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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the latest research related to secure routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and propose a new approach that can achieve a higher security level compared to the existing one. One of the main security issues in WSNs is the security of routing protocols. A typical WSN consists of a large number of small size, low-power, low-cost sensor devices. These devices are very resource-constrained and usually use cheap short-range radios to communicate with each other in an ad hoc fashion thus, achieving security in these networks is a big challenge, which is open for research.

The route updates and data messages of the protocol are authenticated using Edwards-curves Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA). Routing protocols play an essential role in WSNs, they ensure the delivery of the sensed data from the remote sensor nodes to back-end systems via a data sink. Routing protocols depend on route updates received from neighboring nodes to determine the best path to the sink. Manipulating these updates by inserting rouge nodes in the network that advertise false updates can lead to a catastrophic impact on the compromised WSN performance.

As a result, a new secure energy-aware routing protocol (SEARP) is proposed, which uses security enhanced clustering algorithm and EdDSA to authenticate route advertisements and messages. A secure clustering algorithm is also used as part of the proposed protocol to conserve energy, prolong network lifetime and counteract wormhole attacks.

In this paper, a SEARP is proposed to address network layer security attacks in WSNs. A secure clustering algorithm is also used as part of the proposed protocol to conserve energy, prolong network lifetime and counteract wormhole attacks. A simulation has been carried out using Sensoria Simulator and the performance evaluation has been discussed.

Manufacturers of smartphone devices are increasingly utilising a diverse range of sensors. This innovation has enabled developers to accurately determine a user’s current context. One area that has been significantly enhanced by the increased use of context in mobile applications is tourism. Traditionally, tour guide applications rely heavily on location and essentially ignore other types of context. This has led to problems of inappropriate suggestions and tourists experiencing information overload. These problems can be mitigated if appropriate personalisation and content filtering is performed. This research proposes an intelligent context-aware recommender system that aims to minimise the highlighted problems.

Intelligent reasoning was performed to determine the weight or importance of different types of environmental and temporal context. Environmental context such as the weather outside can have an impact on the suitability of tourist attractions. Temporal context can be the time of day or season; this is particularly important in tourism as it is largely a seasonal activity. Social context such as social media can potentially provide an indication of the “mood” of an attraction. These types of contexts are combined with location data and the context of the user to provide a more effective recommendation to tourists. The evaluation of the system is a user study that utilised both qualitative and quantitative methods, involving 40 participants of differing gender, age group, number of children and marital status.

This study revealed that the participants selected the context-based recommendation at a significantly higher level than either location-based recommendation or random recommendation. It was clear from analysing the questionnaire results that location is not the only influencing factor when deciding on a tourist attraction to visit.

To effectively determine the success of the recommender system, various combinations of contextual conditions were simulated. Simulating contexts provided the ability to randomly assign different contextual conditions to ensure an effective recommendation under all circumstances. This is not a reflection of the “real world”, because in a “real world” field study the majority of the contextual conditions will be similar. For example, if a tourist visited numerous attractions in one day, then it is likely that the weather conditions would be the same for the majority of the day, especially in the summer season.

Utilising this type of recommender system would allow the tourists to “go their own way” rather than following a prescribed route. By using this system, tourists can co-create their own experience using both social media and mobile technology. This increases the need to retain user preferences and have it available for multiple destinations. The application will be able to learn further through multiple trips, and as a result, the personalisation aspect will be incrementally refined over time. This extensible aspect is increasingly important as personalisation is gradually more effective as more data is collated.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge that currently exists regarding the study of utilising contextual conditions in mobile recommender systems. The novelty of the system proposed by this research is the combination of various types of temporal, environmental and personal context data to inform a recommendation in an extensible tourism application. Also, performing sentiment analysis on social media data has not previously been integrated into a tourist recommender system. The evaluation concludes that this research provides clear evidence for the benefits of combining social media data with environmental and temporal context to provide an effective recommendation.

Libraries as they are known today can be defined by the term Library 1.0. This defines the way resources are kept on shelves or at a computer behind a login. These resources can be taken from a shelf, checked out to the librarian, taken home for a certain length of time and absorbed, and then taken back to the library for someone else to use. Library 1.0 is a one‐directional service that takes people to the information that they require. Library 2.0 – or L2 as it is now more commonly addressed as – aims to take the information to the people by bringing the library service to the internet and getting the users more involved by encouraging feedback participation. This paper seeks to present an overview of Library 2.0.

This paper presents an overview of Web 2.0 including definitions, technologies involved and sites currently advocated as examples of Web 2.0.

The major difference between Library 1.0 and L2 is that Library 1.0 only allows for a one‐way flow of information while L2 is a read‐write library that gives library users the power to decide the service that they get. L2 reinforces the role libraries play in the community by building on today's best and continually improving the service. L2 can be summarized as being user‐driven and aiming to save each library user time in retrieving information.

