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This paper presents an interactive educational environment for use over both "in situ" and distance-based modalities of teaching. Several technological issues relating to the design and development of the distributed virtual learning environment have also been raised. The PROVIDE framework proposed in this paper is a seamless distributed environment for continuous interaction between teaching and learning. The four learning facets, namely, the things learned from a teacher, learned by students' using their own intellect, learned through peer-interaction and learned through the process of hands-on experience, are all enhanced in the framework by the provision of the "third dimension" in learning. The latter mechanism facilitates learning activities to be observed and monitored through effective co-operation and collaboration through various tools and technologies. Further, the PROVIDE framework introduces the concept of offering alternate courses, learning choices and managing related academic processes, such as testing and certification. Some implementation details and related algorithms have also been provided in this paper. (Contains 7 figures.)

Predicting Freshman student’s aptitude for compu- ting is critical for researchers to understand the underlying aptitude for programming. Dataset out of a questionnaire taken from various Senior students in a high school in the city of Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, India was used, where the questions related to their social and cultural back- grounds and their experience with computers. Several hy- potheses were also generated. The datasets were analyzed using three machine learning algorithms namely, Back- propagation Neural Network (BPN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) (and its variant, Gated Recurrent Network (GNN)) with K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) used as the clas- sifier. Various models were obtained to validate the under- pinning set of hypotheses clusters. The results show that the BPN model achieved a high degree of accuracies on various metrics in predicting Freshman student’s aptitude for computer programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: V. Lakshmi Narasimhan, Peter Croll, William Caelli E-health systems must be capable of adhering to clearly defined security policies based upon legal requirements, regulations and ethical standards while catering for dynamic healthcare and professional needs. Further, such security policies, incorporating enterprise level principles of privacy, integrity and availability, coupled with appropriate audit and control processes, must be able to be clearly defined by enterprise management with the understanding that such policy will be reliably and continuously enforced. The ability, then, to map such e-health policies into mandatory access control structures for next generation secure computer systems is an essential requirement for the future. This paper provides some principles for addressing these issues and provides a solution space that tackles the technical challenges involved in their implementation.

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) has shown significant prospects in rapid production of large software systems with enhanced quality, and emphasis on decomposition of the engineered systems into functional or logical components with well-defined interfaces used for communication across the components. In this paper, a series of metrics proposed by various researchers have been analyzed, evaluated and benchmarked using several large-scale publicly available software systems. A systematic analysis of the values for various metrics has been carried out and several key inferences have been drawn from them. A number of useful conclusions have been drawn from various metrics evaluations, which include inferences on complexity, reusability, testability, modularity and stability of the underlying components. The inferences are argued to be beneficial for CBSE-based software development, integration and maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical look at the likely demise of Computer Science (CS) as a discipline, in the light of various mishaps that academics in Universities have met with due to trial and error. We trace the issues of the past and present and, identify the reasons why computer science as a discipline in many Universities has not moved with time -- in particular why it is not kept up with the pace required by the field. The loss of computer science is also well-reflected in the huge downturn in CS student enrolment across the Anglo-Saxon world. The paper also details some steps on how to change the ways and means of CS academics. We record that some of the arguments and recommendations presented in this paper can be controversial and may not necessarily relate to scenarios that exist in other countries. Further, some of the assertions made are without comprehensive statistical data, as we could not gather them, besides gathering anecdotal evidences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes extensions to a Behavioural Description Language (BDL), which was originally proposed to characterize concurrent behaviour of simple objects and a group of objects. One of the novelties of this paper is its application to the field of E-Commerce transaction systems. Based on the BDL, we propose new concepts, namely, transaction patterns and transaction architectures, which have event-based semantics to describe large-scale transaction systems. Furthermore, the transaction architecture is introduced as a unified medium for specifying and verifying distributed, heterogeneous and complex E-Commerce transaction processes. It is also illustrated as a powerful modeling technique which is easy-to-use, flexible and promotes reusability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines an analytic data distribution technique for improving the performance of host-client type parallel applications. Exhibition of serialized communication patterns; Basis for real-time dynamic load balancing; Use of parallel matrix multiplication implementation and parallel Motion Picture Experts Group compression implementation.

This paper presents the design of the software system, ADTEST, for generating test data for programs developed in Ada83. The key feature of this system is that the problem of test data generation is treated entirely as a numerical optimization problem and, as a consequence, this method does not suffer from difficulties commonly found in symbolic execution systems, such as those associated with input variable-dependent loops, array references, and module calls. Instead, program instrumentation is used to solve a set of path constraints without explicitly knowing their form. The system supports not only the generation of integer and real data types, but also non-numerical discrete types such as characters and enumerated types. The system has been tested on large Ada programs (60,000 lines of code) and found to reduce the effort required to test programs as well as provide an increase in test coverage. Index Terms-Software test data generation, software testing, program instrumentation, symbofic execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of three parallel sorting algorithms, namely binary sort, odd-even transposition sort and hitonic sort, on a network of transputers is analysed in the paper. The variation in the performance of these algorithms as the number of processors and sort size are changed is investigated. Experimental results show that when up to eight transputers are used, connected as a linear pipeline configuration, all three algorithms can achieve reasonable speedup ratios. The hitonic sort, binary sort and odd-even transposition sort achieve speedup ratios of 5, 4.4 and 4, respectively, when eight processors are used to sort 100,000 integers. Analytical models are derived which can be used to predict the performance of the three algorithms when a linear pipeline configuration is used. The predicted performance of the algorithms is compared with the experimental performance in order to validate the model. When the models are used to predict the performance using 16 transputers, it is found that the speedup does not significantly improve compared to the performance achieved with eight transputers. This shows that inter processor communication has a significant effect on the algorithmic performance when a larger number of processors are used. The conclusions reinforce the fact that the binary and hitonic sorting algorithms are not well-suited to a linear pipeline configuration and that they may perform better if a different topology were used, for example a mesh or a cube connection scheme. Further, the analytical technique used for performance modelling as elaborated in the paper can be employed profitably for other multiprocessor systems as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's views on the article novel data distribution technique for host-client type parallel applications. The area of scheduling is very active with more than 3,000 papers published over this decade alone in good journals. As a consequence, it is rather difficult to get a handle on all of them. Notwithstanding, the records indicate that several aspects of our work appear to be very contemporary to the works of some of the other's work cited by the author. This goes to show that more than one person can have the similar approach to solving similar problems. Furthermore, there are several important dimensions to the issues raised by the author, which are listed below.