Pacloud

Research on the influence of attitudes toward computers and end user performance has reported inconsistent results. The inconsistent results, at least in part, could be attributed to the lack of correspondence between the general nature of the attitude measure and the specific nature of the criterion, end user performance. Based on Ajzen and Fishbein’s (1980) behavioral intentions model, we argue that attitudes toward working with computers matches end user performance in terms of specificity and relevance, and therefore should be consistently related to end user performance. In this study, in addition to attitudes toward working with computers, the effects of goal setting and self-efficacy on end user performance were also tested. Results indicate that attitudes toward working with computers, goal setting and self-efficacy significantly influence end user performance. Strong support for attitudes, goal setting and self-efficacy indicate that end user performance can be substantially enhanced by shaping end users’ attitudes toward working with computers, teaching end users to set specific and challenging goals, and enhancing end users’ beliefs to effectively learn and use computing technology.

Interface consistency is an important basic concept in web design and has an effect on performance and satisfaction of end users. Consistency also has significant effects on the learning performance of both expert and novice end users. Consequently, the evaluation of consistency within a e-learning system and the ensuing eradication of irritating discrepancies in the user interface redesign is a big issue. In this paper, we report of our experiences with the Shadow Expert Technique (SET) during the evaluation of the consistency of the user interface of a large university learning management system. The main objective of this new usability evaluation method is to understand the interaction processes of end users with a specific system interface. Two teams of usability experts worked independently from each other in order to maximize the objectivity of the results. The outcome of this SET method is a list of recommended changes to improve the user interaction processes, hence to facilitate high consistency.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on user performance (UP) in higher education institutions with a view to better understanding the ERP phenomenon in these institutions, and to determine whether or not these systems work well in such a complex environment. Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative methodology was used in this study and data were collected by means of a written questionnaire. Measurement items used in the operationalization of the study instrument were adopted from relevant prior research. Findings – The findings indicated that system quality, task technology fit and information quality are the most important factors that lead to better end UP. The provides evidence of the appropriateness of extending IS models as a useful way to give more powerful insights into user aspects and system impact. Research limitations/implications – Although the study factors explained a large portion of the variance in UP, there is a part of the variance that still remains unexplained. Practical implications – Vendors and designers must consider user needs and concerns in the design of ERP packages. Understanding user characteristics and their interaction will lead to better benefits. For example, if ERP users are predominantly individuals with little computer experience, the system designers should invest more in making the systems easier to use to facilitate more system impacts and benefits. Originality/value – There has been a general lack of awareness about the importance of evaluating ERP systems from a user perspective. Rather, the main focus of previous studies was either on critical factors and implementation issues and/or on user acceptance and satisfaction. This study underscores the importance of this issue and presents some insights into the benefits of ERP systems in higher education by taking lessons from IS theory in general.

Web applications have been spreading everywhere. However, this may have a number of drawbacks mostly related to usability issues. Therefore, the investigation of usability problems continues to improve these applications. In this study, usability metrics are used for web application interface evaluation. The relation between web application usability and end user performance is investigated. Many studies have evaluated interface usability in a number of sectors; however, studies on oil and gas web applications have been limited. In this study, two sessions with twelve participants were designed to obtain data directly from end users. The sessions were observation and user feedback sessions. The findings indicate a potential relation between system usability and end user performance in terms of effectiveness and satisfaction.

Application management in Linux based operating systems is managed by package managers. The package repositories of most Linux distributions provide software through central servers. While having a central server provides a unique verified and maintained version, servers often separate official and community packages, and users frequently use community packages. However, some highly demanded community packages may not be stored in official repositories. While central servers are open to a single point of failure, using community packages without any security check may be insecure. In this paper, we introduce the idea of a distributed package management architecture for Linux systems based on blockchain technology. In the proposed system, package providers are considered as miners, building a package is mining, and proof-of-work is reproducible packaging by the miners. The blockchain keeps the hash of the package contents. Creating and testing a package will return to the packager as reliability scores. This system will have the following advantages. Packages will be verified through consensus, single points of failure will be eliminated ensuring availability, packages are stored in a distributed network. The goal is to keep the operating system alive with a decentralized, reliable, and transparent blockchain-based package management system.

