Hussein Zedan

De Montfort University | DMU · Solid State Research Centre

Formal methods and agile software development as part of the software engineering process have sometimes been seen as opposing techniques that are difficult to reconcile. However, in the opinion of the authors, these two approaches are orthogonal and complementary in nature, at least when used judiciously in a real‐world setting. Both methodologies...

There are two major concerns in the development of current workflow system. The first is security considerations and the second is context awareness. Modern workflow systems cross the boundaries of organisations, each may have its own security requirements, policies and constraints. Even within one organisation, activities in a workflow system may...

Since the original development of program slicing in 1979 there have been many attempts to define a suitable semantics, which will precisely define the meaning of a slice. Particular issues include handling termination and nontermination, slicing nonterminating programs, and slicing nondeterministic programs. In this paper we review and critique th...

Within this chapter is presented a service- and agent-oriented infrastructure created to support the delivery of context-aware education services and teaching content provision, known as Distributed eLearning Centre (DeLC). The current state of DeLC and its ongoing transformation into a Virtual Education Space are described in detail. Furthermore,...

Combining formal and agile techniques in software development has the potential to minimize change-related problems.

A conceptual multi-agent framework based on a knowledge-based collaborative decision support is proposed in this paper to design hybrid intelligent decision support systems (HIDSS) based on policy settings for the support of intelligent and pro-active decision making activities. An example of HIDSS has been developed to support the design and confi...

Can the semantics of a program be represented as a single formula? We show that one formula is insufficient to handle assertions, refinement or slicing, while two formulae are sufficient: A(S), defining non-termination, and B(S), defining behaviour. Any two formulae A and B will define a corresponding program. Refinement is defined as implication b...

Digital forensics aims to examine a wide range of digital media in a "forensically" sound manner. This can be used either to uncover rationale for a committed crime and possible suspects, prevent a crime from taken place or to identify a threat so that it can be dealt with. The latter is firmly rooted within the domain of intelligence counter measu...

Worldwide, traffic accidents cause over a million fatalities every year. Thus, improving road safety and saving people's lives is an international priority. One major challenge faced by researchers is to design an ideal system that is able to predict road accidents and implement efficient prevention actions. Context-aware systems are those systems...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged as an application of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), which use dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) to allow vehicles in close proximity to communicate with each other or to communicate with roadside equipment. Applying wireless access technology in vehicular environments has led to the improve...

A novel intelligent decision support system (IDSS) based on policy settings is proposed in this paper. This work supports the design and configuration of small wireless sensor networks (WSN) used to supply real time environmental and context related data to emergency response applications specifically in the domain of civil defense. This integrated...

Arabic is a widely spoken language but few mining tools have been developed to process Arabic text. This paper examines the crime domain in the Arabic language (unstructured text) using text mining techniques. The development and application of a Crime Profiling System (CPS) is presented. The system is able to extract meaningful information, in thi...

The Health Delivery Practice with additional innovative technologies become a key ingredient in health care industry. However, under the complex and dynamic environment, predictability, reactivity and accuracy are considered as inherent features of risk management. During the runtime monitoring system, risks are largely observed due to changes in e...

Security requirements deal with the protection of assets against unauthorized access (disclosure or modification) and their availability to authorized users. Temporal constraints of history-based access control policies are difficult to express naturally in traditional policy languages. We propose a compositional formal framework for the specificat...

Organizations increasingly are adopting information technology (IT) in order to automate their business processes to be competitive in marketplace. The greater evolving interdependence between information technology and business processes has created various opportunities for technologies and businesses. Therefore, co-evolutionary changes generate...

Many military research efforts have concentrated on how to allow war-fighters to take advantage of all available information within the battlefield in a rapid and flexible manner. As a result, the development of the Global Information Grid (GIG) was the key enabler for this process; hence, adding to the development of the mobile networking part of...

This paper proposes a novel fusion technique using iris-online signature biometrics at feature level space. The biometric features are extracted from the pre-processed images of iris and the dynamics of signatures. We propose different fusion schemes at feature level. In order to reduce the complexity of the fusion scheme, we adopt a binary particl...

The Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA in short) has been proposed as a notation that is suitable to model mobile applications that are context-aware. This paper considers a real-world case study of an infostation-based mLearning system in which mobile devices such as hand-set phones, PDA's and laptops can access a number of services and commu...

We present the Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA in short) for the modelling and verification of mobile systems that are context-aware. This process calculus is built upon the calculus of mobile ambients and introduces new constructs to enable ambients and processes to be aware of the environment in which they are being executed. This results...

This paper presents an online signature identification system based on global features. The information is extracted as time functions of various dynamic properties of the signatures. A database of 2160 signatures from 108 subjects was built. Thirty-one features were identified and extracted from each signature. Different feature reduction approach...

Within this chapter, an agent-oriented middleware created to support the delivery of context-aware mLearning services provision is presented. This middleware architecture, based on the concept of InfoStations and developed within a University campus domain, is described in detail. Concepts for the control and management of service sessions and comm...

This paper presents an iris recognition method based on the two dimensional dual-tree complex wavelet transform (2D-CWT) and the support vector machines (SVM). 2D-CWT has such significant properties as the approximate shift-invariance, high directional selectivity and computationally much more efficient. These properties are very useful in invarian...

In this paper, we Propose a novel fusion scheme of iris and online signature biometrics at feature level space. The features are extracted from the pre-processed images of iris and the dynamics of signatures. We propose different fusion schemes at feature level, which we compare on a database of 108 virtual people. Moreover, in order to reduce the...

In this paper we present a case study in deriving an algorithm from a formal specification via FermaT transformations. The general method (which is presented in a separate paper) is extended to a method for deriving an implementation of a program transformation from a specification of the program transformation. We use program slicing as an example...

Growing violation activity makes monitoring of information technology resource systems day by day necessity. As a matter of importance, the popularity of surveillance systems increases with its associated systems. The security of such surveillance systems plays a critical role as their compromise has a technical impact and the need for them is incr...

Sufficient test coverage for Software Agents that operate in an open and dynamic environment is unlikely to be achieved during the agents' development. Especially when agents exhibit self properties and are constantly adapting to changes in their environment it is important to limit their autonomy to ensure that their behaviour lies within safe bou...

Modern business goals are often fulfilled with workflows that may cross many organisations and utilise services on a variety of devices and/or supported by different platforms. Current workflows are inherently context-aware. Each context is governed and constrained by its own policies and rules to prevent unauthorised participants from executing se...

Grids are increasingly being used in applications, one of which is e-learning. As most of business and academic institutions (universities) and training centres around the world have adopted this technology in order to create, deliver and manage their learning materials through the Web, the subject has become the focus of investigate. Still, collab...

Information technology has become an increasingly integral part of business organizations and a greater interdependence between information technology and business has evolved. The growing business requirements create opportunities for new technologies and advancements in technology provide new business processes and models. Therefore, co-evolution...

The transformational programming, method of algorithm derivation starts with a formal specification of the result to be achieved (which provides no indication of how the result is to be achieved), plus some informal ideas as to what techniques will be used in the implemen- tation. The formal specification is then transformed into an implementa- tio...

In this paper we have proposed a biometric-based authentication system based on rough set theory. The system employed signature for authentication purpose. The major functional blocks of the proposed system are presented. Information is extracted as time functions of various dynamic properties of the signatures. We apply our methodology to global f...

One of the most challenging tasks a programmer can face is attempting to analyse and understand a legacy assembler system. Many features of assembler make analysis difficult, and these are the same features which make migration from assembler to a high level language difficult. In this paper we describe some of the methods used inthe FermaT transfo...

Service-oriented applications are increasingly requested to be adaptive and reliable, to face harsh market competitiveness and volatility. Towards achieving that, service developers must foster current adhoc and rigid available technology, e.g. WSDL, BPEL and WS-CDL, with early formal specification and validation and equip them with adaptability as...

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Many military research efforts have concentrated on how to allow war-fighters to take advantage of all available information within the battlefield in a rapid and flexible manner. As a result, the development of the Global Information Grid (GIG) was the key enabler for this process; hence, adding to the development of the mobile networking part of...

