Access control, as part of every software system, has evolved as computing has evolved. Its origi... more Access control, as part of every software system, has evolved as computing has evolved. Its original aim was to limit unauthorized access to centralized systems, but the rise of social networks like Facebook has changed that. Now each person wants to control who sees photos or makes comments on their local wall by making and unmaking friends, i.e. dynamic, distributed rights control. Social networks already have access control, but there is currently no agreed logical model for their rights, no consistent scheme for allocating and re-allocating permissions to create, edit, delete and view social objects and entities. A socio-technical approach based on social and technical requirements can give the basics of a model. Various rights reallocations like multiply, divide, transfer and delegate are explored. It suggests a theoretical base for access control beyond its security parent.
Spam and anti-spam techniques are part of email since its birth. Spam is electronic garbage with ... more Spam and anti-spam techniques are part of email since its birth. Spam is electronic garbage with no anticipating recipient and almost always deleted. In 2010, around 89% of all emails were spam, resulting in an estimated 260 billion spam emails sent every single day. Most of the current anti-spamming systems focus on incoming spam but these messages still travel the internet world and waste bandwidth, storage and processing resources. This research proposes a collaborative outgoing anti-spam technique to reduce the spread of spam on the internet. The technique targets outgoing emails and its use would free the internet from 260 billion spam a day. During real-time experiment, it blocked 99.95% of the total spam generated with 99.57% elimination at sender side.
A community is a social entity that by norms, laws or ethics grants its citizens rights-social pe... more A community is a social entity that by norms, laws or ethics grants its citizens rights-social permissions to act. Online social networks are computer based communities whose social requirements are not too different from any other. Access control in these networks requires some logical foundation to build upon. Without an agreed logical basis to distribute social rights, current access control models are based on intuition, experience or trial and error. This paper identifies some ethical issues in online social networks and suggests their solutions by socio-technical approach – use the knowledge of physical society as the basis of information rights model for online communities. Social axioms provide a theoretical base for rights analysis that could not only satisfy technical but also social and ethical requirements.
Access control is the process by which authorized users are granted permission over resources. Ac... more Access control is the process by which authorized users are granted permission over resources. Access control models incorporate application requirements in their design and thus evolve with the applications. The rise of online social networks (OSN), like Facebook, has posed new requirements over the privacy of users' data due to the presence of heterogeneous privacy circle. The traditional models cannot be used for this new type of applications for the complexity of millions of users interacting with each other. Different access control models for OSN are proposed based on relationships, trust, rule semantics, or history between the user and the requestor, however, rights delegation, rights transfer, reputation management and transparency are still ignored by the research community. To address these concerns and challenges, further research is needed. This paper reviews these challenges and presents a number of future research directions for access control models in the context of OSN.
In any educational system, no one can deny the importance of assessments. Assessments help in
eva... more In any educational system, no one can deny the importance of assessments. Assessments help in evaluating the knowledge gained by a learner at any specific point as well as in continuous improvement of the curriculum design and the whole learning process. However, with the increase in students’ enrollment at University level in either conventional or distance education environment, traditional ways of assessing students’ work are becoming insufficient in terms of both time and effort. In distance education environment, such assessments become additionally more challenging in terms of hefty remuneration for hiring large number of tutors. The availability of automated tools to assist the evaluation of students’ work and providing students with appropriate and timely feedback can really help in overcoming these problems. Although, building such tools for assessing students’ work for all kinds of courses in not yet possible. However, courses that involve some formal language of expression can be automated, such as, programming courses in Computer Science (CS) discipline. Learning how to program is the core of CS discipline. It is also becoming an important part even in various academic disciplines. Programming skills can only be learned through practice. Instructors provide various practical exercises to students as assignments to build these skills. Usually, instructors manually grade and provide feedbacks on these assignments. Although in literature, various tools have been reported to automate this process, but most of these tools have been developed by the host institutions themselves for their own use. We at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore are conducting a pioneer effort in Pakistan to automate the marking of assignments of introductory programming courses that involve C or C++ languages with the capability of associating appropriate feedbacks for students. In this paper, we basically identify different components that we believe are necessary in building an effective automated assessment system in the context of introductory programming courses that involve C/C++ programming. We further provide a survey of existing state of the art tools and techniques reported in literature for implementing these components. We also discuss those reported concepts and techniques that can help in making such system reusable with the capability of sharing its assessment objects in a secured manner.