Libraries have been around for centuries and are considered places in which books, journals, CDs, etc. are kept for reference or for borrowing by the public. The term L2 was believed to have been first made by Michael Casey in his blog LibraryCrunch. Chad and Paul Miller describe Library 2.0 (L2) as a concept, very different from the service one knows today, that operates according to the expectations of today's users. They state that with this concept the library will make information available wherever and whenever the user requires it. One point to note here is that this concept is not about replacing the 1.0 technology already being used but rather about adding additional functionality.

Seeks to demonstrate how, with regard to viewing video on the internet, the delay experienced, whilst the stream is being buffered, can be virtually eradicated.

Documents a scheduled rich site summary (RSS) multimedia prototype which utilizes idle computer time (at night) to subscribe to media RSS channels in order to download audio and video content.

Finds that, a part from involving zero display, the quality of the operation is controlled only by the size of the hard disk not by the capacity of the connection.

The system documented here will serve users at either end of the RSS feed chain.

The automated teller machine (ATM) has become an integral part of our society. However, using the ATM can often be a frustrating experience as people frequently reinsert cards to conduct multiple transactions. This has led to the research question of whether ATM menus are designed in an optimal manner. This paper aims to address the issues.

This research set out to investigate a number of high‐street bank ATM menus. The design of each banks menu system was recreated in a laboratory environment and user evaluation observations were made. The findings were then used to create a “best‐of‐breed” ATM and this was evaluated with respect to usability against the current breed of ATM menu.

An optimal ATM navigation menu was designed, which ultimately reduces transaction times. The user is always prompted after a transaction asking the question “Would you like another transaction?” This is also the case when withdrawing cash, eliminating the problem of having to reinsert their card for another transaction.

The main objective was to design a “best‐of‐breed” ATM menu system. This was achieved in the form of the OptiATM. The OptiATM menu design, outperformed the navigation systems on the existing bank menus and was found to be a more usable and efficient system than existing ATMs. The new system was designed to resolve the problem of users having to reinsert their ATM cards to carry out another transaction and to speed‐up transaction times.

Student dropout rates have been a source of contention throughout many Universities worldwide. Universities recognize this fact and many have acted to improve their induction process for students joining the University in the first year. However, student dropout rates continue to be higher than acceptable and it is in this context that this project has been undertaken. However, quite often there is no additional support provided to overseas students arriving on the campus. Frequently, these students are taken into final year and miss all the inductions aimed at year 1 students. The purpose of this research is to investigate the feasibility of designing an information portal in the Chinese language to assist new arrivals on campus.

The authors started with the premise that any additional information that can make life easier for these foreign language students is to be welcomed. Mobile communications is a continually growing sector in industry and a wide variety of visual services such as video‐on‐demand have been created which are limited by low‐bandwidth network infrastructures. The distinction between mobile phones and personal device assistants has already become blurred with pervasive computing being the term coined to describe the tendency to integrate computing and communication into everyday life.

The authors believe that placing location based campus information on a mobile device outlining key information concerning the University of Ulster at the Magee campus in the Chinese language will assist overseas students greatly in the crucial early days of arrival at the University.

This paper outlines the unique implementation of a multilingual Chinese–English Campus information portal for mobile devices which assists fresh arrivals in locating important information about the university. The research finds that students are assisted by mobile portals created in their native language directing them to important sources of information on campus.

The interoperability of cloud data between web applications and mobile devices has vastly improved over recent years. The popularity of social media, smartphones and cloud-based web services have contributed to the level of integration that can be achieved between applications. This paper investigates the potential security issues of OAuth, an authorisation framework for granting third-party applications revocable access to user data. OAuth has rapidly become an interim de facto standard for protecting access to web API data. Vendors have implemented OAuth before the open standard was officially published. To evaluate whether the OAuth 2.0 specification is truly ready for industry application, an entire OAuth client server environment was developed and validated against the speciation threat model. The research also included the analysis of the security features of several popular OAuth integrated websites and comparing those to the threat model. High-impacting exploits leading to account hijacking were identified with a number of major online publications. It is hypothesised that the OAuth 2.0 specification can be a secure authorisation mechanism when implemented correctly.

