School of computing

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A Study of the State of Art B2B Integration Patterns, Components and Architectures
(Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology., 2015-11-16) Njeru, Edwin Mwendi; Musau, Felix; Kipruto, Cheruiyot W.
In modern business operations, it has become imperative that processes, systems and sometimes organizations integrate. This is for various reasons such as maximizing profits, efficiency, expansion etc. Developing a robust integration plan, architecture and process mapping are key to any B2B integration. B2B integration can be defined as the integration of applications, programs, or systems extending the walls of an organisation and it include heterogeneous infrastructures, data, application software, and business processes integration between two or more businesses. The growth and change of systems and related technology is a very rapid arena, thus requiring almost every software system to have constant modification, integration and/or configuration, to provide enhanced integrated solutions to the changing world. Simply put it is developing an approach to expanded and extended collaboration, communication, resource sharing, optimization, profitability and efficiency within and between organisations. Integration is a general term for the tools and applications that are involved to enable different systems to interoperate and communicate with each other within or beyond a business enterprise, thus allowing complete integration of services and data sources among different applications. Current integration architectures are sufficient on the basis of service or product needs. But most B2B integrations do not sufficiently consider the involved processes, which contain most if not all stakeholders concerns and quality attributes. In this study, we take a look at the art of integration architecture and patterns, the impact on business processes, services and products as well as challenges hitherto.
The Effect of Gender in Online Shopping Behaviour Among USIU Africa Students.
(International Journal of Research Publications, 2019) Ondiek, Collins Oduor; Jonyo, Elvis
Kenya has a growing e-commerce market but very little is known about the consumer characteristics of online shoppers in Kenya. Demographic factors such as gender are very important in the online shopping space in Kenya. The study investigated the effect of gender among university students in USIU-Africa. With a survey sample of 71, the study used a descriptive design approach and used an online survey to get the students perception of online shopping. The study tested the effect of gender on three main constructs; Ecommerce adoption, Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU). The results reveal that gender has significant impact on Perceived Ease of Use among university students in Kenya and has no significant impact on E-commerce adoption or Perceived Usefulness. The study recommends that e-commerce platforms in Kenya to leverage on gender aspects and create more user-friendly interfaces towards female shoppers.
Adoption of Students Management Information System for the Development of Student Records in Secondary Schools in Kenya
(The International Journal Of Humanities & Social Studies, 2019) Ondiek, Collins Oduor; Opiyo, Elisha T.; Ndung’u, Joseph Karanja
The Government education institutions identified the student management information system (SMIS) as a key contributor for building trust and confidence for the general education institutions in the heart of any nation or state. SMIS has been visualized to not only help the teachers and administrators to have better monitoring and control of the functioning of the education institutions but also many other education stakeholders across the nation who needs decision support indicators. This study established the extent to which adoption and implementation of SMIS in education institutions and determined the extent to which SMIS promoted management decision making, academic practices and increasing demand for students information use. Target population was school administrators, teachers and parents in Kandara Sub County. A sample size of 200 respondents was used and questionnaires were the data collection tools. Findings showed that 90% of administrators had already adopted and implemented the use of SMIS in their institutions, 87.5% of teachers had adopted and implemented the use of SMIS in managing students’ data and information while 75% of parents appreciated the adoption and implementation of SMIS in the institutions where their children were learning. Further, 95% of administrators and 75% of teachers appreciated the use of SMIS in their institutions which has enabled them to make sound decisions regarding students’ data and information. The study recommends adoption and implementation of SMIS since it helps institutions’ administration manage various operations including students’ data and information.
A Literature Survey of Image Descriptors in Content Based Image Retrieval
(International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, 2016-03) Kamau, John Wachira; Makori, Cyrus Abanti; Mohamed, Abdulrehman Ahmed
As a result of the new communication technologies and the massive use of Internet in the society, the amount of audio-visual information available in digital format is increasing considerably. This has necessitated designing systems that allow describing the content of several types of multimedia information in order to search and classify them. The audiovisual descriptors are used for contents description in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). The CBIR is a technique for retrieving images on the basis of automatically-derived features such as color, texture and shape. It uses digital processing and analysis to automatically generate descriptions directly from the media data. Image descriptors are the descriptions of the visual features of the contents in images, which describe elementary characteristics of images such as the shape, the color, the texture or the motion, among others. A literature survey study is most important for understanding and gaining insight about specific area of a subject. Therefore, in this paper we survey some of the state-of-art technical aspects of image descriptors in CBIR. Even though lots of research works had been published on CBIR, however, in this paper an effort has been made to explore an in-depth chronological growth in this field of image descriptors with respect to performance measure metrics of CBIR systems.
