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Scholarly interest in Green IT has been rapidly growing over the past 15 years in a wide variety of disciplines including computer science, information systems, sustainability, production management and engineering. This is not surprising given the growing environmental impacts of information and communication technologies. This article presents a bibliometric analysis of academic literature across 1862 sources to improve our understanding of the evolution and current state of this multidisciplinary field. The corpus includes 4067 published journal and conference papers identified using the Scopus database. A descriptive performance analysis of the corpus using Bibliometrix software first allows us to identify the most influential works, authors, sources, institutions, and countries in the field. Examination of its conceptual structure reveals that most work has focused on the design and use phases of ICTs and neglected the manufacturing and end-of-life phases. Further insights are provided and opportunities for future research are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abstract should summarize the content of the paper. Try to keep the abstract below 200 words. Do not make references nor display equations in the abstract. The journal will be printed by photo-offset from the same-sized copy prepared by you. Your manuscript should be printed on A4 paper (21.0 cm x 29.7 cm). It is imperative that the margins and style described below be adhered to carefully. This will enable us to keep uniformity in the final printed copies of the Journal. Please keep in mind that the manuscript you prepare will be photographed and printed as it is received. Readability of copy is of paramount importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending metaphorically the Moisilean idea of ‘nuanced-reasoning logic’ and adapting it to the e-world age of Information Technology (IT), the paper aims at showing that new logics, already useful in modern software engineering, become necessary mainly for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), despite obvious adversities. The first sections are typical for a position paper, defending such logics from an anthropocentric perspective. Through this sieve, Section 4 outlines the features asked for by the paradigm of computing as intelligent interaction, based on ‘nuances of nuanced-reasoning’, that should be reflected by agent logics. To keep the approach credible, Section 5 illustrates how quantifiable synergy can be reached - even in advanced challenging domains, such as stigmergic coordination - by injecting symbolic reasoning in systems based on sub-symbolic ‘emergent synthesis’. Since for future work too the preferred logics are doxastic, the conclusions could be structured in line with the well-known agent architecture: Beliefs, Desires, Intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the correlation between first-year students' prior knowledge of programming and their academic achievements. Many students who enroll in the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology at Riga Technical University drop out during their first year. Therefore, it is crucial to support first-year students in acquiring programming knowledge successfully. The Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology provides an additional course called "Algorithmization Practice" for students without prior programming experience. The authors of this paper conducted research to investigate whether this course helps bridge the gap between students with and without prior programming knowledge and whether it improves the academic performance of students without prior knowledge in their first year. The collected data was summarized using descriptive statistics, and the final scores of students from different groups were compared to identify any differences between those who attended the "Algorithmization Practice" course and those who did not. Based on a sample of 1744 introductory programming course students, our analysis indicates that students who attended the additional course demonstrated better academic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research domains and solutions of information technology have been rapidly changed as information technology continuously and deeply deployed into our society. On the other hand, it can be considered that there are some common knowledge creation processes in information technology researches. In this paper, we propose a common research process on creating new researches which were extracted by retrospectively reengineering knowledge creation model of our Information Technology research papers that were conducted with my co-authors. The research creation model is applied and evaluated by our publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study discussed in this article attempts to trace the research trends in information and communication technology (ICT) in top 10 countries during 1999-2018, as reflected by scholarly publications index in the Scopus database. During the mentioned time period, total 18,382 research papers were published. Of these, maximum 1622 (8.82%) records were published in 2017. The annual growth (- 11.07 to 51.30) and the compound annual growth (- 0.01 to 0.23) have shown a fluctuating trend. However, a considerable number of records (7345) were published in the field of computer science while 52.35% of the records (9623) were journal article-type publications. 