IT Professional

PrePrint: Constructing a Resource-Sharing Platform for Biomedical IP Trading

This project aims at designing and building a resource-sharing and online transaction platform to support and facilitate the technology transfer from the biotech academia to the industry and to prosper Biotech industry in Taiwan. This project constructs a web-based platform, namely BioIPMall, for biomedical IP trading, analyzing and developing strategy. To facilitate the classification and categorization of biotechnology, a tree-structured classification framework was constructed to create the taxonomy system in this project. The framework is composed of two main categories: “Industrial Application” and “Biotechnology” and 259 sub-categories totally. This biotechnology classification tree has been used to facilitate data mining and tech matchmaking process in BioIPMall. A prototypical business model was developed for providing IP management and technology transfer services. Currently 342 bio-related patents or technologies have been gathered from research institutes and have been posted on BioIPMall. Website available at: http://www.bioipmall.com.tw/.

PrePrint: End Brake Retarder Prohibitions: Defining “Shall Not” Requirements Effectively

This paper looks at how to define a set of “shall nots” requirements that is as complete as possible, starting with the elicitation and discovery through system integration and testing using a process called hazard mining. Hazard mining deeply probes the semantics of the code while the code executes in attempts to flush out forgotten hazards that need to be defended.

PrePrint: A Framework for Enterprise Mobile Application Development

While mobile technologies and applications present many new opportunities for enterprises, they also present several challenges to development and implementation of enterprise mobile applications. These challenges emanate from location-independence, contextualization, personalization and other factors. To successfully address these challenges in a systematic and comprehensive manner, we present in this article a six-layer Mobile Applications Development Framework (MADF). The framework consists of networks, contents, middleware, applications and presentation layers with security layer lying orthogonally, covering all the layers. The MADF is based on the mobile applications taxonomy that we outline in this article: mobile broadcast (M-Broadcast), mobile information (M-Information), mobile transaction (M-Transaction), mobile operation (M-Operation), and mobile collaboration (M-Collaboration). This framework which has been validated by applying it practice helps mobile application development and maintenance.

PrePrint: An Exploratory Study of Information Assurance Practices of Cloud Computing Vendors

While cloud computing is one of the newest forms of IT infrastructure, it has fostered many concerns about security, privacy and business integrity. This paper explores differences in practice in those assurance dimensions across variations in characteristics of the Cloud vendors.

PrePrint: A Strategic Framework Deployment of RFID in Supply Chains

We have synthesized widely reported observations about RFID, our own extensive set of interviews of supply chain managers, and an analysis of their processes into a framework that guides managers in making a decision about whether, and how they might adopt RFID in their supply chains. The framework is based on two important characteristics that determine the benefits and barriers of an RFID deployment, which are the granularity of tracking and how many supply chain links are involved in reading RFID tags and sharing RFID information. The framework serves as a basis for supply chain managers to plan which RFID deployment strategy fits with their business goals, if any, and the difficulty of successful adoption based on the barriers that must be overcome.

PrePrint: Anatomy of an Intrusion

This article describes a real, sustained attack against a major, multinational corporation. We describe the nature of the attack, the process used for deciding how to address it, and the actions taken by the company in response. This insider’s look at a serious attack offers lessons learned to other organizations about how to recognize an attack early and what to do about it.

PrePrint: Mobile Ontology-Based Reasoning and Feedback Health Monitoring Platform

Over the past few years many research efforts have been made to develop robust health monitoring systems. Most of these systems are being used in hospitals to monitor patient’s vitals in order to provide timely treatment. This research pertains to the design and implementation of a mobile health monitoring system geared towards non-critical hospital patients that still require some degree of monitoring. Introducing a ubiquitous system to remotely monitor patients outside of the hospital provides huge financial savings to the health care system, as non-critical patients who have partial autonomy and mobility can then be discharged from hospital. The proposed system seamlessly integrates vital data from various health sensors in order to identify the health status of the patient and to take the appropriate measures for a timely support.