BYOD Concept and Issues Relating to Adoption in Learning Institutions
(International Journal of Education Management & Administration (IJEMA)., 2016-09) Kamau, John Wachira; Mutwiwa, Petronilla Ndunge; Gikandi, Joyce
As Information Communication Technology (ICT) has evolved, the overall physical size of computing devices has gradually decreased due to advances in the microchip technology; com`puting processing power doubles every few months and at the same time the cost of the computing devices has continuously been going down. What this means is that today, the general citizenly in every economy have every powerful devices within their hands for personal use. With the growth in internet and interconnectivity between devices, all these devices already have access to the internet where they can be able access vast amounts of information resources and organizational systems (school included). With the global shift to internet based systems, this combines to add immense power to a knowledge/information based societies. Schools and other learning institutions are at the verge of being transformed by the growth of this digital content/transformation. Students from their early years of learning have access to these powerful devices and most of them now how to operate them. Learning institutions on the other hand face the challenge of acquiring computing devices especially with the drive towards one device a student, driven by the rising financial needs to sustain education hence limited budgets to acquire and maintain computing devices. Bring your own device (BYOD) offers an opportunity for learning institutions to exploit the power of the devices that students and staff have to drive the delivery of digital content. However, this is not easy as it may sound even thou beneficial. Several issues have arisen as regards BYOD adoption in schools and addressing them would be critical for its success. This paper looks at these issues, and provides an approach on how each of these issues can be handled to provide an inherent framework for BYOD adoption.
The Effect of Mobile Money on Saving and Money Transfer Practices for Low-Income Earners in Kenya
(Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, 2017) Kamau, John Wachira; Waweru, Kennedy Munyua
The mapping of the alternative value storage and saving methods is important in providing insights on the impacts of mobile money on saving practices, how people navigate their available payment choices now, and in what ways these practices are shifting. This study sought to find out whether the introduction of mobile money has been accompanied by a significant shift in saving and money transfer practices used by low-income earners in Kenya. The study surveyed 750 households across Kenya and found that the introduction of mobile money has been associated with an increase in the number of low-income earners saving their money with formal banks and saving and credit co-operatives and a significant shift away from the practice of saving money by hiding it houses. The practice of storing wealth in non-monetary forms was however unaffected by the introduction of mobile money in rural areas. Also, unaffected is the hawala type method of money transfer in rural areas of Northeastern Kenya. Other methods of money transfer experienced a significant decrease in usage amongst low income earners after the introduction of mobile money.
A Government Driven Approach Towards Green IT Economies
(African Journal of Computing and Information Systems (IJSTER-AJCIS)., 2016) Kamau, John Wachira; Muketha, Geoffrey Muchiri; Njeru, Kevin Mwiti
The growing threat on the environment driven by an accelerated growth in economic activities has amplified the role of government in enhancing sustainability. To business and the industry leaders, the global economic challenges have compelled them to reconsider how they do business to gain an economic advantage and as a drive towards enabling a socially responsible business environment. This has forced businesses and industry to consider and act on a broad range of socially responsible and sustainable programs. As a majority business and industry align their goals by embedding sustainability mechanisms as key pillars to economic empowerment, most global governments seem to be lagging behind in providing the necessary facilitation in their economies. In the field of Information Communication Technology (ICT), the integrating and enabling role of ICTs has been considered critical in managing the global carbon footprint by exploiting their innovative capabilities thus providing sustainable solutions to the environment. Even in this area, the government has been considered a late adopter thus limiting its ability to provide solutions that is critical in this vital area. This paper therefore analyzes the role of government in building a sustainable economy using ICT and provides an action plan for governments in developing economies. This is based on data collected from both primary and secondary sources. Descriptive and inferential statistics was used to analyze the data and to draw conclusions. The action plan evaluates the role of government on green ICT from the perspectives of legislation, policies and regulations, Incentives, Education and social economics, support for business process integration and Implementation and usage of green ICT.
