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Global warming is one of the most serious issues faced by today's world. The increase in world population and adoption of modern lifestyle have dramatically increased the demand for energy. Over the last decade Higher Educational Institution (HEI) buildings have seen massive increase in energy consumption due to increased use of IT equipments, longer occupancy and increased use of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Current Building Management Systems (BMS) fail to optimize energy consumption of HVAC systems in commercial and educational buildings. In this paper we present an intelligent agent based system to optimize energy consumption of HVAC system in HEI buildings. The system employs artificial intelligence techniques to predict the demand of the system and optimize energy consumption of the HVAC system. The experimental results have shown that the deployment of the system has resulted in 3% reduction in energy consumption of HVAC.

Many web search engines retrieve enormous amounts of irrelevant information in answer to users' queries. The semantic web provides a promising approach to improve search operation. For specific domains, ontologies can capture concepts to help machines deal with data semantically. Our aim in writing this paper was to show how to measure the closeness (relevancy) of retrieved web sites to user query-concepts and re-rank them accordingly. We therefore proposed a new relevancy measure to re-rank retrieved documents. We termed the approach ''ontology concepts'' and it on the domain of electronic commerce. Results suggested that we could re-rank the retrieved documents (web sites) according to their relevancy to the search query. Our method depends on the frequency of the ''ontology concepts'' in the retrieved documents and uses this to compute their relevancy.

Problem statement: Routers are very important components in any network. They control and organize the in-bound traffic and the out-bound traffic. Controlling a router by an intruder leaves the entire network unsecured. In different studies, Router security was discussed from different aspects such as the routing protocol, the firewall. In this research, we present a new effective security mechanism for routers depending on the packet structure. Approach: Our approach in the new security mechanism is based on the utilization of the unused bits in the packet structure that have been left for future use. These unused bits will be used for security purposes to increase the protection level along the path between various routers between networks. Results: In the proposed approach, the router represents a manager that can take security decisions and coordinate between the operations that are related to both the packet and the routing table, both of which will assume a new structure. Achieving integration between these main routing components will make the routing of information more secure. Conclusions/Recommendations: From the analysis, we see that the proposed mechanism takes the communication security a step further without extra cost and effort and this is because we have used the unused bits that are already exist in the packet header.

This paper reports a comparative study of two machine learning methods on Arabic text categorization. Based on a collection of news articles as a training set, and another set of news articles as a testing set, we evaluated K nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm, and support vector machines (SVM) algorithm. We used the full word features and considered the tf.idf as the weighting method for feature selection, and CHI statistics as a ranking metric. Experiments showed that both methods were of superior performance on the test corpus while SVM showed a better micro average F1 and prediction time.

Nowadays cloud computing is widely used to provide different kinds of services such as, maintaining data and applications, scalable processing, storing data, access management, employing virtualization and other internet applications to its user. As there are benefits of the cloud services, on the other hand there are risks as well that might face the cloud providers, companies or individuals when using cloud computing services. One of the major risks is securing and providing privacy of data in cloud computing infrastructure. In this paper a novel method has been proposed for securing and providing privacy of data in cloud computing infrastructure. The data has been divided into parts and encryption has been performed on the data through a control access on the data. Experiments have been performed for splitting data and encrypting the data based on the proposed method. The result shows the proposed method is an efficient method which can be used as an academic tool for demonstrating cloud computing applications providing privacy and security of the cloud data.

