One of the objectives of any government is the establishment of an effective solution to significantly control crime. Identity fraud in Nigeria has generated global attention and negative publicity toward its citizens. The research problem addressed in this study was the lack of understanding of the dynamics that influenced the adoption and usability of biometrics technology for reliable identification and authentication to control identity deception. The support for this study was found in the theoretical framework of the technology acceptance model (TAM). The purpose of the study was to provide scholarly research about the factors that influenced the adoption of biometrics technology to reliably identify and verify individuals in Nigeria to control identity fraud. The mixed-method descriptive and inferential study used interview and survey questionnaires for data collection. The binary logistic regression, point bi-serial correlation, independent samples t test, and content analyses were performed using SPSS version 18, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet 2007, and Nvivo 7.0 software. The results from the findings indicated statistical correlation between adopt biometrics technology and three other variables, ease of use (r = .38, n = 120, p <.01), perceived usefulness (ri = .41, n = 120, p < .01), and awareness (ri = .33, ni = 120, p < .01). The implications for social change include leveraging biometrics technology for recognition, confirmation, and accountability of individuals to prevent identity scheming, ensure security, and control the propagation of personal information. Beyond these immediate benefits, this research presents an example that other developing countries may use to facilitate the adoption of biometrics technology.

The research reported in this thesis was an exploratory study that investigated the relationship between Information Systems (IS) investment and organisational performance and which led to the successfd development and testing of a combined process and variance model that sought to explain this complex relationship. The focal industry was the Australian Financial Services Sector (FSS), with samples being drawn from both the credit union industry (largest industry by size in the FSS) and the commercial/retail bank industry (largest industry by volume). The research began with a detailed review of the literature and thus explored the concepts underlying the business value of IS in general and the relationship between IS investment and organisational performance in particular. To fuaher enhance understanding of this literature, a meta-analysis of the business value of IS in general, and IS investment and organisational performance in particular, was undertaken as it was noted that there did not appear to have been any such formal structured meta-analyses to date. The foregoing analyses led to the proposal and development of a conceptual model of the relationship between IS investment and organisational performance that was comprised of four main components, the level of IS investment as represented by the IT portfolio, Organisational performance (both internal and external), Considerations for Strategic Information Systems Planning and Managerial effectiveness. In addition, the conceptual model explicitly considered the effect and impact of Context on the conceptual model. Further, analysis of subsequent results was strongly grounded in the literature and utilised three key theoretical foundations, General Systems Theory, The Resource Based View of IT and Stakeholder theory. / Thus, the conceptual model was developed and tested utilising a pluralist approach combining two research methods, a) Case research (model development and testing) and b) survey research (model refinement). The collection (and analysis) of data was achieved in two parts. First, given the complexity of the issues under investigation, a unique case study protocol was successfully developed and applied to a select group of Financial Institutions with the Commercial/retail Banking and Credit Union industries to confirm the components of the original conceptual model. Second, the resultant model(s) were tested via a survey targeted at the wider population of Authorised Deposit-taking Institutions in the Australian Financial Services Sector. The outcomes of this research were many, however the most notable were; 1) the development and testing of the conceptual model which were deemed to contribute to the development of theory within the discipline of Information Systems, 2) the development of a unique case study protocol that was deemed to contribute to IS research in general, 3) the derivation of a set of intermediary variables (Customer service quality, Operational efficiency, Staff and Product delivery) that was found to influence the relationship between IS investment and organisational performance and therefore extended and strengthened the conceptual model, and 4) the meta-analysis that was deemed to contribute to a better understanding of the state of the art with respect to research into this complex phenomenon.

Alignment of information systems (IS) with business activities has been an important problem for practitioners for many years even though there has been considerable research in the area. A criticism of some past research into IS/business alignment is that it has ignored organisational complexity and context. This is partly due to the dominant paradigm in use within IS research. One result of this paradigm is that there are numerous prescriptions provided in the literature for improving alignment but little in the way of theory development that explains the behaviour of practitioners when confronted with the task of attaining alignment. To address these criticisms a grounded theory approach was adopted using a coding family that encouraged the discovery of systems of interaction between variables rather than assuming linear causality. Data was collected via three unstructured focus groups that limited the effect of prior reading of the literature, an important consideration when conducting a grounded theory study. These were followed by semi-structured individual interviews. The instruments for the latter were developed after the focus group interviews were analysed, so reducing the impact of a prior reading. Analysis of the focus group interviews found that the major concern of practitioners was aligning IS strategies to either business strategies documented in business plans or the business strategies in use. This is a similar result to earlier alignment research. As a result of analysis of the focus group interviews the research question stabilised. This research investigated how factors within an organisational setting impact the ability of senior IT managers to identify, then act upon, the business strategies in use. It confirmed many of the enablers and inhibitors to alignment identified in earlier research. However, it also identified two variables that are rarely given prominence in the literature: the mental models held by managers; and the motivation and measurement schemes applied to managers. It is believed that both these variables have a significant impact on the alignment of IS and business strategies. The theory developed here demonstrates that a system of variables will tend to encourage IT managers to either collaborate with their business peers, or retreat from the business and concentrate on providing a low cost reliable technical IT solution. In the former situation alignment of IT managers’ actions to those of their business peers is encouraged. In the latter situation there will be little alignment between business and IS strategies nor between the actions of business and IT managers. A feedback loop of actions by actors within the system tends to reinforce the situation making a change in response extremely problematic. This, then, helps explain the intractable nature of alignment that has been observed for many years.

