Recent Patents on Computer Science - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2015

With the increasing demand for social media, it is becoming increasingly important to ask our self: How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect and constrain the social contagion and information diffusion in online social networks, including: the Literacy Rate, GDP (PPP) and Gender. This paper is an analysis study for proportion of women using social media, namely Twitter, and the effect of literacy rate, GDP (PPP) and country location. The study included many countries with a total of 926.371.680 Twitter users of whom 490.976.990 are women, which amounts to 53% percent are female users. The research found that the countries fall into three categories: first, fewer women than men use Twitter. Second category, almost equal number of women and men use Twitter. Third category, more women use Twitter than men. The research along with patents also, found that there is positive correlation between GDP (PPP) and female literacy rate when being considered in the analysis of the ratio of female to male social media users.

There is still a gap of knowledge on the usage of recommender systems in Saudi universities and the wider issue of technological change in the universities of developing counties. Relatively, this lack of knowledge is an issue to universities seeking to meet students/instructors expectations and requirements by offering consistently high perceived service standards of e-learning services in a rapidly changing technological environment. In addition, Saudi universities are not able to accept and adopt the good practice of UK universities to solve the problems of Saudi universities. This is because a) there is a different university environment, b) the education level of Saudi people compared to British people c) Service quality levels that are proposed by the Saudi universities do not depend on British standards and criteria d) Local technical issues e) regulations of e-learning and information technology are not used or even exist and i) the social recommender systems are enabled in UK universities through using e-learning systems and while are not adopted or even exist at the Saudi universities. To address this issue, this paper seeks to explore the impact of the acceptance and adoption of recommender systems in e-leaning for Saudi universities and this will help to investigate the students/instructors experience according to the e-learning service quality. Thus, a proposed e-framework has been presented. Such framework describes the factors of acceptance (such as service quality, student/instructor experience, and Human Computer Interaction guidelines) should be considered in the e-learning system because it is viewed as a determinant of student/instructor/university satisfaction. Consequently, a number of dimensions have been taken into account for conducting the relationship between the student/instructor and universities via electronic means such as electronic services. Note that the proposed conceptual framework will be based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) since it has been validated 25 years ago. The implication of this study along with patents will be vital in assisting learning practitioners and academies to reconsider the types of recommender services they provide and identify methods of enhancing and encouraging students/ instructors to utilize service offered. In general, it will be expected that perceptions of e-learning technology would impact on the Saudi universities-student/instructor relationship. This perception of the relationship could lead respondents to develop a perception of e-learning technology. Further research will be recommended.

An enhanced e-learning network based on integration between cloud environment and Web is probably suggested for the existing and upcoming e-learning tools that are considered as Software as a Service (SaaS). This paper examines three most recent patents that were awarded between February 2012 and May 2014 in the area of e-learning. In addition, we have proposed a new direction which is the possibility of integration of the E-learning processes with Cloud Processes. This kind of integration needs to enable the Software Engineering concepts. Thus it is possible to design and develop the E-learning processes and then the Cloud Computing processes are integrated with the e-learning application process to formulate a new platform is called a Cloud E-learning system/platform. It is expected that such integration is an iterative, incremental development process leads to faster delivery of more constructive software. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a proposed deployment of Cloud e-learning software has been presented.

Educational institutions continue to look for opportunities to reduce the way they manage their resources. Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm that promises to provide opportunities to deliver a diversity of computing services in a way that has not been experienced before. In this paper, we will discuss the impact of cloud computing and recent patents on educational institutions and identify the key factors that make cloud computing attractive to the education scene. A case study at University Sains Malaysia, Malaysia, is presented to demonstrate the importance of using private cloud computing in education in a real situation. The findings show that the cloud resources provided flexibility for students and staff with ease of access, enabling more effective and efficient collaboration within and among the research groups.

Knowing the hot topics in Social Networking Systems become essential for many applications such as marketing and social studies. Topic detection from Arabic posts or tweets using standard cluster labeling techniques such as the most frequent terms or the most predictive terms in the cluster lack the accuracy to catch the implicit semantic relations between terms. In this paper, in this approach we automatically cluster the Arabic tweets based on lingual clustering model for Arabic. This model is based on the Arabic’s rich morphology where most of the words are root derivatives. Changing vowels and insertion of consonants lead to the generation of inflections and derivations. In addition, our approach introduces a semantically enriched Bayesian Network model for cluster labeling. This model generates a list of candidate labels for each cluster given its centroid terms. This model enriches the centroid terms semantic from world knowledge, and models the semantic relations between them by creating a Bayesian Network. After that it utilized probabilistic inference techniques to elect a list of labels to the candidate topic. The elected lists have the highest posterior probability as observed evidences taking into consideration the explicit and implicit features of the cluster’s centroid terms. We conducted a primitive evaluation using manually annotated data set. Our data set consists of 100 clusters that extracted from 38,000 tweets. The results showed that our approach has indications for effectively labeling clusters of tweets in Social Networking Systems.