Introduction The importance of higher education to gain prosperity and to develop human resources is understood by under-developed countries. Three quarters of Arab universities were established in the last 25 years of the 20th century (UNDP: Arab Human Development Report, 2003). Students in higher education require a very flexible environment to communicate and collaborate with their peers to accomplish tasks needed to succeed. Social and cultural values of a society do impose different rules based on gender. Females in Arab society are usually subject to different sets of rules as compared to their male counterparts in the same society. These rules may severely limit the learning opportunities for females. In western society, culture and social values do not impose any restriction on individuals based on their gender. Students in higher education regardless of their gender can meet, communicate, and collaborate at anytime at any place of their choice. In contrast, most Middle Eastern society is based on gender segregation that permits limited interaction between genders. Culture and social values in UAE and Saudi Arabia strictly enforce gender segregation, while countries such as Jordan and Lebanon are moderately liberal in this matter. Advances in networking technologies and the Internet can have a significant impact on teaching and learning in higher education (Hodges, 2004; Muhlhauser & Trompler, 2002; Smith & Winking-Diaz, 2004). In a technology mediated learning environment, students and teachers use a wide range of ICT tools to communicate, collaborate and share resources; these tools provide anytime anywhere learning opportunities. We begin by providing an overview of how ICT could be used to enhance traditional instructor-led teaching to alleviate the impact of social and cultural values on higher education; to make the learning environment a place to pass information and knowledge from teacher to students, from students to teacher, and from students to students; and a place for creative thinking and learning. Next, we discuss education and learning environment in two Middle Eastern countries. We then discuss their ICT infrastructure and its impact on higher education. We conclude by presenting the findings from a case study based on surveys conducted at JUST in Jordan and at ZU in the UAE. Education and Learning Environment The UAE secondary schooling system remains very traditional with teacher-led classes where memorization is emphasized (Sanders & Quirke, 2002). Students prefer all-knowing teachers who provide them answers to all questions. Only the UAE citizens can attend the public education system that has separate schools for boys and girls. The private education system is mainly for ex-patriots and is usually not segregated by gender at the school level. Some private higher education institutions have a co-education environment while others have separate arrangements for male and female students. The UAE provides free education for its citizens at all levels of education. United Nations (UN) statistics indicates that the UAE is among the most developed nations in educating female students (Information in the UAE, 2005). Each major center of population within the country has two colleges of technology, one for males, and another for females. ZU was established for the national female population. The University has five colleges and most of the faculty members are western educated. Its faculty endeavor to provide students learning opportunities in an American style of teaching ensuring a very high quality of education. ZU's operations and policies reflect the impact of social and cultural values on higher education. Women enroll in higher education more than men and their ratio is 6:2. In UAE, 20% of the total work force is now women. Women have gained access to higher education, though they are still largely excluded from government decision making. …

This paper presents a fast algorithm for solving the n-queens problem. The basic idea of this algorithm is to use pre-computed solutions in 75% of the cases, while the remaining cases are solved by calling the Sosic's algorithm. The novelty of this algorithm is in the observation that these pre-computable cases exhibit a modular nature. In addition, the pre-computed solutions run 100 times faster than Sosic's algorithm in most cases.

Integer multiplication is a very common operation that is executed in many applications. However, some of these applications suffer from the overflow problem caused by the multiply operation of two operands. The overflow occurs whenever the multiplication of any two-integer numbers exceeds the maximum limit available for the result. Many programming languages ignored this problem; therefore, the programmer has to handle it, mostly in “predict and avoid” approach. Present study addresses the detection and control of integer overflow in programming languages. Two examples from C and JAVA programming languages are considered. The paper suggests “detect and do” algorithms to handle the overflow. In addition, this paper suggests adding a built-in function to test whether an overflow will be generated by multiplication operation in advance.

Word prediction methodologies depend heavily on the statistical approach that uses the unigram, bigram, and the trigram of words. However, the construction of the N-gram model requires a very large size of memory, which is beyond the capability of many existing computers. Beside this, the approximation reduces the accuracy of word prediction. In this paper, we suggest to use a cluster of computers to build an Optimal Binary Search Tree (OBST) that will be used for the statistical approach in word prediction. The OBST will contain extra links so that the bigram and the trigram of the language will be presented. In addition, we suggest the incorporation of other enhancements to achieve optimal performance of word prediction. Our experimental results showed that the suggested approach improves the keystroke saving.

A quick matrix multiplication algorithm is presented and evaluated on a cluster of networked workstations consisting of Pentium hosts connected together by Ethernet segments. The obtained results confirm the feasibility of using networked workstations to provide fast and low cost solutions to many computationally intensive applications such as large linear algebraic systems. The paper also presents and verifies an accurate timing model to predict the performance of the proposed algorithm on arbitrary clusters of workstations. Through this model the viability of the proposed algorithm can be revealed without the extra effort that would be needed to carry out real testing.

