'Achieving Bologna convergence: is ECTS failing to make the grade?'

Transparent and consistent credit transfer procedures are essential if EU Universities are to successfully build the European Higher Education Learning Area and thrive in the emerging global knowledge economy. Currently the European Credit Transfer System is the most widely used mechanism to enable credit transfer between universities in different EU nations. Using data from 20 universities in four EU states, this paper examines the problems of calculating and using ECTS grades. The results demonstrate that the alignment of ECTS grades varies within nation states and show that, despite the fact that ECTS grading is a norm referenced system, while the national systems are usually criterion referenced, many ECTS conversion tables provided by universities indicate straight line transference from institutional to ECTS grades . Given the anticipated increase in student mobility following the EU enlargement to 25 nations, the paper proposes a re-alignment of ECTS towards a criterion referenced system. Such a new system would acknowledge and build on the diversity of EU higher education systems, unlike the current mechanistic system, which both masks this diversity and is flawed in calculation, and ad hoc in operation

A framework for the forensic investigation of unstructured email relationship data

Our continued reliance on email communications ensures that it remains a major source of evidence during a digital investigation. Emails comprise both structured and unstructured data. Structured data provides qualitative information to the forensics examiner and is typically viewed through existing tools. Unstructured data is more complex as it comprises information associated with social networks, such as relationships within the network, identification of key actors and power relations, and there are currently no standardised tools for its forensic analysis. Moreover, email investigations may involve many hundreds of actors and thousands of messages. This paper posits a framework for the forensic investigation of email data. In particular, it focuses on the triage and analysis of unstructured data to identify key actors and relationships within an email network. This paper demonstrates the applicability of the approach by applying relevant stages of the framework to the Enron email corpus. The paper illustrates the advantage of triaging this data to identify (and discount) actors and potential sources of further evidence. It then applies social network analysis techniques to key actors within the data set. This paper posits that visualisation of unstructured data can greatly aid the examiner in their analysis of evidence discovered during an investigation

An object-oriented organic architecture for next generation intelligent reconfigurable mobile networks

Next generation mobile networks have great potential in providing personalised and effcient quality of service by using re-confgurable platforms. The foundation is the concept of software radio where both the mobile terminal and the serving network can be re-configurable. This approach becomes more effective when combined with historic-based prediction strategies that enable the system to learn about application behaviour and predict its resource consumption. We extend that concept by proposing the use of an object-oriented intelligent decision making architecture, which supports general and large-scale applications. The proposed architecture applies the principles of business intelligence and data warehousing, together with the concept of organic viable systems. The architecture is applied to the CAST (Configurable radio with Advanced Software Technology) platform

Intelligent reconfiguration of large mobile networks using complex organic distributed architecture

This paper presents a possible solution to the intelligent evolution of mobile systems using a Complex Organic Distributed Architecture (CODA), which supports intelligent reconfiguration of all system components. A key feature of this architecture is the deployment of multiple warehouses. The warehouses store data in a variety of ways depending on the type of intelligence required. On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) software is used to monitor and control data in the system. An effective system of filters and wrappers ensures that data is secure. A system of feedback loops ensures that information travels through the system quickly and effectively