Arabic is widely spoken language but very few text mining tools have been developed for Arabic language. This paper presents an algorithm for automatically building dictionaries. The target domain is crime profiling. The corpus is mined for crime type, location and nationality. This work is then validated through three experiments, the results of w...

The Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (in short) has been proposed as a suitable notation for modelling mobile applications that are context-aware. This paper considers a real-world case study of an infostation-based mLearning system which enables mobile devices such as cellular phones, laptops and personal digital as-sistants to communicate to ea...

Biometrics is constantly evolving technology which has been widely used in many official and commercial identification applications. A biometric system is essentially a pattern recognition system which makes a personal identification decision by determining the authority of specific physiological or behavioral traits. Despite considerable advances...

With vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) being considered a vital application of Mobile ad hoc Network (MANET), this paper will focus on exploiting the aspect of context aware system to leverage the efficiency of routing protocols in VANET. Our investigation will concentrate on the vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication type rather than the vehicle to...

This paper describes an initial prototype for identifying types of crime in a text within the crime domain. Two approaches are explored to perform recognition tasks. The first approach completely relies on direct recognition using gazetteers. In this case, lists of crime verbs and crime names are used. The second approach is a rule-based system. Ru...

Today, databases provide the best technique for storing and retrieving data, but they suffer from the absence of a semantic perspective, which is needed to reach global goals such as the semantic web and data integration. Using ontologies will solve this problem by enriching databases semantically. Since building an ontology from scratch is a very...

Whereas cross-organizations are under swift competition to operate in unanticipated and dynamic business environment, current service composition standards (e.g. BPEL, WS-CDL) are strictly manual and static. In other words, besides ensuring adaptability at-design time, it is also crucial to cope with runtime adaptability in a very effective manner....

A strong need for new approaches and new curricula in different disciplines in European education area still exists. It is especially the case in the field of software engineering which has traditionally been underdeveloped in some areas. The curriculum presented in this paper is oriented towards undergraduate students of informatics and engineerin...

Measuring speech quality in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks is an increasingly important application for legal, commercial and technical reasons. Any proposed solution for measuring the quality should be applicable in monitoring live-traffic non-intrusively. The E-Model proposed by the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunica...

Service technology proposes a loosely-coupled integration and composition of any service functionalities, exposed by XML-based interfaces and composed using standards such as BPEL. Nevertheless, as cross-organizations are swiftly competing, the rigid character as well as the ad-hoc deployment using these standards is still hindering the large-scale...

Grids are increasingly being used in applications, one of which is e-learning. As most of business and academic institutions (universities) and training centres around the world have adopted this technology in order to create, deliver and manage their learning materials through the Web, the subject has become the focus of investigate. Still, collab...

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a for...

Our definition for Mobile Ad hoc Network of Networks (MANoNs) are a group of large autonomous wireless nodes communicating on a peer-to-peer basis in a heterogeneous environment with no pre-defined infrastructure. In fact, each node by itself is an ad hoc network with its own management. Based on the Recommendation ITU-T M.3400 security management...

Understanding and analysing creativity and the creative process is hard and has been for a long time a major concern of many scholars across the spectrum, from the arts and literature to the sciences and engineering [19][17]. This is especially important in the context of creativity support [14] and some questions that arise are: • Is it possible t...

The Internet is moving from being a collection of applications toward a collection of services through the Web. Therefore, service oriented architecture (SOA) has become an active area of research and development. Web services as an example of SOA provide the integration of software applications in an incremental way, using existing platforms and l...

Using the Internet to enhance e-learning has become a trend in modern higher education institutes. E-learning systems are increasingly becoming an important part of the strategy for delivering online and flexible e-learning. The main advantage of e-learning is the opportunity for students to interact electronically with each other and their teacher...

Is it possible to map Human Creativity in a way similar to that of the Human Genome? • Do mechanisms of the creative processes cross the boundaries of disciplines? • Are there optimal conditions that may enhance human creativity? • How does cooperation/collaboration affect creativity? To shed some light on all of the above questions, we provide a u...