Ridesharing enables different people to share ride with each other to reach a common destination.... more Ridesharing enables different people to share ride with each other to reach a common destination. It helps the users as individually to save cost, the community as collectively to reduce air pollution and road congestions. Now a day’s smart phone technology has enabled people to share rides on short notices. However, trust is a major apprehension of people while providing ease in selecting a safe ride and developing acceptable and comfortable environment inside the ride. So, a trust development mechanism may elevate ride sharing systems as a common transport system which can greatly reduce the road congestion. This research puts the users as the primary stakeholders and thus encapsulates the human preferences in trust evaluations. It then formalizes the mathematically traceable concepts through temporal logic where the treatment is formal and based on logics. The reliability and the trust ranking is done by Chronbach’s alpha and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Overall, the necessity to improve the trust development in dynamic ride share is the main contribution of this article.
Traffic obstruction, elevated gas prices and insufficient communal transportation are foremost co... more Traffic obstruction, elevated gas prices and insufficient communal transportation are foremost confront for any countryside, trade or entity. The conventional loom to solve this problem is to recover public transportation and use greener power by massive reserves and time. An alternative solution seeks to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads and to travel by making run time or dynamic plans by ride share systems. This system can lead to less consumption of currency, fuel and ecological destructions. One problem that is not focused much in the system is social distress that begins due to deficiency of trust amongst riders and ride givers. In this work we are trying to understand the perception of trust by a model which identifies user’s preferences, needs, and travelling behaviors for sharing private vehicles. We formally verified our model and implemented it to reduce three core issues; trust, convenience and incentives. Implementation of the model is provided as a working application. The model identifies trust and dis-trust among trustor and trustee by evaluating human based, ride based and system based trust rating in a feedback criteria. This feedback will help us in identifying trust norms and beliefs to constitute long term societal comfort.
Abstract A novel video coding scheme is presented with superior performance against packet losses... more Abstract A novel video coding scheme is presented with superior performance against packet losses and hence is suitable for wireless communication compared to standard approaches like scalable video coding. The scheme also offers a better multi-rate video ...
Abstract Video conferencing systems typically rely on the computational and compression performan... more Abstract Video conferencing systems typically rely on the computational and compression performance of their video codecs to meet strict performance constraints. It is well known that blocking artifacts in DCT-video codec based video conferencing system becomes ...
Social ideas like freedom seem far removed from computer code, but today computing is social. Tha... more Social ideas like freedom seem far removed from computer code, but today computing is social. That technology designers aren't ready, have no precedent, or don't understand social needs is irrelevant. Like a baby being born, online society is pushing forward, ready ...
The beast of computing has regularly defied pundit predictions. Key advances like the cell-phone ... more The beast of computing has regularly defied pundit predictions. Key advances like the cell-phone (Smith, Kulatilaka & Venkatramen, 2002) and open-source development (Campbell-Kelly, 2008) weren't predicted by the experts of the day, though the signs were there for all ...
Access control, as part of every software system, has evolved as computing has evolved. Its origi... more Access control, as part of every software system, has evolved as computing has evolved. Its original aim was to limit unauthorized access to centralized systems, but the rise of social networks like Facebook has changed that. Now each person wants to control who sees photos or makes comments on their local wall by making and unmaking friends, i.e. dynamic, distributed rights control. Social networks already have access control, but there is currently no agreed logical model for their rights, no consistent scheme for allocating and re-allocating permissions to create, edit, delete and view social objects and entities. A socio-technical approach based on social and technical requirements can give the basics of a model. Various rights reallocations like multiply, divide, transfer and delegate are explored. It suggests a theoretical base for access control beyond its security parent.
Spam and anti-spam techniques are part of email since its birth. Spam is electronic garbage with ... more Spam and anti-spam techniques are part of email since its birth. Spam is electronic garbage with no anticipating recipient and almost always deleted. In 2010, around 89% of all emails were spam, resulting in an estimated 260 billion spam emails sent every single day. Most of the current anti-spamming systems focus on incoming spam but these messages still travel the internet world and waste bandwidth, storage and processing resources. This research proposes a collaborative outgoing anti-spam technique to reduce the spread of spam on the internet. The technique targets outgoing emails and its use would free the internet from 260 billion spam a day. During real-time experiment, it blocked 99.95% of the total spam generated with 99.57% elimination at sender side.