To analyse the security of OAuth implementations in industry a list of the 50 most popular websites in Ireland was retrieved from the statistical website Alexa (Noureddine and Bashroush, 2011). Each site was analysed to identify if it utilised OAuth. Out of the 50 sites, 21 were identified with OAuth support. Each vulnerability in the threat model was then tested against each OAuth-enabled site. To test the robustness of the OAuth framework, an entire OAuth environment was required. The proposed solution would compose of three parts: a client application, an authorisation server and a resource server. The client application needed to consume OAuth-enabled services. The authorisation server had to manage access to the resource server. The resource server had to expose data from the database based on the authorisation the user would be given from the authorisation server. It was decided that the client application would consume emails from Google’s Gmail API. The authorisation and resource server were modelled around a basic task-tracking web application. The client application would also consume task data from the developed resource server. The client application would also support Single Sign On for Google and Facebook, as well as a developed identity provider “MyTasks”. The authorisation server delegated authorisation to the client application and stored cryptography information for each access grant. The resource server validated the supplied access token via public cryptography and returned the requested data.

Two sites out of the 21 were found to be susceptible to some form of attack, meaning that 10.5 per cent were vulnerable. In total, 18 per cent of the world’s 50 most popular sites were in the list of 21 OAuth-enabled sites. The OAuth 2.0 specification is still very much in its infancy, but when implemented correctly, it can provide a relatively secure and interoperable authentication delegation mechanism. The IETF are currently addressing issues and expansions in their working drafts. Once a strict level of conformity is achieved between vendors and vulnerabilities are mitigated, it is likely that the framework will change the way we access data on the web and other devices.

OAuth is flexible, in that it offers extensions to support varying situations and existing technologies. A disadvantage of this flexibility is that new extensions typically bring new security exploits. Members of the IETF OAuth Working Group are constantly refining the draft specifications and are identifying new threats to the expanding functionality. OAuth provides a flexible authentication mechanism to protect and delegate access to APIs. It solves the password re-use across multiple accounts problem and stops the user from having to disclose their credentials to third parties. Filtering access to information by scope and giving the user the option to revoke access at any point gives the user control of their data. OAuth does raise security concerns, such as defying phishing education, but there are always going to be security issues with any authentication technology. Although several high impacting vulnerabilities were identified in industry, the developed solution proves the predicted hypothesis that a secure OAuth environment can be built when implemented correctly. Developers must conform to the defined specification and are responsible for validating their implementation against the given threat model. OAuth is an evolving authorisation framework. It is still in its infancy, and much work needs to be done in the specification to achieve stricter validation and vendor conformity. Vendor implementations need to become better aligned in order to provider a rich and truly interoperable authorisation mechanism. Once these issues are resolved, OAuth will be on track for becoming the definitive authentication standard on the web.

Electronic mail (e‐mail) and messaging systems are a powerful means of communication which are fast become a primary means of communication. This paper aims to describe the need for expression in e‐mail.

This paper describes the need for expression in e‐mail and the development of a personalised e‐mail system. A survey is carried out to comprehend the derived meanings from visuals; as a result the prototype is formed.

This paper presents a prototype which utilises the idea of reading pictures as sentences and the semiotic and linguistic meaning derived from those sentences. The system aims to interpret the sender's thoughts and convey their emotion and personality through a combination of graphical components, image, and expressive typography. In contrast with the new developing successful language that is rapidly spreading in the use of mobile devices, this personalized e‐mail introduces a visual language that people will acquire in using their e‐mails. Initial findings are presented from exercises of visual literacy, where the viewer has to play a series of matching games with words and images in order to derive each user's meanings and interpretations.

This interactive piece is attempting to transform the static nature of e‐mail into a more dynamic form that can offer new ways to interpret verbal information visually. The device will instill the user's message with more authentic personalities and expressions.

Cognitive semiotics is something designers explore over time with intuition and experience. Introducing and equipping young designers in college, with regard to semiotics would speed up this essential and unavoidable mental process.

This research will accelerate the coming of emotion to computer systems. Graphic design should be viewed from a structuralism perspective as a language system, to extend the understanding of language from a spoken and written system of signs to a manner of visual signals. Designers play a part in reinventing and redefining signs and symbols.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a location determination technology that has been receiving a lot of commercial attention in recent times, especially in the areas of asset tracking and supply chain management. The purpose of this paper is to outline a library prototype that utilises RFID in order to enhance and speed up the current customer book search and identification processes.

The hardware to be used in the design and implementation of the prototypes include a laptop to host the server, a router to create the wireless network, a PDA to host the applications, RFID tags and an RFID reader to carry out the RFID communication.

The functionality and benefits offered by the RFID systems match the needs and areas of improvement for libraries. RFID technology can help streamline major library processes such as stocktaking and book searches. Already approximately 8 per cent of libraries worldwide are using RFID, and it will be incorporated into many items libraries purchase in the future. The development and evaluation of the Library Application has demonstrated that RFID can be successfully integrated into library systems.

RFID systems can be integrated into existing library systems to improve the efficiency of the main processes carried out in any library and increase the quality of services provided. The ability of RFID to uniquely identify every item is very suitable for libraries.

Presents an RFID enabled library system to aid in the speed of identifying and finding books for the customer.