This paper presents an efficient and objective procedure for the outcome-based assessment of engineering final year projects (FYP). The procedure, consisting of 6 steps, can easily be customized for different engineering curricula. A User Guide has been developed to help institutions create their own FYP assessment system. The guide includes the assessment procedure and aids for its implementation. Particularly, a set of FYP-oriented observable descriptors for Tuning outcomes was defined. The end-products of the proposed assessment procedure are a set of assessment reports that the evaluator agent/s must fulfil per milestone, marking the level reached by the student at every descriptor (0: unacceptable, 1: minimum acceptable, 2: good, 3: excellent). These marks are then gathered together in an overall assessment sheet showing, for every learning outcome, the evolution along the assessment milestones of the level reached by the student at any descriptor. This sheet is a very powerful tool for setting the final mark. All assessment agents use the same list of descriptors and the same levels of acquisition, thus improving the consistency, traceability and global quality of the assessment process.

Nowadays, the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems in industry and stores has increased. Nevertheless, some of these systems present privacy problems that may discourage potential users. Hence, high confidence and efficient privacy protocols are urgently needed. Previous studies in the literature proposed schemes that are proven to be secure, but they have scalability problems. A feasible and scalable protocol to guarantee privacy is presented in this paper. The proposed protocol uses elliptic curve cryptography combined with a zero knowledge-based authentication scheme. An analysis to prove the system secure, and even forward secure is also provided.

MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) is the most popular genre among network gamers, and now attract millions of users, who play simultaneously in an evolving virtual world. This huge number of concurrent players requires the availability of high performance computation servers. Additionally, gaming aware distribution mechanisms are needed to distribute game instances among servers to avoid load imbalances that affect performance negatively. In this work, we tackle the problem of game distribution and scalability by means of a hybrid Client-Server/P2P architecture that can scale dynamically according to the demand. To manage peak loads that occur during the game, we distribute game computation across the system according to the behavior of MMORPGs. We distinguish between the computation associated with the Main Game, that affects all players, and the computation of Auxiliary Games that affects only a few players and acts in isolation from the execution of the Main Game. Taking this distinction into account, we propose a mechanism that is focused in the distribution of Auxiliary Games, as an entity, across the pool of servers and peers of the underlying hybrid architecture. We evaluate the performance of the balancing mechanism taking the criteria of latency and reliability into account, and we compare the effectiveness of the mechanism with a classic approach that applies load balancing to individually players in a Client-Server system. We show that the balancing mechanism based on the latency criteria provides lower latency Appl (2016Appl ( ) 75:2005Appl ( -2029 than the classical proposal, while in relation to reliability, we obtain a failure probability of under 0.9 % in the worst case, which is amply compensated by the scalability provided by the use of the P2P area.

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Our main interest is oriented towards keeping both local and parallel jobs together in a non-dedicated cluster. In order to obtain some profits from the parallel applications, it is important to consider time and space sharing as a mean to enhance the scheduling decisions. In this work, we introduce an integral scheduling system for non-dedicated clusters, termed CISNE. It includes both a previously developed dynamic coscheduling system and a space-sharing job scheduler to make better scheduling decisions than can be made separately. CISNE allows multiple parallel applications to be executed concurrently in a non dedicated Linux cluster with a good performance, as much from the point of view of the local user as that of the parallel application user. This is possible without disturbing the local user and obtaining profits for the parallel user. The good performance of CISNE has been evaluated in a Linux cluster.

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