PrePrint: Medical Image Viewing On Multi-Core Platforms Using Software Patterns For Parallel Computing

Software patterns codify the collective knowledge and experience of software experts. Over the years, the parallel programming community has accumulated a significant amount of experience in the form of software patterns. We show that parallel programming patterns can be used in medical imaging applications on multi-core platforms. We discuss two problem decomposition patterns – task and data decomposition, which can be used to expose concurrency in programming tasks; and three program structuring patterns – task parallelism, data parallelism, and pipelining, which can be exploited to structure a parallel program. We illustrate how to use those patterns to improve the startup time, runtime throughput, and algorithm reliability in medical image viewing, visualization, and analysis on multi-core platforms. Our experience suggests that the computing power provided by multi-core and many core platforms can be systematically exploited in medical imaging applications by following the best practices established by software patterns for parallel programming.

PrePrint: Information Technology in the Development of Electronic Health Records in Taiwan

The use of electronic medical record is the developmental tendency in Hospital Information Systems (HIS). It can be expanded to form Electronic Health Records (EHR). Its value consists of its ability to integrate the health information of patients from different sources. The Taiwan Electronic Medical Record Template (TMT) was developed to provide a basic structure of reference for establishing electronic medical records in the unique medical environment in Taiwan. This paper will review past developments in electronic medical record between 2004 and 2009 in Taiwan and scrutinize the current application and development of international electronic medical record exchange standards. Additionally, this study will address the TMT construction process and its information architecture as well as its information safety design and describe the TMT information transfer mechanism and present some application samples. Finally, the researchers will present concrete suggestions conducive to the study of future medical information exchange standards.

IT Professional - January/February 2010 (Vol. 12, No. 1)

IT Professional

PrePrint: Is Your Enterprise Warming Up to Carbon 2.0?

Climate change has clearly become one of the top global concerns. All organizations are expected to set their agendas to understand and manage their carbon footprints in the near future. This new practice needs appropriate IT systems to help tackle challenges in measuring, analyzing and managing carbon emissions in a cost effective manner. Hence, IT departments and professionals will play a major role in crafting and supporting a company's carbon strategy. We give an overview and taxonomy of present carbon management systems. Based on the present systems, we sketch how future carbon systems -which we dub Carbon 2.0 - will evolve and what architecture and functionality can be expected. CIOs and IT professionals need to be aware of the current status of carbon management systems as well as the evolutionary trend in this software to better position themselves in a future low-carbon economy.

Presented By:

NEC

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PrePrint: Intrusion Detection Techniques in Grid and Cloud Computing Environment

Providing security in a distributed system requires more than user authentication with passwords or digital certificates and confidentiality in data transmission. Rigorous control of the executed tasks is needed in order to prevent malicious users from breaking policies, to identify the use of stolen passwords, and also to make possible rapid detection of known attacks. In this work, a solution for intrusion detection in grid and cloud computing environment is presented in which audit data is collected from the cloud and two intrusion detection techniques are applied. Analysis for anomaly detection is performed to verify if user actions correspond to known behavior profiles and knowledge analysis is performed to verify security policy violations and known attack patterns. This approach was evaluated in terms of performance results.

PrePrint: BUSINESS–IT STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT MATURITY: PREDICTING THE IMPACT ON TRANSFORMATIONAL STRATEGY AND BUSINESS RESULTS

Academic and management literature hypothesize that organizations that adopt organizational and management practices (“complementary factors”) that improve IT-business communications and partnership are better able to transform their business models. This implies that these firms obtain higher productivity and profitability from IT investments than organizations with comparable levels of IT investment. This study employs a stage-growth model (the “strategic alignment maturity model”) that focuses on the evolution of a bilateral and ideally co-adaptive relationship between business and information technology functions to empirically test that hypothesis. Employing the results of a survey of pharmaceutical industry business and IT executives, this research provides new insights into the relationship between IT-business strategic alignment maturity and firm-level productivity and profitability. This study also helps to quantify important “complementary factors” that provide transformational impact on a firm’s production function by its investments in IT.