Cornelius Ncube - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Cornelius Ncube
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications
The adoption of Blockchain has caused the organization to rethink how it operates and adds value ... more The adoption of Blockchain has caused the organization to rethink how it operates and adds value to its current processes. Some scholars refer to Blockchain as the Black Swan of the 21 st century, which will have a greater impact than the introduction of the Internet. Currently, there is little discussion about Blockchain technology and the value model approach and how organizations can close the gap between strategy and operational planning to successfully implement this technology in organizations. This paper explores the relationship and implications of Blockchain technology in relation to the value chain model in education. This paper proposes a value modeling approach for implementing Blockchain in the education sector and demonstrates how a solution works in practice. The novelty of the research will be from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The study will appraise enhancement that can be made within the existing literature on Blockchain and the value chain model, and how the alignment of the two concepts can be used to improve the use of the current value chain model in the education sector.
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
Recognition of human activity is a significant area of research with numerous uses. In developed ... more Recognition of human activity is a significant area of research with numerous uses. In developed countries, the rising age of citizens requires the improvement of the medical service structure, which raises the price of resources, both financial and human. In that sense, ambient assisted living (AAL) is a relatively novel information and communication technology (ICT) that presents services and recognizes various products that enable older people and the disabled to live autonomously and improve their quality of life. It further assists in reducing the cost of hospital services. In the AAL environment, various sensors and devices are fixed to gather a broad range of data. Moreover, AAL will be the motivating technology for the latest care models by acting as an adjunct. This will become thought-provoking research in a fast-growing world, but exploring different ADL and self-classification will become a major challenge. This paper proposed a Novel Stacking Classification and Predicti...
As many governments the world over are engaged in an e-Race to provide their citizens, business c... more As many governments the world over are engaged in an e-Race to provide their citizens, business communities and public organizations (i.e. service consumers) with electronic public service delivery (EPSD) information systems, the number and type of devices that can be used to access these services is increasing all the time. The mobility of the service consumers over a wide geographical range raises new essential user and system requirements for EPSD systems. Therefore, in order to address the needs of the “mobile citizen”, this research proposes an infrastructure for developing EPSD systems that are designed to offer service consumers their individualized information or government services wherever they are, whatever time and whatever their connection point or access device used. In this approach, services are created by applications that are dynamically constructed and configured from a set of interconnected COTS-components with the service instances adapted to the access device u...
2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)
The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoSs) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is largely d... more The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoSs) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is largely driven by global societal needs including energy-water-food nexus, population demographics, global climate, integrated transport, security and social activity. However, due to their scale, structural and functional complexity and emergent properties, these global spanning Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult for current requirements engineering (RE) practices to handle. In this paper, we firstly introduce SoSE as an emerging discipline and key characteristics of SoSs. We then highlight the challenges that the RE discipline must respond to. We discuss some weaknesses of current RE techniques and approaches to cope with the complexity of SoSs. We then argue that there is a need for the global RE community to evolve current RE approaches and to develop new ways of thinking, new RE capabilities and possibly a new RE science as a key mechanism for addressing requirements engineering complexities posed by Systems of Systems. We then outline a requirements engineering perspective and research agenda that identifies 'top-10' research themes informed by a cluster of four Systems of Systems Engineering projects funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 research programme.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is st... more Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is still a knowledge gap with regard to mobile game user behavior and methodologies for predicting the likely success of mobile game apps during the development phase. This paper analyses game features and (Acquisition, Retention and Monetization) ARM strategies as primary drivers of mobile game application success. This study addresses these challenges through data driven research of the mobile gaming application market, mobile gaming application features, user acquisition and retention trends, and monetization strategies using the CRISP-DM model for data mining in order to prove a successful method for predictions of mobile game application success. A prediction model is developed then applied to 50 games. The prediction of successful mobile game application from a sample of 50 games is achieved by running a batch prediction for the game features dataset and a separate batch prediction for the user behavior dataset. The model produced a total of 9 titles from the sample with the highest probability of success. The significant outcomes for the comparisons included the predominance of the Social Networking Features, Offers, and (In App Purchase) IAP 90% to 100% of the sample. A model of mobile game app success prediction based upon the game features values that are created is proposed.
