Editorial

Abstract

The Founding Editor stated that PSU Research Review is seriously committed to maintaining high-quality research (Yamani, 2017). As mentioned in Issue 1, this international journal will enhance global understanding of current research topics among both academics and practitioners (Nurunnabi, 2017). Issue 2 covers computer science and engineering. This issue presents seven papers. Recently, an audacious global cyberattack has targeted vulnerabilities in computer systems in almost 100 countriesone of the largest 'ransomware' attacks involving malicious software (Scott and Wingfield, 2017). In the first paper, Happa and Goldsmith (2017) investigate the description of minor variations in attacks and how and when it may (and may not) be appropriate to communicate those differences in existing attack models. They argue that using annotations appropriately should enable analysts and researchers to express subtle, but important, variations in attacks that may not fit the model of attack that is currently being used. The novelty of the study is in Happa and Goldsmith's demonstration of how annotations may help analysts communicate and ask better questions more rapidly when identifying unknown aspects of attacks (e.g. as a means of storing mental notes in a structured manner, especially while facing zero-day attacks when information is incomplete). The second paper, by Bejarano et al. (2017), argues that 'recommender systems' collect information about users and businesses and describes how this is done in terms of reviews and votes on reviews. They find that there is a connection between social attributes and user influence. Bejarano et al. (2017) also conclude that the findings are relevant in marketing, credibility estimation and Sybil detections, among others. Fang et al. (2017) focus on the problem of generating actionable knowledge from big data. Because existing knowledge bases (KBs) are still far from complete and accurate, they propose a system consisting of two phases, namely, knowledge extraction and truth discovery, to construct a broader KB called 'GrandBase'. They extract new predicates from four types of data sources, namely, Web texts, Document Object Model trees, existing KBs and query streams to augment the ontology of existing KBs (i.e. Freebase). Fang et al. also propose a graph-based approach to conduct better truth discovery for multi-valued predicates. Their study concludes with future research directions regarding GrandBase construction and extension. The fourth paper by Segarra et al. (2017) stresses the importance of internet of things (IoT) applications (e.g. smart homes, smart cities and industry 4.0) for better inventory management using mainly radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. In particular, they focus on RFID technology impairment and the advantages of mature IoT technologies in respect of automatic service discovery, which will be used in our framework to make heterogeneous readers collision free while reading tags. She considers the emerging case of Industry 4.0, where RFID te...

Editorial

“…The journal publishes original research findings, critical literature review, case studies and commentaries from the leading international experts in the field. Both empirical and theoretical contributions on the theme, as well as practitioner focused submissions, are considered suitable for publication (Nurunnabi, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Yamani, 2017). All articles undergo an initial assessment by the journal editor.…”

Editorial

“…The vision of PSU Research Review is to make a substantial impact on both scholarship and practice in the twenty-first century via a rich stream of conceptual and applied research focused on developments in various fields (Yamani, 2017;Nurunnabi, 2017aNurunnabi, , 2017b. The submissions in our journal arise from various parts of the world.…”