A widespread assumption in economic geography and the economics of innovation is that firms located in clusters benefit from territorial learning and knowledge spillovers. However, it remains unclear to what extent these benefits actually occur. This article aims to address this issue and...

This thesis proposes a novel method for allocating multi-attribute computational resources via competing marketplaces. Trading agents, working on behalf of resource consumers and providers, choose to trade in resource markets where the resources being traded best align with their preferences and...

One of the dominant properties of a global computing network is the incomplete information available to principals about each other. This was the motivation of using the notion of probabilistic trust as an approach to security sensitive decision making in modern open and global computing...

The double auction, a highly efficient market mechanism, has been widely used by both traditional and online exchanges. However, with the globalisation of the economy, these marketplaces increasingly need to compete with each other to attract traders and charge suitable fees to make profits. In...

Egypt is investing in e-services as a driver for socioeconomic development. Designing e-services that are conducive to novice users is central to their proliferation. This paper presents a study in an Egyptian government organization to investigate novice user perception of e-services, based on...

This thesis presents a comparison between two simulation methods, namely Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and Agent Based Simulation (ABS). In our literature review we identified a gap in comparing the applicability of these methods to modelling human centric service systems. Hence, we have...

This thesis presents a novel market-based method, inspired by retail markets for resource allocation in fully decentralised computational systems where agents are self-interested. The posted offer mechanism used requires no central or regional coordinator or complex negotiation strategies. The...

Citizen sensor networks are open information systems in which members of the public act as information providers. The information distributed in such networks ranges from observations of events (e.g. noise measurements or monitoring of environmental parameters) to probabilistic estimates (e.g....

Lifelong User Modelling is an area that aims at harvesting the massive volume of web-based user information, so that it can be used for educational long-term services. Although an amount of research has addressed this issue from an educational angle, by finding ways for educational peer systems...

The open and dynamic nature of modern distributed systems and pervasive environments presents significant challenges to security management. One solution may be trust management which utilises the notion of trust in order to specify and interpret security policies and make decisions on...