Ebook: Advances in Digital Technologies

The International Conference on Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies was the 6th event of the series organized since 2008 with the aim at building infrastructure necessary for large-scale development of Web technologies that make easy access to digital information in its every form regardless of the user's need. Over these years, the ICADIWT conference has created its own research community of participants from very many countries who attend the event every time with the intention to demonstrate and discuss the essential details of their research findings.

The Icadiwt conference series is organized by the Indian Digital Information Research Foundation, a publisher of academic journals in computer and information science. The 6th ICADIWT conference was held on February the 12th, 2015, in the University of Macau, Macao. This year Professor Jonathan Chan from King Mongkut's University of Technology, Thonburi, Thailand gave a keynote speech on Digital Information and Communication in the Aging Society which granted a wide audience of researchers and practitioners.

The scope of the ICADIWT 2015 conference covers the following research areas: Internet Communication, Internet Technologies, Web Applications, Internet Software, Data Access and Transmission, Digital Communication Software, Digital Networks, Web Communication Interfaces, Internet Content Processing, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything, Data Communication, Databases and applications, Web Systems Engineering Design, Intelligent Agent systems, Semantic Web Studies, Adaptive Web applications and personalization, Navigation and hypermedia.

This year, 27 papers were accepted for presentation out of 78 submissions reviewed by at least two Review Committee members each making the overall acceptance rate at 34.6%.

We would like to express our gratitude to all our Program Committee members as well as the Board of Reviewers for their hard work to ensure a high standard of the ICADIWT 2015 conference papers.

With the proliferation of high speed internet access and rapid developments in telecommunication technology, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is fast transforming the way of life for many people globally, especially for the so-called urbanites. This is especially true in how information is gathered and communicated among us. In particular, timely and reliable access to information about health and health-care is of special interest to the aged. Elderly people face physical and mental impairment such as deterioration of movement, vision, hearing, and cognition. These conditions is put into consideration when designing tools and assistive technologies for elderly people. They should not need much knowledge and skills to operate the new tools. In general, it would be beneficial to gain more understanding on how to deal with the process of aging and recognize the concept of “Active Aging” in order to improve the Quality of Life (QoL) of the aged.

The purpose of this study is to compile the teaching materials for education on college of commerce and management, and develop the corresponding digital learning achievement test and creativity test as evaluation mechanism. It aims to apply digital technology and the creative pedagogy to the curriculum of college of commerce and management at technology universities, in order to stimulate students' learning interests, learning initiatives, and critical thinking skills. This project is a three-year research plan and currently only the first year of the project was permitted and under engagement. This study compiled the digital-media teaching materials in the field of business administration, corresponding with the requirements of two courses “Innovative Technology Management” and “Cultural and Creative Industries Management”. The innovative pedagogy is applied to the two courses to achieve the main goal of developing student's problem-solving knowledge and abilities. The participants will be the junior students in the college of commerce and management at China University of Science and Technology. The two courses require students to download and preview the digital teaching materials from the WebDrive in advance of each class. There are activities of group discussion and achievement evaluation during each class to facilitate enhancing students' learning interests and learning effectiveness. Both group discussion and achievement evaluation are conducted once every three weeks and there are total six group discussions and six assessments in the 16-topic/week session. For course “Innovative Technology Management”, the digital teaching materials cover topics of creativity theories and practices, commercial innovation models and innovative technology management. And course “Cultural and Creative Industries Management” developed teaching materials of 16 units, and also held a “project planning contest for local cultural roots” for the junior students to cultivate their creativity, integration and implementation capabilities.

Sender-based message logging (SBML) is one of the most lightweight fault-tolerance techniques to considerably lower high failure-free overhead of receiver-based message logging by using volatile memory of its sender as storage for logging. However, all of the existing SBML protocols have the limitation that they can tolerate only a single failure at one time, called sequential failures. So, if more than one process crashes concurrently, they may not make the entire system consistent. Assuming reliable FIFO point-to-point communication links, all the existing SBML protocols may not effectively employ log information of the same message to a group its members received on being applied into group communication link-based distributed system platforms. This paper presents a new SBML protocol to tolerate concurrent failures by using the inherently beneficial features of FIFO broadcast links effectively. The protocol can lift the inherent drawback of the original SBML by replicating the log information of each message sent to a group into the volatile storages of its members. Therefore, even if only one process in a group survives at a time, our protocol can progress the execution of the entire system without stopping and restarting it.

We have extracted and stored character features SCF from all character images. Extracted a feature from test image of Urdu text line, afterwards, taking a smaller sample calculated maximum likelihood to match it against each SCF in inference algorithm and continue until whole sample is consumed, revealing all the characters in it. The algorithm may reduce complexity using smaller dictionary of Urdu characters instead of using a very larger set of ligatures. This work can be used in problems like OCR system, number plate segmentation and postal address processing, form processing etc.

