Electronic surveillance system for COVID-19 virus management in Palestine- an observational study

This research investigated the performance of the electronic surveillance system of COVID 19 and assessed its key attributes. The research results for the overall system performance were good (82.81%). The highest attribute score was 100% for representativeness and data completeness and the lowest score was 75.30% for acceptability. The COVID-19 surveillance system is generally simple and accepted by users, although the instability of electricity and the Internet, the benefit from the training on the system, and the lack of willingness to participate in the system at the health facility level had the greatest impact on simplicity and acceptability scores. The quality and completeness of the data enabled stakeholders to carry out the most effective prevention and control activities. System developers indicated that the system has achieved the desired benefit, due to the flexibility and stability of the system and comprehensiveness of geographical coverage.

Governmentality of Value Added Tax compliance using Electronic Fiscal Devices in Malawi

This paper critically analysed the implementation of Electronic Fiscal Devices (EFD) in supporting value added tax (VAT) compliance. The study draws on the concept of governmentality to highlight ways of exercising power and authority among VAT stakeholders using the case of Malawi. The findings showed that tax regime discourse was important in shaping the ways of thinking and acting of stakeholders in the implementation of EFD. Complex relationships emerged as a result of implementing EFD between the revenue authority and VAT registered operators, foreign-owned businesses, business associations, government agencies and donors. While the revenue authority managed to achieve VAT compliance using EFD, there was resistance from VAT registered operators and business organisations which affected the growth of the tax regime and financing of the national budget. The study contributes to the understanding of EFD use and VAT compliance in the context of developing countries.

Diffusion Analysis for Techno-commercial Predictions in 5G HetNet Deployment Scenarios

Fifth-generation (5G) mobile services entail network densification, having Massive MIMO air interfaces operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. Techno-economic analysis for such a complex heterogeneous network (HetNet) is challenging due to uncertain future demand and technical hurdles for ensuring seamless nationwide coverage and capacity. We show in this work how a Logistic diffusion model may be used to forecast 5G adoption in a country and then utilize those forecasts to perform a techno-economic assessment of 5G deployment. The complete analysis is showcased for a European nation, namely France, for the period 2020-2030. We find that, theoretically, both the Capex and the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the considered 5G HetNets is cheaper (1/7th) than that for 4G LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks, also translating into higher returns. The sensitivity analysis predicts the Average Revenue from Users (ARPU), spectrum acquisition costs, and spectrum bandwidth as the most influential variables for profitability.

Building trust in eCommerce - an experimental study of social-cue design dimensions

Integrating diverse social media cues such as photos, video streaming, and social networking has become a common marketing strategy to boost consumer trust in an online setting. In this paper, we study the influence of social-cue design dimensions such as a facial photo, a video stream, and social networking site on trust through an experiment. Our results show that online retailers can enhance consumer trust and stimulate a clear purchase intention by embedding social media cues into a web interface.

Explaining Country Heterogeneity in E-Government Evolution Based on Longitudinal Analysis of Nations

E-government (EGOV) has emerged as an important innovation disrupting the government-citizen relationship in the past two decades. It has attracted wide attention from scholars across varied domains. However, most of these scholarly works, while richly contributing to this evolving domain, assume homogeneity and uniformity in its design, implementation, and impact. This “one size fits all” approach fails to account for the contextual richness, often culminating in a “design-reality” gap. Also, the existing literature lacks adequate investigation of EGOV heterogeneities along time. To address the lacuna, this study attempts to uncover country-level heterogeneities inherent in EGOV longitudinal evolution. Using a dataset over 2008-2018, the study performs a longitudinal clustering analysis and identifies four distinct cohorts with varying EGOV trajectories. Further, the study uncovers variations in EGOV's influence on country-level development indicators across the four cohorts. The findings help derive theoretical and policy implications while identifying avenues for future works.