Emerging global environment of knowledge creation and its dissemination has complicated the challenges in the teaching learning. Wide spectrum use of technology driven teaching aids supplement the curricula with its applicative relevance in the practical life. Accompanying such a phenomena, digital and knowledge divide occurs due to lack of access and equity in terms of technology applications. The present paper therefore examines the broad issues about effective use and application of technology in the teaching institutions across the country so that over the period of time incremental progression is achieved in enhancing learner’s knowledge and competitiveness. Some of the broad issues are: • Mostly technological interventions are uncoordinated pilot projects • Vocational and livelihood education is still left un-touched by the use and application of technology • No central data base is available to guide the stakeholders and policy makers on technology tools in teacher education • Quite often, technology related projects are too expensive for mass implementation • Empirical research and associated studies to undertake comprehensive analysis of technology in education needs to be augmented • There are no guidelines about the costs for development of software (content) • Significant gap between what is needed-to-be-done and what-is-being-done • Disparity in technology`s required role and the actual role that it is playing • Too much time is lost in initiating projects and doing preliminary research and analysis • In the process synchronizing with the school calendar does not take place resulting in teachers' inability to do justice to the program and the students. On the basis of these issues, present paper suggests an integrative technology model to be introduced with recent patents in educational institutions so as to harness the benefits of technology to become knowledgeable and globally competitive.

In this paper, we present a solution for translating an existing relational database (RDB) schema with recent patents into relatively newer database (i.e., object-oriented and object-relational database) schemas, based on available standards. The solution is more beneficial compared to the existing approaches as it generates two different and equivalent target schemas based on the user choice. The main aim of the proposed method is to enrich the source RDB semantically with metadata information, which may have not been obviously represented in it. An enriched common data model is then produced, which preserves all necessary characteristics of target models to be mapped into any of the target schemas. A prototype has been designed in order to translate RDBs into target schemas realizing the concepts and algorithms of the approach. An experiment has been conducted, results of which have been very encouraging, and validating the feasibility, efficiency and correctness of the proposed solution.

With the development of new technologies of information and communication, more and more data sources are available. The diversity, distribution and heterogeneity of these sources make their access a real issue. Data integration systems allow a unified and transparent access to heterogeneous data sources giving the illusion to user that he is accessing only one source. A query over the global schema of a data integration system is rewritten into the union of sub-queries over sources. But obviously, not all sources contain necessary answer to the posed query and querying such sources is a loss of time. To optimize queries on an integration system, we propose in this patent paper, to associate (annotate) to each numeric or enumerated property, the domain of values of this property in the source. We group together and merge domains into subdomains. A set of sources is assigned to each sub-domain. We store these sub-domains and linked sources (annotations) at the mediator. Consequently, a query having a predicate on one of these annotated properties will be checked before sending to a source. If the source does not contain instances that satisfy the predicate, this source is removed from the concerned sources. Our patent proposition is evaluated on a set of generated databases and the experimental results show a clear improvement in the queries execution time.

Minimizing the risk/hazards in industrial plants and their surroundings has become a growing research field. Aspects such as continued industrial growth, the development of new technologies, climate changes, terrorists’ actions and society having greater access to information are just some of the factors that require a more structured study of risk. Gathering information about threats, the vulnerability of critical assets, the likelihood of risks and consequences, and then how to use such information to identify ways to reduce those risks and to establish strategies for doing so are the focus of several academic research studies and patents. The major goals of this paper are first to contextualize what tools management in industry have adopted for risk analysis, and secondly to provide a review of patents on industrial risk management. It is worth noting that this subject may lead to opportunities for new patents, since only a small number of patents was found to have been published in the last 3-year period, compared with the number of published papers in journals.

In allusion to the complementary of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm and genetic algorithm (GA), this paper proposes a novel hybrid ant colony genetic (NHACG) algorithm with recent patents based on integrating multi-population strategy and collaborative strategy. The solutions of the ACO algorithm is regarded as the initial population of the GA, and the ACO algorithm and GA are dynamically applied according to the objective function in the NHACG algorithm. When the population evolutionary is close to the stagnation, the ACO algorithm is applied. And the collaborative strategy is used to dynamically balance the global search ability and local search ability, and improve the convergence speed. In order to illuminate the validity of the NHACG algorithm in solving the complex optimization problems, some traveling salesman problems (TSP) are selected to test the effectiveness of the NHACG algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed NHACG algorithm can obtain the global and local search ability, avoid the phenomena of the prematurity and effectively search for the optimum solutions.

This article deals with a new CAD system of railways routing. The route of railway as 3D curve is traditionally presented by two flat curves: plan and longitudinal profile. The plan of route is its projection on horizontal plane XOY and its longitudinal profile is dependent Z(s), where s - is the length of plan from initial point. The software of the new system allows us to receive the optimal project line of the longitudinal profile for each variant of the route plan. Thus, it is an opportunity for objective comparison and selection of the best from them. The new algorithm of nonlinear programming was developed for this purpose. This algorithm is based on essential features of the system of constraints on parameters of unknown optimal project line. In the new CAD system, projection of longitudinal profile is provided many times with different source data due to interrelations with other project tasks. For railway haul (25-30 km), optimization of longitudinal profile is a big dimension problem of nonlinear programming with the number of variables and constraints in a few hundreds and more. The standard algorithms of nonlinear programming demand a lot of machine time for solving this task. The new algorithm is more efficient due to using the features of constraints.