No / There has been a significant rise in the number of applicants to nursing pre-registration courses at British universities. A large proportion of these will be healthcare assistants. This article aims to guide them through the process of applying for nurse training and preparing for a successful outcome at interview.

No

Software-intensive systems operating in a shared environment must utilize a "request, acquire and release" protocol. In the popular client-server architecture resource-poor clients rely on servers for the needed capabilities. With mobile clients using wireless connectivity, the disparity in resource needs can force the consideration of adaptation by clients, leading to a strategy of self-reliance. Achieving self-reliance through adaptation becomes even more attractive in environments, which are dynamic and continually changing. A more comprehensive strategy is for the mobile client to recognize the changing resource levels and plan for any such degradation; that is, the applications in the mobile client need to adapt to the changing environment and availability of resources. Portable adaptation middleware that is sensitive to architecture and context changes in network operations is designed and implemented. The Adaptation Middleware not only provides the flexibility for the client applications to adapt to changing resources around them, but also to changing resource levels within the client applications. Further, the Adaptation Middleware imposes few changes on the structure of the client application. The Adaptation Middleware creates the adaptations; the client remains unaware and unconcerned with these adaptations. The Adaptation Middleware in this study also enables a more informative cost estimation with regard to applications such as mobile agents. A sample application developed using the Adaptation Middleware shows performance improvements in the range of 31% to 54%. A limited set of experiments show an average response time of 68 milliseconds, which seems acceptable for most applications. Further, the Adaptation Middleware permits increased stability for applications demonstrating demand levels subject to high uncertainty. / Master of Science

Intrusion detection systems are an integral part of web application security. As Internet use continues to increase, the demand for fast, accurate intrusion detection systems has grown. Various IDSs like Snort, Zeek, Solarwinds SEM, and Sleuth9, detect malicious intent based on existing patterns of attack. While these systems are widely deployed, there are limitations with their approach, and anomaly-based IDSs that classify baseline behavior and trigger on deviations were developed to address their shortcomings. Existing anomaly-based IDSs have limitations that are typical of any machine learning system, including high false-positive rates, a lack of clear infrastructure for deployment, the requirement for data to be centralized, and an inability to add modules tailored to specific organizational threats. To address these shortcomings, our work proposes a system that is distributed in nature, can actively learn and uses experts to improve accuracy. Our results indicate that the integrated system can operate independently as a holistic system while maintaining an accuracy of 99.03%, a false positive rate of 0.5%, and speed of processing 160,000 packets per second for an average system. / Master of Science / Intrusion detection systems are an integral part of web application security. The task of an intrusion detection system is to identify attacks on web applications. As Internet use continues to increase, the demand for fast, accurate intrusion detection systems has grown. Various IDSs like Snort, Zeek, Solarwinds SEM, and Sleuth9, detect malicious intent based on existing attack patterns. While these systems are widely deployed, there are limitations with their approach, and anomaly-based IDSs that learn a system's baseline behavior and trigger on deviations were developed to address their shortcomings. Existing anomaly-based IDSs have limitations that are typical of any machine learning system, including high false-positive rates, a lack of clear infrastructure for deployment, the requirement for data to be centralized, and an inability to add modules tailored to specific organizational threats. To address these shortcomings, our work proposes a system that is distributed in nature, can actively learn and uses experts to improve accuracy. Our results indicate that the integrated system can operate independently as a holistic system while maintaining an accuracy of 99.03%, a false positive rate of 0.5%, and speed of processing 160,000 packets per second for an average system.

Finding errors in applications has been achieved using a wide variety of techniques. Some tools instrument the application to check for program properties dynamically whereas others analyze the program statically. We use a technique that analyzes a program's execution by binary runtime instrumentation. Unlike tools that work on a particular language or an intermediate representation of a language, our approach works directly on binaries and hence it is not bound to any language. In order to instrument binaries, we use a binary instrumentation system called Pin, which provides APIs to instrument the application at runtime. We have built an infrastructure using Pin called Top that allows program entities like variables and events to be traced. Using finite automata we can check if certain events take place during the execution of the program. Top consists of a Tracing System that can trace movement of pointers to memory locations or 32-bit data values and keeps track of all their copies. It also provides an Event Framework that reports the occurrence of events such as function calls or returns. Top provides a programming interface which allows querying for particular events. The query is compiled with Top to produce a customized analysis tool, also called client. Running the analysis tool with the application, under Pin, results in events of interest being detected and reported. Using Top, we built a Memory Checker that checks for incorrect usage of dynamic memory allocation APIs and semantically incorrect accesses to dynamically allocated memory. Since we perform fine-grained checking by tracing references, our memory checker found some errors that a popular memory checker called valgrind did not. We have also built an MPI Checker which is used to check if programs use MPI's asynchronous communication primitives properly. This checker can detect errors related to illegal data buffer accesses and errors where the programmer inadvertently overwrote a handle needed to finish the processing of a request. / Master of Science