Requirements Engineering, 2009
Most current research in Component-Based Systems Engineering (CBSE) focuses on design and integra... more Most current research in Component-Based Systems Engineering (CBSE) focuses on design and integration processes. There is little interest in the requirements engineering and product evaluation/selection processes that must precede design and integration. Also most current methods and tools support systems design and integration but neglect the requirements engineering and product evaluation/selection processes. However, in spite of this lack of focus on requirements engineering, a consensus seems to be emerging that the CBSE development process should be an iterative one of requirements engineering, systems design, product evaluation/selection and systems integration. This paper proposes a new method, PORE, to address the lack of requirements engineering methods and product evaluation/selection process guidance for the CBSE process. The paper ends with a `vision' for future research directions for component-based systems engineering development process. Keywords: PORE, systems ...
2019 Sixth HCT Information Technology Trends (ITT)
The Government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moving towards the Smart City and integrating... more The Government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moving towards the Smart City and integrating Blockchain (BC) technology among its services to the public. In April 2018, the UAE government launched a Blockchain Strategy of 2021. Under this initiative, 50 percent of government transactions will be processed over a BC platform. Eleven billion dirhams are expected to be saved in transactions and documents prepared in the government sector. The UAE 2021 strategy includes four pillars, focusing on residence happiness, government efficiency, advanced legislation, and global entrepreneurship. In October 2016, the emirate of Dubai, launched a local BC strategy to become the first energy-powered city that leads the future economy by 2020. This motivation placed the Government of UAE as a unique and pioneered country in innovation and enabling the ecosystem to be addressed in both the public and private sectors. This strategy is based on three domains: government effectiveness, industry innovation, and international, domestic leadership. BC projects will be experimenting throughout the country in many sectors such as energy, transportation, logistics, tourism, health, education and employment, economic development, safety and justice, social services, municipal and land works. This paper study the state of art of the UAE strategy towards adopting BC technology among all its entities. A survey has been conducted to evaluate the strategic effectiveness of this new technology. The study involves a combination of 71 public and private companies that operate in the UAE. The outcome shows that there is a need to integrate this technology. At the same time, the survey concluded that 92.0% of the companies are aware of the technology. It also highlighted that 55% of companies suffer from the lack of experienced consultants and outsources their services. The survey confirmed that BC technology had been used in different industrial use cases such as supply chain (35%), Internet of things (27%), and financial transactions (25%).
An increasing number of organisations are procuring off-the-shelf software products from commerci... more An increasing number of organisations are procuring off-the-shelf software products from commercial suppliers. However, there has been a lack of methods and software tools for such requirements acquisition, product selection and product procurement. This thesis proposes a new method called PORE (Procurement-Oriented Requirements Engineering) which integrates existing requirements engineering techniques with those from knowledge engineering, feature analysis, multi-criteria decision-making and argumentation approaches to address the lack of guidance for acquiring requirements to enable evaluation and selection of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. PORE is designed in part from conclusions drawn from real-world case studies of requirements acquisition for complex software product selection. Such studies are reported in this thesis. The PORE method is part goal-driven and part context-driven, in that it exploits models of the candidate COTS software and customer requirements as ...
Emergence of Pharmaceutical Industry Growth with Industrial IoT Approach
This paper presents the work undertaken so far in the formulation of a Strategic Research Agenda ... more This paper presents the work undertaken so far in the formulation of a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for research in Systems of Systems Engineering in the EU. The T-AREA-SoS project is introduced to provide a context, together with a section on Drivers for Change which the SRA needs to take into account. The strategy and process for the generation of the SRA is described, followed by details of outputs to date and the potential benefits it is believed would accrue from the implementation of the SRA.
This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in... more This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in the forthcoming decade. It describes the increasing shift towards software engineering based on COTS software packages, the limitations of current COTS/component-based software engineering methods and research efforts, and proposes a new research agenda to address the problems which arise from a software engineering process based on the reuse of COTS software and software components. The focus of the proposed research is how can we develop complex software systems by integrating together different combinations of COTS software packages and software components. 1. The Changing Face of Software Engineering There are few methods, guidelines or environments that support the selection of COTS and component software. This is an increasing problem. Forrester Research estimate that 70% of European software development will be componentor COTSbased by 2003. The coverage of the problem is also la...
Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is st... more Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is still a knowledge gap with regard to mobile game user behavior and methodologies for predicting the likely success of mobile game apps during the development phase. This paper analyses game features and (Acquisition, Retention and Monetization) ARM strategies as primary drivers of mobile game application success. This study addresses these challenges through data driven research of the mobile gaming application market, mobile gaming application features, user acquisition and retention trends, and moneti-zation strategies using the CRISP-DM model for data mining in order to prove a successful method for predictions of mobile game application success. A prediction model is developed then applied to 50 games. The prediction of successful mobile game application from a sample of 50 games is achieved by running a batch prediction for the game features dataset and a separate batch prediction for...