A Review of Prominent Technology Acceptance Models in the Context of Predicting Software Adoption in African Developing Countries: A Case of Free Desktop Open Source Software (OSS)
(Asian Journal of Information Technology, 2017) Kamau, John Wachira; Sanders, Ian D.
A number of technology adoption models have been developed over the years. Currently, there are ten prominent models which since, their development have been tested in different environments. The models have also been extended by including constructs which researchers perceive to be important depending on the environment. The models are Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Motivational Model (MM), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Combined TAM and TBP, Model of PC Utilization (MPCU), Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT), Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and the Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (EUTAUT). Generally these models have been developed and tested in non-African and non-developing countries. This study reviews these prominent existing technology adoption models with the aim of establishing their appropriateness in predicting Desktop Open Source Software (OSS) adoption in developing countries in Africa.
Evaluation of the Effects of SaaS on SMEs in Nairobi County, Kenya
(Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 2018-07) Mwaniki, Paul; Ondiek, Collins Oduor
SMEs in Kenya form the majority of enterprises in Kenya providing close to 80% of Kenya’s employment. Although they are the majority they perform dismally contributing very poorly to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period. Past statistics indicate that three out of five businesses fail within the first few months of operation and those that continue, 80 per cent fail before the fifth year. This means that there is a sustainability issue among small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If SMEs adopted information and communications technology (ICT) solutions their sustainability would increase, but the main challenge SMEs face with implementing ICT solutions is the high cost of implementation and maintenance. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effects of SaaS on SMEs in Nairobi County, Kenya to find out if SaaS was affordable and if it improved the SMEs. The effects that were evaluated were end user effects, economic effects and functional effects. Literature review of SMEs, SaaS and the effect that SaaS has on SMEs in various countries was done. The study which followed the explanatory research design evaluated 35 SMEs in Nairobi County, Kenya. This number was identified through a sample formulae. The data collected through a questionnaire was then analyzed and indicated that SaaS use had positive end user, economic and functional effects on SMEs. The study then recommended that SMEs in Nairobi County, Kenya, should be encouraged to use SaaS as it would improve their performance.
Similarity Formation of Groups and Key Management in Dynamic Peer to Peer E-commerce.
(IEEE, 2011) Musau, Felix; Abdullahi, Muhammad Bashir
The ease of shopping and comparing products and prices online has made it an attractive option for many shoppers. When it comes to time to enter personal information or complete a business transaction on the Internet, most people hesitate, and understandably so. They've read about credit card fraud, identity theft, spoofing, hacking, phishing and other abuses. These business transactions take place among peer to peer systems at the edge of the internet. In peer-to-peer environments, a peer needs to interact with unknown entities. In the method proposed, the peers form groups in order to ensure security. Each group is based on interest among the peers and has its own way of operation. The paper gives a clear outline of how peers form groups, select group leaders. Peers can belong to more than one group to a maximum of n groups hence exempt a similarity behavior. This paper also addresses the distribution and management of keys among the peers
Principals of trust in internet security and websecure environment
(IEEE, 2011) Musau, Felix; Kipruto, Cheruiyot W.; Mushi, Joseph Cosmas; Mwamafundo, Juma Modie
Trust and security are key enablers of the information society. Trust is an important aspect of decision making for Internet applications and particularly influences the specification of security policy. It addresses issues on who is authorised to perform actions as well as the techniques needed to manage and implement security in the applications. Trust relates to belief in honesty, truthfulness, competence, and reliability. The significance of incorporating trust in distributed systems is that trust is an enabling surety of good transaction. Its inclusion will enable Internet commerce and seamless, secure agent based applications. This paper investigates trust in relation to security in internet transactions; it specifically deals with different authentication schemes, Encryption, Trust in the websecure environment.