Evaluation of Technological Solutions and Requirements for Cloud TV Services Based on Decision Support Systems

Cloud TV will play an important role in future pay TV services and is quickly becoming the next arena for TV content providers. This emphasizes the need for a technology roadmap to address several key issues that may affect the deployment of future Cloud TV services. Three alternative technologies, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), Over the Top (OTT), and Smart TV have been investigated. The methodology used is the analytic hierarchy process based on a decision support system developed for this study. The current work implements and verifies a transparent road mapping model for Cloud TV solutions. The results indicate that OTT seems to be the most efficient and valuable choice and reveal an important blend of social, economic, technological requirements to be taken into account when deploying and/or adopting Cloud TV services from a pay TV operator. Sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the stability of the results and the accuracy of the approach. The findings will be an important guide for the development of Cloud TV solutions and the improvement of those already deployed.

Evolution of Online Marketing Tools, Approaches, and Strategies With Associated Challenges

Marketing tools like organizing campaigns, banners, TV, and radio are traditionally designed for making the product more appealing and creating a need in the customers' minds. With the increased use of internet in our day-to-day life, these traditional tools are being replaced rapidly by online marketing media. Online marketing is a two-way communication that can reach a large number of relevant people in less time by providing more information and removing geographical constraints. The companies can respond to the customers' requirements more speedily with better quality by making direct contact with them. Most of the online development work supports itself with the revenue earned through advertisements rather than subscription. Online marketing is one of the largest, most effective, and fastest advertising media. Today, it is an essential medium of advertising for meeting the desires and needs of the customer. This paper explores the history of online marketing along with its basic tools with a special emphasis on keyword-based search, recommendation engines, and real-time bidding.

A Requirements-Oriented Modelling Language for an Optimized Distribution of Business Processes on a Multi-Cloud Environment

Many companies resort to business process outsourcing (BPO) to survive in today's tough competition. This trend has been intensified with the advent of Cloud computing that brings a new way of paying and consuming resources. Nonetheless, preserving companies' knowhow, protecting sensitive data, and ensuring the compliance of business processes (BPs) remain among the most important challenges in BPO to the Cloud. An organization must therefore consider several factors to determine which BP parts should be outsourced and to assign them the most appropriate Cloud offers. This paper proposes an extension of the business process model notation (BPMN) that allows specifying the requirements of BP activities in terms of security, compliance, cost, performance, data transfer, and obfuscation. This extension is intended for the BP modelling phase and aims to assign to each activity the Cloud offer that best meets its requirements.

Comparitive Analysis of Link Prediction in Complex Networks

The most attractive aspect of data mining is link prediction in a complex network. Link prediction is the behavior of the network link formation by predicting missed and future relationships among elements based on current observed connections. Link prediction techniques can be categorized into probabilistic, similarity, and dimension reduction based. In this paper six familiar link predictors are applied on seven different network datasets to provide directory to users. The experimental results of multiple prediction algorithms were compared and analyzed on the basis of proposed comparative link prediction model. The results revealed that Jaccard coefficient and Hub promoted performed well on most of the datasets. Different applied methods are arranged on the basis of accuracy. Moreover, the shortcomings of different techniques are also presented.

E-Government Development at the Global Level

This study examines the impact of ICT access and ICT skills on e-government development in 135 countries globally. Whilst extant studies in information systems research have examined the factors that lead to successful e-government development, these studies fail to view ICT access and skills as dual necessities such that without either, the success of e-government development can be derailed. Previous studies have also failed to consider the mediating effect of a country's political and regulatory environment on e-government development. The authors address these by relying on secondary data and partial least squares-structural equation modeling to test a model based on the technology-organization-environment framework. The results show that ICT skills positively influences e-government development, whilst ICT access and the political and regulatory environment do not. Furthermore, the political and regulatory environment was found to positively mediate the link between ICT access and e-government development. Whilst the findings make important contributions to e-government research at the global level, this research provides some implications for policy and practice.