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Higher education institutions are becoming increasingly engaged in assessing their programs in order to enhance student learning outcomes. States, accreditation bodies and various organizations are calling upon institutions to buildup their accountability towards student learning. Accordingly, multiple assessment methods (both direct and indirect) are being used to gather program assessment data. The paper outlines the framework that has been undertaken to design and implement a Web-based Senior Exit Exam (WEBSEE). This exam is being used as a major direct assessment instrument for an undergraduate program in Computing Information Systems (CIS). The assessment framework is deemed important to enhance the validity of the exam, making it more appropriate for measuring what it tries to measure. The paper also shares some guidelines that have been used to generate reliable and valid exam questions which are directly mapped to program outcomes. The exam questions have been designed to span across a range of IS knowledge areas, knowledge depths and difficulty levels. Our research also outlines the importance to integrate the exit exam in the credit-bearing curriculum to drive students' learning through motivation. The assessment data collected has uncovered some deficiencies that when addressed will help improve student learning. The collected data will also be used as a reference baseline to historically track achievement of program outcomes over the next semesters. The approach and research methodology presented in this study can be useful for IS departments planning to administer similar kind of locally-developed exit exams in future. (Contains 7 tables and 9 figures.)

For the past years, the academic IT profession through various professional society curriculum committees and accreditation bodies has made considerable progress to revise and update IT curricula to meet the changing needs of the profession. In particular, learning techniques, beyond classroom teaching activities, have been recognized as essential ingredients to enhance the learning outcomes of advanced-level IT courses. This study outlines an assessment framework to explore the merits of inviting IT professionals as a pedagogical technique to integrate real world IT experience into the classroom. Though the general merits of inviting guest speakers have been confirmed in many previous (non-IT related) studies, these events are particularly much needed in the IT field. This urgency is justified by many factors such as the complex and constantly changing IT profession and its environment, the rapid pace in the roll-out/phase-out of IT technologies and terminologies, and the shallow focus on professional orientation in most IT curricula. Our study confirms some of the merits of inviting guest speakers as reported in the literature. It also adds to existing literature in at least three aspects. First, to our best knowledge, this is the first reported study that reflects upon the usage of guest speakers in IT classrooms. Second, our research is a first initiative that contributes to establishing a formal framework for the planning and the assessment of guest speaker events. Such an assessment framework will be very useful for continuous improvement to ensure that students will not feel cheated that three hours of class-time lecturing and discussions were devoted to a less worthwhile guest speaker talk. Third, compared to previous studies, the experience reported in this article is unique in the sense that it is formally and strategically planned, conducted on a large university-wide) scale and scheduled during a particular week near the end of each semester. Based on the proposed assessment framework and research methodology, this research makes use of multiple sources of evidence to assess the merits of guest speaker events. The data collected indicate that the event helps remedy the lack of exposure of information technology students to the IT professional environment. The event can also provide students with invaluable real-world and practical IT knowledge. Such knowledge can either relate to a particular topic already covered by the course, or it can bring new practical perspectives which are not covered by the course syllabus. These perspectives, along with the guest speaker recommendations, can be fed-back into the IT courses to enrich their content and/or scope. Such feedback is more important than ever given the rapidly evolving nature of the IT environment. This study also revealed that, in our case, the event did not contribute much towards exposing students to ethical and/or cultural issues related to the workplace. The authors believe that this shortcoming could be addressed by sharing with guest speakers the event's objectives and requesting their support to achieve them. Our research also underlines the need for formal frameworks to assess the learning outcomes of guest speaker events. Event objectives, performance criteria and measurement indicators should be clearly defined. Careful planning, judicious implementation, based on best practices, and thorough assessment are some basic ingredients for successful guest speaker events. These requirements need to be integrated in the overall assessment strategy of the program curriculum. The assessment tools and research methods presented in this study can be very useful for IT faculty planning to conduct similar guest speaker events in future. Future research could focus on refining the event's assessment criteria by incorporating the objectives outlined in the various IT professional curriculum reports. Similar studies can also be conducted to confirm whether the findings of this study still hold in other institutions. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

Recently neural networks have been proposed as new computational tools for solving constrained optimization problems. This paper is concerned with the application of neural networks to the optimum routing problem in packet-switched computer networks, where the goal is to minimize the network-wide average time delay. Under appropriate assumptions, the optimum routing algorithm relies heavily on shortest path computations that have to be carried out in real time. For this purpose an efficient neural network shortest path algorithm, that is an improved version of previously suggested Hopfield models, is proposed. The general principles involved in the design of the proposed neural network are discussed in detail. The computational power of the proposed neural model is demonstrated through computer simulations. One of the main features of the proposed model is that it will enable the routing algorithm to be implemented in real time and also to be adaptive to changes in link costs and network topology.

Summary The rapid proliferation of Internet of things (IoT) devices, such as smart meters and water valves, into industrial critical infrastructures and control systems has put stringent performance and scalability requirements on modern Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. While cloud computing has enabled modern SCADA systems to cope with the increasing amount of data generated by sensors, actuators, and control devices, there has been a growing interest recently to deploy edge data centers in fog architectures to secure low‐latency and enhanced security for mission‐critical data. However, fog security and privacy for SCADA‐based IoT critical infrastructures remains an under‐researched area. To address this challenge, this contribution proposes a novel security "toolbox" to reinforce the integrity, security, and privacy of SCADA‐based IoT critical infrastructure at the fog layer. The toolbox incorporates a key feature: a cryptographic‐based access approach to the cloud services using identity‐based cryptography and signature schemes at the fog layer. We present the implementation details of a prototype for our proposed secure fog‐based platform and provide performance evaluation results to demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed platform in a real‐world scenario. These results can pave the way toward the development of a more secure and trusted SCADA‐based IoT critical infrastructure, which is essential to counter cyber threats against next‐generation critical infrastructure and industrial control systems. The results from the experiments demonstrate a superior performance of the secure fog‐based platform, which is around 2.8 seconds when adding five virtual machines (VMs), 3.2 seconds when adding 10 VMs, and 112 seconds when adding 1000 VMs, compared to the multilevel user access control platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]