Clustering is currently more and more applied on hyperlinked documents, especially for web search results. Although most commercial web search engines will provide their ranking algorithms sorting the matched results to raise the most relevant pages to the top, the size of results is still so huge that most ones including some pages that suffers are really interested in will be discarded. Clustering for web search results separates unrelated pages and clusters the similar pages with the same topic into the same group, thus helps suffers to locate the pages much faster. Many features of web pages have been studied to be used in clustering, such as content information including title, snippet, anchor text and etc. Hyperlink is another primary feature of web pages, some content-link coupled clustering methods have been studied. We propose an authoritative K-Means clustering method that combines content, in-link, out-link and page rank. In this project, we adjust the construction of in-link and out-link vectors and introduce a new page rank vector with two patterns, one is a single value representation of page rank and the other is a 11-dimensional vector. We study the difference of these two types of page rank in clustering, and compare the different clustering based on different web page representations, such as content-based, content-link coupled and etc. The effect of different elements of web page is also studied in our project. We apply the authoritative clustering for the web search results retrieved from Google search engine. Three experiments are conducted and different evaluation metrics are adopted to analyze the results.

This project work is about mobile learning system that will enable people to learn and collaborate anywhere and at anytime. It is the continuation of the work carried out in autumn 2009, by Noble and Izaz.In this project work, a Mobile Collaborative Learning System (MCLS) prototype was designed and implemented. The project work has been carried out according to the design science research methodology. An evaluation of the usability of the prototype was conducted. Mobile Services Acceptance Model (MSAM) was used to analyze factors that are influential for user adoption of the prototype.The results from the evaluation indicated that the majority of the test users perceived the prototype to be useful and they intend to use the prototype if they have access to it. These results confirm how useful and beneficial the prototype would be to students.

Nowadays, one subfield of information extraction, Named Entity Recognition, becomes more and more important. It helps machine to recognize proper nouns (entities) in text and associating them with the appropriate types. Common types in NER systems are location, person name, date, address, etc. There are several NER systems in the world. What‘s the main core technology of these systems? Which kind of system is better? How to improve this technology in the future? This master thesis will show the basic and detail knowledge about NER.Three existing NER systems will be choose to evaluate in this paper, GATE, CRFClassifier and LbjNerTagger. These systems are based different NER technology. They can stand for the most of NER existing systems in the world now. This paper will present and evaluate these three systems and try to find the advantage and disadvantage of each system.

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate how different age categories of users and the service provider’s point of view about understandability, technicality, importance and awareness of privacy policy. The emerging ambiguity in information security has raised many privacy and trust issues that are context dependent. Therefore there are several uncertainties and risks seen today concerning theprivacy policy & subscriber trust. It is a responsibility of services providers before amending their policy to notify their subscribers. Because if they do not take this initiative then it creates trust deficit for their subscribers and this affects their business and goodwill.In this work we have adopted the online survey questionnaire technique to perform a research based on the user’s ideas and thoughts about the privacy policy and security issues. We have used the same technique with different questions based on the organization’s own perspectives on the privacy policy. This would highlight to what extent an organization thinks the policy fulfills the user’s confidence. We have decided to target Norwegian service providers and people as participants for this survey, to better understand the theme of research. It took about four months to collect the responses from the organizations and from the participants. This report discusses the importance of privacy policy for a common user / subscriber. Generally observed in this work is that, before accepting privacy policy, it is hard to read these policies and understood by end-user, and taking this prospect ahead, many privacy policies and regulations have a difficult context to understand.This survey methodology was selected to ensure the originality of the user`s state of mind, and it was also vital for the service providers to show their responses and opinion on privacy policy. We have noticed that a majority of the users are not interested in reading the contents of the privacy, and they simply provide their sensitive information without ensuring the authenticity and regulations inside theprivacy policy. Furthermore, we observed that users think privacy policy just saves them from viruses and threats, and there is a chance of phishing if it is not mentioned on the service provider website. Most of the service providers have recently introduced the privacy protection seals for secure data transmission on their website in order to build a strong subscriber`s trust.Finally, it is important to continue researching to get better tools and more mechanisms for a good security policy, and to establish guidelines for better understanding as we learn more.Keywords: Privacy; Personal information; Service providers; Subscriber`s; Policy; Issues; Survey design; Legislation; Settings; Practices.

