STOPE‐based approach for e‐readiness assessment case studies

The STOPE‐based approach is used here for practical e‐readiness assessment case studies. The approach integrates and evaluates the various e‐readiness assessment issues, over its well‐structured domains: strategy, technology, organization, people, and environment. The case studies considered concern three Saudi organizations: a government organization, a bank, and a private sector company. The results obtained provide e‐readiness indicators that illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each organization with regard to e‐readiness strategic development issues, information and communication technology (ICT) issues, management and organization issues, people issues, and environment issues within which the organization operates. The work shows how the approach can be practically used, and it also provides practical results that direct the organizations concerned toward enhancing their e‐readiness in response to the current trend of globalizing e‐business. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development of e‐government: a STOPE view

The transition from conventional government services to e‐government services is becoming an international trend in various parts of the world. This transition is useful in two main ways. It provides benefits not only to the government, but also to all organizations and people, contributing to what is now known as the digital economy and the well being of the society. The transition is also an opportunity for the government to reorganize its services and reduce, or even eliminate, unnecessary overheads and inefficiencies that may exist in its traditional services. This paper uses the STOPE (Strategy / Technology / Organization / People / Environment) development profile to explore the transition to e‐government, and to support its continuous improvement. The paper identifies e‐government within the broad scope of e‐development towards the digital economy using STOPE. It describes its basic processes, and emphasizes its potential benefits. The paper also discusses maximizing these benefits using proven techniques, including TQM (Total Quality Management), BPR (Business Process Re‐engineering), and Six Sigma; in addition to experience accumulated by early e‐government adaptors. Based on STOPE, recommendations on maximizing the benefits are then introduced. Finally conclusions and potential future work are discussed. In this respect, a specific future work concerned with STOPE‐based development of typical e‐government services is proposed. The work would be useful for standardizing basic e‐government services at the national and international levels, so that well‐designed e‐government services can be globalized. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An improved t‐out‐of‐n e‐lottery protocol

In 2009, Lee and Chang proposed an electronic t‐out‐of‐n lottery protocol over the Internet based on the Chinese remainder theorem and blind signature. However, a security flaw exists in Lee–Chang's protocol that the lottery agent and the malicious purchaser can collude to control the winning result, which is unfair for the honest participants. On the basis of a verifiable random number generated by using the Lagrange interpolation formula over a finite field, an improved t‐out‐of‐n e‐lottery protocol is proposed, which guarantees that each participant can generate the winning result equally. The improved protocol achieves public verifiability and fairness without a trusted third party and a delaying function, which makes it more robust and more efficient. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward a Magnesium‐Iodine Battery

The quest for new electrolyte and cathode materials is a crucial point for beyond‐lithium‐ion energy storage systems. Following this, an electrolyte for secondary magnesium batteries based on a new iodoaluminate ionic liquid and δ‐MgI₂ is reported. Promising electrochemical performance in terms of Mg plating‐stripping, coulombic efficiency, and conductivity, demonstrates the potential of this iodine‐based system for future Mg secondary batteries.     

e‐LiteSense: Self‐adaptive energy‐aware data sensing in WSN environments

Currently deployed in a wide variety of applicational scenarios, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are typically a resource‐constrained infrastructure. Consequently, characteristics such as WSN adaptability, low‐overhead, and low‐energy consumption are particularly relevant in dynamic and autonomous sensing environments where the measuring requirements change and human intervention is not viable. To tackle this issue, this article proposes e‐LiteSense as an adaptive, energy‐aware sensing solution for WSNs, capable of auto‐regulate how data are sensed, adjusting it to each applicational scenario. The proposed adaptive scheme is able to maintain the sensing accuracy of the physical phenomena, while reducing the overall process overhead. In this way, the adaptive algorithm relies on low‐complexity rules to establish the sensing frequency weighting the recent drifts of the physical parameter and the levels of remaining energy in the sensor. Using datasets from WSN operational scenarios, we prove e‐LiteSense effectiveness in self‐regulating data sensing accurately through a low‐overhead process where the WSN energy levels are preserved. This constitutes a step‐forward for implementing self‐adaptive energy‐aware data sensing in dynamic WSN environments.     

Increasing end‐to‐end fairness over IEEE 802.11e‐based wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we discuss the issue of fairness in the IEEE802.11e over wireless mesh networks. Fairness is an important factor that we have to achieve before talking about QoS. Inspired by social networks approximations, and to achieve fairness and provide QoS by regulating heterogeneous traffic, we extended the original IEEE802.11e protocol by introducing a new algorithm based on the ‘token bucket’ concept. We also treat the problem of exposed/hidden nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed approach offers better performance than the IEEE802.11e one. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Immersive Augmented‐Reality‐Based e‐Learning System Based on Dynamic Threshold Marker Method

In recent years, augmented reality (AR) technologies have been the subject of great interest among many communities. In education applications, old‐fashioned materials (or textbooks) are still used, despite remarkable AR developments in the industrial area. We present an AR system for education. Our system consists of an authoring tool that can be used to create educational content, a viewer that plays that content, and an engine to manage the tool and viewer. In our system, a marker unit recognizes a marker printed on a plane or a cubic plane by adaptively adjusting the threshold to have an excellent recognition rate in diverse environments and acquires corresponding data of the marker. Based on the system, we test 142 elementary school students for increased educational benefits using our system.     

