2016 30th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2016
Institutions in higher education generate terabytesof data that has great value to shape future o... more Institutions in higher education generate terabytesof data that has great value to shape future of nations. This Big Data is in heterogeneous formats, very current, and in large volumes. We propose a framework to collect, scope and verify this large amount of data. Although the framework is explained in the context of institution accreditation in higher education, the framework can be applied in the fields of health-care, finance, marketing etc. Our framework is used to reduce human involvement in the collection and analysis of data, for the purpose of accreditation. The framework extends the scope of data collected to target the heterogeneous nature of the data. Finally, our framework helps to verify the data against a standard set by an accreditation body.
Within recent years there has been increasing societal concern around the compulsive and excessiv... more Within recent years there has been increasing societal concern around the compulsive and excessive use of digital and Internet-enabled devices, such as the use of social media or online video gaming, and associated psychological and physical harms. However, problematic use or addictive behaviours are not yet included as diagnosable mental health issues in any major diagnostic system in Western countries and the conceptualisations of the phenomena are still inconsistent. To address this issue, the present study reviewed the current conceptualisations of digital addiction used within the research literature and identified common features of the definition of digital addiction. Definitions of the phenomenon were extracted from 47 studies, and they were analysed using a content analysis approach. The initial process assessed definitions for features of digital addiction within Internet, gaming and smartphone addiction. Two higher-order themes were identified, which focused on the harm c...
Periodicals of Engineering and Natural Sciences (PEN)
An accessible website enables the access to information and interaction for many people with disa... more An accessible website enables the access to information and interaction for many people with disabilities so these people can contribute more effectively in the society. Today, most governments are enforcing their websites to follow the www consortium (w3c)'s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). This paper investigates the WCAG 2.0 success criterions that make a website accessible and explores the most violated WCAG 2.0 success criterions by the developers of e-Government websites.
Although dynamic programming (DP) is an optimization approach used to solve a complex problem fas... more Although dynamic programming (DP) is an optimization approach used to solve a complex problem fast, the time required to solve it is still not efficient and grows polynomially with the size of the input. In this contribution, we improve the computation time of the dynamic programming based algorithms by proposing a novel technique, which is called “SDP: Segmented Dynamic programming”. SDP finds the best way of splitting the compared sequences into segments and then applies the dynamic programming algorithm to each segment individually. This will reduce the computation time dramatically. SDP may be applied to any dynamic programming based algorithm to improve its computation time. As case studies, we apply the SDP technique on two different dynamic programming based algorithms; “Needleman–Wunsch (NW)”, the widely used program for optimal sequence alignment, and the LCS algorithm, which finds the “Longest Common Subsequence” between two input strings. The results show that applying th...
The value of big data comes from its variety where data is collected from various sources. One of... more The value of big data comes from its variety where data is collected from various sources. One of the key big data challenges is identifying which data objects are relevant or refer to the same logical entity across various data sources. This challenge is traditionally known as schema matching. Due to big data velocity traditional approaches to data matching can no longer be used. In this paper we present an approach for inferring data objects correlation. We present our algorithm that relies on the objects meta-data and it consults the Word Net thesaurus
International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2016
Cloud computing has transformed the way businesses manage their IT resources. By uploading IT sol... more Cloud computing has transformed the way businesses manage their IT resources. By uploading IT solution to the cloud, businesses are assured that computational power and storage capacity are availab...
Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, 2016
Institutions in higher education generate terabytes of data that has great value to shape future ... more Institutions in higher education generate terabytes of data that has great value to shape future of nations. This Big Data is in heterogeneous formats, very current, and in large volumes. We propose a framework to collect, scope and verify this large amount of data. The analysis of the data is used to evaluate the institution against a standard set by an accreditation body, for the purpose of the academic accreditation of higher education programs. Therefore, the framework reduces human involvement in accreditation. The paper provides the detailed design of the process of aligning assessment with student learning outcomes.
Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Information Systems Technology and Its Applications Volume P 2, Sep 6, 2002
This paper is concerned with reusing and sharing behaviours of component Object Oriented Database... more This paper is concerned with reusing and sharing behaviours of component Object Oriented Database Systems in a tightly coupled federated multidatabase system environment. In such a federation, users benefit from exploiting the behaviours available in the participating components that are not available in their local systems so they can capitalise on investment made in writing their code. To facilitate this, users need to know which behaviours can be reused and shared and what are the requirements of reusing and sharing these behaviours. This means that the users will be able to build their integrated federation views augmented with behaviours of their preference.
2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing and 2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Autonomic and Trusted Computing and 2014 IEEE 14th Intl Conf on Scalable Computing and Communications and Its Associated Workshops, 2014
The cloud-computing paradigm has become a standard for on-demand and scalable storage and computa... more The cloud-computing paradigm has become a standard for on-demand and scalable storage and computation capabilities. Merging the elasticity of the clouds with mobile computing produces mobile cloud computing, which enhances many aspects, such as battery lifetime, performance and bandwidth. Cloudlets are resourceful computational units that provide cloud-computing services to mobile devices. Before mobile cloud computing can be widely adopted and deployed, security, privacy and trust barriers must be addressed. One of the main issues is whether a mobile user should trust a cloudlet provider. In cloud computing, cloud users trust their cloud providers, which tend to be large organisations with reputation to maintain. In mobile cloud computing, however, a cloudlet could be hosted on an LTE small base-station, known as a femtocell, owned by a small business or an individual. This paper presents a trust management scheme that allows mobile users to utilize cloud computing through trusted mobile cloud providers. The simulation of the trust management scheme shows the feasibility of our work.
This paper addresses the problem of integrating objectoriented local database schemas by creating... more This paper addresses the problem of integrating objectoriented local database schemas by creating several tailored global views using multiple structures and behaviours which fully match user requirements. Different users have different needs for integrating databases, and even the same user might want to integrate the same data in a variety of ways and/or include different behaviours to satisfy different tasks in an organisation. Supporting the global views with multiple behaviour, when possible saves effort, cost and time where the investment made in developing them can be exploited again by the original owner of these behaviours and also by new users in the interoperation context. We describe the theoretical framework we are using in the construction of the (MVMBS) Multiple Views supporting Multiple Behaviours System. MVMBS offers the potential for users to work in terms of integrated and customised global views supported by multiple behaviours. 3 Sharing Behaviour-Scope and Requirements Let us consider the classes EMPLOYEE and WORKER in DB1 and DB2, respectively (Fig. 1). Assume that both classes are semantically related and ideal for integration by merging into a global class GLOBAL-EMPLOYEE (see section 5.7) where its extension is the union of both EMPLOYEE and WORKER extensions
International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering, 2013
Peer-to-Peer database management systems have become an important topic in the last few years. Th... more Peer-to-Peer database management systems have become an important topic in the last few years. They rise up p2p technology to exploit the power of available distributed database management system technologies. Identifying relationship between different peer schema objects is one of the main activities so semantically relevant peer database management systems can be acquainted and become close in the overlay. In this paper we present our approach that measures the similarity of peer schema objects and ultimately depicts database management systems closeness in the overlay.
There is increasing interest from large organisations who are requiring access to and manipulatio... more There is increasing interest from large organisations who are requiring access to and manipulation of data distributed over the multiple sites of a computer network, and furthermore, they want to share and reuse database resources and services that are not available in their original systems. In the context of Object-Oriented Database Systems (OODBSs), services are the set of methods that
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which accessibility is taken into... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which accessibility is taken into account in the assessment and ranking of e-government web sites through the lens of a specific study related to Dubai e-government. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers a case study related to Dubai e-government and it evaluates the accessibility of each of the 21 Dubai e-government web sites, based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and using an automated accessibility testing tool. A bivariate correlation analysis is performed to assess the correlation between web site ranking and accessibility score. Findings – The research reveals that contrary to common intuition and some earlier studies, there is a weak correlation between e-government web site ranking score and web site accessibility. Research limitations/implications – The paper uses an accessibility metric that is a proxy indicator of web accessibility and is not a real assessment of accessibili...
Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation - GECCO '06, 2006
A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The ... more A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The composition is conducted in two Stages. The first Stage generates and identifies musically sound patterns (motifs). In the second Stage, methods to combine different generated motifs and their transpositions are applied. These combinations are evaluated and as a result, musically fit phrases are generated. Four musical phrases are generated at the end of each program run. The generated music pieces will be translated into Guido Music Notation (GMN) and have alternate representation in Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). The Autonomous Evolutionary Music Composer (AEMC) was able to create interesting pieces of music that were both innovative and musically sound.
2014 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops, 2014
Cloud computing is the next phase in the Internet's evolution, providing the means through which ... more Cloud computing is the next phase in the Internet's evolution, providing the means through which computing power, computing infrastructure, applications, business processes can be delivered to businesses and individual as a service wherever and whenever they need. Businesses who use cloud service providers (CSP) tend to have service level agreements (SLA) that act as contract and define the level of expected service from the CSP, including availability, performance and security. Recent research suggests the use of third party auditors (TPA) as a mean to monitor CSPs. This paper shows how CSP may deceit the SLA to reduce their cost and become more competitive, while avoiding detection by TPAs. The paper presents a crowdsourced TPA model to monitor the CSPs and consequently detect any deception.
Innovations and Advanced Techniques in Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering, 2007
In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for t... more In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for their ability to communicate, collaborate and share information in a networked environment. One of the main problems that arises in such systems is how to exploit their mappings in order to answer queries posed to one peer. Our proposed framework can be used to exploit the existing mapped
A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The ... more A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The composition is conducted in two Stages. The first Stage generates and identifies musically sound patterns (motifs). In the second Stage, methods to combine different generated motifs and their transpositions are applied. These combinations are evaluated and as a result, musically fit phrases are generated. Four musical phrases are generated at the end of each program run. The generated music pieces will be translated into Guido Music Notation (GMN) and have alternate representation in Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). The Autonomous Evolutionary Music Composer (AEMC) was able to create interesting pieces of music that were both innovative and musically sound.
In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for t... more In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for their ability to communicate, collaborate and share information in a networked environment. One of the main problems that arises in such systems is how to exploit their mappings in order to answer queries posed to one peer. Our proposed framework can be used to exploit the existing mapped
2016 30th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2016
Institutions in higher education generate terabytesof data that has great value to shape future o... more Institutions in higher education generate terabytesof data that has great value to shape future of nations. This Big Data is in heterogeneous formats, very current, and in large volumes. We propose a framework to collect, scope and verify this large amount of data. Although the framework is explained in the context of institution accreditation in higher education, the framework can be applied in the fields of health-care, finance, marketing etc. Our framework is used to reduce human involvement in the collection and analysis of data, for the purpose of accreditation. The framework extends the scope of data collected to target the heterogeneous nature of the data. Finally, our framework helps to verify the data against a standard set by an accreditation body.
Within recent years there has been increasing societal concern around the compulsive and excessiv... more Within recent years there has been increasing societal concern around the compulsive and excessive use of digital and Internet-enabled devices, such as the use of social media or online video gaming, and associated psychological and physical harms. However, problematic use or addictive behaviours are not yet included as diagnosable mental health issues in any major diagnostic system in Western countries and the conceptualisations of the phenomena are still inconsistent. To address this issue, the present study reviewed the current conceptualisations of digital addiction used within the research literature and identified common features of the definition of digital addiction. Definitions of the phenomenon were extracted from 47 studies, and they were analysed using a content analysis approach. The initial process assessed definitions for features of digital addiction within Internet, gaming and smartphone addiction. Two higher-order themes were identified, which focused on the harm c...
Periodicals of Engineering and Natural Sciences (PEN)
An accessible website enables the access to information and interaction for many people with disa... more An accessible website enables the access to information and interaction for many people with disabilities so these people can contribute more effectively in the society. Today, most governments are enforcing their websites to follow the www consortium (w3c)'s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). This paper investigates the WCAG 2.0 success criterions that make a website accessible and explores the most violated WCAG 2.0 success criterions by the developers of e-Government websites.
