Management Information Systems Commons^™

Top-Down Construction Cost Estimating Model Using An Artificial Neural Network, Douglas D. Gransberg, H. David Jeong, Ilker Karaca, Brendon Gardner

Ilker Karaca

This report contains the information and background on top-down cost estimating using artificial neural networks (ANN)_to enhance the accuracy of MDT early estimates of construction costs. Upon conducting an extensive review of MDT’s budgeting and cost estimating efforts, and following a survey of agency experts on the identification of the most salient project attributes with the dual-objectives of low effort and high accuracy, a rational method for top-down variable selection is proposed. Selected variables were further tested in their explanatory power of construction costs through the application of two cost estimating methodologies—multiple regression and artificial neural network methodologies. Both methods …

Aviation Cybersecurity: An Overview, Gary C. Kessler, J. Philip Craiger

J. Philip Craiger, Ph.D.

Information security—aka cybersecurity—is the most rapidly growing threat to critical infrastructures, including the aviation industry. Due to the plethora of digital devices, ubiquity of the Internet and other networks, and the rapid growth in the adoption of technology, everyone is an information system security manager. Every professional in the aviation and aeronautics industry use computers, mobile devices, tablets, GPS devices, and/or other hardware on a daily basis, as well as go online for a variety of reasons.

Attacks on information have been ongoing since the inception of the industry a hundred years ago, in such forms as intellectual property theft …

Ransomware In Healthcare Facilities: The Future Is Now, Nikki Spence, David P. Paul Iii, Alberto Coustasse

Alberto Coustasse, DrPH, MD, MBA, MPH

Cybercriminals have begun to target the healthcare industry with a type of malware called ransomware, malware that encrypts an infected device and any attached devices or network drives. After encryption, cybercriminals demand a sum of money, also known as a “ransom,” to release the devices from encryption. Without adequate disaster recovery and backup plans, many businesses are forced to pay the ransom. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of recent ransomware infections in healthcare settings, the risk liabilities and cost associated with such infections, and to determine possible risk mitigation tactics. Financial costs associated with business …

From Enrollment To Employment: A Dacum Approach To Information Systems And Information Security And Assurance Curriculum Design, Leila Halawi, Wendi M. Kappers, Aaron Glassman

Wendi M. Kappers, PhD

Issues associated with information security are numerous and diverse. Since the majority of organizational actions rely greatly on information and communication technologies, Information Systems (IS) security is now a main concern for firms, governments, institutes, and society as a whole. As a result, a plethora of graduate programs have been created, covering nearly every aspect of IS security. The authors review the current state of the IS industry presented in the literature, and identify a panel of IS experts in which to explore current job skill needs using a “Developing a Curriculum,” DACUM, process to support curriculum design for two …

Mobile Devices: The Case For Cyber Security Hardened Systems, Maurice Dawson, Jorja Wright, Marwan Omar

Maurice Dawson

Mobile devices are becoming a method to provide an efficient and convenient way to access, find and share information; however, the availability of this information has caused an increase in cyber attacks. Currently, cyber threats range from Trojans and viruses to botnets and toolkits. Presently, 96% of mobile devices do not have pre-installed security software while approximately 65% of the vulnerabilities are found within the application layer. This lack in security and policy driven systems is an opportunity for malicious cyber attackers to hack into the various popular devices. Traditional security software found in desktop computing platforms, such as firewalls, …

Mobile Devices: The Case For Cyber Security Hardened Systems, Maurice Dawson, Jorja Wright, Marwan Omar

Maurice Dawson

Mobile devices are becoming a method to provide an efficient and convenient way to access, find and share information; however, the availability of this information has caused an increase in cyber attacks. Currently, cyber threats range from Trojans and viruses to botnets and toolkits. Presently, 96% of mobile devices do not have pre-installed security software while approximately 65% of the vulnerabilities are found within the application layer. This lack in security and policy driven systems is an opportunity for malicious cyber attackers to hack into the various popular devices. Traditional security software found in desktop computing platforms, such as firewalls, …