A community is a social entity that by norms, laws or ethics grants its citizens rights-social pe... more A community is a social entity that by norms, laws or ethics grants its citizens rights-social permissions to act. Online social networks are computer based communities whose social requirements are not too different from any other. Access control in these networks requires some logical foundation to build upon. Without an agreed logical basis to distribute social rights, current access control models are based on intuition, experience or trial and error. This paper identifies some ethical issues in online social networks and suggests their solutions by socio-technical approach – use the knowledge of physical society as the basis of information rights model for online communities. Social axioms provide a theoretical base for rights analysis that could not only satisfy technical but also social and ethical requirements.
Access control is the process by which authorized users are granted permission over resources. Ac... more Access control is the process by which authorized users are granted permission over resources. Access control models incorporate application requirements in their design and thus evolve with the applications. The rise of online social networks (OSN), like Facebook, has posed new requirements over the privacy of users' data due to the presence of heterogeneous privacy circle. The traditional models cannot be used for this new type of applications for the complexity of millions of users interacting with each other. Different access control models for OSN are proposed based on relationships, trust, rule semantics, or history between the user and the requestor, however, rights delegation, rights transfer, reputation management and transparency are still ignored by the research community. To address these concerns and challenges, further research is needed. This paper reviews these challenges and presents a number of future research directions for access control models in the context of OSN.
In any educational system, no one can deny the importance of assessments. Assessments help in
eva... more In any educational system, no one can deny the importance of assessments. Assessments help in evaluating the knowledge gained by a learner at any specific point as well as in continuous improvement of the curriculum design and the whole learning process. However, with the increase in students’ enrollment at University level in either conventional or distance education environment, traditional ways of assessing students’ work are becoming insufficient in terms of both time and effort. In distance education environment, such assessments become additionally more challenging in terms of hefty remuneration for hiring large number of tutors. The availability of automated tools to assist the evaluation of students’ work and providing students with appropriate and timely feedback can really help in overcoming these problems. Although, building such tools for assessing students’ work for all kinds of courses in not yet possible. However, courses that involve some formal language of expression can be automated, such as, programming courses in Computer Science (CS) discipline. Learning how to program is the core of CS discipline. It is also becoming an important part even in various academic disciplines. Programming skills can only be learned through practice. Instructors provide various practical exercises to students as assignments to build these skills. Usually, instructors manually grade and provide feedbacks on these assignments. Although in literature, various tools have been reported to automate this process, but most of these tools have been developed by the host institutions themselves for their own use. We at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore are conducting a pioneer effort in Pakistan to automate the marking of assignments of introductory programming courses that involve C or C++ languages with the capability of associating appropriate feedbacks for students. In this paper, we basically identify different components that we believe are necessary in building an effective automated assessment system in the context of introductory programming courses that involve C/C++ programming. We further provide a survey of existing state of the art tools and techniques reported in literature for implementing these components. We also discuss those reported concepts and techniques that can help in making such system reusable with the capability of sharing its assessment objects in a secured manner.
Ridesharing enables different people to share ride with each other to reach a common destination.... more Ridesharing enables different people to share ride with each other to reach a common destination. It helps the users as individually to save cost, the community as collectively to reduce air pollution and road congestions. Now a day’s smart phone technology has enabled people to share rides on short notices. However, trust is a major apprehension of people while providing ease in selecting a safe ride and developing acceptable and comfortable environment inside the ride. So, a trust development mechanism may elevate ride sharing systems as a common transport system which can greatly reduce the road congestion. This research puts the users as the primary stakeholders and thus encapsulates the human preferences in trust evaluations. It then formalizes the mathematically traceable concepts through temporal logic where the treatment is formal and based on logics. The reliability and the trust ranking is done by Chronbach’s alpha and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Overall, the necessity to improve the trust development in dynamic ride share is the main contribution of this article.