In one of the highly globalized fields such as Marine Industry, shipping operations are hugely dependent on the quick and readily accessible information about the people, machinery and services available both at port and terminal levels. The e-collaboration tools often result in improving the potential to take advantage of the information across various dimensions such as nations, organizations and professions. In the maritime transportation sector, collaboration is very much evident as intersection between various elements associated with it such as business processes (or service management), software tools (or technologies) and users. As a result, collaboration is crucial either to make good plans that are aligned with the different stakeholders or can be used as a tool for deviation management if such a thing occurs. Usually, the maritime shipping operations are carried out both on ship and also by various bodies affiliated with port and terminal services. However, establishing collaboration between operations and tools is often challenging as they are two very different disciplines. Therefore, the knowledge gathered via intersection of software engineering and processes involved holds the means for establishing the collaboration between the service providers and potential users. Normally the information is coming from sensors as well as traditional message based sources. These information sources can be used for identifying and capturing business processes which are part of maritime enterprise to achieve collaboration among various involved parties. In this thesis, a method is proposed to overcome the problem of process management by establishing a collaboration medium between the service providers and participants in a maritime enterprise. This work is based on literature study, industry test cases and validation of test case models using process centric approach. The process centric approach, which regards notion of developing enterprise based on process models and facilitating collaboration among participants of business process models, is the main result this work. The steps are to define goals, identify business processes and define collaboration in these. To support this we need the other contributions of the thesis; i.e. uncovering the collaboration space through intersection of entities, collaboration platform, collaboration-oriented architecture and collaboration matrix generation. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) provided a means to model the industrial test case using the process-centric approach and study collaboration among tasks in business process. The analysis of test case BPMN model validates concepts of Marine Information Center (MIS) project at SINTEF and provides set of requirements for improving collaboration further

Pervasive games are a new gender of games that is gaining popularity in recent years.The potential of pervasive games is their ability of mixing real-life physical objects in the gameplay, creating a thrilling experience for players.This thesis work researches the possibility of engaging vehicle drivers in pervasive games with road safety as the primary concern.First a research of main causes of traffic accidents is conducted though available statistics.The statistics shows that the human-factor contributes to the top five causes of traffic accidents.The statistics also concluded that the driver psychophysiological state is vital for road safety.Factors conditioning human&apos;s psycho physiological state are analyzed from computer games perspective.Affective Gaming, a gender of gaming highly dependent on player psychophysiological state, is further studied in terms of its applicability for in-vehicle use.The study includes researching various methods of capturing human psychophysiological state.Furthermore, different types of pervasive games are discussed including state of the art games available for vehicles.A research is conducted to cover available driver support systems and show how they work and contribute to road safety.Heads-up Display are also discussed as a method of displaying information to the driver with minimal distraction from driving.Relevant concepts and technologies in relation to pervasive games, driver support systems and road safety were defined and utilized as a basis for the conceptual framework which was developed in this thesis work. The framework shows how pervasive games can be used to contribute to road safety using various driver support systems. The idea is illustrated in a set of example game scenarios.A simulation software is used to demonstrate a part of the conceptual framework as a proof of concept.An important outcome of this thesis includes a conceptual framework for pervasive game implementation. The guidelines and relevant technologies are indispensable not only for pervasive games, but also for other multimedia (infotainment) application development and integration in the vehicle environment in terms of road safety and driving quality.

Information Retrieval is a research area that has gained attention over thepast two decades. Few of these researches have taken place in the biomed-ical domain where satisfying users&#146; information needs are relatively difficultto be met. The goal of this project is to find out if it is possible to usestatistical methods in Biomedical Information Retrieval (IR) and improveretrieval performance, i.e. finding ways of fulfilling user information needs,in the biomedical domain using clustering with knowledge from the BioTracerproject.K-Mean and Expectation Maximization (EM) approaches to clustering havebeen implemented in this project with more emphasis on the EM. Both ap-proaches are used to re-ranking users searched results in an attempt to findways of fulfilling their information needs. Comparison between the Expec-tation Maximization and the K-mean are drawn in terms of their retrievalperformance i.e. precision and recall, the performance of EM compared to ex-isting approaches to search results re-ranking using clustering and problemsfaced while implementing the EM.