Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists最新文献

{"title":"Benchmarking optimised algorithms for transitive closure","authors":"V. Pieterse, L. Cleophas","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129425","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the impact of using different algorithmic techniques and data representations in algorithms to calculate the transitive closure of a finite binary relation. These techniques are change monitor, loop fusion, loop tiling and short-circuiting. We explain them and how they are applied in the algorithms. We measured the impact of these techniques on the elapsed time to execute the algorithms, using C++ implementations with two different data representations, and using various data sets. The investigation also covers more basic transitive closure algorithms, and as a result forms a large-scale empirical comparison of such algorithms.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123574911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mobile news service adoption: a South African case study","authors":"R. Adam, Lisa F. Seymour","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129422","url":null,"abstract":"Media freedom encourages development of society, leading to growing and sustainable democracies and healthy social, political, and economic engagement Mobile news services (MNSs) are one means to reach out to citizens to share news and provide citizens with a forum to critique and voice opinion. Current findings suggest that there is minimal research and understanding of the adoption of these mobile news services. The purpose of this study was to propose and validate a theoretical framework that articulates factors influencing the adoption of mobile news services in South Africa. A review of the literature on mobile news services and technology adoption helped to identify potential factors. Multiple interpretive case studies were conducted to understand the adoption of mobile news services within the local context. Thematic analysis supported the identification of key influencing factors of MNS adoption. The resultant MNS adoption model offers new insight in the adoption of mobile news services in terms of social factors, attributes of adopters and attributes of innovation. The results are also useful to mobile news service providers, designers, and developers, in their endeavour to satisfy distinct news consumer's needs.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123607853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A new optional parallelism operator in CSP for wireless sensor networks","authors":"T. Steyn, S. Gruner","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129431","url":null,"abstract":"Simulation from formal specification is an important topic in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) research. Classical Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) are often used to write these specifications, but their concurrency operators are either too restrictive, or too lenient, to directly describe real-world WSN scenarios. In this paper we introduce a new optional parallel operator, based on previous work, that allows a process to 'opt out' of the all-synchronisation, as it would happen in real WSN scenarios where some node may run out of resources whilst other nodes continue to function. For its formal semantics, a translation of optional parallelism into classical CSP has been defined. This work also resulted in a notion of directional multi-way synchronisation, enabling various interesting broadcasting properties. Our evaluation of various WSN topology scenarios showed success in terms of deadlock freedom and trace refinement.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124007547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making software humane: the effects of affective and anthropomorphism on the adoption of an m-health application","authors":"J. Coetzer, L. Grobbelaar, M. Masinde","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129447","url":null,"abstract":"With the proliferation of mobile devices, provision of M-health care services has become feasible even in the remotest villages of Africa. Research however shows that many M-health initiatives have not been adopted and used effectively especially in rural communities. Some of the factors contributing to this range from a lack of knowledge with regard the use of technology, literacy challenges, possible fear of technology, to a lack of information regarding these interventions.\u0000 In this paper, we demonstrate that an initiative designed to recognize usability as its core function plays a critical role in the use and adoption of M-health interventions in rural communities. Two versions of an M-health intervention were developed and two interface design principles that may have an impact on users' emotions applied, namely affective design and anthropomorphism.\u0000 Using the Sethakeng rural community in the Northern Cape (South Africa) as the case study, we were able to determine the extent to which both anthropomorphism and affective design influence the adoption of an M-Health application. Further, the research revealed that because of its ability to include human-like qualities to non-living objects, anthropomorphism is a more effective method for designing M-Health applications targeting rural communities.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129143771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agile and hackathons: a case study of emergent practices at the FNB codefest","authors":"P. Alkema, S.P. Levitt, J. Chen","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129430","url":null,"abstract":"Hackathons and similar innovation contests can accelerate the development of software prototypes to help large corporates such as banks experiment with new technology. These companies may also be adopting Agile in their existing software development practices and it is worth exploring the usage of Agile principles at such events and whether hackathons can assist overall Agile adoption. FNB is one of the largest and most innovative banks in South Africa and runs an internal hackathon called Codefest to enhance IT innovation in product design and internal operations. The event attracts over 200 internal developers who compete in teams during a 48-hour coding marathon. South African banks, including FNB, are also adopting Agile practices to improve speed and quality in their software development lifecycle. Codefest was not intended to help drive FNB's Agile journey, however some of its principles and practices were observed as having naturally occurred during the event.\u0000 This article explores the emergence of Agile practices at FNB Codefest as observed during publicly broadcast interviews with various participants and stakeholders. The spoken words of the interviewees were analysed for dominant concepts using the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto as a coding framework. The interviews provided practical observations of the environment at Codefest which was found to encourage certain Agile principles and practices. Adoption of Agile by teams also correlated with their level of success in the Codefest competition however more research would be needed to determine whether Codefest accelerated the bank's overall Agile journey.