Trust and its challenges facing E-Government programs in Kenya
(IEEE, 2011) Musau, Felix; Kipruto, Cheruiyot W.; Mushi, Joseph Cosmas
Kenya’s public sector is at a crossroads today in facing the challenges of institutional change and the impact of new technologies. The public sector can, and will play a much stronger role in implementing all the government plans. The emerging ICT technology can create solid improvement in offering better services to all nations. This can enable the citizens of the countries to access e-services from the governments based on their trust to the systems. In Kenya things have not been as planned as majority of the people don’t trust e-government services. There are many challenges facing its implementation which now remains as a dream, despite the government efforts. The paper raises a lot of concern especially on the trust of the citizens to e-government services being offered and the ICT awareness of the citizens too. The work highlights what the government has done to address the issue. The proposed solutions will help as e-government, and ICT investment has consumed a huge part of the national budget in recent years. The paper addresses how trust influences the change of attitude towards government by employees and the citizens.
A Reliable and Secure Distributed In-Network Data Storage Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks
(IEEE, 2011) Musau, Felix; Wang, Guojun; Abdullahi, Muhammad Bashir
In a battlefield surveillance scenario, data readings and events emerging from a wireless sensor network deployed that may not be used immediately by or simply impossible to transmit to an authorized user (a Soldier) in real time are stored in the network. Without proper protection for the sensitive data generated in this setting, a compromised storage node (by an enemy soldier) may divulge its stored sensitive data about the monitored environment, and even worse, it may alter the data. In this paper, we integrate an elliptic curve cryptography scheme and an erasure coding scheme to provide reliable and secure distributed in-network data storage for sensor networks. The main idea is to distribute each erasure coded fragment appended with a fingerprint to different storage nodes. The fingerprint is to allow each coded data fragment to be independently verified as a valid and correct subset of a specific data item. So, the scheme achieves localization of data error. The proposed scheme is resilient to collusion attack, pollution attack, and data dropping attack, and guarantees forward and backward data secrecy as well. The security of the proposed scheme relies on the intractability of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. Different from the existing solutions, the uniqueness of our method comes from the use of lightweight encryption scheme, which is well suited for resource constrained wireless sensors.
Advanced Algorithm for Brain Segmentation using Fuzzy to Localize Cancer and Epilespy Region
(IEEE, 2010) Musau, Felix; Beiji, Zou; Toure, Mohamed Lamine; Camara, Aboubacar Damaye
The research which addresses the diseases of the brain in the field of the vision by computer is one of the challenges in recent times in medicine, the engineers and researchers recently launched challenges to carry out innovations of technology pointed in imagery. This paper focuses on a new algorithm for brain segmentation of color images based on fuzzy classification to diagnose accurately the region of cancer and the area of epilepsy. In a first step it proceeds by a fine segmentation using the algorithm of fuzzy cmeans (FCM). It then applies a test fusion of fuzzy classes. The result is a coarse segmentation, where each region is the union of elementary regions grown from FCM. The fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering is an iterative partitioning method that produces optimal c-partitions. The standard FCM algorithm takes a long time to partition a large data set. The proposed FCM program must read the entire data set into a memory for processing. Our results show that the system performance is robust to different types of images.
Advanced Algorithm Partitioning of Markov and Color Image Segmentation
(IEEE, 2010) Musau, Felix; Beiji, Zou; Toure, Mohamed Lamine
The color vision systems require a first step of classifying pixels in a given image into a discrete set of color classes. In this paper we introduce a new method of algorithm partitioning, and color image segmentation based on similarities or dissimilarities of the pixels. We consider fuzzy segmentation with markov, and normalized cut method. Experiments show these different processes used an effective solution on natural images, and computational efficiency. Finally, the algorithm has proven our process of experiments on gray scale, color, and texture images show promising segmentation results successful
A novel robust and fast Segmentation of the Color Images using Fuzzy Classification C-means
(IEEE, 2010) Musau, Felix; Toure, Mohamed Lamine; Beiji, Zou
This paper brings out a method for segmentation of color images based on fuzzy classification. It proceeds in a first step by a fine segmentation using the algorithm of fuzzy cmeans (FCM). The method then applies a test fusion of fuzzy classes. The result is a coarse segmentation, where each region is the union of elementary regions grown from FCM. The fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering is an iterative partitioning method that produces optimal c-partitions, the standard FCM algorithm takes a long time to partition a large data set. The proposed FCM program must read the entire data set into a memory for processing. Our results show that the system performance is robust to different types of images.