End user computing (EUC) has become an essential component of successful knowledge management. To maintain their competitive advantage, organisations need to ensure that EUC is productive. Consequently, the problems encountered by end users in composing queries need to be minimised. In constructing queries, end users need to identify the columns, constraints, and aggregation level. They must then accurately translate these requirements into the appropriate constructs in the query language. The accurate translation of each requirement poses a challenge to end users due to the ontological gap between the representation of concepts in the real world and constructs available in the information system. This research examines the factors that influence end user performance in addressing SQL challenges. Ontology and cognitive psychology literature relating to memory schemas and semantic cues provide the theoretical basis for this research. A laboratory experiment was conducted with sixty-six students enrolled in introductory database subjects. The results demonstrate that end user familiarity with a particular SQL challenge has a positive relationship with query performance. The presence of semantic cues in the information request also has a substantial impact on query performance. These results provide assistance relative to improving end user training and designing query interfaces. Making these improvements will enhance both the efficiency and effectiveness of EUC.

GPU runtimes are historically implemented in CUDA or other vendor specific languages dedicated to GPU programming. In this work we show that OpenMP 5.1, with minor compiler extensions, is capable of replacing existing solutions without a performance penalty. The result is a performant and portable GPU runtime that can be compiled with LLVM/Clang to Nvidia and AMD GPUs without the need for CUDA or HIP during its development and compilation. While we tried to be OpenMP compliant, we identified the need for compiler extensions to achieve the CUDA performance with our OpenMP runtime. We hope that future versions of OpenMP adopt our extensions to make device programming in OpenMP also portable across compilers, not only across execution platforms. The library we ported to OpenMP is the OpenMP device runtime that provides OpenMP functionality on the GPU. This work opens the door for shipping OpenMP offloading with a Linux distribution's LLVM package as the package manager would not need a vendor SDK to build the compiler and runtimes. Furthermore, our OpenMP device runtime can support a new GPU target through the use of a few compiler intrinsics rather than requiring a reimplementation of the entire runtime.

This paper proposes an architecture to provide seamless reporting over heterogeneous networks while focusing on the End-to-End information exchange and Quality of Experience analysis. For this purpose, it is presented a reporting architecture based on IEEE 802.21, where the reports are seamless exchanged through new extended IEEE 802.21 messages. This approach, besides saving on overhead of service and end-users reporting, is able to seamless support reporting through heterogeneous technologies, in multiple layers, while integrating both actions of reporting and network reaction, through IEEE 802.21. This new framework balances the impact of the signaling over the network load, representing a good lightweight trade off when comparing to other solutions, while still being able to deploy new business cases.

"This book aims to represent some of the most current investigations into a wide range of end-user computing issues, enhancing understanding of recent developments" - Provided by publisher

A comprehensive reference book codifying the various standards releases for High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) wireless technologyHSPA evolution has maintained its prominence through Releases 7-11 but the evolution is coming to an end with Release 12, with the focus moving to LTE. However, HSPA network and terminal sales will continue for many years: HSPA is expected to remain as the number one radio access technology from the sales point of view far beyond 2015. This timely book examines the complete HSPA evolution, and will be the ultimate long term reference for HSPA evolution.Headed by the successful editing team of Holma, Toskala and Tapia, industry experts look at HSPA evolution including complete Release 11 and the main additions in Release 12. They describe 3GPP definitions, field measurement, expected performance, practical optimization guidelines and the implications to the devices and to the networks. The book also covers MIMO antenna solutions and multicarrier evolution to provide higher data rates. Dedicated chapters include Continuous Packet Connectivity and High Speed Common Channels which provide major improvement to the smartphone capacity, end user performance and power consumption. The book assumes basic understanding of mobile communications yet the material is presented in an understandable way which can be enjoyed without any pre-information about MIMO or other technology solutions.A comprehensive reference book codifying the various standards releases for High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) wireless technologyLeading editor and contributor team focusing their expertise on 3GPP features and performance, including Self Organizing Networks, LTE Interworking, Smartphone Optimization and Voice EvolutionDedicated chapter covering VoIP over HSPA, recognizing that telephony will continue to bring most of the revenues to mobile operators in the near futureIncludes tables, figures and plots illustrating the concepts or simulation results, to aid readers understanding of the topicAn essential resource for R&D engineers by network, terminal and chip set vendors, network engineers with operators, application developers, regulators.