IEEE Access
Malware is 'malicious software' programs that carry out many of the cyberattacks on the Internet,... more Malware is 'malicious software' programs that carry out many of the cyberattacks on the Internet, including cybercrime, fraud, scams and nation-state cyberwar. These malicious software programs come in a wide range of different classifications such as viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware, botnet malware, ransomware, Rootkit, etc. Ransomware is class of malware that holds the victim's data hostage by encrypting the data on a user's computer to make it unavailable to the user and only decrypt it after the user pays a ransom in the form of a sum of money. To avoid detection, different variants of ransomware utilise one or more techniques in their attack flow including Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. There is, therefore, a need to understand the techniques used ransomware development and their deployment strategy in order to understand their attack flow better to develop appropriate countermeasures. In this paper, we propose DNAact-Ran, A Digital DNA Sequencing Engine for Ransomware Detection Using Machine Learning. DNAact-Ran utilises Digital DNA sequencing design constraints and k-mer frequency vector. To measure the efficacy of the proposed approach, we evaluated DNAact-Run on 582 ransomware and 942 goodware instances to measure the performance of precision, recall, f-measure and accuracy. Compared to other methods, the evaluation results show that DNAact-Run can predict and detect ransomware accurately and effectively. INDEX TERMS Ransomware, digital DNA sequence, machine learning, active learning.
This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in... more This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in the forthcoming decade. It describes the increasing shift towards software engineering based on COTS software packages, the limitations of current COTS/component-based software engineering methods and research efforts, and proposes a new research agenda to address the problems which arise from a software engineering process based on the reuse of COTS software and software components. The focus of the proposed research is how can we develop complex software systems by integrating together different combinations of COTS software packages and software components.
The i* approach, although the result of mature research, has yet to be applied widely in practice... more The i* approach, although the result of mature research, has yet to be applied widely in practice. This chapter reports three major industrial projects in which we applied i* to specify complex socio-technical systems. It provides the rationale for adopting i* and results that were obtained in the projects. From these experiences we report and demonstrate 10 lessons learned about using i* effectively in industrial projects, and the benefits that can be gained from its effective use. We believe that these lessons have broader implications for the uptake of requirements modelling techniques.
Component Based Software Engineering, Jun 7, 2001
E Commerce E Business and E Government, 2003
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications
The adoption of Blockchain has caused the organization to rethink how it operates and adds value ... more The adoption of Blockchain has caused the organization to rethink how it operates and adds value to its current processes. Some scholars refer to Blockchain as the Black Swan of the 21 st century, which will have a greater impact than the introduction of the Internet. Currently, there is little discussion about Blockchain technology and the value model approach and how organizations can close the gap between strategy and operational planning to successfully implement this technology in organizations. This paper explores the relationship and implications of Blockchain technology in relation to the value chain model in education. This paper proposes a value modeling approach for implementing Blockchain in the education sector and demonstrates how a solution works in practice. The novelty of the research will be from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The study will appraise enhancement that can be made within the existing literature on Blockchain and the value chain model, and how the alignment of the two concepts can be used to improve the use of the current value chain model in the education sector.
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
Recognition of human activity is a significant area of research with numerous uses. In developed ... more Recognition of human activity is a significant area of research with numerous uses. In developed countries, the rising age of citizens requires the improvement of the medical service structure, which raises the price of resources, both financial and human. In that sense, ambient assisted living (AAL) is a relatively novel information and communication technology (ICT) that presents services and recognizes various products that enable older people and the disabled to live autonomously and improve their quality of life. It further assists in reducing the cost of hospital services. In the AAL environment, various sensors and devices are fixed to gather a broad range of data. Moreover, AAL will be the motivating technology for the latest care models by acting as an adjunct. This will become thought-provoking research in a fast-growing world, but exploring different ADL and self-classification will become a major challenge. This paper proposed a Novel Stacking Classification and Predicti...
As many governments the world over are engaged in an e-Race to provide their citizens, business c... more As many governments the world over are engaged in an e-Race to provide their citizens, business communities and public organizations (i.e. service consumers) with electronic public service delivery (EPSD) information systems, the number and type of devices that can be used to access these services is increasing all the time. The mobility of the service consumers over a wide geographical range raises new essential user and system requirements for EPSD systems. Therefore, in order to address the needs of the “mobile citizen”, this research proposes an infrastructure for developing EPSD systems that are designed to offer service consumers their individualized information or government services wherever they are, whatever time and whatever their connection point or access device used. In this approach, services are created by applications that are dynamically constructed and configured from a set of interconnected COTS-components with the service instances adapted to the access device u...
