence modeling to a certain extent. Relationships between terms are often overlooked, and it is crucial to build sequential models that effectively capture long-term dependencies. Existing methods focus on extracting global sequential information, while ignoring deep representations from subsequences. We argue that limited item transfer is fundamental to sequence modeling, and that partial substructures of sequences can help models learn more efficient long-term dependencies compared to entire sequences. This paper proposes a sequence recommendation model named GAT4Rec (Gated Recurrent Unit And Transformer For Recommendation), which uses a Transformer layer that shares parameters across layers to model the user's historical interaction sequence. The representation learned by the gated recurrent unit is used as a gating signal to filter out better substructures of the user sequence. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed GAT4Rec model is superior to other models and has a higher recommendation effectiveness.

Al Madinah, in Saudi Arabia, is the second most holy city for Muslims throughout the world and has a long and rich heritage. However, most of the historical and traditional buildings, city walls and holy places have been replaced with modern structures. But, there have been several attempts, many by individuals, to preserve the heritage of Al Madinah. This thesis took an in-depth look at the history of Al Madinah, with emphasis on a 3D virtual environment which was produced as part of this project and inspired by a 3D model depicting the historical city of Al Madinah. First, this research examined the documentation of the historical city and identified its limitations by visiting location museums and evaluating the display mediums concerned with the heritage of Al Madinah. To contrast the traditional methods employed in local museums, eight museums in the UK were visited to explore their use of technology and digital devices. After these two initial steps, the main contribution focu...