Toward high‐efficiency dye‐sensitized solar cells with a photoanode fabricated via a simple water‐based formulation

An aqueous formulation containing commercially available P25 nanoparticles and a water‐soluble precursor—titanium (IV) bis(ammonium lactato)dihydroxide (TALH) has been developed and optimized for fabricating photoanodes in dye‐sensitized solar cells. An optimal formulation achieved a power conversion efficiency of 9.2%. Solar cell performance is significantly influenced by precursor concentration impacting the porosity and electron transport of the thin film. The use of TALH during processing is shown to enhance the electron transport in the resulting titanium dioxide nanoparticle network using transient decay measurements. Bridging between neighboring nanoparticles is confirmed using transmission electron microscopy explaining the enhanced electron transport. The developed formulation has several advantages, as it is water‐based, composed of inexpensive, non‐hazardous components, is easy to make, and does not require special handling. The formulation has great potential for industrial applications, in particular for DSC manufacturing using roll‐to‐roll technology. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward the development of a three-dimensional unconditionallystable finite-difference time-domain method

In this paper, an unconditionally stable three-dimensional (3-D) finite-difference time-method (FDTD) is presented where the time step used is no longer restricted by stability but by accuracy. The principle of the alternating direction implicit (ADI) technique that has been used in formulating an unconditionally stable two-dimensional FDTD is applied. Unlike the conventional ADI algorithms, however, the alternation is performed in respect to mixed coordinates rather than to each respective coordinate direction, Consequently, only two alternations in solution marching are required in the 3-D formulations. Theoretical proof of the unconditional stability is shown and numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the method. It is found that the number of iterations with the proposed FDTD can be at least four times less than that with the conventional FDTD at the same level of accuracy     

Prioritized e‐mail servicing to reduce non‐spam delay and loss: A performance analysis

This paper proposes a prioritized e‐mail servicing on e‐mail servers to reduce the delay and loss of non‐spam e‐mails due to queuing. Using a prioritized two‐queue scheme, non‐spam e‐mails are queued in a fast queue and given higher service priority than spam e‐mails that are queued in a slow queue. Four prioritized e‐mail service strategies for the two‐queue scheme are proposed and analyzed. We modeled these four strategies using discrete‐time Markov chain analysis under different e‐mail traffic loads and service capacities. Non‐spam e‐mails can be delivered within a small delay, even under heavy e‐mail loadings and high spam‐to‐non‐spam a priori. Results from our analysis of the two‐queue scheme show that it gives non‐spam delay and loss probability two orders of magnitude smaller than the typical single‐queue approach during heavy spam traffic. Moreover, prioritized e‐mail servicing protects e‐mail servers from spam attacks. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Waterproof,Breathable, and Antibacterial Self‐Powered e‐Textiles Based on Omniphobic Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Multifunctional electronic textiles (e‐textiles) incorporating miniaturized electronic devices will pave the way toward a new generation of wearable devices and human–machine interfaces. Unfortunately, the development of e‐textiles is subject to critical challenges, such as battery dependence, breathability, satisfactory washability, and compatibility with mass production techniques. This work describes a simple and cost‐effective method to transform conventional garments and textiles into waterproof, breathable, and antibacterial e‐textiles for self‐powered human–machine interfacing. Combining embroidery with the spray‐based deposition of fluoroalkylated organosilanes and highly networked nanoflakes, omniphobic triboelectric nanogenerators (R^F‐TENGs) can be incorporated into any fiber‐based textile to power wearable devices using energy harvested from human motion. R^F‐TENGs are thin, flexible, breathable (air permeability 90.5 mm s^?1), inexpensive to fabricate (<0.04$ cm^?2), and capable of producing a high power density (600 µW cm^?2). E‐textiles based on R^F‐TENGs repel water, stains, and bacterial growth, and show excellent stability under mechanical deformations and remarkable washing durability under standard machine‐washing tests. Moreover, e‐textiles based on R^F‐TENGs are compatible with large‐scale production processes and exhibit high sensitivity to touch, enabling the cost‐effective manufacturing of wearable human–machine interfaces.     