\u0000 Three main Agile concepts were found to be naturally cultivated by the environment of Codefest; collaboration, motivation and elements of technical excellence. Collaboration was observed between IT teams, between business and IT teams and between business teams, while also creating a model of conditions for how teams could operate during business as usual. Intrinsic motivators such as autonomy, mastery and purpose were also observed at codefest, supporting the notion of knowledge worker motivation as being crucial in setting up successful software development teams. Elements of technical excellence correlated to Agile through methodologies such as Extreme Programming or Scrum while quality practices were enabled by team practices such as communication and planning. Codefest was also mapped to a proposed model of Agile environments while considerations for such contests and suggestions for next steps are also presented. These include (1) using Codefest to raise awareness of Agile, (2) understanding how extrinsic motivators affect Codefest and Agile, (3) using Codefest participants to share and drive technical excellence and (4) Agile training before Codefest.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132232930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The adoption of ICT for incident reporting at a South African mining company","authors":"Rethabile Thwala, F. Adebesin","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3131470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3131470","url":null,"abstract":"South African mining companies are required by law to keep record of all incidences, whether minor or major that occurred underground during the extraction of mineral resources. Reports on mine incidents must be provided to the Department of Mineral Resources as and when required. The process of compiling and producing incident reports is often laborious and error-prone, primarily because it is often done manually. This paper reports on a study that investigates end-users' acceptance and usage of an incident reporting system at a South African mine. The results showed discrepancies between participants' perceived usefulness and ease of use of the system, and their attitude toward, intention to use and perception of the system's relevance to their work.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"287 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121489845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Turning evil regexes harmless","authors":"Brink van der Merwe, Nicolaas Weideman, Martin Berglund","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129440","url":null,"abstract":"We explore the relationship between ambiguity in automata and regular expressions on the one hand, and the matching time of backtracking regular expression matchers on the other. We focus in particular on the extreme cases where we have either an exponential amount of ambiguity or no ambiguity at all. We also investigate techniques to reduce or remove ambiguity from regular expressions, which can then be used to transform regular expressions which might be exploited by using algorithmic complexity, into harmless equivalent expressions.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117223457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Automatically changing modules in modular ontology development and management","authors":"Z. C. Khan, C. Maria Keet","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129443","url":null,"abstract":"Modularity has been proposed as a solution to deal with large ontologies. This requires, various module management tasks, such as swapping an outdated module for a new one or a computationally costly one for a leaner fragment. No mechanism exists to exchange an arbitrary module automatically. To solve this manual task, we modify the SUGOI algorithm into SUGOI-Gen; with SUGOI-Gen, one can swap any module within a modular system, implemented it, and wrapped a GUI around it. We carried out an experimental evaluation with six ontologies covering three different use-cases to determine whether arbitrary interchangeability is practically doable, and to what extent such changes affect the quality of the module and automated reasoning over it. The results are positive, with the success rate varying between 22--100% depending on the number of mappings between the source and target module. The evaluation also revealed that the interchangeability does indeed have an impact on a module's metrics. Regarding reasoning, when comparing an original ontology to one where a module has been swapped, the processing time is greatly improved for all except one of the swapped modules in the set.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127217991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charting the path towards effective knowledge visualisations","authors":"K. Renaud, J. V. Biljon","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129421","url":null,"abstract":"Knowledge visualisation is enjoying increasing attention from researchers and organisations, due to its potential for expediting knowledge transfer. Despite the availability of many information visualisation guidelines, those who are tasked to produce knowledge visualisations currently do so without any formal guidance. These unguided efforts do not reliably deliver efficacious visualisations.\u0000 The research reported in this paper sought first to delineate the essence of knowledge visualisation. We captured this essence in the form of a comprehensive definition as well as a list of essential criteria exhibited by effective knowledge visualisations. Using these, we moved on to address the lack of guidance by producing a set of knowledge visualisation guidelines. We report on how we derived and evaluated these guidelines.\u0000 The guidelines, despite the rigorous derivation process, did not help the evaluators to produce effective visualisations. We reflect on the reasons for this and report on a number of lessons learned during the process. We conclude by suggesting a direction for future research.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127286086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Applications in accessibility of text-to-speech synthesis for South African languages: initial system integration and user engagement","authors":"Georg I. Schlünz, Ilana Wilken, C. Moors, T. Gumede, W. V. D. Walt, Karen Calteaux, K. Tönsing, Karin van Niekerk","doi":"10.1145/3129416.3129445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3129416.3129445","url":null,"abstract":"Persons with certain disabilities face barriers to information access and interpersonal communication. Assistive technologies provide workaround solutions to these problems. Augmentative and alternative communication systems aid the person with little or no functional speech to speak out loud. Screen readers and accessible e-books allow a print-disabled (visually-impaired, partially-sighted or dyslexic) individual to read text material by listening to audio versions. Text-to-speech synthesis converts electronic text into artificial speech and is used as the vocalisation component in the assistive technologies. For these three use cases, we report on an initial round of system integration and user engagement of the Qfrency text-to-speech voices that provide access to synthetic speech in the South African languages.","PeriodicalId":269578,"journal":{"name":"Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123256065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}