Design of an Integrated Project Management Information System for Large Scale Public Projects

Due to the unprecedented growth of outsourcing ICT projects by the Iranian government, a critical need exists for the proper execution and monitoring of these projects. In this paper, the authors propose a web-based project management system to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the management processes and accelerate decision making. Based on the requirements and information flow between various units involved in the complete life-cycle of ICT project management, a functional model and system architecture with various underlying structures has been designed. The functional model contains two sub-systems: process management and information service. The proposed system structure is based on a four-layer client-server computing model. As a part of a publically available ICT system, it must be secure against cybercrime activities. This system can bring efficiency in managing the projects, improve decision making, and increase the overall management process with total accounting and management transparency. The proposed system overcomes the problems associated with a central system and traditional management processes, as is currently the case in Iran.

The Value of Government Mandated Location-Based Services in Emergencies in Australia

The adoption of mobile technologies for emergency management has the capacity to save lives. In Australia in February 2009, the Victorian Bushfires claimed 173 lives, the worst peace-time disaster in the nation’s history. The Australian government responded swiftly to the tragedy by going to tender for mobile applications that could be used during emergencies, such as mobile alerts and location services. These applications have the ability to deliver personalized information direct to the citizen during crises, complementing traditional broadcasting mediums like television and radio. Indeed governments have a responsibility to their citizens to safeguard them against both natural and human-made hazards and today national security has grown to encapsulate such societal and economic securitization. However, some citizens and lobby groups have emphasized that such breakthrough technologies need to be deployed with caution as they are fraught with ethical considerations, including the potential for breaches in privacy, security and trust. The other problem is that real world implementations of national emergency alerts have not always worked reliably and their value has come into question as a result. This paper provides a big picture view of the value of government-mandated location-based services during emergencies, and the challenges ensuing from their use.

The Effects of Investments in Information Technology on Firm Performance

Analyzing the beneficial effects of investments in information technology (IT) is an area of research that interests investors and academics. A number of studies have examined whether investments in IT have a positive effect on some measure of earnings or other form of financial return. Results from these studies have been mixed. This paper extends the literature by adopting an investor’s perspective on firm performance when IT investments are made, using the preservation of capital as a performance measure. The authors examine companies that made public announcements of their investments in technology to see if they were able to mitigate losses to investors by reducing their downside risk to investors. This study further discusses whether different types of IT investments have different impacts on firm risk from an investor’s viewpoint. Findings suggest that IT investments impact a firm’s downside risk, and the authors offer an alternative perspective on the benefits of IT investments, particularly where no positive incremental financial results are evident.

Pareto Artificial Life Algorithm for Multi-Objective Optimization

Most engineering optimization uses multiple objective functions rather than single objective function. To realize an artificial life algorithm based multi-objective optimization, this paper proposes a Pareto artificial life algorithm that is capable of searching Pareto set for multi-objective function solutions. The Pareto set of optimum solutions is found by applying two objective functions for the optimum design of the defined journal bearing. By comparing with the optimum solutions of a single objective function, it is confirmed that the single function optimization result is one of the specific cases of Pareto set of optimum solutions.

Self-Organizing Tree Using Artificial Ants

In this paper, the authors propose a new approach for topological hierarchical tree clustering inspired from the self-assembly behavior of artificial ants. The method, called SoTree (Self-organizing Tree), builds, autonomously and simultaneously, a topological and hierarchical partitioning of data. Each ’’cluster’’ associated to one cell of a 2D grid is modeled by a tree. The artificial ants similarly build a tree where each ant represents a node/data. The benefit of this approach is the intuitive representation of hierarchical relations in the data. This is especially appealing in explorative data mining applications, allowing the inherent structure of the data to unfold in a highly intuitive fashion.

Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Optimized Attribute Division in Modular Neural Networks

The complexity of problems has led to a shift toward the use of modular neural networks in place of traditional neural networks. The number of inputs to neural networks must be kept within manageable limits to escape from the curse of dimensionality. Attribute division is a novel concept to reduce the problem dimensionality without losing information. In this paper, the authors use Genetic Algorithms to determine the optimal distribution of the parameters to the various modules of the modular neural network. The attribute set is divided into the various modules. Each module computes the output using its own list of attributes. The individual results are then integrated by an integrator. This framework is used for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Experimental results show that optimal distribution strategy exceeds the well-known methods for the diagnosis of the disease.

DISMON

Information technology and, more precisely, the internet represent challenges and opportunities for medicine. Technology-driven medicine has changed how practitioners perform their roles in and medical information systems have recently gained momentum as a proof-of-concept of the efficiency of new support-oriented technologies. Emerging applications combine sharing information with a social dimension. This paper presents DISMON (Disease Monitor), a system based on Semantic Technologies and Social Web (SW) to improve patient care for medical diagnosis in limited environments, namely, organizations. DISMON combines Web 2.0 capacities and SW to provide semantic descriptions of clinical symptoms, thereby facilitating diagnosis and helping to foresee diseases, giving useful information to the company and its employees to increase efficiency by means of the prevention of injuries and illnesses, resulting in a safety environment for workers.

The Consistency of the Medical Expert System CADIAG-2

CADIAG-2 is a well known rule-based medical expert system aimed at providing support in medical diagnose in the field of internal medicine. Its knowledge base consists of a large collection of IF-THEN rules that represent uncertain relationships between distinct medical entities. Given this uncertainty and the size of the system, it has been challenging to validate its consistency. Recent attempts to partially formalize CADIAG-2’s knowledge base into decidable Gödel logics have shown that, on formalization, the system is inconsistent. In this paper, the authors use an alternative, more expressive formalization of CADIAG-2’s knowledge base as a set of probabilistic conditional statements and apply their probabilistic logic solver (Pronto) to confirm its inconsistency and compute its conflicting sets of rules under a slightly relaxed interpretation. Once this is achieved, the authors define a measure to evaluate inconsistency and discuss suitable repair strategies for CADIAG-2 and similar systems.

Secure Electronic Healthcare Records Management in Wireless Environments

Wireless technologies have lately been integrated in many types of environments; their development is able to provide innovative services minimizing costs and the time necessary to identify the necessary information. However medical information is very sensitive since it contains critical personal data. Security and privacy preservation are very critical parameters. Lately, innovative technologies such as software agents’ technology have been utilized to support distributed environments. Presented is an architecture that allows secure medical related information management using software agents; this work expands previous research (Belsis, Skourlas, & Gritzalis, 2011). The authors present a security oriented solution and also provide experimental evidence about the capability of the platform to operate in wireless environments with large number of users.

An Optimization Model for the Identification of Temperature in Intelligent Building

Methods for the reconstruction of temperature fields in an intelligent building with temperature data of discrete observation positions is a current topic of research. To reconstruct temperature field with observation data, it is necessary to model the identification of temperature in each observation position. In this paper, models for temperature identification in an intelligent building are formalized as optimization problems based on observation temperature data sequence. To solve the optimization problem, a feed forward neural network is used to formalize the identification structure, and connection matrixes of the neural network are the identification parameters. With the object function for the given optimization problem as the fitness function, the training of the feed forward neural network is driven by a genetic algorithm. The experiment for the precision and stability of the proposed method is designed with real temperature data from an intelligent building.