2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)
The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoSs) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is largely d... more The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoSs) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is largely driven by global societal needs including energy-water-food nexus, population demographics, global climate, integrated transport, security and social activity. However, due to their scale, structural and functional complexity and emergent properties, these global spanning Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult for current requirements engineering (RE) practices to handle. In this paper, we firstly introduce SoSE as an emerging discipline and key characteristics of SoSs. We then highlight the challenges that the RE discipline must respond to. We discuss some weaknesses of current RE techniques and approaches to cope with the complexity of SoSs. We then argue that there is a need for the global RE community to evolve current RE approaches and to develop new ways of thinking, new RE capabilities and possibly a new RE science as a key mechanism for addressing requirements engineering complexities posed by Systems of Systems. We then outline a requirements engineering perspective and research agenda that identifies 'top-10' research themes informed by a cluster of four Systems of Systems Engineering projects funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 research programme.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is st... more Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is still a knowledge gap with regard to mobile game user behavior and methodologies for predicting the likely success of mobile game apps during the development phase. This paper analyses game features and (Acquisition, Retention and Monetization) ARM strategies as primary drivers of mobile game application success. This study addresses these challenges through data driven research of the mobile gaming application market, mobile gaming application features, user acquisition and retention trends, and monetization strategies using the CRISP-DM model for data mining in order to prove a successful method for predictions of mobile game application success. A prediction model is developed then applied to 50 games. The prediction of successful mobile game application from a sample of 50 games is achieved by running a batch prediction for the game features dataset and a separate batch prediction for the user behavior dataset. The model produced a total of 9 titles from the sample with the highest probability of success. The significant outcomes for the comparisons included the predominance of the Social Networking Features, Offers, and (In App Purchase) IAP 90% to 100% of the sample. A model of mobile game app success prediction based upon the game features values that are created is proposed.
Requirements Engineering, 2009
Most current research in Component-Based Systems Engineering (CBSE) focuses on design and integra... more Most current research in Component-Based Systems Engineering (CBSE) focuses on design and integration processes. There is little interest in the requirements engineering and product evaluation/selection processes that must precede design and integration. Also most current methods and tools support systems design and integration but neglect the requirements engineering and product evaluation/selection processes. However, in spite of this lack of focus on requirements engineering, a consensus seems to be emerging that the CBSE development process should be an iterative one of requirements engineering, systems design, product evaluation/selection and systems integration. This paper proposes a new method, PORE, to address the lack of requirements engineering methods and product evaluation/selection process guidance for the CBSE process. The paper ends with a `vision' for future research directions for component-based systems engineering development process. Keywords: PORE, systems ...
2019 Sixth HCT Information Technology Trends (ITT)
The Government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moving towards the Smart City and integrating... more The Government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moving towards the Smart City and integrating Blockchain (BC) technology among its services to the public. In April 2018, the UAE government launched a Blockchain Strategy of 2021. Under this initiative, 50 percent of government transactions will be processed over a BC platform. Eleven billion dirhams are expected to be saved in transactions and documents prepared in the government sector. The UAE 2021 strategy includes four pillars, focusing on residence happiness, government efficiency, advanced legislation, and global entrepreneurship. In October 2016, the emirate of Dubai, launched a local BC strategy to become the first energy-powered city that leads the future economy by 2020. This motivation placed the Government of UAE as a unique and pioneered country in innovation and enabling the ecosystem to be addressed in both the public and private sectors. This strategy is based on three domains: government effectiveness, industry innovation, and international, domestic leadership. BC projects will be experimenting throughout the country in many sectors such as energy, transportation, logistics, tourism, health, education and employment, economic development, safety and justice, social services, municipal and land works. This paper study the state of art of the UAE strategy towards adopting BC technology among all its entities. A survey has been conducted to evaluate the strategic effectiveness of this new technology. The study involves a combination of 71 public and private companies that operate in the UAE. The outcome shows that there is a need to integrate this technology. At the same time, the survey concluded that 92.0% of the companies are aware of the technology. It also highlighted that 55% of companies suffer from the lack of experienced consultants and outsources their services. The survey confirmed that BC technology had been used in different industrial use cases such as supply chain (35%), Internet of things (27%), and financial transactions (25%).