Although dynamic programming (DP) is an optimization approach used to solve a complex problem fas... more Although dynamic programming (DP) is an optimization approach used to solve a complex problem fast, the time required to solve it is still not efficient and grows polynomially with the size of the input. In this contribution, we improve the computation time of the dynamic programming based algorithms by proposing a novel technique, which is called “SDP: Segmented Dynamic programming”. SDP finds the best way of splitting the compared sequences into segments and then applies the dynamic programming algorithm to each segment individually. This will reduce the computation time dramatically. SDP may be applied to any dynamic programming based algorithm to improve its computation time. As case studies, we apply the SDP technique on two different dynamic programming based algorithms; “Needleman–Wunsch (NW)”, the widely used program for optimal sequence alignment, and the LCS algorithm, which finds the “Longest Common Subsequence” between two input strings. The results show that applying th...
The value of big data comes from its variety where data is collected from various sources. One of... more The value of big data comes from its variety where data is collected from various sources. One of the key big data challenges is identifying which data objects are relevant or refer to the same logical entity across various data sources. This challenge is traditionally known as schema matching. Due to big data velocity traditional approaches to data matching can no longer be used. In this paper we present an approach for inferring data objects correlation. We present our algorithm that relies on the objects meta-data and it consults the Word Net thesaurus
International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2016
Cloud computing has transformed the way businesses manage their IT resources. By uploading IT sol... more Cloud computing has transformed the way businesses manage their IT resources. By uploading IT solution to the cloud, businesses are assured that computational power and storage capacity are availab...
Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, 2016
Institutions in higher education generate terabytes of data that has great value to shape future ... more Institutions in higher education generate terabytes of data that has great value to shape future of nations. This Big Data is in heterogeneous formats, very current, and in large volumes. We propose a framework to collect, scope and verify this large amount of data. The analysis of the data is used to evaluate the institution against a standard set by an accreditation body, for the purpose of the academic accreditation of higher education programs. Therefore, the framework reduces human involvement in accreditation. The paper provides the detailed design of the process of aligning assessment with student learning outcomes.
Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Information Systems Technology and Its Applications Volume P 2, Sep 6, 2002
This paper is concerned with reusing and sharing behaviours of component Object Oriented Database... more This paper is concerned with reusing and sharing behaviours of component Object Oriented Database Systems in a tightly coupled federated multidatabase system environment. In such a federation, users benefit from exploiting the behaviours available in the participating components that are not available in their local systems so they can capitalise on investment made in writing their code. To facilitate this, users need to know which behaviours can be reused and shared and what are the requirements of reusing and sharing these behaviours. This means that the users will be able to build their integrated federation views augmented with behaviours of their preference.
2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing and 2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Autonomic and Trusted Computing and 2014 IEEE 14th Intl Conf on Scalable Computing and Communications and Its Associated Workshops, 2014
The cloud-computing paradigm has become a standard for on-demand and scalable storage and computa... more The cloud-computing paradigm has become a standard for on-demand and scalable storage and computation capabilities. Merging the elasticity of the clouds with mobile computing produces mobile cloud computing, which enhances many aspects, such as battery lifetime, performance and bandwidth. Cloudlets are resourceful computational units that provide cloud-computing services to mobile devices. Before mobile cloud computing can be widely adopted and deployed, security, privacy and trust barriers must be addressed. One of the main issues is whether a mobile user should trust a cloudlet provider. In cloud computing, cloud users trust their cloud providers, which tend to be large organisations with reputation to maintain. In mobile cloud computing, however, a cloudlet could be hosted on an LTE small base-station, known as a femtocell, owned by a small business or an individual. This paper presents a trust management scheme that allows mobile users to utilize cloud computing through trusted mobile cloud providers. The simulation of the trust management scheme shows the feasibility of our work.