Currently, several approaches for image indexing based on the quadtrees exist. In this paper, we propose a new organization for image databases combined with the corresponding algorithm for image search by example. The suggested organization uses the quadtrees to splits the database into multi-subsets by adding some extra fields to facilitate the image search. We suggest a centroid partial match algorithm to process the search query. The algorithm selects random points from an image in a circular uniform movement to check for image match. The proposed organization searches a subset of the image database rather than the whole database. It is flexible since the number of subsets in the database is variable. The centroid image algorithm permits the search regardless of the image size. Both the database organization and the centroid algorithm guarantee that the precision and the recall maximum values are achievable.

There are a growing number of applications, which extensively use the visual media. A key requirement in those applications is efficient access to the stored visual information for the purposes of indexing, fast retrieval, and scene analysis. To support this vision, many scene change detection algorithms have been developed for both sudden and gradual scene change in uncompressed domain. This paper presents a comparison of shot boundary detection and classification techniques and their variations including histogram, pixel-differences, likelihood ratio, and motion vector. In addition, the pros and cons of each approach with many clarifying comments are presented.

The storage and retrieval of multimedia has become a requirement for many information systems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of image search engines, with many clarifying comments. First, we looked at image search engine architecture, followed by the role of the crawler in detecting images. We reviewed the common World Wide Web based systems for image retrieval developed in research institutions and in commercial business. A comparative performance study between the existing engines is also presented.

Over the past years, research has highlighted the importance of enhancing the performance of e-mail spam filters to eliminate the risk of false negative e-mails. On the other hand, the problem of false positive e-mails got less attention despite the fact that it is critical and may cause a failure in the delivery of important e-mails. The aim of this research is to provide a solution to reduce the rate of false positive e-mails. It addresses the problem by exploring the behavior of the existing e-mail spam filters and highlighting the different reasons behind the failure of e-mail delivery. Based on this investigation, we developed an algorithm that helps e-mail users in ensuring the deliverability of their emails. The proposed algorithm is based on reversing the mechanism of spam filters on the client-side.

Summary form only given. The article presents an innovative approach to approximate matching of multi-attribute objects based on reversing the conventional scheme of error-correction coding. The approximate matching problem primarily arises in information retrieval systems, which can store fuzzily described items and operate with nebulous searching criteria. To establish an approximate equivalence relation on a set of multi-attribute objects it has been suggested to apply a decoding procedure to binary vectors corresponding to these objects and to use the obtained message words as hash codes. With this hashing technique it is possible to construct "fault-tolerant" indices allowing certain mismatches of binary vectors in terms of Hamming metrics. The simplest practical realization of this technique is based on the so-called perfect Golay code which maps 23-bit vectors into 12-bit message words. In this case, two different 23-bit vectors at a Hamming distance of 2 would have some common 12-bit indices. This provides an organization of a direct retrieval of a neighborhood of 23 bit-vectors with up to two mismatches from a given key. The proposed technique employs a reasonable redundancy and can trade utilization of extra memory for the speed and range of searching. Besides a direct application to information retrieval, the developed technique is also beneficial for complex computational procedures incorporating near-matching operations. A typical procedure of this kind is recovering of closed matches from vector-quantization tables.

A speedup improvement to an Associative Access (ASSA) method, which is an information retrieval algorithm, has been suggested by Berkovich and others. The improvement is achieved through a novel technique of vertical counting. The vertical counting approach calculates the number of “ones” in characteristic vectors without performing the shift operation repeatedly. Using this technique, the determination of qualifying records in a database can be several times faster than other implementations. Unfortunately, the performance of the suggested technique has not been studied. This paper focuses on the performance of the vertical approach, and analyzes its behavior. It determines the speedup gained from using the Hamming Distance Bit Vertical Counter in the vertical approach, and, it evaluates the parameters that influence the speedup. It also discusses the breaking point that makes the vertical approach faster than the horizontal approach, and lastly determines its time complexity.

