All Papers

John-Harmen Valk, Ahmed Tareq Rashid, Laurent Elder

Despite improvements in educational indicators, such as enrolment, significant challenges remain with regard to the delivery of quality education in developing countries, particularly in rural and remote regions. In the attempt to find viable solutions to these challenges, much hope has been placed in new information and communication technologies (ICTs), mobile phones being one example. This article reviews the evidence of the role of mobile phone-facilitated mLearning in contributing to improved educational outcomes in the developing countries of Asia by exploring the results of six mLearning pilot projects that took place in the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, India, and Bangladesh. In particular, this article examines the extent to which the use of mobile phones helped to improve educational outcomes in two specific ways: 1) in improving access to education, and 2) in promoting <em>new learning</em>. Analysis of the projects indicates that while there is important evidence of mobile phones facilitating increased access, much less evidence exists as to how mobiles promote new learning.

A B M Moniruzzaman, Syed Akhter Hossain

Digital world is growing very fast and become more complex in the volume (terabyte to petabyte), variety (structured and un-structured and hybrid), velocity (high speed in growth) in nature. This refers to as Big Data that is a global phenomenon. This is typically considered to be a data collection that has grown so large it can not be effectively managed or exploited using conventional data management tools: e.g., classic relational database management systems (RDBMS) or conventional search engines. To handle this problem, traditional RDBMS are complemented by specifically designed a rich set of alternative DBMS; such as - NoSQL, NewSQL and Search-based systems. This paper motivation is to provide - classification, characteristics and evaluation of NoSQL databases in Big Data Analytics. This report is intended to help users, especially to the organizations to obtain an independent understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of various NoSQL database approaches to supporting applications that process huge volumes of data.

Abdullah Al Omar, Mohammad Shahriar Rahman, Anirban Basu, Shinsaku Kiyomoto

Priti Tagde, Sandeep Tagde, Tanima Bhattacharya, Pooja Tagde et al.

Blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies are novel innovations in healthcare sector. Data on healthcare indices are collected from data published on Web of Sciences and other Google survey from various governing bodies. In this review, we focused on various aspects of blockchain and artificial intelligence and also discussed about integrating both technologies for making a significant difference in healthcare by promoting the implementation of a generalizable analytical technology that can be integrated into a more comprehensive risk management approach. This article has shown the various possibilities of creating reliable artificial intelligence models in e-Health using blockchain, which is an open network for the sharing and authorization of information. Healthcare professionals will have access to the blockchain to display the medical records of the patient, and AI uses a variety of proposed algorithms and decision-making capability, as well as large quantities of data. Thus, by integrating the latest advances of these technologies, the medical system will have improved service efficiency, reduced costs, and democratized healthcare. Blockchain enables the storage of cryptographic records, which AI needs.

Md Sadek Ferdous, Farida Chowdhury, Madini O. Alassafi

In recent times, with the advent of blockchain technology, there is an optimism surrounding the concept of self-sovereign identity which is regarded to have an influential effect on how we interact with each other over the Internet in future. There are a few works in the literature which examine different aspects of self-sovereign identity. Unfortunately, the existing works are not methodological and comprehensive at all. Moreover, there exist different notions of what the term self-sovereign identity means. To exploit its full potential, it is essential to ensure a common understanding in a formal way. This paper aims to achieve this goal by providing the first-ever formal and rigorous treatment of the concept of self-sovereign identity using a mathematical model. This paper examines the properties that a self-sovereign identity should have and explores the impact of self-sovereign identity over the laws of identity. It also highlights the essential life-cycles of an identity management system and inter-relates how the notion of self-sovereign identity can be applied in these life-cycles. In addition, the paper illustrates several envisioned flows involving a self-sovereign identity leveraging blockchain technology covering different aspects of an identity management system. All in all, this paper presents the first formal and comprehensive step toward an academic investigation of self-sovereign identity.

Mohammad Jabed Morshed Chowdhury, Md Sadek Ferdous, Kamanashis Biswas, Niaz Chowdhury et al.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has emerged as one of the most disruptive technologies in the last decade. It promises to change the way people do their business, track their products, and manage their personal data. Though the concept of DLT was first implemented in 2009 as Bitcoin, it has gained significant attention only in the past few years. During this time, different DLT enthusiasts and commercial companies have proposed and developed several DLT platforms. These platforms are usually categorized as public vs private, general purpose vs application specific and so on. As a growing number of people are interested to build DLT applications, it is important to understand their underlying architecture and capabilities in order to determine which DLT platform should be leveraged for a specific DLT application. In addition, the platforms need to be evaluated and critically analyzed to assess their applicability, resiliency and sustainability in the long run. In this paper, we have surveyed several leading DLT platforms and evaluated their capabilities based on a number of quantitative and qualitative criteria. The comparative analysis presented in this paper will help the DLT developers and architects to choose the best platform as per their requirement(s).

