A Review on the Mathematical Modeling of Biofilm Processes: Advances in Fundamentals of Biofilm Modeling

An attempt is made to review the developments in the modeling of biofilm processes that have been made during the last fifteen years. This article considers only a selection of those publications that have created a significant impact on the trends and techniques of biofilm modeling. The recent advances in the areas of microbial interactions (multispecies biofilms) as well as the inclusion of ionic interactions and the pH effects in the biofilm modeling are also summarized.     

Exploiting hashing for concurrent query processing and indexing of current location of moving objects

Due to recent developments in location-based services and mobile computing, the need for indices for moving objects has been strengthened to improve the response time of a query operation. With a single index in place for managing both the update and query operations for moving objects, the index needs to be updated each time the object moves. This deteriorates the performance of concurrent query operations. It is critical to handle the conflicts between continuous update and query operations effectively using appropriate concurrency control protocol otherwise, inconsistent results will be reported. Many indices have been proposed in the literature for moving objects but they lack the support for processing concurrent operations. Further, the consistent indices in the literature are based on tree structure that have computationally expensive split/merge operations that can negatively affect the response time of query processing algorithms. Moreover such tree based indices are proposed for historical and future timeline data. As the scope of this article is on current timeline and concurrent continuous query operations, therefore, we exploit state of the art hash-based indices in the literature and presented the two consistent versions. The comparative analysis of the indices is performed and meaningful findings are also presented along.     

A GDPR Compliant Approach to Assign Risk Levels to Privacy Policies

Data privacy laws require service providers to inform their customers on how user data is gathered, used, protected, and shared. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a legal framework that provides guidelines for collecting and processing personal information from individuals. Service providers use privacy policies to outline the ways an organization captures, retains, analyzes, and shares customers’ data with other parties. These policies are complex and written using legal jargon; therefore, users rarely read them before accepting them. There exist a number of approaches to automating the task of summarizing privacy policies and assigning risk levels. Most of the existing approaches are not GDPR compliant and use manual annotation/labeling of the privacy text to assign risk level, which is time-consuming and costly. We present a framework that helps users see not only data practice policy compliance with GDPR but also the risk levels to privacy associated with accepting that policy. The main contribution of our approach is eliminating the overhead cost of manual annotation by using the most frequent words in each category to create word-bags, which are used with Regular Expressions and Pointwise Mutual Information scores to assign risk levels that comply with the GDPR guidelines for data protection. We have also developed a web-based application to graphically display risk level reports for any given online privacy policy. Results show that our approach is not only consistent with GDPR but performs better than existing approaches by successfully assigning risk levels with 95.1% accuracy after assigning data practice categories with an accuracy rate of 79%.     

A hash-based index for processing frequent updates and continuous location-based range queries

Knowledge and Information Systems - Wide range of location-based services and sensors in GIS have to manage moving objects that change their position with respect to time. These applications...     

The Effect of Local Metakaolin Developed from Natural Material Soorh on Selected Properties of Concrete/Mortar

Silicon - In this research study the effect local metakaolin produced from natural material Soorh of Thatta, District of Sindh, Pakistan on compressive strength of mortar/concrete, permeability,...