Excessive utilization of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) equipment in Higher Education Institutes (HEI) in addition to variation in occupancy patterns are the main reasons behind the ever increasing level of energy consumption in such environments. Reducing energy consumption while maintaining the comfort level of students and staff is a very challenging task. In this research we attempt to solve this dilemma by developing a framework that utilizes ICT to monitor and manage energy consumption in HEI. The system monitors electrical equipment individually and also collects environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity and occupancy to optimize energy consumption. At King Saud University (KSU) we implemented the first phase of the system by using wireless sensors that measure energy consumption of any electrical device once every 10 second. Energy consumption data is then displayed to building managers, students and staff to create awareness. It was also utilized to generate situation specific advice. In addition to the unique design, the novelty of this work stems from the utilization of timetable and event management systems, which we believe was never used before in developing such systems.

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), an oil-rich country, where gas prices is cheaper than water and electricity is not considered a major expanse. The authors carried out a project to save electrical energy in higher educational buildings by developing and implementing an intelligent energy management system. The project faced many problems and difficulties. The main problem was the cultural understanding/attitude toward energy. In this paper, the authors report their experience and observations about this project. The authors present the results of a survey carried out to measure the degree to which people apply electrical saving tips distributed by the electrical company. Guided by the knowledge gained from developing the project, the authors suggest some ideas that might influence Saudis attitude toward energy consumption.

Websites written in ASP.NET might contain security vulnerabilities that are not seen to the owner of the website. This paper describes an algorithm that aims in the detection of security vulnerabilities. The suggested algorithm performs a scanning process for all website/ application files. Our scanner tool relies on studying the source code of the application depending on ASP.NET files and the code behind files (Visual Basic VB and C sharp C#). A program written for this purpose is to generate a report that describes most leaks and vulnerabilities types (by mentioning the file name, leak description and its location). The suggested algorithm will help organization to fix the vulnerabilities and improve the overall security.

In this paper, we report our work on a Finite State Transducer-based entity extractor, which applies named-entity extraction techniques to identify useful entities from prophetic narrations texts. A Finite State Transducer has been implemented in order to capture different types of named entities. For development and testing purposes, we collected a set of prophetic narrations texts from “Sahih Al-Bukhari” corpus. Preliminary evaluation results demonstrated that our approach is feasible. Our system achieved encouraging precision and recall rates, the overall precision and recall are 71% and 39% respectively. Our future work includes conducting larger-scale evaluation studies and enhancing the system to capture named entities from chains of transmitters (Salasil Al-Assanid) and biographical texts of narrators (Tarajims).

Recently, fuel price becomes as hot topic and never ending issue especially the demand of fuel is very high. Malaysia Government has stood up in helping citizens by giving certain amount of money per vehicle owner to reduce their burden. However, the solution of reducing the total amount of fuel cost and consumption seems to be more helpful if the citizens can plan their fuel expenditure efficiently without unnecessary spend. Therefore, new software namely Online Fuel Consumption Cost Calculator (OFCCC) has been developed to help user plan and calculates the total amount of fuel cost for a car to travel based on the distance given, driving speed, weight capacity and current market fuel price cost. This software has been developed by using Microsoft Web Expression 2 and SQL Server database system. The result shows that the users can obtain a minimum cost towards the desired destination by using OFCCC.

Huffman coding is a simple lossless data compression technique that tries to take advantage of entropy by using a Variable-Length encoding to build a code table to encode a source file symbols. In this paper, we have re-visited Huffman coding and enhance it by considering the second order form of characters rather the first order form of characters. Results showed that using the second order form improves the compression ratio by around 8% than the existing Huffman coding.

Feature reduction methods have been successfully applied to text categorization. In this paper, we perform a comparative study on three feature reduction methods for text categorization, including Document Frequency (DF), Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) and Latent Semantic Analyses (LSA). Our feature set is relatively large (since there are thousands of different terms in different texts files). We propose the use of the previous feature reduction methods as a preprocessor of Back-Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) to reduce the input data on training process. The experimental results on an Arabic data set demonstrate that among the three dimensionality reduction techniques proposed, TFIDF was found to be the most effective in reducing the dimensionality of the feature space.

This paper suggests a new algorithm for data compression based on Boolean minimization of binary data. On the compressor side, the input bit-stream is divided into blocks of N-bits each, and a ℌsum of products” function is found for each block using Quine-McCluskey algorithm.

