Ernest Ketcha Ngassam

• SAP Research

The world is, amid rapid technological disruptions, characterized by the adoption and usage of advanced digital technologies now forming part of our daily activities. These technology disruptions forms part of the Digital Industrial Revolution which marks the fourth phase of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution refers to the fast-pa...

The increasing demand for online and real-time interaction with IT infrastructures by end users is facilitated by the proliferation of user-centric devices such as laptops, iPods, iPads, and smartphones. This trend is furthermore propounded by the plethora of apps downloadable to end user devices mostly within mobile-cum-cloud environments. It is c...

A study of more than 100 e-Governance projects showed that impact assessment of rolled out e-Governance projects remain insignificant. These findings remain inconclusive notwithstanding the fact that outcomes of public sector based ICT4D initiatives have not been fully established and disseminated. This paper proposes a framework for assessing the...

The increase need for services to handle a plethora of business needs within the enterprise landscape has yielded to an increase in the development of heterogeneous services across the digital world. In today’s digital economy, services are the key components for communication and collaboration amongst enterprises internally and externally. Since I...

Microtasking as one of the crowdsourcing models has found penetration mostly in developed nations and is slowly making inroads in developing nations. It has been used for quickly solving a myriad of social and business challenges by tapping into the diversity of the unknown crowd. Nevertheless, there are still a number of research challenges that a...

E-governance (e-Gov) is increasingly taking centre stage all over the world. Countries like United States, Japan and Singapore have successfully transformed their governance process through e-Gov. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have become an integral part of the social fabric of many countries. Although, E-Gov has chalked significa...

e-Governance (e-Gov) has generally been acclaimed as innovation that can provide an impetus for socio-economic development across the globe. As a result, developed and developing countries are continuously making efforts to implement e-Gov projects as they are proven to enhance good governance and improve the delivery of government services to the...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained popularity as an enabler for rapid organizational change with regard to controlling, optimizing and complexity management. It is thus regarded as organizations’ blueprint for adaptability, change, evolution and therefore growth. However, its mere deployment would not necessarily yield favorable results; inste...

We hereby present a technology model for improving the traditional supply chain process on which small enterprises in developing countries rely-upon for stock replenishment. Current procurement processes for small enterprises in emergmg economies are fostered by the lack of direct access to market and social factors influencing these enterprises. S...

This chapter demonstrates how interoperability can serve as a catalyst for business innovation. It explores its core definitions and illustrates relevance and applicability thereof through a use case: Business in Your Pocket (BiYP) use case, that enforces value co-creation amongst business ecosystem partners. The BiYP use case clearly indicates tha...

The increasing demand for on-line and real-time interaction with IT infrastructures by endusers are facilitated by the proliferation of user centric devices such as laptops, iPods, iPads, and smartphones. This trend is furthermore propounded by the plethora of apps down loadable to end-user devices mostly within mobile-cum-cloud environments. It is...

In this paper a framework for the choreography of intelligent electronic services (e-services) that follows the Service-Oriented Architecture principle is presented. The composition abilities of intelligent e-services in the framework enable them to match a user’s request for service consumption. The framework is based on a dynamic model of message...

The purpose of this paper is to indicate how Living Labs (LL) are organized and applied as part of the research mandate of the SAP Research Pretoria in South Africa. This will be done by exploring existing definitions of LLs. This is followed by the identification of four dimensions of living labs which is then used to evaluate three existing LLs t...

We undertook an investigation on the socio-economic landscape of the rural Kgautswane, Mafarafara and neighbouring communities in Rietfontein, South Africa. This enabled us to determine critical drivers that are likely to impact on and improve the current socio-economic landscape if implemented. The objectives were to generate baseline data on the...

The quest for the enforcement and the promotion of value co-creation amongst businesses from the 1st and 2nd economies through ICT is becoming increasingly demanding from a technology perspective, yet of absolute importance for socio-economic development and co-operation. We introduce in this paper a project referred to as RUSTICA (that builds on,...

We rely on advancements made on Web 2.0 to propose a Web portal for accessing services by SMMEs in South Africa. The suggested Web solution exploits the so-called mashup technique that consists of gathering information (i.e. data and services) from various Web sources, and consolidating them within a single integrated platform. The extracted data a...