Advances In Technology Project Management: Review Of Open Source Software Integration, Maurice Dawson, Brian Leonard, Emad Rahim

Maurice Dawson

As organizations must continually drive down costs of software-driven projects, they need to evaluate the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and other software-based design methodologies. These methodologies include looking at software-based alternatives that could save a significant amount of money by reducing the amount of proprietary software. This chapter explores the use and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) in software-driven projects to include in enterprise organizations. Additionally, the legalities of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Creative Commons are explored with the integration of these OSS solutions into organizations. …

A Brief Review Of New Threats And Countermeasures In Digital Crime And Cyber Terrorism, Maurice Dawson

Maurice Dawson

Cyber security is becoming the cornerstone of national security policies in many countries around the world as it is an interest to many stakeholders, including utilities, regulators, energy markets, government entities, and even those that wish to exploit the cyber infrastructure. Cyber warfare is quickly becoming the method of warfare and the tool of military strategists. Additionally, it is has become a tool for governments to aid or exploit for their own personal benefits. For cyber terrorists there has been an overwhelmingly abundance of new tools and technologies available that have allowed criminal acts to occur virtually anywhere in the …

Understanding The Methods Behind Cyber Terrorism, Maurice E. Dawson Jr., Marwan Omar, Jonathan Abramson

Maurice Dawson

Cyber security has become a matter of national, international, economic, and societal importance that affects multiple nations (Walker, 2012). Since the 1990s users have exploited vulnerabilities to gain access to networks for malicious purposes. In recent years the number of attacks on U.S. networks has continued to grow at an exponential rate. This includes malicious embedded code, exploitation of backdoors, and more. These attacks can be initiated from anywhere in the world from behind a computer with a masked Internet Protocol (IP) address. This type of warfare, cyber warfare, changes the landscape of war itself (Beidleman, 2009). This type of …

Advances In Technology Project Management: Review Of Open Source Software Integration, Maurice Dawson, Brian Leonard, Emad Rahim

Maurice Dawson

As organizations must continually drive down costs of software-driven projects, they need to evaluate the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and other software-based design methodologies. These methodologies include looking at software-based alternatives that could save a significant amount of money by reducing the amount of proprietary software. This chapter explores the use and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) in software-driven projects to include in enterprise organizations. Additionally, the legalities of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Creative Commons are explored with the integration of these OSS solutions into organizations. …

Teaching Evaluation (Spring 2014), Hwee-Joo Kam

Hwee-Joo Kam

No abstract provided.

Open Source Software To Enhance The Stem Learning Environment, Maurice E. Dawson Jr., Imad Al Saeed, Jorja Wright, Festus Onyegbula

Maurice Dawson

This chapter examines the use of Open Source Software (OSS) technologies that can be used to improve the learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Explored are the various methods that can be utilized to improve the percentage of STEM majors in the American educational system with resources such as: Open Source as Alternative (OSALT), virtualization, cloud computing, Linux distributions, open source programming, and open source hardware platforms. Increasing the amount of students that pursue STEM majors is important because the projected job growth in the STEM field compared to non-STEM jobs is 33%. OSALT provides cost-effective alternatives to …

The Future Of National And International Security On The Internet, Maurice Dawson, Marwan Omar, Jonathan Abramson, Dustin Bessette

Maurice Dawson

Hyperconnectivity is a growing trend that is driving cyber security experts to develop new security architectures for multiple platforms such as mobile devices, laptops, and even wearable displays. The futures of national and international security rely on complex countermeasures to ensure that a proper security posture is maintained during this state of hyperconnectivity. To protect these systems from exploitation of vulnerabilities it is essential to understand current and future threats to include the laws that drive their need to be secured. Examined within this chapter are the potential security-related threats with the use of social media, mobile devices, virtual worlds, …

Student Feedback (Spring 2014), Hwee-Joo Kam

Hwee-Joo Kam

No abstract provided.