An increasing number of organisations are procuring off-the-shelf software products from commerci... more An increasing number of organisations are procuring off-the-shelf software products from commercial suppliers. However, there has been a lack of methods and software tools for such requirements acquisition, product selection and product procurement. This thesis proposes a new method called PORE (Procurement-Oriented Requirements Engineering) which integrates existing requirements engineering techniques with those from knowledge engineering, feature analysis, multi-criteria decision-making and argumentation approaches to address the lack of guidance for acquiring requirements to enable evaluation and selection of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. PORE is designed in part from conclusions drawn from real-world case studies of requirements acquisition for complex software product selection. Such studies are reported in this thesis. The PORE method is part goal-driven and part context-driven, in that it exploits models of the candidate COTS software and customer requirements as ...
Emergence of Pharmaceutical Industry Growth with Industrial IoT Approach
This paper presents the work undertaken so far in the formulation of a Strategic Research Agenda ... more This paper presents the work undertaken so far in the formulation of a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for research in Systems of Systems Engineering in the EU. The T-AREA-SoS project is introduced to provide a context, together with a section on Drivers for Change which the SRA needs to take into account. The strategy and process for the generation of the SRA is described, followed by details of outputs to date and the potential benefits it is believed would accrue from the implementation of the SRA.
This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in... more This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in the forthcoming decade. It describes the increasing shift towards software engineering based on COTS software packages, the limitations of current COTS/component-based software engineering methods and research efforts, and proposes a new research agenda to address the problems which arise from a software engineering process based on the reuse of COTS software and software components. The focus of the proposed research is how can we develop complex software systems by integrating together different combinations of COTS software packages and software components. 1. The Changing Face of Software Engineering There are few methods, guidelines or environments that support the selection of COTS and component software. This is an increasing problem. Forrester Research estimate that 70% of European software development will be componentor COTSbased by 2003. The coverage of the problem is also la...
Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is st... more Even though billions of dollars in revenue have been generated from mobile game apps, there is still a knowledge gap with regard to mobile game user behavior and methodologies for predicting the likely success of mobile game apps during the development phase. This paper analyses game features and (Acquisition, Retention and Monetization) ARM strategies as primary drivers of mobile game application success. This study addresses these challenges through data driven research of the mobile gaming application market, mobile gaming application features, user acquisition and retention trends, and moneti-zation strategies using the CRISP-DM model for data mining in order to prove a successful method for predictions of mobile game application success. A prediction model is developed then applied to 50 games. The prediction of successful mobile game application from a sample of 50 games is achieved by running a batch prediction for the game features dataset and a separate batch prediction for...
IEEE Access
Malware is 'malicious software' programs that carry out many of the cyberattacks on the Internet,... more Malware is 'malicious software' programs that carry out many of the cyberattacks on the Internet, including cybercrime, fraud, scams and nation-state cyberwar. These malicious software programs come in a wide range of different classifications such as viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware, botnet malware, ransomware, Rootkit, etc. Ransomware is class of malware that holds the victim's data hostage by encrypting the data on a user's computer to make it unavailable to the user and only decrypt it after the user pays a ransom in the form of a sum of money. To avoid detection, different variants of ransomware utilise one or more techniques in their attack flow including Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. There is, therefore, a need to understand the techniques used ransomware development and their deployment strategy in order to understand their attack flow better to develop appropriate countermeasures. In this paper, we propose DNAact-Ran, A Digital DNA Sequencing Engine for Ransomware Detection Using Machine Learning. DNAact-Ran utilises Digital DNA sequencing design constraints and k-mer frequency vector. To measure the efficacy of the proposed approach, we evaluated DNAact-Run on 582 ransomware and 942 goodware instances to measure the performance of precision, recall, f-measure and accuracy. Compared to other methods, the evaluation results show that DNAact-Run can predict and detect ransomware accurately and effectively. INDEX TERMS Ransomware, digital DNA sequence, machine learning, active learning.
This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in... more This short paper presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in the forthcoming decade. It describes the increasing shift towards software engineering based on COTS software packages, the limitations of current COTS/component-based software engineering methods and research efforts, and proposes a new research agenda to address the problems which arise from a software engineering process based on the reuse of COTS software and software components. The focus of the proposed research is how can we develop complex software systems by integrating together different combinations of COTS software packages and software components.
The i* approach, although the result of mature research, has yet to be applied widely in practice... more The i* approach, although the result of mature research, has yet to be applied widely in practice. This chapter reports three major industrial projects in which we applied i* to specify complex socio-technical systems. It provides the rationale for adopting i* and results that were obtained in the projects. From these experiences we report and demonstrate 10 lessons learned about using i* effectively in industrial projects, and the benefits that can be gained from its effective use. We believe that these lessons have broader implications for the uptake of requirements modelling techniques.
Component Based Software Engineering, Jun 7, 2001
E Commerce E Business and E Government, 2003