Sharifa Sultana, François Guimbretière, Phoebe Sengers, Nicola Dell

This paper examines the opportunities and issues that arise in designing technologies to support low-income rural women in Bangladesh. Through a qualitative, empirical study with 90 participants, we reveal systemic everyday challenges that women face that form the backdrop against which technology design could potentially happen. We discuss how technology is already impacting women's lives, sometimes by reinforcing their subservient role in society and sometimes used tactically by women to gain a measure of agency. The issues raised by our participants concerning technology's place in their lives provide HCI researchers with valuable guidance about what might (or might not) be appropriate to design for them. We also show how prevalent HCI research and design strategies may fit more poorly than expected into rural women's lives, and we discuss possible alternative design directions, and the ethical and pragmatic trade-offs that they entail. Our contribution is not to "solve" the problem of designing for low-income rural women, but to expand the HCI community's understanding of technology design within deeply patriarchal societies.

Joseph S. Mollick

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoseph S. MollickJoseph S. Mollick is an assistant professor of management information systems at the College of Business at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC). He earned the PhD degree in business administration from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). His major field of study was information systems and minor fields were organization theory, business strategy and statistics. In addition to the PhD, he has two master’s degrees and two bachelor’s degrees. He earned a master of sciences degree in information systems from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). For the master of business administration (MBA) and the bachelor of business administration (BBA) degrees he studied at Saint Edward’s University, Austin, Texas. His bachelor of arts (BA) degree from Notre Dame College (NDC), Dhaka, Bangladesh, was in the humanities--economics, social welfare, language and literature. His research interest is in the intersection of strategy, law and ethics of managing information and knowledge resources. Before coming to TAMU-CC, he taught at SIUC, UTA and Notre Dame College. His research articles have been published in journals such as the Journal of International Technology and Information Management, Journal of Information Privacy and Security, The Journal of Academic Administration in Higher Education, and Issues in Information Systems.

Tahmid Hasan Pranto, Abdulla All Noman, Atik Mahmud, AKM Bahalul Haque

The agricultural sector is still lagging behind from all other sectors in terms of using the newest technologies. For production, the latest machines are being introduced and adopted. However, pre-harvest and post-harvest processing are still done by following traditional methodologies while tracing, storing, and publishing agricultural data. As a result, farmers are not getting deserved payment, consumers are not getting enough information before buying their product, and intermediate person/processors are increasing retail prices. Using blockchain, smart contracts, and IoT devices, we can fully automate the process while establishing absolute trust among all these parties. In this research, we explored the different aspects of using blockchain and smart contracts with the integration of IoT devices in pre-harvesting and post-harvesting segments of agriculture. We proposed a system that uses blockchain as the backbone while IoT devices collect data from the field level, and smart contracts regulate the interaction among all these contributing parties. The system implementation has been shown in diagrams and with proper explanations. Gas costs of every operation have also been attached for a better understanding of the costs. We also analyzed the system in terms of challenges and advantages. The overall impact of this research was to show the immutable, available, transparent, and robustly secure characteristics of blockchain in the field of agriculture while also emphasizing the vigorous mechanism that the collaboration of blockchain, smart contract, and IoT presents.

Bojie Li, Zhenyuan Ruan, Wencong Xiao, Yuanwei Lu et al.

Performance of in-memory key-value store (KVS) continues to be of great importance as modern KVS goes beyond the traditional object-caching workload and becomes a key infrastructure to support distributed main-memory computation in data centers. Recent years have witnessed a rapid increase of network bandwidth in data centers, shifting the bottleneck of most KVS from the network to the CPU. RDMA-capable NIC partly alleviates the problem, but the primitives provided by RDMA abstraction are rather limited. Meanwhile, programmable NICs become available in data centers, enabling in-network processing. In this paper, we present KV-Direct, a high performance KVS that leverages programmable NIC to extend RDMA primitives and enable remote direct key-value access to the main host memory.

Pranto Kumar Ghosh, Arindom Chakraborty, Mehedi Hasan, K. Rashid et al.

