Management of Software Projects in Indian IT Firms: Issues, Opportunities and Challenges Before Project Managers

-- Padmanav Acharya and Biswajit Mahanty

Over the last decade, India has emerged as an important global player in software and other IT enabled services. Studies have attributed India's success to factors such as the existence of a large pool of English-speaking and technically qualified manpower, low cost, and minimal regulatory intervention. While the influence of these factors cannot be denied, the authors feel that adaptive as well as archetypal project management practices have the biggest influence on the industry in maintaining its competitive edge. This paper presents the features of the project management practices in the Indian software industry on the basis of a questionnaire survey, field visits and a number of interviews with industry participants and researchers. The paper addresses the unique characteristics of the industry and highlights the opportunities and challenges facing the project managers.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Information Technology and the Gender Digital Divide in Africa: The Case of Ethiopia

-- Wondwosen Teshome B and Mag Jerusalem Negash W

This paper examines the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the gender digital divide in Africa by analyzing the situation in Ethiopia as a case study.

The progress of the ICT in Africa is very slow when compared to Europe, North America and Asia. Ethiopia is characterized by poor telecommunication infrastructure and Internet access is confined only to cities. Therefore, one of the future challenges of the country is to expand ICT in the rural areas and tackle the gender digital divide.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

A New Network Management Framework Using Mobile Agents

-- C Valliyammai and S Thamarai Selvi

The centralized approach in network management has limitations on scalability and efficiency. A new framework is proposed for network management using mobile agents by analyzing the limitations of the existing centralized approach—Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The mobile agents decentralize the processing and control, thus reducing the traffic on management station and distributing the processing load. The proposed work compares the use of mobile agent with the static agent. The mobile agents' use in managing the networks is simulated, and the performance of the mobile agents is compared with the centralized management. The analysis of these two methods shows that performance is improved with the use of mobile agents. The experimental results prove the advantages and the flexibility of the proposed framework.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Improved Weighted Inter-Cluster Edge Ranking (WICER) Algorithm for Clustered Graph

-- Vishal Gupta and P S Gill

In response to a user's query, a search engine generally returns a very large and ranked list of Web pages. Weighted Inter-Cluster Edge Ranking (WICER) is one of the most popular algorithms used for ranking of such lists. It consists of two parameters, a and b, representing inter-cluster and intra-cluster edge weights, respectively. According to WICER, a should be greater than b. As these two parameters depend upon the knowledge of users about the topic they are searching for, this paper focuses on finding the percentage of cases in which a should be greater than b, and vice versa. Research shows that in 21% of the cases, the value of b should be greater than a, and for the remaining 79%, vice versa.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Affective Computing: Next Generation AI Software Systems

-- K Chandra Sekharaiah,
Md Abdul Muqsit Khan, U Gopal, U Rakesh and U G Swapna

Rational intelligence and emotional intelligence are not supported together by the state-of-the-art computing paradigms. Even the so called Artificial Intelligence (AI) has so far no worthy claims in regard to emotional intelligence to computers, and it has become a moot question as to whether affective computing is, in fact, possible in toto. This paper presents the emerging trends and applications of affective computing vis-à-vis other related paradigms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We analyze the chasm in the theory of affective computing systems and the practicability with the available technological support. The field has potential applications in regard to Web service design, e-learning, HCI, wearable computers and e-commerce. The work presents issues that give essential details of the next generation computers and software systems that know how and what you feel.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Intelligent Classification Using Rough Sets and Neural Networks

-- M Durairaj and K Meena

Extracting useful information from the volume of data being generated at a phenomenal rate is an important and challenging issue at present. The rough set theory, a new mathematical approach to data analysis, based on classification, is a promising technique. In real world situations, collected data is usually uncertain and incomplete. For this reason, this theory alone is not sufficient to properly describe the information hidden in a data set (Magnani, 2003). To deal with complex data, the hybridization of rough set theory with neural networks, can be a useful technique (Magnani). In this paper, a hybrid approach of expert system with a reduct algorithm in order to generate effective reduced data set (reduct) and to construct the core of the attribute set has been proposed. In this approach, the reduced data set is transformed suitably to input neural network to improve classification accuracy. The proposed algorithm is implemented on medical data set to test the efficiency of the algorithm.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Data Warehousing and Its Utility in Modern Business

-- Debtilak Majumdar

Data warehousing is a concept, an algorithm, and more of a structure that helps the decision support system to its best. Decision making is very critical for business. The ability to take the right decision not only helps the business to make more profit but also to exist competitively in the market. This paper is designed to review the needs of modern business and the features of data warehousing and also the utility of data warehousing in implementing a strong information base for today's business.

© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.