Big Data, Predictive Analytics, And Data Visualization In The Construction Engineering, Joseph Shrestha

Joseph Shrestha

Improved Decision Making To Underpin The Achievement Of Strategic Goals At The University Of Wollongong, Craig Napier

Craig Napier

The Higher Education sector is an increasingly competitive environment. As such, it is prudent for institutions to seek advantages across all areas that will lead to improved research outcomes, commercial partnerships and student learning experience. The Performance Indicators Unit commenced in 1999 and has evolved to cover seven key perspectives of integration of Information Management across the University, working to avoid the operational silos that can occur within Universities. This session will explore: Utilising network relationship analysis to develop an understanding of the University of Wollongong's collaborations and facilitate improvement The importance of visualisation to translate data into meaningful information …

From Cyber Terrorism To State Actors’ Covert Cyber Operations, Jan Kallberg, Bhavani Thuraisingham

Jan Kallberg

Historically, since the Internet started to become a common feature in our lives, hackers have been seen as a major threat. This view has repeatedly been entrenched and distributed by media coverage and commentaries through the years. Instead the first twenty year of the Internet was acceptably secure, due to the limited abilities of the attackers, compared to the threat generated from a militarized Internet with state actors conducting cyber operations. In reality, the Internet have a reversed trajectory for its security where it has become more unsafe over time and moved from a threat to the individual to a …

Nuclear Deterrence In A Second Obama Term, Adam Lowther, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In the months prior to the 2012 presidential election in the United States, members of the Obama administration and sympathetic organizations inside the Beltway began floating the idea that the administration would pursue – after an Obama victory – further reductions in the US nuclear arsenal. With the ink still wet on the New ST ART Treaty, efforts to reduce the American arsenal to 1000 operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons or, as some suggest, 500, is certainly premature. These efforts illustrate a poor understanding of nuclear deterrence theory and practice and the ramifications of a United States that lacks a …

Offensive Cyber: Superiority Or Stuck In Legal Hurdles?, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In recent years, offensive cyber operations have attracted significant interest from the non-Defense Department academic legal community, prompting numerous articles seeking to create a legal theory for cyber conflicts. Naturally, cyber operations should be used in an ethical way, but the hurdles generated by the legal community are staggering. At a time when the United States has already lost an estimated $4 trillion in intellectual property as a result of foreign cyber espionage, not to mention the loss of military advantage, focusing on what the United States cannot do in cyberspace only hinders efforts to defend the country from future …

Europe In A ‘Nato Light’ World - Building Affordable And Credible Defense For The Eu, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

From an outsider’s perspective, the Common Security and Defense Policy and the efforts of the European Defense Agency are insufficient to provide Europe with the defense it will require in coming decades. While the European Union—particularly the members of the European Monetary Union—struggle to solve prolonged fiscal challenges, viable European security alternatives to an American-dominated security architecture are conspicuously absent from the documents and discussions that are coming from the European Council and at a time when the United States is engaged in an Asia-Pacific pivot. This is not to say that no thought has been given to defense issues. …

Cyber Operations Bridging From Concept To Cyber Superiority, Jan Kallberg, Bhavani Thuraisingham

Jan Kallberg

The United States is preparing for cyber conflicts and ushering in a new era for national security. The concept of cyber operations is rapidly developing, and the time has come to transpose the conceptual heights to a broad ability to fight a strategic cyber conflict and defend the Nation in a cohesive way. Richard M. George, a former National Security Agency official, commented on recent developments: “Other countries are preparing for a cyberwar. If we’re not pushing the envelope in cyber, somebody else will.”1 Therefore, increased budgets are allocated to cyber operations research and education. The Defense Advanced Research Projects …

Energy Costs For Data Center Operations, Heather M. Brotherton

Heather M Brotherton

This document answers the questions: What are relative energy costs for data center operations (energy per unit computing) and how do sources of fuel impact data center operation costs geographically across the US?

