Appealing features of cloud services such as elasticity, scalability, universal access, low entry cost, and flexible billing motivate consumers to migrate their core businesses into the cloud. However, there are challenges about security, privacy, and compliance. Building compliant systems is difficult because of the complex nature of regulations and cloud systems. In addition, the lack of complete, precise, vendor neutral, and platform independent software architectures makes compliance even harder. We have attempted to make regulations clearer and more precise with patterns and reference architectures (RAs). We have analyzed regulation policies, identified overlaps, and abstracted them as patterns to build compliant RAs. RAs should be complete, precise, abstract, vendor neutral, platform independent, and with no implementation details; however, their levels of detail and abstraction are still debatable and there is no commonly accepted definition about what an RA should contain. Existing approaches to build RAs lack structured templates and systematic procedures. In addition, most approaches do not take full advantage of patterns and best practices that promote architectural quality. We have developed a five-step approach by analyzing features from available approaches but refined and combined them in a new way. We consider an RA as a big compound pattern that can improve the quality of the concrete architectures derived from it and from which we can derive more specialized RAs for cloud systems. We have built an RA for HIPAA, a compliance RA (CRA), and a specialized compliance and security RA (CSRA) for cloud systems. These RAs take advantage of patterns and best practices that promote software quality. We evaluated the architecture by creating profiles. The proposed approach can be used to build RAs from scratch or to build new RAs by abstracting real RAs for a given context. We have also described an RA itself as a compound pattern by using a modified POSA template. Finally, we have built a concrete deployment and availability architecture derived from CSRA that can be used as a foundation to build compliance systems in the cloud. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-04-06T12:55:35Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Desirèe Luíse Lopes Conceição.pdf: 2748185 bytes, checksum: c467bc5ad86bb59233d0a5e34244958c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-04-06T12:55:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Desirèe Luíse Lopes Conceição.pdf: 2748185 bytes, checksum: c467bc5ad86bb59233d0a5e34244958c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-02-21 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This dissertation aims to analyze the political information produced and disseminated by the digital platform “Truco!”, which is Agência Pública’s fact-checking project developed for the 2014 election in order to identify and ascertain the political debate taking place. The methodology adopted is based on the network policy concept of the author Manuel Castells, and consists of an elaboration for primary data collection, defined from the interactions and linked to the initial proposal of this research. The results recognize qualitative investigative journalism work with political participation activities, and it’s possible to relate them to the idea that the internet has elements to contribute to citizen education / A dissertação tem por objetivo analisar a produção e divulgação de informação política na plataforma digital “Truco!”, um projeto de fact-checking da Agência Pública desenvolvido para as eleições de 2014, além de identificar e averiguar o debate político ocorrido por meio da iniciativa. A metodologia adotada é baseada no conceito de política em rede do autor Manuel Castells. A técnica metodológica consistiu na elaboração de indicadores para a coleta de dados primários, definidos a partir de uma análise piloto e da identificação de padrões de interação relacionados à proposta inicial da pesquisa. Os resultados permitem identificar um trabalho de jornalismo investigativo qualitativo, além da presença de atividades de colaboração e participação política, o que aponta à concepção de que a internet contém elementos para contribuir com a formação para a cidadania

Processing and optimizing ad-hoc and continual queries in an open environment with distributed, autonomous, and heterogeneous data servers (e.g., the Internet) pose several technical challenges. First, it is well known that optimized query execution plans constructed at compile time make some assumptions about the environment (e.g., network speed, data sources' availability). When such assumptions no longer hold at runtime, how can I guarantee the optimized execution of the query? Second, it is widely recognized that runtime adaptation is a complex and difficult task in terms of cost and benefit. How to develop an adaptation methodology that makes the runtime adaptation beneficial at an affordable cost? Last, but not the least, are there any viable performance metrics and performance evaluation techniques for measuring the cost and validating the benefits of runtime adaptation methods? To address the new challenges posed by Internet query and search systems, several areas of computer science (e.g., database and operating systems) are exploring the design of systems that are adaptive to their environment. However, despite the large number of adaptive systems proposed in the literature up to now, most of them present a solution for adapting the system to a specific change to the runtime environment. Typically, these solutions are not easily ``extendable' to allow the system to adapt to other runtime changes not predicted in their approach. In this dissertation, I study the problem of how to construct a framework where I can catalog the known solutions to query processing adaptation and how to develop an application that makes use of this framework. I call the solution to these two problems the Ginga approach. I provide in this dissertation three main contributions: The first contribution is the adoption of the Adaptation Space concept combined with feedback-based control mechanisms for coordinating and integrating different kinds of query adaptations to different runtime changes. The second contribution is the development of a systematic approach, called Ginga, to integrate the adaptation space with feedback control that allows me to combine the generation of predefined query plans (at compile-time) with reactive adaptive query processing (at runtime), including policies and mechanisms for determining when to adapt, what to adapt, and how to adapt. The third contribution is a detailed study on how to adapt to two important runtime changes, and their combination, encountered during the execution of distributed queries: memory constraints and end-to-end delays.