This paper presents the results of classifying Arabic text documents using a decision tree algorithm. Experiments are performed over two self collected data corpus and the results show that the suggested hybrid approach of Document Frequency Thresholding using an embedded information gain criterion of the decision tree algorithm is the preferable feature selection criterion. The study concluded that the effectiveness of the improved classifier is very good and gives generalization accuracy about 0.93 for the scientific corpus and 0.91 for the literary corpus and we also conclude that the effectiveness of the decision tree classifier was increased as we increase the training size, and the nature of the corpus has such a influence on the classifier performance.

This paper introduces a novel method for semantic annotation of web pages. We perform semantic annotation with regard to unwritten and empirically proven agreement between users and web designers using web patterns. This method is based on extraction of patterns, which are characteristic for a particular domain. A pattern provides formalization of the agreement and allows assigning semantics to parts of web pages. We will introduce experiments with this method and show its benefits for querying the web.

This paper suggests splitting the existing email handlers into more than one group. The existing group can be considered as a group that has one-to-one relationship. However, this paper suggests that the email handlers should give the user the choice to select the relation that he would like to implement in the email handler. Three types of relationships can be identified. They are: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationship. Enforcing a certain type of relationship saves the time of the emailer. The paper will describe the prototype for each relationship with the advantages of each one.

The Arabic language is one of the most important languages because it is the sacred and liturgical language of Islam, one of the influential monotheistic religions of our times. In the post-9/11 aftermath, Islam suddenly dominated western actuality for the remaining years of the present decade. Al-Qurpsilaan - The Reading par Excellence - and ldquoHadithrdquo - Saying - represent the two fundamental scriptural sources of Islamic Legislation. Specifically, ldquoHadithrdquo, or Prophetic Traditions, are sayings and doings of the Prophet of Islam (Peace and Blessings be upon Him). Researchers need automatic search tools within large ldquoHadithrdquo databasesto access one of the original sources of Islam. For this purpose, we describe the development of AuthenTique, an updated automatic text mining search tool, based on the vector space model (VSM). The aim is to allow the provision of a list of ldquoHadithsrdquo classified according to their degrees of similarity based on a given userpsilas query.

One of the artifacts important for reuse is design pattern. Our article concentrates on the usage of web design patterns while analyzing the structures and contents of web pages. We have created our own Pattrio method of pattern detection on web pages. The detected patterns on web pages describe the web page architecture from the external point of view of the user. The knowledge of this architecture can be used in various connections. Experiments have been presented in several conferences using the method of knowing the structure of web pages as automatically found. The article compares our approach with other selected approaches. Our comparison shows that web design patterns can play an important role in the area of analysis of web page structure and contents.

This paper introduces a novel method for semantic annotation of web page. We perform semantic analysis with regard to unwritten and empirically proven agreement between users and web designers. This method is based on patterns in selected domains. Pattern provides formalization of the agreement and allows assignment of semantics to parts of web pages. We will introduce experiments with this new method for semantic analysis.

Recently the numbers of Arabic web sites are rapidly increasing in the World Wide Web. Existing search engines retrieve information based on keywords, so huge number of irrelevant information is retrieved for users. By the appearing of the second generation of the World Wide Web the semantic web, many suitable approaches to retrieve information that depends on semantic can be built. Semantic web provides data models and languages such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Web Ontology Language (WOL) that facilitate building ontology within a specific domain. Ontology can capture concepts for specific domain. In addition, it can capture properties of these concepts, and their relationships. Therefore, they help machines to deal with data domain semantically. This paper proposes a new approach to measure the relevancy of Arabic documents to the user query using ontology concepts. In this paper we built Arabic ontology concepts for the electronic commerce domain in Arabic language. Ontology concepts are used to find new approach for ranking Arabic documents, and show the effectiveness of ontology in retrieving relevant documents.

In this paper was proposed a new approach to semantic analysis of web pages. To prove the efficiency of this approach, we designed a method for analysis and evaluation of web pages. The method is built on a silent agreement between web designers and users. The key aspects of this agreement are web patterns which are used by web designers in their web page implementations. With our method, we can find out whether the pattern is presented on the page with a high level of relevance. The extracted patterns are considered as semantic features representing the contents of Web pages. In this lecture, we explain essentials of our approach as well as key features of our method and context for proper usage.