The world is facing the phenomena of rapidly growing population of the aged, in which there are more elderly people than children. The elderly people tend to live longer and hence have to live alone and feel lonely in large part due to healthcare advancement globally and structural social changes. This causes a great deal of concerns for loneliness, social isolation, and depression among the elderly. The elderly people also have mobility and vision-reducing eye problems. Therefore, it is important for the family to provide the proper health and social care environment to assist the elderly's daily living in order to enable them to live quality lives. This study aims to design and develop an interactive (bidirectional) multimedia delivery system to deliver multimedia contents among elderly people, family members, relatives and friends, and healthcare providers. The elderly can chat and send multimedia contents from a tablet PC via smart TV to family members and friends. Multimedia contents and the chat history are displayed on the elderly's smart TVs. The elderly can control the smart TV multimedia delivery application with ease by using our developed tablet PC touchpad features. It is intended to enhance the quality of lives of the elderly people by allowing them to stay connected with the family members, relatives and friends, in hope to replace the TV remote control, which is deemed not to be so user-friendly.

In general, game users (or players) recognize and classify games based on their own experience rather than the genre of game itself. The objective of this study is to identify the attributes of game based on user's perspectives, paying attention to understanding of game users and the diversification of game genres. To find those attributes, we conduct in-depth interview with twenty-two game users by using the Repertory Grid technique, which is a qualitative research method drawing personal cognitive constructs. As a result, we get to propose a new user-centric taxonomy of games, which includes general elements of games such as space, time, player structure, player relation, character, item in game, and user-based elements such as user's past experience, capacity, ownership and presentation. A meaningful implication of this study is that we can find cognitive attributes of games, which are elicited from game users without using general framework of game genre and elements. Also, the user-centric taxonomy of games is organized based on user's perspective and theoretical basis. We conclude that this taxonomy will contribute future game design and development to reflect users' perspectives, which is important to provide more user-centric games.

The purpose of this study is to explore and conceptualize different cognitive patterns found among website users in accessing and using websites. Following procedures defined in Q methodology, twenty one graduate students were recruited and asked to classify thirty seven website usability measures in terms of personal importance, in using their university websites. Three different cognitive patterns in using websites are identified: (1) use-focused, (2) goal-focused and (3) information-focused. Use-focused group concerns mostly about easy navigational features, error-free functionalities, and so on while goal-focused cares for explicit segmentation for different functionality, education-specific content and features, etc. Information-focused desires integrated search functions, information protection, timely update, etc. This research successfully applies Q methodology in identifying different cognitive patterns in play in accessing and using websites. Results provide convincing evidence to support different cognitive patterns in using websites, and suggest that these patterns be recognized and managed in constructing and maintaining websites.

This paper proposed a distributed web-DB based electronic voting system model. This model was thought about for state of the national election of Japan, also it is considered to be easy to fit not only the election of Japan but also elections in other countries. As a prototype of the model, a web-DB based electronic system is implemented on a Windows PC. In the system, the voter's profile browser, the political views browser and the tool for helping voters to find the candidate who has the most similar opinion with oneself are implemented as additional functions.Using this system, a qualified voter can easily use a right to vote anytime from anywhere. And, even if a voter does not know any candidate, the voter can cast the ballots to candidates whom the political views are similar to.

In this paper, we introduce Rec4LRW, a recommender system (RS) for assisting researchers in finding research papers for their literature review and writing purposes. This system focuses on three researcher tasks – (1) Building a reading list of research papers, (2) Finding similar papers based on a set of papers, and (3) Shortlisting papers from the final reading list for inclusion in manuscript based on article type. A set of intermediate criteria are proposed to capture the relations between a research paper and its bibliography. The recommendation techniques for the three tasks in Rec4LRW are specifically devised on top of the intermediate criteria. The Rec4LRW workflow along with the screen designs for the three tasks is provided in this paper. The recommendation techniques in the system will be evaluated with state-of-the-art approaches along with user-based evaluation in subsequent studies.

Recreational cycling marathons are a kind of attractive sport event where a bunch of riders ride a different courses without competing between each other. In the last fifteen years, sport became popular for people of all ages. Therefore, many recreational cyclists has joint to such events in order to test their abilities, have a good time with friends, meet new people, and take care for their health and body. Collecting registrations of cyclists in the events was difficult to manage because of a large time complexity. In the past, each cyclist had to print the registration card that was uploaded on the organizer's webpage, fill it and send to over the classic post. Today, the problem is worldwide solved by using the online registration system. Participants from different countries can register themselves over the Internet. This paper presents the common pitfalls and learned lessons in the past four years, when we began developing such solutions for recreational cycling marathons.

As the role of software increases in computing environments, issues in software security become more important problems. Taint analysis is a technique to trace and manage tainted data originated from untrustworthy sources in a program. This analysis can be applied to software security verification as well as software behavior understanding, testing unexpected errors, or debugging. In this paper, we present a method for tracing information flows of untrustworthy data in a base language. In addition, we verify the correctness of the proposed algorithm by implementing an analyzer, and show that propagation of untrustworthy data can be traced by the proposed algorithm. The proposed trace algorithm can be applied to understand the analysis procedures of information flows of untrustworthy data, and it can be used in software analysis to detect security problems that is caused by misuse of information in software or system.