Traffic obstruction, elevated gas prices and insufficient communal transportation are foremost co... more Traffic obstruction, elevated gas prices and insufficient communal transportation are foremost confront for any countryside, trade or entity. The conventional loom to solve this problem is to recover public transportation and use greener power by massive reserves and time. An alternative solution seeks to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads and to travel by making run time or dynamic plans by ride share systems. This system can lead to less consumption of currency, fuel and ecological destructions. One problem that is not focused much in the system is social distress that begins due to deficiency of trust amongst riders and ride givers. In this work we are trying to understand the perception of trust by a model which identifies user’s preferences, needs, and travelling behaviors for sharing private vehicles. We formally verified our model and implemented it to reduce three core issues; trust, convenience and incentives. Implementation of the model is provided as a working application. The model identifies trust and dis-trust among trustor and trustee by evaluating human based, ride based and system based trust rating in a feedback criteria. This feedback will help us in identifying trust norms and beliefs to constitute long term societal comfort.
Abstract A novel video coding scheme is presented with superior performance against packet losses... more Abstract A novel video coding scheme is presented with superior performance against packet losses and hence is suitable for wireless communication compared to standard approaches like scalable video coding. The scheme also offers a better multi-rate video ...
Abstract Video conferencing systems typically rely on the computational and compression performan... more Abstract Video conferencing systems typically rely on the computational and compression performance of their video codecs to meet strict performance constraints. It is well known that blocking artifacts in DCT-video codec based video conferencing system becomes ...
Social ideas like freedom seem far removed from computer code, but today computing is social. Tha... more Social ideas like freedom seem far removed from computer code, but today computing is social. That technology designers aren't ready, have no precedent, or don't understand social needs is irrelevant. Like a baby being born, online society is pushing forward, ready ...
The beast of computing has regularly defied pundit predictions. Key advances like the cell-phone ... more The beast of computing has regularly defied pundit predictions. Key advances like the cell-phone (Smith, Kulatilaka & Venkatramen, 2002) and open-source development (Campbell-Kelly, 2008) weren't predicted by the experts of the day, though the signs were there for all ...
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Publications by Adnan Ahmad
evaluating the knowledge gained by a learner at any specific point as well as in continuous
improvement of the curriculum design and the whole learning process. However, with the
increase in students’ enrollment at University level in either conventional or distance education
environment, traditional ways of assessing students’ work are becoming insufficient in terms of
both time and effort. In distance education environment, such assessments become additionally
more challenging in terms of hefty remuneration for hiring large number of tutors. The
availability of automated tools to assist the evaluation of students’ work and providing students
with appropriate and timely feedback can really help in overcoming these problems. Although,
building such tools for assessing students’ work for all kinds of courses in not yet possible.
However, courses that involve some formal language of expression can be automated, such as,
programming courses in Computer Science (CS) discipline.
Learning how to program is the core of CS discipline. It is also becoming an important part even
in various academic disciplines. Programming skills can only be learned through practice.
Instructors provide various practical exercises to students as assignments to build these skills.
Usually, instructors manually grade and provide feedbacks on these assignments. Although in
literature, various tools have been reported to automate this process, but most of these tools
have been developed by the host institutions themselves for their own use. We at COMSATS
Institute of Information Technology, Lahore are conducting a pioneer effort in Pakistan to
automate the marking of assignments of introductory programming courses that involve C or
C++ languages with the capability of associating appropriate feedbacks for students. In this
paper, we basically identify different components that we believe are necessary in building an
effective automated assessment system in the context of introductory programming courses that
involve C/C++ programming. We further provide a survey of existing state of the art tools and
techniques reported in literature for implementing these components. We also discuss those
reported concepts and techniques that can help in making such system reusable with the
capability of sharing its assessment objects in a secured manner.
individually to save cost, the community as collectively to reduce air pollution and road congestions. Now a day’s smart phone
technology has enabled people to share rides on short notices. However, trust is a major apprehension of people while providing
ease in selecting a safe ride and developing acceptable and comfortable environment inside the ride. So, a trust development
mechanism may elevate ride sharing systems as a common transport system which can greatly reduce the road congestion. This
research puts the users as the primary stakeholders and thus encapsulates the human preferences in trust evaluations. It then
formalizes the mathematically traceable concepts through temporal logic where the treatment is formal and based on logics. The
reliability and the trust ranking is done by Chronbach’s alpha and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Overall, the necessity to improve the
trust development in dynamic ride share is the main contribution of this article.