Printed Conformable Liquid Metal e‐Skin‐Enabled Spatiotemporally Controlled Bioelectromagnetics for Wireless Multisite Tumor Therapy

With inherent flexibility, high electroconductivity, excellent thermal conductivity, easy printability and biosafety, gallium‐based functional liquid metals (LMs) have been increasingly evaluated for biomedical applications, especially as electronic skin (e‐skin). Extending these versatile materials to more challenging applications is a worthwhile pursuit. To realize precise and spatiotemporal multisite tumor treatment under an alternating magnetic field (AMF), an oxidized GaIn (O‐GaIn) mixture‐based e‐skin is developed and demonstrated to be printable. Compared with the commonly utilized non‐oxidized GaIn, O‐GaIn possesses outstanding adhesion to the skin surface and can be directly and quickly printed into various customized patterns. The LM e‐skin thus constructed as conformable bioelectrodes on tumor‐bearing mice exhibits evident feasibility for administrating non‐invasive wireless multisite tumor therapy under AMF exposure due to its favorable magnetothermal effects. These in vivo experiments reveal remarkable tumor growth inhibition and increased life span in mice, especially in the case of multilesion treatment. A favorable biomedical strategy based on O‐GaIn material for developing future non‐invasive and high‐performance cancer therapy, which is also promising for treating whole‐body diseases in the future, is provided.     

A new approach for service migration in cloud‐based e‐commerce using an optimization algorithm

Service‐oriented architecture (SOA) has a crucial role in backing productive cloud services. Also, the vast spread of the theoretical notion of diverse businesses (like e‐commerce) into the actual use has been recently applied by cloud computing. The service functionality could be affected by overfilling of the network traffic because of the broadly dispersed nature of e‐commerce in clouds—a key challenge for immediate jobs. Throughout the last decade, a vast range of applications or large‐scale operators has increasingly attracted to migrate the services in clouds. An effective method for accessing the applications throughout standard business hours is continually moving virtual machine containers from one data center to another. Now, with the commonness of cloud computing, many applications have been moved to the cloud fully/partly. It can be handled through the migration of cloud services to diverse platforms in a way that minimizes the communication cost of e‐commerce. As this issue has an NP‐hard nature, in the present article, we present an automatic smart service migration outline through the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm on cloud‐oriented e‐commerce. In the presented model, we use the ACO algorithm to take the finest (near‐optimal) service migration decisions. Based on the obtained results, the proposed technique has the optimal number of migrations compared to the existing models.     

Toward Chirality‐Encoded Domain Wall Logic

Nonvolatile logic networks based on spintronic and nanomagnetic technologies have the potential to create high‐speed, ultralow power computational architectures. This article explores the feasibility of “chirality‐encoded domain wall logic,” a nanomagnetic logic architecture where data are encoded by the chiral structures of mobile domain walls in networks of ferromagnetic nanowires and processed by the chiral structures' interactions with geometric features of the networks. High‐resolution magnetic imaging is used to test two critical functionalities: the inversion of domain wall chirality at tailored artificial defect sites (logical NOT gates) and the chirality‐selective output of domain walls from 2‐in‐1‐out nanowire junctions (common operation to AND/NAND/OR/NOR gates). The measurements demonstrate both operations can be performed to a good degree of fidelity even in the presence of complex magnetization dynamics that would normally be expected to destroy chirality‐encoded information. Together, these results represent a strong indication of the feasibility of devices where chiral magnetization textures are used to directly carry, rather than merely delineate, data.     

A SECPG model for purchase behavior analysis in social e‐commerce environment

In social e‐commerce environment, consumers share commodity information with others frequently. It is urgent for social e‐commerce enterprises or merchants to learn rules about commodity information dissemination so as to improve the purchase rate of goods and predict the sales trend at the same time. In this paper, we extend the social e‐commerce customers' purchasing behavior game model (SECPG model) to simulate multiple complex social e‐commerce networks, so as to further quantify internal relation between users' information dissemination and online shopping behavior to a certain extent and predict the purchase rate in diverse social e‐commerce networks. The concept of relationship update frequency is introduced to the updating mechanism in social e‐commerce, and simulations are carried out for networks with various update frequency of social relations. Numerical simulations show that individuals' reputation and cost‐to‐benefit ratio both have specific ranges of influence on the purchase rate in social e‐commerce environment. And relationship update frequency is also a key factor for users to spread purchase information.     

Microparticle‐Based Soft Electronic Devices: Toward One‐Particle/One‐Pixel

While microparticle (MP) assemblies have long attracted academic interest, few practical applications of assembled MPs have been achieved because of technological difficulties related to MP synthesis, MP position registration, and the absence of device concepts. The precise positioning of functional MPs in a proper stencil can produce flexible/stretchable electronic devices, even when the MPs themselves are rigid. In recent years, remarkable progress has been made in the programmable position registration of MPs, production of functional MPs, and concepts for MP‐based, pixel‐type electronic devices. This progress report reviews the recent technological advances in MP assembly and discusses the technological challenges preventing the realization of the one‐particle/one‐pixel concept.