Data collection is being used in all fields nowadays. This data collection of data creates a dataset. Association rule mining is one of the data mining techniques used to extract hidden knowledge within the dataset. These rules are very useful for the organizations but on the other hand, these rules also generate sensitive or confidential information and patterns. Resolving the problem of hiding the sensitive or confidential information with the sensitivity patterns, Privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) is introduced. Privacy preserving data mining is used to hide sensitive and confidential information and patterns, and also preserves the knowledge of the dataset. Various techniques are used to hide such confidential and sensitive information, but they all produce lost rules, ghost rules and hidden failure ratio. In current research work, we propose an algorithm which is based on ant colony optimization (ACO) technique. This proposed methodology is used to triumph over the problem of lost rules, ghost rules and hidden failure ratio. Fuzzy sets are used as the fitness function of ACO. The technique minimizes the problem of lost rule, ghost rule and hidden failure ratio in a great manner. Further-more, this technique is used in all types of areas for hiding sensitive information with sensitive patterns.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid heading estimation scheme exploiting smart-phone inertial sensors, accelerometer, magnetic, gyroscope, for the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR). Generally the heading estimation of a pedestrian determines the performance of indoor navigation system (INS). Even though various heading estimation schemes are known, most systems are simply based on only one scheme. Based on the performance evaluation of each scheme, in this paper, a hybrid heading estimation scheme is proposed to improve the performance of INS. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we performed experiments in indoor environments and compared with various heading estimation schemes with a step detection scheme based on a peak detection scheme. According to the experiment results, the proposed hybrid heading estimation can provide enhanced performance than the conventional schemes.

Patients with the frozen shoulder condition that limits their arm movement should seek rehabilitation assistance from a medical facility. The normal process is for the patients to travel from their home to a hospital or a medical center to see a physiotherapist. Such potentially cumbersome effort may reduce their motivation and determination to seek proper treatment. Our approach is to use a single smartphone with accelerometer, magnetic field, and gyroscope sensors to provide the necessary monitoring measurements to enable effective tele-rehabilitation. This work proposes a framework for such a system and has successful developed prototype based on the Android platform. Also, there are many different smartphones in the market. Therefore, we evaluated performance of three different smartphones, which are Samsung Google Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy Note 1, and Sony Xperia Z Ultra. According to the experimentation, we have shown that smartphones with the appropriate sensors are suitable for tele-rehabilitation. Also, a newer generation model would provide more precise measurements, as expected.

In this paper, we propose a modular role player game-learning system based on voice recognition for language education in cloud. Each designed modular language teaching materials can be embedded into the game platform on the virtual machine in cloud. By connecting to the external voice recognition resource, the pronounce of learners can be recognized. Only when the voice recognition result data (in words) of learners matches the on demand answer, the learners can be identified and enter the further learning unit. By designing different scenarios, different vocabularies or conversations can be added into the RPG game. The information about users in the individual game learning system can be stored in the cloud database. In addition, the whole learning system is established as a virtual machine. System maintainer can configure the learning system easily and quickly. Based on cloud, different remote devices can connect to server for learning.

An allocation of resources to a virtual machine specifies the maximum amount of each individual element of each resource type that will be utilized, as well as the aggregate amount of each resource of each type. In this paper, we present an new approach to improve the deadlock detection algorithm, to schedule the policies of resource supply for allocating multiple resources to competing services running in virtual machines on a heterogeneous distributed platform. We introduce the matrix representation of a deadlock detection problem and some essential features can be mapped into a cloud architecture which can handle multiple requests/grants simultaneously and can detect multiple deadlocks in linear time, hence, significantly improving performance. Our algorithm proposed has a run time complexity of O(min(m,n)), where m is the number of resources and n is the number of processes. The experiments also compare the performance of our algorithm proposed approach with other related works.

In recent years, Cloud services are more popular for many network services. Cloud computing utilizes computing resources via a high bandwidth network to facilitate the execution of complicated multi-tasks that require large-scale computing. In this paper, we propose a novel Cloud multiple-function survey system. The survey system will allow users to either choose one option with one category or spread their super multiple options with multiple categories for each question with results in a multi-level scale. To analyze survey performance, our proposed new Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) model discrimination index will reflect a more accurate quantity than the IPA model proposed by Hollenhorst (1992). Further, the index is implemented to compare and distinguish the effects of different types of survey events. Adopting the new IPA discrimination index to compare the homogeneous survey results will demonstrate t our scheme has better information for performance comparisons.

This paper develops cloud based software computing as a service (SCaaS) in hybrid evolution algorithm with feedback assistance to find the optimal solution of NP-complete problems such as job shop scheduling problems. In this paper, the different steps and types of the evolution algorithm can be established via individual thread procedures and various virtual machines in cloud. During the evolution steps, methods, or procedures of the genetic algorithm, the fitness evaluation result and survival ratio of different crossover methods in the current generation can be used for the feedback assistance method. The proposed feedback assistance method can be added into the evolution procedure and dynamically emphasize the corresponding methods or procedures with better performance in optimal solution searching. All the steps or methods in genetic algorithm are created similar to the MapReduce structure. Furthermore, via using the feedback assistance, the convergence time of the optimal solution can be enhanced.