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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.