Two studies of factors affecting the programming performance of first- and second year Computer Science students were conducted. In one study students used GIL, a simple application framework, for their programming assignments in a second-semester programming course. Improvements in student performance were realized. In the other study, students submitted detailed logs of how time was spent on projects, along with their programs. Software metrics were computed on the students' source code. Correlations between student performance and the log data and software metric data were sought. No significant indicators of performance were found, even with factors that are commonly expected to indicate performance. However, results from previous research concerning variations in individual programmer performance and relationships between software metrics were obtained. / Master of Science

Yes / This deliberately dual perspective paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of SMEs in hosted enterprise applications in the UK. The emergence and development of the ASP sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. The paper starts by considering ICT adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK (market perspective). The study is extended by qualitative empirical data collected by semi-structured interviews with SME users of hosted enterprise applications (user perspective) and subsequent analysis in order to develop the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems and multiple service providers, iv) the financial attractiveness of the rental model and v) the intention to continue or extend the use of hosted applications. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take deliberately market and SME user perspectives - this paper makes an important contribution in this emerging field.

PT Hemma is a company consisting of personal trainers specializing in personal training in people's homes. They need to store information about their customers, such as personal data, training background and notes associated with each training session. Currently, this information is stored locally in spreadsheets. The spreadsheets lack a good user interface and sharing information about customers between different personal trainers is inconvenient. An alternative for PT Hemma would be to use one of the numerous medical record systems available online. However, these are considered to be either too complicated, expensive or adapted for health care rather than personal trainers. This has led to the need for PT Fysio, a simple medical record system tailored for personal trainers. PT Fysio is a lightweight medical record system, containing only the most necessary functionalities. The system is easy to navigate and information is easily found. Moreover, the system has different access levels preventing users from accessing unauthorized information. The medical record system has support for multiple simultaneous users and allows the storage of information about hundreds of customers. However, the system could be further improved by adding more features, such as customer profiles, an integrated booking system and support for using the system on a smartphone. / PT Hemma är ett företag som består av personliga tränare som specialiserar sig inom träning i kundernas hem. Deras behov inkluderar lagring av information om deras kunder, som personlig data, träningsbakgrund och anteckningar kopplade till varje träningstillfälle. I nuläget lagras informationen lokalt i kalkylblad. Kalkylbladen saknar ett bra användargränssnitt och och att dela information om kunder mellan de personliga tränarna är opraktiskt. Ett alternativ för PT Hemma skulle vara att använda ett redan existerande journalsystem som finns online. Dessa system anses vara antingen för komplicerade, dyra eller anpassade för sjukvården snarare än för personliga tränare. Detta har lett till behovet av PT Fysio, ett enkelt journalsystem anpassat för personliga tränare. PT Fysio är ett lättviktigt journalsystem som endast innehåller de mest nödvändiga funktionerna. Systemet är lätt att navigera och informationen är lättillgänglig. Dessutom har systemet olika åtkomstnivåer som förhindrar obehörig åtkomst. Journalsystemet stödjer flera samtidiga användare och kan lagra information om hundratals kunder. Systemet kan dock utvecklas ytterligare genom att lägga till fler funktioner, så som kundprofiler, ett integrerat bokningssystem och stöd för att använda systemet på mobiltelefonen.

Ces travaux de recherche ont pour ambition de contribuer à la problématique de la classification d’images de documents. Plus précisément, ces travaux tendent à répondre aux problèmes rencontrés par des sociétés de numérisation dont l’objectif est de mettre à disposition de leurs clients une version numérique des documents papiers accompagnés d’informations qui leurs sont relatives. Face à la diversité des documents à numériser, l’extraction d’informations peut s’avérer parfois complexe. C’est pourquoi la classification et l’indexation des documents sont très souvent réalisées manuellement. Ces travaux de recherche ont permis de fournir différentes solutions en fonction des connaissances relatives aux images que possède l’utilisateur ayant en charge l’annotation des documents.Le premier apport de cette thèse est la mise en place d’une méthode permettant, de manière interactive, à un utilisateur de classer des images de documents dont la nature est inconnue. Le second apport de ces travaux est la proposition d’une technique de recherche d’images de documents par l’exemple basée sur l’extraction et la mise en correspondance de points d’intérêts. Le dernier apport de cette thèse est l’élaboration d’une méthode de classification d’images de documents utilisant les techniques de sacs de mots visuels. / The aim of this research is to contribute to the document image classification problem. More specifically, these studies address digitizing company issues which objective is to provide the digital version of paper document with information relating to them. Given the diversity of documents, information extraction can be complex. This is why the classification and the indexing of documents are often performed manually. This research provides several solutions based on knowledge of the images that the user has. The first contribution of this thesis is a method for classifying interactively document images, where the content of documents and classes are unknown. The second contribution of this work is a new technique for document image retrieval by giving one example of researched document. This technique is based on the extraction and matching of interest points. The last contribution of this thesis is a method for classifying document images by using bags of visual words techniques.

The thesis examines how current mobile operating systems support context-aware applications and investigates the methods of mobile application debugging. The thesis points out what kind of problems need to be solved during debugging of context-aware applications. The primary goal of the thesis is to propose a debugging method which takes context information into account and to implement this method. The thesis contains a real world use case to demonstrate the proposed method.