In the world of computing, one major statement has always been true: the request for computing power is always greater than the available resources. For this reason, scientists and researchers started considering the concept of sharing resources. In the last decade, the world of computing has seen a big leap forward with the emergence of cloud computing. In this new paradigm, computing resources of data centers spread all over the world can be shared to provide increased power and availability to users. However, with this increase in computing power came along an exponential increase in energy ...

With the considerable rise of Internet users and the massive and diverse web searches, an excess of data has become available online. A recommendation model, also known as an engine, handles this massive amount of data available to find patterns that reflect user behaviors. Recommendation models have been implemented in several industries, and the most popular implementation is in the entertainment industry, specifically video streaming and on-demand platforms. There are several types of recommendation systems. In this paper, we have proposed a way to escape the loop created by the recommendation ...

Enterprise resource planning – ERP – is among the latest technologies that companies have undertaken. Typically it is a software package that has a centralized database for several modules; these modules could be customized based on the organization’s needs. Since the cost of an ERP implementation is considered to be very high, it is critical for organizations to make it a success and start having return on their investment. But what makes an ERP implementation project successful? How to evaluate its success? These are the questions addressed by the thesis. Answering these questions, a research ...

Marine observatories based on sensor networks provide continuous ocean monitoring. The design phase of such systems, which is part of the complete development life cycle, is a complex and challenging task. The design difficulties may induce the designers to make architectural design errors during the design phase. This study aims to identify the best design approach that helps sensor networks designers in preventing errors and validating models at an early phase. In addition, it introduces a new environmental constraint that should be taken into consideration when building design models. To ...

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt by a person or a group of persons to cripple an online service. This can have serious consequences on companies like Amazon and eBay, which rely on their online availability to do business. Many defense mechanisms have been proposed to thwart DoS attacks. One of these defense mechanisms is called hop-count filtering. Although an attacker can forge any field in the IP header, he or she cannot falsify the number of hops an IP packet takes to reach its destination. This hop-count information can be inferred from the time-to-live value in the IP header. ...

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have gone a great way since it has started as a science. GIS is making headlines in a number of disciplines and, through its advancement, has improved our ability to model our real world. In the past years the need to support the storage and retrieval of dynamic changes, which occur to our data, has increased which consequently led to the interest in spatio-temporal behavior in GIS. These years have also seen the birth of several spatio-temporal data Models, whose aim is to support this spatio-temporal behavior. The main aim behind Spatio-Temporal support is ...

In this thesis, we investigate the use of neural networks for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). First, we review the main elements of the theory of NP-completeness. Then, we explain what makes some problems computationally intractable. We review some heuristic approaches used to provide near-optimal solutions to NP-complete problems. Then, we introduce the topic of neural networks and describe some of the most popular neural network models. We pay a special attention to a recent model, named the Hybrid Neural Network model (HNN), used for solving optimization problems and the Hybrid ...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are vital for managing any modern-day business. These systems aim to facilitate an organization's work by automating and integrating all business information and processes. However, ERP systems suffer from many problems that may cause an implementation failure. Many of these problems are related to usability, which is affected by the complexity of user interfaces (Uls). Usability can be defined in terms of an end-user's efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfactions. A study was conducted in this thesis to inquire about the usability problems that ...

The global Internet has experienced many years of sustained exponential growth doubling in size every nine months or faster [8]. Millions of users at tens of thousands of sites around the world depend on the global Internet as part of their daily work environment. This massive use of the Internet as well as the continuous interconnection of new groups arises many problems such as: packet loss, network congestion, insufficient bandwidth, increase in delay... In this thesis, we focus mainly on the problem of communication delay and bandwidth allocation. Our main goal is to find a way to minimize ...

This thesis deals with the modeling of comlex three-dimensional objects, and emphasizes on the Boolean operations between objects. It discusses a modification of the ray-casting method, which offers an improved performance over the regular ray-casting method. A small simulation will be performed, on a personal computer, about how to draw three-dimentional primitives and shading them using the wire-frame technique, plus performing Boolean operations between two objects using the modified version of the ray-casting method. Data structures and the main drawing algorithms that were created for this ...