Transforming Information Systems And Computer Science Education With Virtualization, Maurice E. Dawson Jr., Jorja Wright, Jonathan Abramson

Maurice Dawson

This paper will propose an innovative method to transform information systems (IS) and computer science education on a global scale. This method will introduce the use of virtualization and cloud computing combined with open source software (OSS) in higher education. This will allow for those studying IS and computer science to work independently on projects anywhere in the world from a baseline image that has been developed with information assurance (IA) controls. Additionally, this will allow professors and course developers to deploy their own customized virtual machines (VMs) to be used with the course. These VMs will host their own …

Research In Progress-Defending Android Smartphones From Malware Attacks, Marwan Omar, Maurice E. Dawson Jr.

Maurice Dawson

Smart phones are becoming enriched with confidential information due to their powerful computational capabilities and attractive communications features. The Android smart phone is one of the most widely used platforms by businesses and users alike. This is partially because Android smart phones use the free, open-source Linux as the underlying operating system, which allows development of applications by any software developer. This research study aims to explore security risks associated with the use of Android smart phones and the sensitive information they contain, the researcher devised a survey questionnaire to investigate and further understand security threats targeting Android smart phones. …

Ict For Poverty Alleviation In Pacific Island Nations: Study Of Icts4d In Fiji, Deogratias Harorimana, Opeti Rokotuinivono, Emali Sewale, Fane Salaiwai, Marica Naulu, Evangelin Roy

Dr Deogratias Harorimana

ICT for Poverty Alleviation in Pacific Island Nations: Study of ICTs4D in Fiji There has been a vague and little knowledge on the role or potential of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in relation to addressing poverty in Fiji. This may be probably due to the newness of the technology in the South Pacific Region as a whole but also probably due to the fact that only 9.7% of the current Fiji 931,000 populations are internet users (ITC Figures 2011). This paper reports on finding how ICTs is contributing towards poverty alleviation in Fiji. On the basis of reviewed best …

Diseñando Colisiones De Satélites En La Guerra Cibernética Encubierta, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

La guerra concentrada en la red depende de la red de información global para capacidades de combate conjuntas.3 La capa fundamental crea la capacidad de combate global como la columna vertebral espacial de la red de información donde los haberes espaciales son el elemento decisivo. EE.UU. depende de las capacidades espaciales para su éxito y la seguridad nacional de EE.UU. se basa hoy en día en un número limitado de satélites muy utilizados. Estos satélites son cruciales para la disuasión estratégica, la vigilancia, la recopilación de inteligencia y las comunicaciones militares. Si la disuasión estratégica falla, los satélites forman parte …

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove: How Austerity Makes Us Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb…And Cyber War, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With sequestration looming—generating significant cuts to defense spending—the United States may find itself increasingly relying on nuclear and cyber deterrence as an affordable way to guarantee national sovereignty and prevent major conflict. While earlier defense planning and acquisitions were based on economic conditions that no longer exist, Congress’ options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense voters” than “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys.

Analysis - Toward A New American Military., Adam Lowther, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In releasing the United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense and Defense Budget Priorities and Choices in January 2012, President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta offered a rationale for the administration’s reductions in defense spending. By stating that the shift in strategic direction is an effort to “put our fiscal house in order” and a response to the 2011 Budget Control Act, which requires DoD to reduce spending by $487 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2021, the United States’ NATO partners in Europe were given considerable reason for …

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With the prospect of sequestration looming, the United States may find itself increasingly rely ing on nuclear and cy ber deterrence as an affordable means of guaranteeing national sovereignty and preventing major conflict between the U.S. and potential adversaries in the Asia-Pacific. While earlier defense planning and acquisition were based on economic conditions that no longer ex ist, Congress’s options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense v oters” relative to “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys. The simple fact is China’s rise has …

Common Criteria Meets Realpolitik Trust, Alliances, And Potential Betrayal, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation has the ambition to be a global standard for IT-security certification. The issued certifications are mutually recognized between the signatories of the Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement. The key element in any form of mutual relationships is trust. A question raised in this paper is how far trust can be maintained in Common Criteria when additional signatories enter with conflicting geopolitical interests to earlier signatories. Other issues raised are control over production, the lack of permanent organization in the Common Criteria, which leads to concerns of being able to oversee the actual compliance. As …