Previous work on implementations of FA-based string recognizers suggested a range of implementation strategies (and therefore, algorithms) aiming at improving their performance for fast string recognition. However, an efficient exploitation of suggested algorithms by domain-specific FA-implementers requires prior knowledge of the behaviour (perform...

The purpose of mentorship is to supplement, support, and improve the learning experience of people. Since mentorship is a relationship between individuals, it requires dedication, trust, physical and emotional participation. It further involves various aspects such as listening, supporting, questioning, and supervising. In a mentorship process, the...

Women are active participants in the Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise (SMME) sector. In conducting their business activities they are usually confronted with a range of challenges in accessing operational resources. These include but are not limited to lack of financial support, skills, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructur...

In this paper, we present data structures and algorithms for efficiently constructing approximate automata. An approximate automaton for a regular language L is one which accepts at least L. Such automata can be used in a variety of practical applications, including network security pattern matching, in which false-matches are only a performance nu...

The spatial and temporal locality of reference on which cache memory relies to minimize cache swaps, is exploited to design a new algorithm for finite automaton string recognition. It is shown that the algorithm, referred to as the Dynamic State Allocation algorithm outperforms the traditional table-driven algorithm for strings that tend to repeate...

A range of implementation strategies of DFA-based string recognizers is suggested. The strategies are associated with parameters which modify the implementation of conventional DFA implementations (table-driven and hardcoded). These parameters are used to provide a formal characterization of DFA-based string recognizers. Various instantiations of t...

We study the performance of a hardcoded algorithm for recognizing strings of a finite automaton's language and compare it with the use of the more conventional table-driven algorithm. In both cases, performance depends on the finite automaton's dimensions such as alphabet size and the number of states. However, the respective processing mechanisms...

Table-driven (TD) DFA-based string processing algorithms are examined from a number of vantage points. Firstly, various strategies for implementing such algorithms in a cache-efficient manner are identified. The denotational semantics of such algorithms is encapsulated in a function whose various arguments are associated with each implementation st...

The aim of this work is to provide a model for the dynamic im- plementation of finite automata for enhanced performance. Investigations have shown that hardcoded finite automata outperforms the traditional table-driven implementation up to some threshold. Moreover, the kind of string being recog- nized plays a major role in the overall processing s...

The spatial and temporal locality of reference on which cache mem- ory relies to minimize cache swaps, is exploited to design a new algorithm for finite automaton string recognition. It is shown that the algorithm, referred to as the state reordering algorithm, outperforms the traditional table-driven algorithm for strings that tend to repeatedly a...

The aim of this work is to provide a model for the dynamic implementation of finite automata for enhanced performance. Investigations have shown that hardcoded finite automata outperforms the traditional table-driven implementation up to some threshold. Moreover, the kind of string being recognized plays a major role in the overall processing speed...

Various experiments in hardcoding a single row of a transition table of a finite state machine directly into symbol- recognizing code are presented. Measurements are provided to show the time efficiency gains by various hardcoded versions over the traditional table-driven algorithm.

To hardcode and algorithm means to build into it the data that it requires. In this paper, we present various experiments in hardcoding the transition table of a finite state machine directly into string-recognizing code. Experiments are carried out in two phases. The first phase is limited to the analysis of the hardcoded behavior in relation to a...

English summary. Thesis (M. Sc.)(Computer Science)--University of Pretoria, 2003. Includes bibliographical references 137-140).

Emerging economies are considered to provide the future growth opportunities for the ICT industry. With regard to enterprise applications, the envisaged growth will essentially be driven by SMEs as they represent the largest proportion of the untapped market. In order to capture this future growth market, suppliers of enterprise applications system...

The current expansion of mobile technologies penetration and usage in emerging regions represent an opportunity for leveraging ICT applications adoption by rural communities. Businesses nowadays utilise this opportunity to implement m-commerce to communicate with customers directly via mobile devices, regardless of time and location. Despite the av...

We rely on the denotational semantics of algorithms to suggest an abstrac-tion of a string recognizer. The abstraction provides a unified formalism for representing FA-based string recognizers as an instance of a parameterized function. It also forms the basis for theoretical investigations on implementations of FA-based recognizers, and represents...

IST-Africa 2009 Conference Proceedings The traditional and quasi manual-based approach for providing services by Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) supporting agencies to South African SMMEs is considered, and associated drawbacks demonstrated. It is shown that, the translation of the existing model to an e-model may lead to an effective an...