In the recent years, blockchain technology has gained significant attention in the healthcare sector. It has the potential to alleviate a wide variety of major difficulties in electronic health record systems. This study presents an elaborate overview of the existing research works on blockchain applications in the healthcare industry. This paper evaluates 144 articles that discuss the importance and limits of using blockchain technologies to improve healthcare operations. The objective is to demonstrate the technology’s potential uses and highlight the difficulties and possible sectors for future blockchain research in the healthcare domain. The paper starts with an extensive background study of blockchain and its features. Then, the paper focuses on providing an extensive literature review of the selected articles to highlight the current research themes in blockchain-based healthcare systems. After that, major application areas along with the solutions provided by blockchain in healthcare systems are pointed out. Finally, a discussion section provides insight into the limitations, challenges and future research directions.

Md Sadek Ferdous, Mohammad Jabed Morshed Chowdhury, Mohammad A. Hoque

In recent years, crypto-currencies (a form of decentralised digital currencies) have been quite popular as an alternative form of payments. They are underpinned by a breakthrough technology called Blockchain which extensively use a number of cryptographic mechanisms and other advanced techniques from the domain of distributed computing. This blockchain technology has received unparalleled attention from academia, industry, and governments worldwide and is considered to have the potential to disrupt several application domains, other than currencies, touching all spheres of our lives. The sky-rocket anticipation of its potential has caused a wide-scale exploration of its usage in different application domains. This has resulted in a plethora of blockchain systems for various purposes. However, many of these blockchain systems suffer from serious shortcomings related to their performance and security, which need to be addressed before any wide-scale adoption can be achieved. A crucial component of any blockchain system is its underlying consensus algorithm, which determines its performance and security in many ways. Therefore, to address the limitations of different blockchain systems, several existing as well novel consensus algorithms have been introduced. A systematic analysis of these algorithms will help to understand how and why any particular blockchain performs the way it functions. Towards this aim, there are a number of existing works that have surveyed and reviewed a number of consensus algorithms. However, all these works have some major shortcomings. For example, the factors upon which the consensus algorithms have been analysed are not comprehensive. Importantly, a wide range of consensus algorithms utilised in public blockchain systems supporting mainly crypto-currencies have different variants. Such variants and their internal mechanisms utilised in many existing crypto-currencies have not been considered at all. This article fills these gaps by analysing a wide range of consensus algorithms leveraged in different public blockchain systems using a comprehensive taxonomy of properties. We have also analysed more than a hundred top crypto-currencies belonging to different categories of consensus algorithms to understand their properties and implicate different trends in these crypto-currencies. Finally, we have presented a decision tree of the reviewed algorithms to be used as a tool to test the suitability of consensus algorithms for a particular application under different criteria.

Md Nazirul Islam Sarker, Min Wu, Qian Cao, G. M. Monirul Alam et al.

Technological integration in learning and education is an inevitable part of the ever-changing technological world. Leveraging technology is an essential part of every learning mode. While digital technology is increasing common in schools and classrooms, finding ways to improve its impact on student learning remains a challenge for researchers and practitioners. The purpose of the study is to explore and highlight recent key literature addressing the problem of how to most effectively integrate digital technology into educational setting. Because of our inclusion criteria, forty-three key studies were identified with focus on four types of integrated digital learning such as electronic learning, mobile learning, digital learning and ubiquitous learning. The study further explores that the major technology associated delivery modes are lectures, tutorials and laboratory work. Incorporating technology in the teaching-learning process can be an effective way to develop the learners and educators for better learning and education outcomes. Our review of these studies reveals a consensus that particular strategies can promote significant improvement in student learning. We examine these arguments in hopes of offering educators and policy makers a new lens for educational effectiveness.

Mohammad Nazmul Alam, Dhiman Sarma, Farzana Firoz Lima, Ishita Saha et al.

Evolving digital transformation has exacerbated cybersecurity threats globally. Digitization expands the doors wider to cybercriminals. Initially cyberthreats approach in the form of phishing to steal the confidential user credentials. Usually, Hackers will influence the users through phishing in order to gain access to the organizatlou's digital assets and networks. With security breaches, cybercriminals execute ransomware attack, get unauthorized access, and shut down systems and even demand a ransom for releasing the access. Anti-phishing software and techniques are circumvented by the phishers for dodging tactics. Though threat intelligence and behavioural analytics systems support organizations to spot the unusual traffic patterns, still the best practice to prevent phishing attacks is defended in depth. In this perspective, the proposed research work has developed a model to detect the phishing attacks using machine learning (ML) algorithms like random forest (RF) and decision tree (DT). A standard legitimate dataset of phishing attacks from Kaggle was aided for ML processing. To analyze the attributes of the dataset, the proposed model has used feature selection algorithms like principal component analysis (PCA). Finally, a maximum accuracy of 97% was achieved through the random forest algorithm.