SUMMARY One of the most challenging tasks a programmer can face is attempting to analyse and understand a legacy assembler system. Many features of assembler make analysis difficult, and these are the same features which make migration from assembler to a high level language difficult. In this paper we discuss the application of program transformat...

Policy-based approaches to the management of systems distinguish between the specification of requirements, in the form of policies, and their enforcement on the system. In this work we focus on the latter aspect and investigate the enforcement of stateful policies in a concurrent environment. As a representative of stateful policies weuse the UCON...

A grid job's requirements description is very important, and raises interesting issues for resource man- agement and scheduling within a grid environment. Several languages such as Globus Resource Specification language and European Data Grid JDL have been developed for describing grid jobs, the latest of which is Job Submission Description Languag...

This paper proposes a novel secure mechanism for managing the digital certificates in WMANETs. Based on our defined architecture for WMANETs, we will take the case where WMANET is operating in an area covered by other infrastructure-based wireless networks such as cellular systems or WLANs. We define two different algorithms for two different scena...

Developing a joint curriculum across different institutions is a unique and novel initiative to harmonize university education in Europe, sharing the efforts of curriculum development (hence reducing their cost), and to improve the quality of education. Our ongoing project covers seven partner institutions from five countries – four in the role of...

Media services over IP networks are provided through Voice over IP (VoIP) Protocols. In this paper an architecture for Quality of Service (QoS) service within an enterprise business model is presented. In the proposed architecture an enterprise offers media streaming services to its clients and the client needs to pay for this service. The quality...

Policies provide a flexible and scalable approach to the management of distributed systems by separating the specification of security requirements and their enforcement. Over the years the expressiveness of policy languages increased considerably making it possible to capture a variety of complex requirements that for example depend on the history...

The aim of this article is to provide a unified mathematical framework for program slicing which places all slicing work for sequential programs on a sound theoretical foundation. The main advantage to a mathematical approach is that it is not tied to a particular representation. In fact the mathematics provides a sound basis for any particular rep...

Usage Control (UCON) Models, similar to Access Control Models, control and govern the users' access to resources and services that are available in the system. One of the major improvements of UCON over traditional access con- trol models is the continuity of the control and the concept of attribute mutability. In this paper we provide an alternati...

Wireless Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (WMANET) is a group of an independent wireless (Mobile/ Semi Mobile) nodes communicating on a peer-to-peer basis with no pre-established infrastructure. The unique characteristics of WMANET make such networks highly vulnerable to security attacks when compared with wired networks or infrastructure-based wireless netwo...

The Temporal Agent Model (TAM) is a wide-spectrum development language for real-time systems. In TAM, limited resources are modelled by deriving release times and absolute deadlines from weakest pre-condition predicate transformers. In this paper the language syntax and semantics are described along with a number of examples.

Policies are increasingly used to govern the be- haviour of complex distributed systems. Most policy models that allow policy composition, to address the complexity of policies, are only concerned with structural composition. In this paper we argue that it is natural to compose policies also along the temporal axis, i.e. express policies that can d...

A Service oriented system emerges from composition of ser- vices. Dynamically composed reactive Web services form a special class of service oriented system, where the delays as- sociated with communication, unreliability and unavailabil- ity of services, and competition for resources from multiple service requesters are dominant concerns. As compl...

AnaTempura is a tool based on Interval Temporal Logic (ITL). It is used to analyse time-critical systems at run-time. It validates code (implementation) against a formal specification. In this paper, we will describe a tool, AnaTempura and its supporting logic, ITL. A small but illustrative case study is presented.

A program transformation is an operation which can be applied to any program (satisfying the transformations ap- plicability conditions) and returns a semantically equiva- lent program. In the FermaT transformation system pro- gram transformations are carried out in a wide spectrum language, called WSL, and the transformations themselves are writte...

Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information is the key issue in the battle for information superiority and thus is a decisive factor in modern warfare. Security policies and security mechanisms govern the access to information and other resources. Their correct specification, i.e. denial of potentially dangerous access a...

In this paper we describe an improved formalisation of slicing in WSL (Wide Spectrum Language) transformation theory and apply the result to give syntactic and semantic slices for some challenging slicing problems. Although there is no algorithm for constructing a minimal syntactic slice, we show that it is possible, in the WSL language, to derive...