An Enhanced Service Flow Management Scheme for IEEE 802.16 Broadband Wireless Access Systems
(International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering, 2012-08) Musau, Felix; Kipkorir, Sang; Mwamafundo, Juma Modie
While the protocols have been proposed to support QoS (quality of service) guarantees for a variety of applications, the WiMax/IEEE 802.16 standard does not specify a mandatory scheduling architecture to fulfill stringent QoS requirement for the different classes of traffic. Only the framework is established in the standard which provides an opportunity for developers to design efficient scheduling mechanism to fulfill stringent QoS requirement for the different classes of traffic. The scheduling scheme requires catering for rigorous QoS guarantee for all types of service flows as specified in the standard, enabling fairness and facilitating the traffic of lower priority. In this paper, we propose a Service Flow Management Scheme for the IEEE 802.16 Broadband Wireless Access systems that can provide QOS support that enhances performance through a scheduler that performs optimally and efficiently.
Using Genetic Algorithms to Optimize Web Caching in MultimediaIntegrated e-Learning Content
(International Journal of Digital Content Technology and its Applications, 2011-08) Musau, Felix; Mushi, Joseph Cosmas; Tan, Guan-Zheng; Kipruto, Cheruiyot W.
The evolution of e-learning as a new information technology built around the use of internet has originated new possibilities to develop pedagogical methodologies that provide the necessary knowledge and skills in the higher education environment. This has in effect given rise to a large number of learners who desire to access the educational resources provided by the new technology. But for many institutions of higher learning, the users often experiences poor performance when they try to access contents or download e-learning files. The main reasons for such are often performance problems concerning network infrastructure and the fact that many people tend to access the same piece of information repetitively. This paper uses web caching scheme and genetic algorithm optimization to effectively lessen this service bottleneck, diminish the user access latency and reduce the network traffic.
Genetic Algorithm-Enhanced Retrieval Process for Multimedia Data
(International Journal of Advancements in Computing Technology, 2011-04) Musau, Felix; Mushi, Joseph Cosmas; Tan, Guan-Zheng; Kipruto, Cheruiyot W.
The explosive growth of digital media content from various domains has given rise to the need for efficient techniques for retrieval of relevant information is getting more and more attention, especially in the large-scale Multimedia Digital Database (MDD) applications. It is for this reason that there has been an increased interest in the query reformulation for use in Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) using a combination of various techniques. In this paper, we propose a retrieval method that is formalized as an optimized similarity search process that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Query Quality Refinement (QQR) using Histogram Equalization and Genetic Algorithm (GA) enhancement. Experimental results show that the approach significantly narrows the search process by retrieving similar images satisfying the needs of the user.
Query quality refinement in singular value decomposition to improve genetic algorithms for multimedia data retrieval
(Springer-Verlag 2011-Multimedia Systems, 2011-04-03) Musau, Felix; Mushi, Joseph Cosmas; Cheruiyot, Wilson; Tan, Guan-Zheng
With the development of internet and availability of multimedia data capturing devices, the size of Multimedia Digital Database (MDD) collection is increasing rapidly. The complex data presented by such systems do not have the total ordering property presented by the traditional data handled by Database Management Systems (DBMSs). The quality of the search experience in such systems is also normally a big challenge since users from various domains require efficient data searching, browsing and retrieval tools. This has triggered an important research topic in Multimedia information retrieval concerning efficient and effective image similarity search. Modern search algorithms are fast and effective on a wide range of problems, but on MDD with a large number of parameters and observations, manipulations of large matrices, storage and retrieval of large amounts of information may render an otherwise useful method slow or inoperable. The focus of this work is the application of image enhancement technique, using histogram equalization, to the images retrieved using singular value decomposition (SVD). SVD is a linear algebra technique used for discovering correlations within data. The approach, herein referred to as query quality refinement (QQR) technique, improves the image similarity search result, and when incorporated with genetic algorithms further optimizes the search. These beneficial applications can be extended to other different types of multimedia data in various areas such as the P2P and WiMAX networks.

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