Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2012 Issue 1

This research is aimed at evaluating the usability of notational systems that are used for specifying programs. We provide a conceptual analysis of the development of constraint diagrams (CD) as a diagrammatic notation which developed to support program specification. A detailed analysis of multi-case comparisons of formal languages and graphical systems for expressing logic and program constructs was conducted in order Read More

Under the scenario of an underlay cognitive radio network, we introduce the concept of minimum-selection maximum ratio transmission (MS-MRT). Inspired by the mode of operation of the minimum-selection generalized selection combining (MS-GSC) technique, the main idea behind MS-MRT is to present an adaptive variation of the existing maximum ratio transmission (MRT) technique. While in the MRT scheme, all the transmit Read More

Background and Objectives: A new generation of software emerged with mobile devices, cloud computing and the web. New usages come with new security threats, and a new generation of malware (malicious software) is emerging as well. Recent security reports show that these malware are on the increase. The goal of this project is to evaluate the risk of exposure to malware in popular app ecosystems such as Apple iOS, Read More

Background and Objectives: The target of this work is to construct a mathematical model to help resolve aircraft scheduling over multiple runways. This problem is considered a hard topic in transportation research due to the constantly increasing aviation traffic volume around the world. Surprisingly, although there exists an impressive amount of literature for the landing and arrival cases, there is no proposed exact soluti Read More

Two significant identities-de Bruijn and Stein-were independently studied in information theory and statistics. De Bruijn identity shows a connection between two fundamental concepts in information theory and signal processing: differential entropy and Fisher information. On the other hand, Stein identity represents a relationship between the expectation of a function and its first-order derivative. Due to their several applicati Read More

Having multiple users gives rise to multi-user diversity which can be exploited to give good quality-of-service to each user in the network and also increase the overall capacity of the network. In a spectrum-sharing setting, the multi-user diversity can be exploited; however, this is different from the traditional multi-user case because of the interference power constraints imposed on the secondary users. In this work, we consider Read More

With the advent of ultra high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies used in Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) machines, we are facing a daunting new era in petabyte scale bioinformatics data. The enormous amounts of data produced by NGS machines lead to storage, scalability, and performance challenges. At the same time, cloud computing architectures are rapidly emerging as robust and economical solutions to h Read More

Background and Objectives: In this work, we explore the implementation of the binary consensus algorithm in wireless sensor networks. Binary consensus is used to allow a collection of distributed entities to reach consensus regarding the answer to a binary question. Existing work on the algorithm focuses on simulation of the algorithm under the assumption of a fully connected network topology and unlimited messaging Read More

Water-related problems are increasingly recognized as one of the most immediate and serious environmental threats to mankind. In particular, all the GCC countries being located in an arid region, suffer from lack of natural freshwater resources. Groundwater is the major source of water for irrigation in these countries. The groundwater aquifers contain either fresh or brackish waters. In countries like Kuwait and Qatar the gr Read More