'Information and communication technology' was the most significant keyword used in 4997 records while the average (145.3) publications were contributed by top 10 organizations in which Japan National Institute of Information and Communications Technology was the most productive organization with 256 records. The maximum contributing country was the United States, standing for 22% of the total publications produced. Toyoshima, M. is the most prolific author with 53 publications on a particular topic, that is, ICT. The overall relative growth has shown a decreasing trend (0.92 to 0.09) while during the period of study, the doubling time has shown an increasing trend (0.75 to 7.54). Out of the total 18,382 records, total 209,919 citations were recorded in which the maximum citations (20,548) were found in 2010. Out of the total 55,913 research papers, maximum (5058) records were contributed by two authors while the least number of publications (2186) came from four authors. The mean value of the degree of collaborations was 0.92 and the overall degree of collaboration has exhibited an increasing trend during the period of study. The average author's collaboration coefficient and modified collaboration coefficient was recorded to be 0.69 while collaborative index was recorded at 4.21. However, Lotka's law of authors' productivity shows, the authors observed are somehow unlike from the numbers of authors expected during the period of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an international scientific journal, Studies in Informatics and Control (SIC) covers the field of Information Technology (IT) and topics related to research areas, as well as important applications in IT, with particular emphasis on Advanced Automatic Control, Modeling and Optimization. SIC has greatly contributed to the areas where it involves since its first online publication way back in 1992. This paper sets out to analyze the structure and the underlying trend of the journal by making use of bibliometric methods. Firstly, the classical indicators are provided to illustrate the performance of the journal. This current study performs an in-depth analysis of the most productive and the most influential authors, institutions, and countries/regions, as well as the most cited research works published in SIC. Secondly, the visualization tools VoS viewer and CiteSpace are used to create scientific maps that may explain the structure of the journal in an intuitionistic way. In the science mapping, the co-citation maps, and the co-authorship networks of various items (such as authors, institutions, and countries/regions) are conducted. Also, the bursts detection of these items are derived. The co-occurrence of keywords and their bursts detection and timeline review are shown, respectively. Finally, some conclusions are given. This paper provides a comprehensive and visual understanding of this well-regarded scientific journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, teaching coding at primary and secondary levels is emerging as a major educational issue, particularly in light of the recent reforms now being implemented. Consequently, there has been increased research on how to introduce information technology in lower secondary schools. This paper presents an exploratory survey, carried out through an intensive workshop on coding, which was designed to introduce the basic principles of computer science to be included in the future school curriculum. Specifically, the paper examines three key aspects of the coding unit for lower secondary schools: (a) the students' perception of their self-efficacy in carrying out coding; (b) the involvement of students' cognition and perception; (c) the principal obstacles students might encounter while coding. The results are encouraging as they demonstrate that coding turns out to be both highly interesting and motivating for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphical abstract Highlights • Proposed a randomised method to generate the teacher signals for the lower-bound and upper-bound, which are used to train neural networks. • Two-phase technique is proposed to construct the PIs: estimate a key parameter by applying a cross-validation scheme, and Phase 2 computes the PIs by applying the supervised teacher signals obtained in Phase 1. • Two ANFIS models, which constructed by using rule extraction and optimization methods, are employed so that the resulting learner models can be interpreted. This is useful and helpful to end-users in applications. • Benchmark datasets and a real world dataset are used in simulations, and results with comparisons demonstrate a good potential of the proposed techniques for robust data modelling. Abstract Point forecasting suffers from its poor interpretation respects in cases of the existence of uncertainties associated with the data or instability in the system. Prediction intervals (PIs) can cope with these deficiencies and can qualify the level of uncertainty related with point predictions. In this paper, the well-known adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) are employed as learner models to construct PIs with a randomized algorithm. Two ANFIS models are independently built to produce the lower-bound and upper-bound of PIs, respectively. The obtained results with comparisons over six datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithm performs positively in terms of both coverage rate and specificity. The proposed algorithm is also applied for a real-world application in energy science, and the experimental results show its applicability to construct PIs with satisfactory performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the problem of efficient processing of continuous range queries (CRQs) over a large number of moving objects, each of which continually retrieves the moving objects that are currently within a geographic query region of interest. In order to keep the result of CRQs up-to-date, the moving objects should continually communicate with the server to report their current locations. However, this increases the server workload and entails a huge amount of communication cost when the number of the moving objects and CRQs becomes enormous. In this paper, we adopt the approach of leveraging available memory and computational resources of the moving objects to remedy such problems. To this end, we propose a novel query indexing structure, referred to as the space partitioning query index (SPQI), which enables the server to efficiently cooperate with the moving objects for processing CRQs. SPQI greatly improves the overall system performance in terms of server workload and communication cost. Through a set of comprehensive simulations, we verify the superiority of SPQI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a history of humanities computing over the past decade as embodied in or represented by A Companion to Digital Humanities (first published in 2004), methodologically, theoretically, and in terms of community practice. It explores digital humanities as an emerging discipline through changes in technology, as well as through evolving conceptions of the field, particularly through the lens of literary studies and new media. The article also explores how the field's major conference Digital Humanities, but