countryside, trade or entity. The conventional loom to solve this problem is to recover public transportation and use
greener power by massive reserves and time. An alternative solution seeks to reduce the number of vehicles on the
roads and to travel by making run time or dynamic plans by ride share systems. This system can lead to less
consumption of currency, fuel and ecological destructions. One problem that is not focused much in the system is social
distress that begins due to deficiency of trust amongst riders and ride givers. In this work we are trying to understand
the perception of trust by a model which identifies user’s preferences, needs, and travelling behaviors for sharing
private vehicles. We formally verified our model and implemented it to reduce three core issues; trust, convenience and
incentives. Implementation of the model is provided as a working application. The model identifies trust and dis-trust
among trustor and trustee by evaluating human based, ride based and system based trust rating in a feedback criteria.
This feedback will help us in identifying trust norms and beliefs to constitute long term societal comfort.
Papers by Adnan Ahmad
evaluating the knowledge gained by a learner at any specific point as well as in continuous
improvement of the curriculum design and the whole learning process. However, with the
increase in students’ enrollment at University level in either conventional or distance education
environment, traditional ways of assessing students’ work are becoming insufficient in terms of
both time and effort. In distance education environment, such assessments become additionally
more challenging in terms of hefty remuneration for hiring large number of tutors. The
availability of automated tools to assist the evaluation of students’ work and providing students
with appropriate and timely feedback can really help in overcoming these problems. Although,
building such tools for assessing students’ work for all kinds of courses in not yet possible.
However, courses that involve some formal language of expression can be automated, such as,
programming courses in Computer Science (CS) discipline.
Learning how to program is the core of CS discipline. It is also becoming an important part even
in various academic disciplines. Programming skills can only be learned through practice.
Instructors provide various practical exercises to students as assignments to build these skills.
Usually, instructors manually grade and provide feedbacks on these assignments. Although in
literature, various tools have been reported to automate this process, but most of these tools
have been developed by the host institutions themselves for their own use. We at COMSATS
Institute of Information Technology, Lahore are conducting a pioneer effort in Pakistan to
automate the marking of assignments of introductory programming courses that involve C or
C++ languages with the capability of associating appropriate feedbacks for students. In this
paper, we basically identify different components that we believe are necessary in building an
effective automated assessment system in the context of introductory programming courses that
involve C/C++ programming. We further provide a survey of existing state of the art tools and
techniques reported in literature for implementing these components. We also discuss those
reported concepts and techniques that can help in making such system reusable with the
capability of sharing its assessment objects in a secured manner.
individually to save cost, the community as collectively to reduce air pollution and road congestions. Now a day’s smart phone
technology has enabled people to share rides on short notices. However, trust is a major apprehension of people while providing
ease in selecting a safe ride and developing acceptable and comfortable environment inside the ride. So, a trust development
mechanism may elevate ride sharing systems as a common transport system which can greatly reduce the road congestion. This
research puts the users as the primary stakeholders and thus encapsulates the human preferences in trust evaluations. It then
formalizes the mathematically traceable concepts through temporal logic where the treatment is formal and based on logics. The
reliability and the trust ranking is done by Chronbach’s alpha and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Overall, the necessity to improve the
trust development in dynamic ride share is the main contribution of this article.
countryside, trade or entity. The conventional loom to solve this problem is to recover public transportation and use
greener power by massive reserves and time. An alternative solution seeks to reduce the number of vehicles on the
roads and to travel by making run time or dynamic plans by ride share systems. This system can lead to less
consumption of currency, fuel and ecological destructions. One problem that is not focused much in the system is social
distress that begins due to deficiency of trust amongst riders and ride givers. In this work we are trying to understand
the perception of trust by a model which identifies user’s preferences, needs, and travelling behaviors for sharing
private vehicles. We formally verified our model and implemented it to reduce three core issues; trust, convenience and
incentives. Implementation of the model is provided as a working application. The model identifies trust and dis-trust
among trustor and trustee by evaluating human based, ride based and system based trust rating in a feedback criteria.
This feedback will help us in identifying trust norms and beliefs to constitute long term societal comfort.