This paper addresses the problem of integrating objectoriented local database schemas by creating... more This paper addresses the problem of integrating objectoriented local database schemas by creating several tailored global views using multiple structures and behaviours which fully match user requirements. Different users have different needs for integrating databases, and even the same user might want to integrate the same data in a variety of ways and/or include different behaviours to satisfy different tasks in an organisation. Supporting the global views with multiple behaviour, when possible saves effort, cost and time where the investment made in developing them can be exploited again by the original owner of these behaviours and also by new users in the interoperation context. We describe the theoretical framework we are using in the construction of the (MVMBS) Multiple Views supporting Multiple Behaviours System. MVMBS offers the potential for users to work in terms of integrated and customised global views supported by multiple behaviours. 3 Sharing Behaviour-Scope and Requirements Let us consider the classes EMPLOYEE and WORKER in DB1 and DB2, respectively (Fig. 1). Assume that both classes are semantically related and ideal for integration by merging into a global class GLOBAL-EMPLOYEE (see section 5.7) where its extension is the union of both EMPLOYEE and WORKER extensions
International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering, 2013
Peer-to-Peer database management systems have become an important topic in the last few years. Th... more Peer-to-Peer database management systems have become an important topic in the last few years. They rise up p2p technology to exploit the power of available distributed database management system technologies. Identifying relationship between different peer schema objects is one of the main activities so semantically relevant peer database management systems can be acquainted and become close in the overlay. In this paper we present our approach that measures the similarity of peer schema objects and ultimately depicts database management systems closeness in the overlay.
There is increasing interest from large organisations who are requiring access to and manipulatio... more There is increasing interest from large organisations who are requiring access to and manipulation of data distributed over the multiple sites of a computer network, and furthermore, they want to share and reuse database resources and services that are not available in their original systems. In the context of Object-Oriented Database Systems (OODBSs), services are the set of methods that
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which accessibility is taken into... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which accessibility is taken into account in the assessment and ranking of e-government web sites through the lens of a specific study related to Dubai e-government. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers a case study related to Dubai e-government and it evaluates the accessibility of each of the 21 Dubai e-government web sites, based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and using an automated accessibility testing tool. A bivariate correlation analysis is performed to assess the correlation between web site ranking and accessibility score. Findings – The research reveals that contrary to common intuition and some earlier studies, there is a weak correlation between e-government web site ranking score and web site accessibility. Research limitations/implications – The paper uses an accessibility metric that is a proxy indicator of web accessibility and is not a real assessment of accessibili...
Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation - GECCO '06, 2006
A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The ... more A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The composition is conducted in two Stages. The first Stage generates and identifies musically sound patterns (motifs). In the second Stage, methods to combine different generated motifs and their transpositions are applied. These combinations are evaluated and as a result, musically fit phrases are generated. Four musical phrases are generated at the end of each program run. The generated music pieces will be translated into Guido Music Notation (GMN) and have alternate representation in Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). The Autonomous Evolutionary Music Composer (AEMC) was able to create interesting pieces of music that were both innovative and musically sound.
2014 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops, 2014
Cloud computing is the next phase in the Internet's evolution, providing the means through which ... more Cloud computing is the next phase in the Internet's evolution, providing the means through which computing power, computing infrastructure, applications, business processes can be delivered to businesses and individual as a service wherever and whenever they need. Businesses who use cloud service providers (CSP) tend to have service level agreements (SLA) that act as contract and define the level of expected service from the CSP, including availability, performance and security. Recent research suggests the use of third party auditors (TPA) as a mean to monitor CSPs. This paper shows how CSP may deceit the SLA to reduce their cost and become more competitive, while avoiding detection by TPAs. The paper presents a crowdsourced TPA model to monitor the CSPs and consequently detect any deception.
Innovations and Advanced Techniques in Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering, 2007
In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for t... more In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for their ability to communicate, collaborate and share information in a networked environment. One of the main problems that arises in such systems is how to exploit their mappings in order to answer queries posed to one peer. Our proposed framework can be used to exploit the existing mapped
A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The ... more A second-generation autonomous music composition tool is developed using Genetic Algorithms. The composition is conducted in two Stages. The first Stage generates and identifies musically sound patterns (motifs). In the second Stage, methods to combine different generated motifs and their transpositions are applied. These combinations are evaluated and as a result, musically fit phrases are generated. Four musical phrases are generated at the end of each program run. The generated music pieces will be translated into Guido Music Notation (GMN) and have alternate representation in Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). The Autonomous Evolutionary Music Composer (AEMC) was able to create interesting pieces of music that were both innovative and musically sound.
In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for t... more In recent years, peer-to-peer data integration systems have attracted significant attention for their ability to communicate, collaborate and share information in a networked environment. One of the main problems that arises in such systems is how to exploit their mappings in order to answer queries posed to one peer. Our proposed framework can be used to exploit the existing mapped
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Papers by Basel Almourad