previously titled the Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ACH/ALLC), reflects these changes, through not only the themes presented in conference papers, but in the change of the title of the conference itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Biology databases (bioDBs) play an ever-increasing role in the post-genome era for bioinformatics education. In order to handle the increasing demand for bioDBs in bioinformatics education, since Spring 2005, the College of Information Science and Technology (IST) at University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) has offered a course entitled “Database Search and Pattern Discovery” for seniors of our undergraduate Bioinformatics program (which is also available for graduate students majored in Compute Science program) on an annual base. This paper summarizes considerations behind development of this course, describes how the course is structured, reports our findings and observations, and raises issues of urgent tasks. The main objective of this paper is to exchange our thoughts of bioinformatics course development and solicit feedbacks and suggestions from colleagues working in bioinformatics education and related fields. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The privilege in the operating system (OS) often results in the break of confidentiality and integrity of the system. To solve this problem, several security mechanisms are proposed, such as Role-based Access Control, Separation of Duty. However, these mechanisms can not eliminate the privilege in OS kernel layer. This paper proposes a Separation of Three Powers Architecture (STPA). The authorizations in OS are divided into three parts: System Management Subsystem (SMS), Security Management Subsystem (SEMS) and Audit Subsystem (AS). Mutual support and mutual checks and balances which are the design principles of STPA eliminate the administrator in the kernel layer. Furthermore, the paper gives the formal description for authorization division using the graph theory. Finally, the implementation of STPA is given. Proved by experiments, the Separation of Three Powers Architecture we proposed can provide reliable protection for the OS through authorization division. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents the importance of formulating general discrete-time model representations for current pathway deterministic modeling study. Discrete-time models can be considered as a link between continuous-time kinetic reactions and discrete-time experimentation as well as computer based simulation and analysis. In the paper, different discretization techniques are investigated according to different sorts of ODE model structures. Two discretization strategies are mainly focused, that are one-step Taylor/Lie series based method and multi-step Runge-Kutta method. A new discretization approach based on Taylor expansion and Carleman linearization is proposed for bilinear in states pathway models. Finally, the superiority of using Runge-Kutta based approach as general discrete-time model representations are concluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The computer-assisted learning is a very modern study area, which can be applied to the learning process. The main objective of this paper is to present a software system for online learning based on the intelligent software agents technologies. The main ideas on which this paper is built are: to any person is associated a learning profile (the idea is based on the existence of multiple intelligences, defined by Gardner [3]); the pedagogical resources can be shaped through educational semantic networks or through conceptual maps; a flexible software system in computer assisted learning must be based on the intelligent agents' technology. The system dedicated to computer-assisted learning must be adapted to the learning profile of each student. The author presents a flexible online teaching software system, which learns to teach according to the learning profile of each student (the author defines this system in the PhD thesis and includes: intelligent agent structures, reward learning algorithms, algorithms to generate plans for an agent). The application includes two agents: the supervising agent and the pedagogical agent, which determines the optimal pedagogical resources for teaching the course. The application has been designed in Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 and uses Microsoft Agent Technology, which allows vocal recognition. Also, the Protéjé 3.0 software has been used, software that allows building ontology for computer assisted learning. The system has been experimented on the Graph Theory Course, taught at postuniversitary computer science courses, the results proving the necessity of defining a strategy for selecting the pedagogical resources presented to the students according to their learning profile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of information technology outsourcing (ITO) ‘configuration’, defined as: a high-level description of the set of choices the organization makes in crafting its IT outsourcing portfolio. From research into 49 ITO arrangements studied over time, we identify seven attributes—Scope Grouping, Supplier Grouping, Financial Scale, Duration, Pricing, Resource Ownership, and Commercial Relationship—as key descriptors of an organization''s ITO configuration. Seven further cases tested the relevance of the attributes. The contribution of this paper is its articulation of the concept of configuration as a taxonomy of ITO structural characteristics, the key attributes, and demonstration that configuration is an important concept for understanding, comparing, and managing ITO arrangements. In particular, the paper details the rationales for 31 different options in outsourcing, the risks and management issues emerging for each, and how these play out in different combinations in selected, illustrative case studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With increasing numbers of organizations automating their business processes by using workflow systems, security aspects of workflow systems has become a heavily researched area. Also, most workflow processes nowadays need to be adaptive, i.e., constantly changing, to meet changing business conditions. However, little attention has been paid to integrating Security and Adaptive Workflow. In this