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Steven J. Jackson, Nova Ahmed, Hasan Shahid Ferdous et al.

Public sexual harassment has emerged as a large and growing concern in urban Bangladesh, with deep and damaging implications for gender security, justice, and rights of public participation. In this paper we describe an integrated program of ethnographic and design work meant to understand and address such problems. For one year we conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups around sexual harassment with women at three different universities in Dhaka. Based on this input, we developed "Protibadi", a web and mobile phone based application designed to report, map, and share women's stories around sexual harassment in public places. In August 2013 the system launched, user studies were conducted, and public responses were monitored to gauge reactions, strengths, and limits of the system. This paper describes the findings of our ethnographic and design-based work, and suggests lessons relevant to other HCI efforts to understand and design around difficult and culturally sensitive problems.

Ala’a M. Al-Momani, T. Ramayah, Mohammed A. Al‐Sharafi

Bikram Biswas, Sajib Kumar Roy, Falguni Roy

The aim of this study is to measures the student’s perception of using mobile for learning during COVID-19 in Bangladesh especially at the university student’s perspective. During the COVID-19 pandemic period, mobile learning may help the students to fulfill the study gap. Due to COVID-19 pandemic 213 countries, higher education has affected all over the world of June 2020. Although all of the developed countries considered mobile learning as an effective tool for education, it is not used properly in Bangladesh. This survey method conducted on 416 students from different university students in Bangladesh to understand the student’s perception of using mobile phones as a learning system. The findings of this study show that most of the students at the university level have a positive perception of m-learning. This study revealed that m-learning is very helpful to recover the study gap during this COVID-19 pandemic time and the findings of this study will help the education policymaker as well as the educational institutions to incorporate mobile learning technology for the whole system where social media may enhance the process of teaching and learning.

Farhana Akter Sunny, Petr Hájek, Michal Munk, Mohammad Zoynul Abedin et al.

For this study, the researchers conducted a systematic literature review to answer complex questions about the field of blockchain technology. We used an unbiased systematic review process to find works on blockchain-based applications and developed a Python code that searched various online databases. This paper provides an overview of the characteristics, mode of operation, and applications of blockchains in various domains such as transportation, commerce and industry, privacy and security, the financial sector, government, education, healthcare, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The aim was to identify the key research themes addressed in existing articles within each application domain and suggest future research directions for these domains. We analyzed a set of 750 articles published between 2015 and 2021 that dealt with blockchain applications. We found that financial management and security issues have been the main research focus since 2015. However, the use of blockchain in education has become a central research theme in 2021. Healthcare, IoT, and government applications have also grown in popularity. We furthermore analyzed some of the implementations of privacy mechanisms, as well as the challenges and future directions that need to be addressed for effective blockchain deployment. This study contributes to existing research by providing a comprehensive overview of blockchain application themes and their emerging areas for stakeholders in diverse sectors.

Reaz A. Chowdhury, M. Arifur Rahman, M. Sohel Rahman, M. R. C. Mahdy

At present, cryptocurrencies have become a global phenomenon in financial sectors as it is one of the most traded financial instruments worldwide. Cryptocurrency is not only one of the most complicated and abstruse fields among financial instruments, but it is also deemed as a perplexing problem in finance due to its high volatility. This paper makes an attempt to apply machine learning techniques on the index and constituents of cryptocurrency with a goal to predict and forecast prices thereof. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to predict and forecast the close (closing) price of the cryptocurrency index 30 and nine constituents of cryptocurrencies using machine learning algorithms and models so that, it becomes easier for people to trade these currencies. We have used several machine learning techniques and algorithms and compared the models with each other to get the best output. We believe that our work will help reduce the challenges and difficulties faced by people, who invest in cryptocurrencies. Moreover, the obtained results can play a major role in cryptocurrency portfolio management and in observing the fluctuations in the prices of constituents of cryptocurrency market. We have also compared our approach with similar state of the art works from the literature, where machine learning approaches are considered for predicting and forecasting the prices of these currencies. In the sequel, we have found that our best approach presents better and competitive results than the best works from the literature thereby advancing the state of the art. Using such prediction and forecasting methods, people can easily understand the trend and it would be even easier for them to trade in a difficult and challenging financial instrument like cryptocurrency.