This paper describes a method of using web patterns for Internet Search. We perform semantic annotation of web pages with regard to unwritten and empirically proven agreement between users and web designers. This method is based on extraction of web patterns which are characteristic for concrete domain. Pattern provides formalization of the agreement and allows assignment of semantics to parts of web pages. We introduce experiment with this method.

Introduction The importance of higher education to gain prosperity and to develop human resources has been realized by under-developed countries. Students in higher education require a very flexible environment to communicate and collaborate with their peers to accomplish tasks needed to succeed. In western countries where higher education is common, individuals regardless of their gender can meet, communicate and collaborate at anytime at any place of their choice. University campuses provide facilities and resources that students can use any time. In some countries and societies, it is not possible due to the cultural and social reasons. ZU was established for national female population of United Arab Emirates. The university has five colleges and most of the faculty members are western educated to provide students learning opportunities in American style of teaching ensuring a very high quality of education. ZU operations and policies reflect the impact of social and cultural values on higher education. Advances in networking technologies and the Internet have a significant impact on teaching and learning in higher education (Hodges, 2004; Muhlhauser, 2002; Smith & Winking-Diaz, 2004). ZU campuses are fully networked that allow students to connect to the university network and Internet from anywhere on campus. Each student is required to purchase a very recent laptop that she is supposed to carry with her while she is on campus. Each faculty member receives a laptop with a three-year replacement schedule. Normal working hours are 8 to 5 and students are allowed to be on campus during this period. For cultural and social reasons, students are not allowed to be oncampus after normal working hours and on weekends. Social and cultural values of a society could impose different rules based on the gender. Females in a society are usually subject to different set of rules as compared to their male counterparts in the same society. These rules could severely limit the learning opportunities for females. In this paper, we will present a case study using hybrid teaching approach to answer how technology could overcome these limitations without violating and changing any established society rules. In a technology-mediated learning environment, students and teachers use a wide range of Internet based tools to communicate, collaborate and share resources; these tools provide anytime anywhere learning opportunities. In this case study, we have used the following tools in our learning environment: Blackboard, a web-based Learning Management Systems (LMS) that has discussion forum functionality and assessment tools, email and conferencing communication tools. We also used server-based computational tools such as databases, web-servers and compilers needed for CS/IS courses. This paper discusses how educational technology could be used to enhance traditional instructor-led teaching to alleviate the impact of social and cultural values on higher education to make the learning environment a place to pass information and knowledge from teacher to students, from students to teacher, and from students to students; and a place for creative thinking, and learning. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses motivation and related work. Section 3 explains teaching and learning environment at ZU. Section 4 presents methodology and results of a case study based on a database course to show that technology-mediated environment can overcome limitations and constraints imposed by the social and cultural values. Summary and future work is presented in Section 5. Related Work Distance education is used to accommodate those students who could not attend regular school to learn in a traditional learning environment. Invention and adoption of Internet has a significant impact on distance education and traditional classroom based teaching. Web-based learning (WBL) has become a major trend in teaching and learning. …

There is a wide variation in the energy consumption between different educational institutions due to the adoption of different management strategies and different levels of occupants’ environmental understanding. The presence of large amounts of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system causes a major consumption of energy in higher education institution (HEI) buildings. The main objective of this research is to investigate the use of ICT to optimize the energy consumption in HEI buildings and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emission. The first phase of the system has been implemented at King Saud University to measure energy consumption through sensors that read energy consumption of electrical appliances and devices every 10 seconds. The analysis of collected data allows us to develop and employ energy saving strategies that lead to a reduction in total energy consumption. Our preliminary results show that up to 17% of energy consumption can be reduced by simply dealing with standby energy loss of labs’ computers. The novelty of this research comes from the use of a functional database approach to deal with high volume of data and query performance and the incorporation of a timetabling system in energy management system.

In this paper was proposed a method for the description of web pages using web patterns. We will explain what we mean by the term "web pattern". We will present a taxonomy web patterns and a description of some their types. In the description of web patterns we will focus on properties which are useful for automatic detection on web pages. As a result of the detection we get a description of a web page using found web patterns. The description can be used for reordering and clustering of a web page set.