People seem to equate programming with coding, and that’s a problem. Before you code, you should understand what you’re doing. If you don’t write down what you’re doing, you don’t know whether you understand it, and you probably don’t if the first thing you write down is code. If you’re trying to build a bridge or house without a blueprint—what we call a specification—it’s not going to be very pretty or reliable. That’s how most code is written. Every time you’ve cursed your computer, you’re cursing someone who wrote a program without thinking about it in advance. There’s something about the culture of software that has impeded the use of specification. We have a wonderful way of describing things precisely that’s been developed over the last couple of millennia, called mathematics. I think that’s what we should be using as a way of thinking about what we build.

––Leslie Lamport (2014)

The coming of the Big Data era is a chance for everyone in the technology world
to decide into which camp they fall—those who work for a paycheck versus those
who come to work to change the world—as this era will bring the biggest opportunity for companies and individuals in technology since the dawn of the Internet. The aspects of the present century—like 80% of the world’s information is unstructured, this unstructured information is growing at 15 times the rate of structured information, and computational power is growing enormously—will demand a change in our approach to solving information-based problems.

Big Data applies to information that cannot be processed or analyzed using traditional processes or tools. Big Data is characterized by volume, variety and velocity. Through better analysis of the large volumes of data that are becoming available, there is the potential for making faster advances in many scientific disciplines and improving the profitability and success of many enterprises. Many technical challenges like scale and heterogeneity, lack of structure, error-handling, privacy, timeliness, etc. will have to be addressed before their potential can be realized fully.

M Gayatri’s paper, “Performance of Modified Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm on Cloud Data”, tries to focus on analyzing the limitations of current cryptographic schemes used in providing security to data on cloud. It highlights the usage of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) scheme used in cloud-based applications, implements elliptic curve digital signature algorithm on cloud data, and compares its performance with the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) scheme.

In the paper, “Comparing the Properties of Communities Using Ontology”, Vijay Nayak and Bhaskar Biswas have proposed a method to find the relationship between the different properties of communities in social network analysis through ontology. The relationships among the properties help to understand the behavior of the communities.

Nikhil Agrawal, Vidhyadhar Jain and Bhaskar Biswas have proposed an improved model for solving the structural limitations in ranking the websites, in their paper, “Improving Website Ranking for Multi-Term Query Search Based on Its Trustworthiness”. The simulation results of the proposed model rank the websites according to their relevance to the searched query and find the trustworthy websites.

B Ramadasu, in his paper, “Performance Enhancement of Image Filtering on GPU using CUDA”, concentrates on accelerating image filtering with Graphical Processing Unit such that the speedup and performance of filtering process can be enhanced in both Gaussian Blur Filter and Sobel Edge Detection Filter.

In the paper, “Video Compression Using Improved QPSO Technique and 3D-DWT”, Sk. Jumlesha and Ch. Satyanarayana have used Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization technique to reduce the number of computations of video compression by maintaining the same or improved quality of video. The results show better accuracy in block matching.

In the last paper, “Robust Digital Image Watermarking Using 3AES in Wavelet Domain”, Chittaranjan Pradhan, Bidhyut Jyoti Saha, Arundhati Sahoo and Ajay Kumar Bisoi have modified the Advanced Encryption Standard to triple AES for better security. Better PSNR values are obtained for 3AES in comparison to DES, 3DES and AES standards. It also resists the common image processing attacks.

-- C R K Prasad
Consulting Editor