Information System Prosumption Development and Application in e-Learning

In order to reduce risks and increase the speed of new information technology (IT) product or service development as well as to satisfy customers’ demand, end users’ involvement has become one of the most important issues. The chapter aims at the presentation of the user role in information system development and the activities of prosumers in e-learning. The first part of the chapter covers literature review referring to studies on end users’ involvement in the information system (IS) development process. In the second part of the chapter the opportunities of prosumption development on the Internet are discussed. Particularly, the author focuses on e-learning purposes development and IT-supported communication among e-learners. The third part of the chapter covers a proposal of the architecture model as well as a discussion on methods of information system design for the prosumption development.

Development, Integration, and Deployment of Mobile Information Services in Healthcare

The use of mobile and wireless technologies has great potential to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery. The main goal of this chapter is to describe the current state of the art in the research field of development and integration of mobile services in the healthcare sector by addressing the two main challenges: usability and security. The authors investigate the main requirements and approaches for developing highly usable, user-friendly, and well-accepted mobile healthcare services. In addition, they identify various ways of addressing security and privacy issues in mobile healthcare services and discuss the advantages and shortcomings of each approach. Finally, the chapter presents the CONNECT (Care Online: Novel Networks to Enhance Communication and Treatment) project and describes how security and usability issues can be addressed during the development of mobile access to a multi-modal Internet-based patient support system.

Password Recovery Research and its Future Direction

As users become increasingly aware of the need to adopt strong password, it brings challenges to digital forensics investigators due to the password protection of potential evidentiary data. On the other hand, due to human nature and their tendency to select memorable passwords, which compromises security for convenience, users may select strong passwords by considering a permutation of dictionary words. In this chapter, the authors discuss the existing password recovery methods and identify promising password recovery approaches. They also present their previous work on the design of a time-memory tradeoff pre-computed table coupled with a new sorting algorithm, and its two new storage mechanisms. The results on the evaluation of its password recovery performance are also presented. In this chapter, the authors propose the design of a new password recovery table by integrating the construction of common passwords within the enhanced rainbow table to incorporate the two promising password recovery approaches. They then present the theoretical proof of the feasibility of this technique.

The Impact of Social Media in Web-Based Information Management and Digital Media

The availability of Social Media has changed the way we handle requested resources in interactive media contexts and how we operate with each other on the Web. New challenges in the area of information management, Digital Media processing, and knowledge engineering have arisen such as, how to query or effectively embed Social Media into information and knowledge management concerns effectively. In addition, interactivity and the focus on interaction between users and resources in Social Media contexts create new ways of enriching and annotating content collectively following the wisdom of crowds and helpful intelligent automatic analysis. In this chapter the impact of Social Media concepts and distributed resources in web-based information management, knowledge engineering, and Digital Media applications is introduced. The relation between traditional web application design, distributed resource utilization, changes, and challenges in current interactive Digital Media systems will be regarded.

An Ontology-Based Approach to Support Information Discovery in Spatial Data Infrastructures

Currently, spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are becoming the solution adopted by many organizations to facilitate discovery, access and integration of geographic information produced and provided by different agencies. However, the catalog services currently offered by these infrastructures provide keyword-based queries only. This may result on low recall and precision. Furthermore, these catalogs retrieve information based on the metadata records that describe either a service or a dataset. This feature brings limitations to more specific information discovery, such as those based on feature types and instances. This chapter proposes a solution that aims to overcome these limitations by using multiple ontologies to enhance the description of the information offered by SDIs. The proposed ontologies describe the semantics of several features of a service, enabling information discovery at level of services, feature types, and geographic data.

Mobile Communication in Hospitals

The work setting in hospitals is communication intensive and can lead to significant difficulties related to interruptions from co-workers. Physicians often need information fast, and any delay between the decision made and the action taken could cause medical errors. One suggested solution for this problem is to implement wireless phone systems. However, psychological theory and empirical evidence, both suggest that wireless phones have the potential of creating additional problems related to interruptions, compared to traditional paging systems. The fact that hospital workers prefer interruptive communication methods before non-interruptive methods, amplifies the risk of overloading people when phones are widely deployed. This challenge causes some hospital staff to resist the diffusion of wireless phones, and a key is how to handle the balance between increased availability, and increased interruptions. In this chapter, the authors present solutions based on context aware communication systems, aiming to reduce interruptions.

High-End Storage

This chapter discusses the challenges high-end storage solutions will have with future demands. Due to heavy end-user demands for real-time processing of data access, this need must be addressed by high-end storage solutions. But what type of high-end storage solutions address this need and are suitable to ensure high performance write and retrieval of data in real-time from high- end storage infrastructures, including read and write access from digital archives? For this reason, this chapter reviews a few disk and tape solutions as well as combined disk- and tape storage solutions. The review on the different storage solutions does not focus on compliance of data storage management, but on available commercial high-end systems, addressing scalability and performance requirements both for online storage and archives. High level requirements aid in identifying high-end storage system features and support Extreme Scale infrastructures for the amount of data that high-end storage systems will need to manage in future.

Accessing Knowledge from the Bedside

Tablet computers are very powerful devices that have numerous potential uses in the medical field. Already, the development community has created a wide range of applications that can be used for everything from the most basic level of medical undergraduate education to specialist care delivery. The challenge with tablet computers as a new technology is to find where they fit most effectively into healthcare. In this chapter, the authors focus on how tablets might find a role in the area of care delivery in the educational setting. Included is a discussion on the tablet computer’s place on the eLearning / mLearning spectrum, an annotated list of recommended medical applications, a description of challenges and issues when deploying the tablet computers to clinical settings, and finally a proposed pilot study that will explore the effectiveness of using a tablet computer in a clinical teaching setting. The content of this chapter can be applied to many workplace and learning settings that may find tablet computers beneficial such as businesses that require mobile communications, K-12 schools, and higher learning institutions.

Software Design for Passing Sarbanes-Oxley in Cloud Computing

The purpose of this chapter is to identify and analyze the challenges of creating new software in the public cloud due to legal regulations. Specifically, this chapter explores how the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) will indirectly affect the development and implementation process of cloud computing applications in terms of software engineering and actual legality of said software solutions. The goal of this chapter is twofold - to bring attention to the need for specific analysis of legal issues in public clouds (as opposed to general analysis), and to illustrate the need for cloud developers to address legal constraint while creating their platforms, in order to increase their viability in the corporate environment.

Thermo-Chemical Convection in Planetary Mantles

Thermo-chemical convection is the primary process that controls the large-scale dynamics of the mantle of the Earth and terrestrial planets. Its numerical simulation is one the principal tools for exploiting the constraints posed by geological and geochemical surface observations performed by planetary spacecrafts. In the present work, the authors discuss the modeling of active compositional fields in the framework of solid-state mantle convection using the cylindrical/spherical code Gaia. They compare an Eulerian method based on double-diffusive convection against a Lagrangian, particle-based method. Through a series of increasingly complex benchmark tests, the authors show the superiority of the particle method when it comes to model the advection of compositional interfaces with sharp density and viscosity contrasts. They finally apply this technique to simulate the Rayleigh-Taylor overturn of the Mars’ and Mercury’s primordial magma oceans.