paper, we investigate this important research topic, with emphasis on Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Adaptive Workflow. Based on our earlier work on a 3-tier adaptive workflow architecture, we present the design of a similar 3-tier RBAC infrastructure, and we show that it conceptually mirrors our adaptive workflow architecture. We also describe the mappings between them, and we show how this mapping can be used to manage organizational RBAC constraints when the workflows are being adapted continuously. We illustrate our ideas throughout the paper with a simple yet non-trivial example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scheduling is a crucial task fo r schools, universities, an d industries. It is a vital task fo r any system containing utilization of resources to fulfill a certain criterion. Utilization of such resources usually includes several conflicting const) aints that scheduling has to take into account. Exam scheduling is an essential key for schools and universities in order fo r exams periods to be smooth. In this paper, we present an exam scheduling system that employs graph coloring scheduling technique. We focus on two aspects: First, the constraints our system handles, second, the user friendly interface of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 40 Inventive Principles are one of the best known and most used tools of TRIZ. Originally, the 40 Inventive Principles were focused on solving problems of physics and chemistry. Caused by the increasing impact of software solutions, there were some activities in searching for analogies of the 40 Principles in software environments since the year 2000. Unfortunately, these efforts only had limited success. TRIZ and software is a difficult topic until today. This paper takes a look at past searches for software analogies of the 40 Principles. As a result, the creation of analogies is regarded as very useful. In the past, the analogies were limited to one-to-one transfers and new examples for the existing 40 Principles. But information technology is very different from physics and chemistry. This causes lateral thinking to be necessary when applying the current analogies of the Inventive Principles, thus often reducing quality and number of the ideas found. For avoiding lateral thinking, the transfer of the Inventive Principles to information technology has to be done in a more flexible way. For achieving this objective, information technology is separated into its three characteristics: objects, data, and algorithms. In the first step, each original Principle is applied to each of these three characteristics. Then, all results are put together. In the second step, the found results are put back into groups based on the original Principles. Thereby, groups are created, dropped, modified, or split. Thus, the new groups can be very different in comparison to the original Inventive Principles. Finally, the groups are turned into Inventive Principles for information technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The localization of object parts in the component-based object detection is among the main tasks to solve. This paper presents several improvements of the proposed local image descriptor based on Gabor wavelets. Including these descriptors in the desired application is an ambitious challenge if we take into account the high number of parameters. Determining of parameters can be very hard because of their infinite definition range. Defining the filters is done in two stages: a theoretical consideration narrows the domain and the cardinality of parameters; this is followed by adequate experiments to select the most characteristic descriptor for a target image patch. The descriptor is created from a given number of 2D Gabor filters chosen by the GentleBoost learning algorithm. Comparing the proposed descriptor to those found in the state of the art, we can conclude that the selected filters are adaptable to any target object. In contrast to this, the majority of filter-based descriptors have fixed values for the parameters that do not allow to be ductile to the given object. Parameters fine-tuning allows the descriptor to be general, and discriminative at the same time. The effect of the following experiments has been analyzed during the investigation: elimination of redundancy between the weak classifiers, using the LoG interest points in the detection process. Finally, we propose an acceleration algorithm in order to deter- mine the response map faster. By means of the descriptor, the response map is created, which accurately localizes the target object part and can easily be integrated in almost all detection systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an Arabic statistical learning-based text classification system has been developed using Polynomial Neural Networks. Polynomial Networks have been recently applied to English text classification, but they were never used for Arabic text classification. In this research, we investigate the performance of Polynomial Networks in classifying Arabic texts. Experiments are conducted on a widely used Arabic dataset in text classification: Al-Jazeera News dataset. We chose this dataset to enable direct comparisons of the performance of Polynomial Networks classifier versus other well-known classifiers on this dataset in the literature of Arabic text classification. Results of experiments show that Polynomial Networks classifier is a competitive algorithm to the state-of-the-art ones in the field of Arabic text classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report on the practical outcomes of Software Studio (SS) undergraduate course, but also on a graduate Software Engineering for Internet Applications (SEIA) course, both of which are taught collaboratively by IT and non-IT faculty members. In the latter, students are assigned to projects proposed by actual customers and work together in teams to deliver quality results under time and resource constraints. We are interested in the learning results, such as skills acquired, e.g. by analysing the interaction between students and customers to determine how and to what degree the students transform through project based collaborative learning. As for the SEIA course, the primary goal is to allow students to manage a relatively large number of tools with little prior knowledge and having to work out how to obtain