MASTS is an extensible, feature rich, software architecture based on tabu search (TS), a metaheuristic that relies on memory structures to intelligently organize and navigate the search space. MASTS introduces a new methodology of rule based objectives (RBOs), in which the search objective is replaced with a binary comparison operator more capable of expressing a variety of preferences. In addition, MASTS supports a new metastrategy, dynamic neighborhood selection (DNS), which “learns” about the search landscape to implement an adaptive intensification-diversification strategy. DNS can improve search performance by directing the search to promising regions and reducing the number of required evaluations. To demonstrate the flexibility and range of capabilities, MASTS is applied to two complex decision problems in conservation planning and groundwater management. As an extension of MASTS, ConsNet addresses the spatial conservation area network design problem (SCANP) in conservation biology. Given a set of possible geographic reserve sites, the goal is to select which sites to place under conservation to preserve unique elements of biodiversity. Structurally, this problem resembles the NP-hard set cover problem, but also considers additional spatial criteria including compactness, connectivity, and replication. Modeling the conservation network as a graph, ConsNet uses novel techniques to quickly compute these spatial criteria, exceeding the capabilities of classical optimization methods and prior planning software. In the arena of groundwater planning, MASTS demonstrates extraordinary flexibility as both an advanced search engine and a decision aid. In House Bill 1763, the Texas state legislature mandates that individual Groundwater Conservation Districts (GCDs) must work together to set specific management goals for the future condition of regional groundwater resources. This complex multi-agent multi-criteria decision problem involves finding the best way to meet these goals considering a host of decision variables such as pumping locations, groundwater extraction rates, and drought management policies. In two separate projects, MASTS has shaped planning decisions in the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District and Groundwater Management Area 9 (GMA9). The software has been an invaluable decision support tool for planners, stakeholders, and scientists alike, allowing users to explore the problem from a multicriteria perspective. / text

Experiences of the TUT LIS in offering support to e-learning. / Though relatively new to the family of universities and in particular, universities of technology, Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Library and Information Services (LIS) is one of the fortunate South African higher education libraries which have a dedicated and fully-fledged IT and Systems Section. Further, TUT LIS has a Section referred to as Electronic Resource Centres which is commonly known as ERCs. The Section includes Internet Centres, popularly known as ICentres. Each of TUT’s nine learning site libraries has an ERC. Four of the learning sites have I-Centres, some in student residences. Many of the libraries have a training room attached to the ERC. Those which do not have a training facility schedule training at certain times and only thereafter avail the ERC for other use. Many of the academic departments have computer laboratories for use by their students. These are not related to ERCs or I-Centres. The LIS works in cooperation with the Directorate of Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) and Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Services to support the teaching departments and students’ learning endeavours. The LIS is involved in a project to increase the University’s success and throughput rates. Other partners in this project are from HEDS (Higher Education Development and Support) Directorate comprising: Curriculum Development, Teaching and Learning with Technology, Cooperative Education and Student Development and Support. The aim of this paper is to share experiences of the TUT LIS in offering support to e-learning. The newly formed LIS embraced the model of the ERC/I-Centre as a one-stop facility that one of the merger partners, Pretoria Technikon, had established. The other partner, Technikon Northern Gauteng had partially developed an ERC to “extend access to the book/journal in electronic format”.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

The second international m-Libraries conference schedule & guidebook features the conference program; pre-conference workshops; and, local/UBC tours, events and attractions. A listing of the various conference committees and sponsors including the names of the organizing committee chair members, the graphic artist, the conference staff, and the consultant are shown on pages 27 and 28.

Attached is the list of 15 session abstracts and proposals from the second international m-Libraries Conference, held and sponsored on 23 & 24 June 2009, by the University of British Columbia in conjunction with Athabasca University, The Open University and Thompson Rivers University.

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate the Web search strategies used to retrieve information from the Web by postgraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus in order to address the weaknesses of undergraduate students with regard to their Web searching strategies. The study attempted to determine the Web search tactics used by postgraduate students, the Web search strategies (i.e. combinations of tactics) they used, how they determined whether their searches were successful and the search tool they preferred. In addition, the study attempted to contribute toward building a set of best practices when searching the Web. The sample population consisted of 331 postgraduate students, yielding a response rate of 95%. The study involved a two-phased approach adopting a survey in Phase 1 and interviews in the Phase 2. Proportionate stratified random sampling was used and the population was divided into five mutually exclusive groups (i.e., postgraduate diploma, postgraduate certificate, Honours, Master’s and PhD). A pre-test was conducted with ten postgraduate students from the Pietermaritzburg campus. The study revealed that the majority of postgraduate students have been searching the Web for six years or longer and that most postgraduate students searched the Web for information from five to less than ten hours a week. Most respondents gained their knowledge on Web searching through experience and only a quarter of the respondents have been given formal training on Web searching. The Web searching strategies explored contribute to the best practices with regard to Web search strategies, as interviewees were selected based on the highest number of search tactics used and they have several years of searching experience. The study was also able to identify the most preferred Web search tool. It is envisaged that undergraduate students can potentially follow these search strategies to improve their information retrieval. This finding could also be beneficial to librarians in developing training modules that assist undergraduate students to use these Web search tools more efficiently. The final outcome of the study was an adaptation Bates’ (1979) model of Information Search Tactics to suit information searching on the Web. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

This study observed the interaction between historically disadvantaged undergraduate students and on-line information retrieval systems at the University of the Western Cape and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.