Current ontological specifications for semantically describing properties of Web services are limited to their static interface description. Normally for proving properties of service compositions, mapping input/output parameters and specifying the pre/post conditions are found to be sufficient. However these properties are assertions only on the i...

In this paper we describe the legacy assembler problem and describe how the FermaT transformation system is used to reengineer assembler systems and migrate from assembler to C and COBOL.

Despite considerable number of work on authorization models, enforcing multiple polices is still a challenge in order to achieve the level of security required in many real-world systems. Moreover current approaches address security settings independently, and their incorporation into systems development lifecycle is not well understood. This paper...

Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) is a flexible notation for both propositional and first-order reasoning about periods of time found in descriptions of hardware and software systems. Unlike most temporal logics, ITL can handle both sequential and parallel composition and o#ers powerful and extensible specification and proof techniques for reasoning ab...

The maintenance and evolution of distributed, heterogeneous software components; including both legacy and green-field subsystems is described through a highly re-configurable architectural style. It is shown how this architectural style is realized through identification, separation and externalization of a formal specification of the manners of t...

Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) was designed as a tool for the specification and verification of systems. The development of an executable subset of ITL, namely Tempura, was an important step in the use of temporal logic as it enables the developer to check, debug and simulate the design. However, a design methodology is missing that transforms an ab...

This paper advocates that extracting formal specification semantically consistent to the original legacy system will facilitate further redesign and forward engineering greatly. The three parts of reengineering could be integrated on the basis of a wide spectrum language. The key approach to comprehension and the production of formal specification...

Process modelling is a vital issue for communicating with experts of the application domain. Depending on the roles and respon-sibilities of the application domain experts involved, process models are discussed on different levels of abstraction. These may range from de-tailed regulation for process execution to the interrelation of basic core proc...

In the hardware industry, simulation is still all too frequently considered synonymous with verification. The design process usually consists of developing an implementation from a specification without the use of any formal proof techniques. Both are then simulated for a number of inputs (an approach known as co-simulation). Bugs discovered are re...

We provide a formal framework within which an Information System (IS) could be modelled, analysed, and verified in a compositional manner. Our work is based on Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) and its programming language subset Tempura. This is achieved by considering IS, of an enterprise, as a class of reactive systems in which it is continually rea...

An object based formal method for the development of real-time systems, called ATOM, is presented. The method is an integration of the real-time formal technique TAM (Temporal Agent Model) with an industry-strength structured methodology known as HRT-HOOD. ATOM is a systematic formal approach based on the refinement calculus. Within ATOM, a formal...

A development method for the construction of provably correct robot control systems together with its supporting tool environment are described. The method consists of four stages and is centered around the notion of widespectrum formalism within which an abstract (logical) representation is intermixed freely with the concrete representation of the...

ITL and Tempura are used for respectively the formal specification and simulation of a large scale system, namely the general purpose multi-threaded dataflow processor EP/3. This paper shows that this processor can be specified concisely within ITL and simulated with Tempura. But it also discusses some problems encountered during the specification...

We propose a sound and practical approach, based on a formal method (known as Interval Temporal Logic), to cope with `change' and analyse its effect. The approach allows us to capture a snapshot of system's behaviour over which various interesting properties, such as liveness, timeliness and safety properties, can be validated compositionally. Thes...

The movement from algorithmic decomposition, structured design and procedural implementation towards object-oriented design and programming has resulted in a growing need to restructure/re-engineer old programs which have a poor architecture in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. It is more economic to restructure existing software i...

We discuss the current situation of formal methods and their use in the re-engineering of computing systems, especially real time systems. Based on the analysis result, a solution which uses a consistent 4-sector Wide Spectrum Language (WSL) is proposed, which presently includes the general architecture and work flow, the structure of ObjectAction...

An empirical comparison is made between present approaches/tools of software maintenance and development. The conclusion is that development technology is more mature in many aspects, such as automation, formalism, confidence, understanding of original systems and application domain. Aims to improve the weakness of maintenance, a unified re-enginee...