detailed information about given features, when required. In other words, students have to understand the key ideas of web application development in order to be able not only to apply technical knowledge, but also to successfully interact with all the stakeholders involved. In the process, we look for the added value of collaborative teaching, aiming at equipping the participants with both technical and non-technical skills required for their prospective jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel technique for object identification and representation in complex traffic scene based on the colour features integrated with line detection techniques. Objects of interest (vehicles) are represented by using a Minimum Bound Region (MBR) with a reference coordinate. Object appearance is represented by colour-based features computed from the proposed technique. The performance of the object identification based colour features depends on some parameters, which should be determined carefully to locate and identify objects that exists in the images successfully. Experiments have been conducted to determine the efficient parameters that should used and demonstrate that single and multiple known objects in complex scenes can be identified by the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a framework for the rapid development of problem solving environments in the field of Urban Science. This framework focuses on the use of shared cloud computing technologies for data processing and resource-intensive modeling, GIS-technologies for visualization of incoming data and computational results, and tools for the creation of a control graphical user interface and human- computer interaction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper presents a specific approach to designing the curriculum and syllabus of a newly formed course for study programmes in information technology, protection and other fields. The topic is risk assessment that is introduced in the course and which is a common element in various fields. The content creation approach is the result of the strong relationship and cooperation between the higher education institution and the overall industrial and non-industrial sectors of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconfiguring the parameters of PTZ cameras in a surveillance system is a combinatorial optimization problem. Computing the optimal solution is very time consuming, and existing methods can only provide sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a non-linear objective function that better utilizes a camera network to track multiple targets. We also show that, by expanding the unknown parameters and imposing new constraints, the non-linear objective function can be converted into a linear production game (LPG) problem. Since an LPG yields an optimal solution that can be evaluated in polynomial time, the proposed method is efficient and accurate. The results of simulations and a real-world experiment demonstrate the proposed method's potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mesh simplification has become a key ingredient for real-time graphics applications. However, practitioners have found that automatic simplification methods usually fail to produce satisfactory result when models of very low polygon count are desired. This is due to the fact that existing methods take no semantic or functional metric into account, and moreover, each error metric proposed previously has its own strength and weakness. In this paper, we propose a user-controllable mesh simplification framework that allows users to achieve a predictable resolution improvement in selected regions of a simplified mesh derived by using any error metric. The framework consists of two stages. The first stage employs weighting schemes that allow users to refine unsatisfactory regions to a user-expected resolution. The second stage is a local refinement aiming to provide a user-guided fine-tune to recover local sharp features. Two weighting schemes, namely uniform weighting and nonuniform weighting, are proposed. In uniform weighting scheme, a weight value is applied to all original mesh vertices in a selected region, resulting in a uniform improvement on vertex resolution in the region, while in the nonuniform weighting scheme varying weights are applied to vertices in a selected region and obtain a nonuniform resolution improvement in the region. Different from the previous user-assisted simplification methods that reorder the collapsing sequence indirectly by weighting the collapsing cost of edges, the two proposed weighting schemes directly reorder the edge collapsing sequence, ensuring a predictable resolution improvement in the selected regions. Moreover, the proposed weighting schemes are independent on error metric used for simplification and ensure the same resolution improvement when a weighting value is applied to simplified meshes with different resolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While many firms have introduced SOA, only one in five have achieved anticipated benefits such as increased IT flexibility or reuse. Industry analysts assume that a lack of SOA governance is the main reason why SOA projects fail. Addressing the substantial research gap on SOA governance this paper theoretically and empirically investigates which SOA governance mechanisms are needed to achieve the benefits of SOA, such as increasing IT flexibility and reusing services. The proposed theoretical SOA governance model is evaluated using data from 81 SOA-using organizations. Overall, the results confirm the relevance of a variety of SOA governance mechanisms (structures, processes, and employees/relations), but at the same time, that IT infrastructure flexibility and service reuse are influenced by different mechanisms. Key governance mechanisms that show a strong effect on infrastructure flexibility are using standards, service management processes, educating employees, and IT/business communication while reuse can only be increased through service management, standards and qualification. Contrary to expectations, implementing new, dedicated decision-making bodies for SOA hampers organizations in achieving higher degrees of IT flexibility and reuse, and a firm is better off using existing IT decision-making bodies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the ever-increasing complexity of systems, it is important to properly educate the upcoming systems engineering workforce. The Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE) provides guidelines for graduate program degrees in systems engineering. GRCSE establishes a baseline set of entrance expectations, objectives, outcomes and content for any graduate degree in systems engineering. GRCSE recognizes that each university needs to meet the needs of their constituents, and for this purpose, GRCSE only defines 50% of the program content, and leaves the other 50% to be defined by individual universities to satisfy the needs of their stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to introduce GRCSE''s outcomes, and how those outcomes can be attained through the program content. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Systems engineering increasingly addresses the system lifecycle, as opposed to its more traditional role focusing on design and development. This new situation results in part from the recognition that upstream design and deployment decisions have potentially significant cost and performance implications post-deployment. For military systems, the role that typically addresses post-deployment issues is the logistician. Over the system lifecycle, it is important that the traditional roles of systems engineer and logistician understand issues faced by one another, as well as joint cost and performance implications. This paper presents the design of a role-based experiential learning environment for logisticians involved in military sustainment. This design leverages the generic components of an existing single-learner technology base, the Experience Accelerator, for presenting and controlling the learner experience, plus simulating program outcomes resulting from learner decisions. This technology base has been used to create a learning experience for a lead systems engineer in charge of designing and developing a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system. In this new environment, the logistician learner interacts with systems engineers during UAV system acquisition and sustainment, learns about systems engineering issues and their effect on logistics, tries to influence upstream systems engineering decisions, and also performs logistics functions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In order to tackle problems in the modern world, individuals must possess a strong ability to reason about and understand complex systems in a practical and useful way. Past research has indicated that experts and novices possess fundamentally different kinds of understanding of complex systems. Therefore, to adequately prepare students to address problems pertaining to complex systems, it is important to help them acquire an authentic expert- like understanding of these systems. We approach this problem from two angles: first, we create an interactive environment in which students may investigate complex systems in a manner similar to that of scientists and engineers; secondly, we embed metacognitive agents in the interactive environments such that the agents provide situated guidance towards expert-like understanding of complex systems. In this paper, we detail the design of these two systems, referred to as MILA and MeTA respectively, and the way in which they help students obtain a more authentic and advanced understanding of complex systems. We also briefly describe the deployments of these tools in a science summer camp for middle school students and preliminary results of students’ interaction with them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Version 1.0 of the Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) was released in September 2012. Seventy authors from around the world working for three years created the SEBoK. This paper discusses twelve factors that were critical to the successful development and on-time release of the SEBoK. The approach taken is elaborated, and lessons learned along the way are highlighted. These experiences and recommendations based on them would be useful to any collaborative research effort that shares one or more of the characteristics of SEBoK development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There is a need for a program designed to more tightly integrate manufacturing, producibility, life cycle costs, and large scale system integration concerns from the beginning of the aerospace design process. This paper presents the results of an analysis performed in support of the development of a Collaborative Aerospace Lifecycle Systems Engineering Master''s Program (CALSEMP). The proposed CALSEMP addresses six focus areas identified by the NDIA including systems engineering trade study and design decision methodologies; system integration, assembly, and test analyses modeling; enterprise level supply chain design; electrical, mechanical, and assembly yield modeling; quantitative analyses; and life cycle cost modeling. The analysis was performed at Georgia Tech using an integrated product and process design approach to systems engineering, with qualitative and quantitative tools, such as the house of quality, morphological matrix, Pugh and TOPSIS methods. We present the alternative concepts studied and our proposed master''s program, which will hopefully enable aerospace industries to compete on the global aerospace market by providing them with tools that help them better integrate all these concerns throughout the product life cycle. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Many system developments fail at the integration and qualification (I&Q) phases in the development and acquisition cycle. How can we, as Systems Engineers (SE), navigate the uncertainty and risk of system development to ensure I&Q success? One solution is applying significant influence of the system integrator (SI) member of the SE team at the very beginning of system design. If this is a solution, then what processes, methods, and practices can the SI apply in the overall SE process? Can the emerging Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods and tools be leveraged by the SI? This paper discusses a Model Based System Integration (MBSI) approach that applies essential MBSE methods and tools to the unique goals of the SI. While MBSE is supportive of the entire SE process, it tends to be optimized for the design-side of the SE process and not necessarily for I&Q goals and objectives. MBSI highlights how MBSE tools and methods can be extended to benefit the SI. Lessons- learned from several SE graduate school projects applying these MBSI methods are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the MBSI approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The current trend in system of systems design is to explore larger and more diverse alternative spaces earlier in the design process. However, the ability to do so is constrained by the efficiency of the models used during the process. Previous research has suggested that aggregation function based models for calculating the overall performance of a system of systems concept can be a very effective way to explore such alternative spaces efficiently. However, such modeling frameworks require the creation of the aggregation functions and as of yet no method or framework has been proposed for choosing the functions that properly model anything but the simplest system of systems. This research surveys existing aggregation methods from the perspective of system of systems modeling, and attempts to find families of aggregation functions that are well suited for modeling relevant types of alternatives and metrics. The goal is ultimately to populate an aggregation based modeling framework with the correct aggregation functions given all the desired alternative types and metrics of performance. This paper takes the first steps in developing the framework by identifying candidate functions and methods which may be appropriate for an aggregation-based approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we investigate the importance of research infrastructures for arts and humanities research. We seek to outline the development of a digital research infrastructure localised in the science and engineering domain and framed within the concept of e-Science. We define the primary characteristics of e-Science as big data and big structures such as the grid and high performance computing. We will attempt to demonstrate the transfer of the e-Science paradigm to the humanities and to assess what worked and what did not. We then suggest how thinking about technology and infrastructure through and within the humanities can lead to transformation and finish with a suggestion that the future for humanities research infrastructures is best framed around the emerging idea of a humanities specific digital ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper propose a method to improve the interacting between MATLAB and NI-DAQmx, we built a new Matlab toolkit for data acquisition using the NI-DAQmx drivers. With this toolkit Matlab can support the full functionality of NI-DAQmx and the data acquisition will be more stabile and effective. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the development of computer science and technology, current secure operating systems failed to respond to many new security challenges. Trusted operating system (TOS) is proposed to try to solve these problems. However, there are no mature, unified architectures for the TOS yet, since most of them cannot make clear of the relationship between security mechanism and the trusted mechanism. Therefore, this paper proposes a double-system architecture (DSA) for the TOS to solve the problem. The DSA is composed of the Trusted System (TS) and the Security System (SS). We constructed the TS by establishing a trusted environment and realized related SS. Furthermore, we proposed the Trusted Information Channel (TIC) to protect the information flow between TS and SS. In a word, the double system architecture we proposed can provide reliable protection for the OS through the SS with the supports provided by the TS. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper describes research in the use of the RMI to develop Java Card applications. the Java Card RMI (JCRMI), which is based on the J2SE RMI distributed-object model. In the RMI model a server application creates and makes accessible remote objects, and a client application obtains remote references to the server''s remote objects, and then invokes remote methods on them. In JCRMI, the Java Card applet is the server, and the host application is the client. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Computer Assisted Instruction, emerging from the traditional computer technology, is a new approach applied to the field of education which brings dramatic changes to the traditional teaching methods, styles, and content. This paper proposes a model of education system based on integrable ware has been created after the research on the structure of education system; The characteristics of the system structure are discussed, the infinite combinations of principal point are adapted to the ever-changing teaching practice and some functions of the education system have been realized. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: There always exists “Information Island” phenomenon in most enterprise application systems and has brought many problems in the enterprise information. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an effective way to solve the “Information Island”. Based on the EAI research, the paper finds the problems of traditional EAI and proposes collaborative commerce model of enterprise application integration and analysis’ and points out the advantages by applying the collaborative commerce model of enterprise application integration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Similarity measurement of XML documents is crucial to meet various needs of approximate searches and document classifications in XML-oriented applications. Some methods have been proposed for this purpose. Nevertheless, few methods can be elegantly exploited to depict structure and semantic information and hence to effectively measure the similarity of XML documents. In this paper, we present a new method of computing the structure and semantic similarity of XML documents based on extended adjacency matrix(EAM). Different from a general adjacency matrix, in an EAM, the structure information of not only the adjacent layers but also the ancestor-descendant layers can be stored. For measuring the similarity of two XML documents, the proposed method firstly stores the structure and semantic information in two extended adjacency matrices(M 1 , M 2 ). Then it computes similarity of the two documents through cos(M 1 , M 2 ) Experimental results on bench-mark data show that the method holds high efficiency and accuracy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the growth of network scale size, structure is getting more and more sophisticated, how to effectively manage the network has been increasingly paid attention to. Development of network management systems, there are mainly two system models, that is, C/S mode and B/S mode. This paper focuses on analysis of advantages and disadvantages in the C/S mode and B/S mode, design and implementation network management system based on the mixed mode with C/S mode and B/S mode. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Biological and chemical information technologies (bio/chem IT) have the potential to reshape the scientific and technological landscape. In this paper we briefly review the main challenges and opportunities in the field, before presenting several case studies based on ongoing FP7 research projects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: This study examines the development of the connected health (CH) research landscape with a view to providing an overview of the existing CH research. The research field of CH has experienced rapid growth coinciding with increasing pressure on health care systems to become more proactive and patient centered.Objective: This study aimed to assess the extent and coverage of the current body of knowledge in CH. In doing so, we sought to identify specific topics that have drawn the attention of CH researchers and to identify research gaps, in particular those offering opportunities for further interdisciplinary research.Methods: A systematic mapping study that combined scientific contributions from research in the disciplines of medicine, business, computer science, and engineering was used. Overall, seven classification criteria were used to analyze the papers, including publication source, publication year, research type, empirical type, contribution type, research topic, and the medical condition studied.Results: The search resulted in 208 papers that were analyzed by a multidisciplinary group of researchers. The results indicated a slow start for CH research but showed a more recent steady upswing since 2013. The majority of papers proposed health care solutions (77/208, 37.0%) or evaluated CH approaches (49/208, 23.5%). Case studies (59/208, 28.3%) and experiments (55/208, 26.4%) were the most popular forms of scientific validation used. Diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and heart conditions were among the most prevalent medical conditions studied.Conclusions: We conclude that CH research has become an established field of research that has grown over the last five years. The results of this study indicate a focus on technology-driven research with a strong contribution from medicine, whereas the business aspects of CH have received less research attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steganography which facilitates covert communication creates a potential problem when misused for planning criminal activities. Its counter measure steganalysis is focused on detecting (the main goal of this research). tracking, extracting, and modifying secret messages transmitted through a subliminal channel In this paper, a feature classification technique, based on the analysis of content independent statistical properties, is proposed to blindly (i.e., without knowledge of the steganographic schemes) determine the existence of hidden messages in an image. To be effective in class separation, the genetic-X-means classifier was exploited. For performance evaluation, a database composed of 5600 plain and stego images (generated by using seven different embedding schemes) was established. Based on this database, extensive experiments were conducted to prove the feasibility and diversity of our proposed system. Our main results and findings are as follows: 1. a 80%+ positive-detection rate. (promising rate for a blind steganalyzer) 2. The removal of content dependency from features enhances the discriminator, power of the classifier. 3. Universal, blind steganalyzer. (not limited to the detection of a particular steganographic scheme) 4. Detection of stego images with an embedding rate as low as 5% of the maximum payload. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Cloud" computing -- a relatively recent term, builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, and more recently networking, web and software services. It implies a service oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand services and many other things. This paper discusses the concept of "cloud" computing, some of the issues it tries to address, related research topics, and a "cloud" implementation available today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is aiming at launching the debate / forum to discuss the new scientific discipline of "c-Enterprise" (e-E) within the knowledge-based Society paradigm. There are great challenges to support the solid foundation of the new "science", copying with the requirements list of Knowledge-based society focusing on globalization and e-democracy approach for c-Enterprise. The first key-driver is the coherent and consistent new methodology for General System Theory based modeling, analysis, performance evaluation and conceptual design of c-Enterprise. The second one concerns with Digital World Theory and Applications based on advanced research in Mathematics, Physics and Computing Practice. A Romanian National Research funding-based project "REMEDIUM" (environment 4 health) is used as a complex study case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code mobility technologies attract more and more developers and consumers. Numerous domains are concerned, many platforms are developed and interest applications are realized. However, developing good software products requires modeling, analyzing and proving steps. The choice of models and modeling languages is so critical on these steps. Formal tools are powerful in analyzing and proving steps. However, poorness of classical modeling language to model mobility requires proposition of new models. The objective of this paper is to provide a specific formalism Coloured Reconfigurable Nets and to show how this one seems to be adequate to model different kinds of code mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]