The security of computer systems often relies upon decisions and actions of end users. In this paper, we set out to investigate users' susceptibility to cybercriminal attacks by concentrating at the most fundamental component governing user behavior-the human brain. We introduce a novel neuroscience-based study methodology to inform the design of user-centered security systems as it relates to cybercrime. In particular, we report on an functional magnetic resonance imaging study measuring users' security performance and underlying neural activity with respect to two critical security tasks: (1) distinguishing between a legitimate and a phishing website and (2) heeding security (malware) warnings. We identify the neural markers that might be controlling users' performance in these tasks, and establish relationships between brain activity and behavioral performance as well as between users' personality traits and security behavior. Our results provide a largely positive perspective on users' capability and performance vis-à-vis these crucial security tasks. First, we show that users exhibit significant brain activity in key regions associated with decision-making, attention, and problem-solving (phishing and malware warnings) as well as language comprehension and reading (malware warnings), which means that users are actively engaged in these security tasks. Second, we demonstrate that certain individual traits, such as impulsivity measured via an established questionnaire, are associated with a significant negative effect on brain activation in these tasks. Third, we discover a high degree of correlation in brain activity (in decision-making regions) across phishing detection and malware warnings tasks, which implies that users' behavior in one task may potentially be predicted by their behavior in the other. Fourth, we discover high functional connectivity among the core regions of the brain, while users performed the phishing detection task. Finally, we discuss the broader impacts and implications of our work on the field of user-centered security, including the domain of security education, targeted security training, and security screening.

Improvement of the human computer interface (HCI) is receiving increasing attention as a panacea for many information systems problems; particularly end-user performance. Several experimental research efforts have made significant contributions toward increasing user performance, and vendor implementation of early research findings into commerical applications software have apparently enhanced user satisfaction. This manuscript proposes a model designed to serve as a framework for HCI research efforts, thereby providing a unified structure for the collection and examination of variables utilized in such efforts. The empirical research supporting this model is also highlighted. The performance relationship model is capable of including the concept of a user interface management system (UIMS) very easily.

In 5G and beyond, the end-user broadcasts data into the radio domain; therefore, protecting the physical layer security (PLS) is a more challenging issue. Here, Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) handles PLS naturally. Because multiple physical resources are encoded in different codes, these codes cannot be easily decoded without sharing a mother codebook and mapping matrix. However, there are a few studies about security implementation in the physical layer against the challenges of the three subdomains of end users, base stations, and the core network. Moreover, there are two new research questions for resource allocation in SCMA: How do codebooks affect the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of end-users? In the presence or absence of a jammer or interference, how should codebooks be assigned to users? We believe that it can only be overcome by using some new paradigms together: Software-defined radio (SDR), Software-defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV). We consider the PLS implementation on SCMA-based 5G by investigating codebook assignment in the presence of noise/jammer with a novel Quality of Service (QoS) parameter <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(\phi)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , which is the ratio of the received power by the user to overloading <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(\lambda)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . In the SDN/NFV controller, the QoS metric-based codebook assignment algorithm prioritizes users into newly defined PEACE, NORMAL, and WAR states. In the OpenFlow table of SDR, grant-free access can be easily implemented. As a result, the BERs for different overloading are the same for the same ratio of energy rate per bit and spectral noise density. The BER is lower when the mother codebook is 150% than when the codebook is 200%. An existing codebook of one eMBB can be utilized to serve one URLLC user and two MTC users with an acceptable BER.

Energy-efficient content delivery networks using cluster shutdown

Information security is one of the key areas of consideration to assure reliable and dependable information systems (IS). Achieving an appropriate level of IS security requires concurrent consideration of the technical aspects of IS and the human aspects related to the end users of IS. These aspects can be described in the form of information security requirements. We propose an approach that helps select and balance information security software requirements (iSSR) and information security training requirements (iSTR) according to the information security performance of end users. The approach was tested in an experiment involving 128 IS professionals. The results showed that using the proposed approach helps IS professionals with limited experience in information security make significantly better decisions regarding iSSR and iSTR.