The Internet has become the standard infrastructure for all kinds of communications. At the same time, the emergence of cloud computing and web services has significantly strengthened requirements for the Internet to display greater robustness to disruptions and higher flexibility to support...

Machine learning has become one of the most active and exciting areas of computer science research, in large part because of its wide-spread applicability to problems as diverse as natural language processing, speech recognition, spam detection, search, computer vision, gene discovery, medical...

The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is generally interpreted as the set of procedures that transform inputs into outputs and as the method by which information systems are built. In the software development industry, the SDLC not only produces information systems but also is itself a type...

Intelligent Product Recommendation Agents have been used for some time now by large, well known Internet businesses such as Amazon and Netflix. Unfortunately there is little research assessing the effectiveness of these systems in influencing online consumer behavior. Businesses that sell...

Software testing, one of the most important methods for quality assurance, has become too expensive and error prone for complex modern software systems. Test automation aims to reduce the costs of software testing and to improve its reliability. Despite advances in test automation, there are...

During the past two decades, increasingly powerful and capable information technologies have made information more accessible and valuable so that it has become the prime resource for business; ahead of the traditional resources of land, labour and capital. Improved information acquisition,...

Although existing laboratory research shows that software is often used inefficiently, relatively little is known about (a) how efficiently software is used in a real work environment and (b) the factors that influence the efficiency of individual users. The present research consists of an...

To sustain a market for software components, component producers and consumers must agree on contracts. These contracts must specify each party's obligations. To ensure that both sides meet their obligations, they must also agree on standards for monitoring contracts and assigning blame for...

Peer-to-peer systems, networks of egalitarian nodes without a central authority, can achieve massive scalability and fault tolerance through the pooling together of individual resources. Unfortunately, most nodes represent self-interested, or rational, parties that will attempt to maximize their...

Disk schedulers in operating systems are generally work-conserving; they schedule a request immediately after the previous request has finished. Such schedulers need multiple outstanding requests to make good decisions. Unfortunately, many applications issue synchronous, almost-continuous...