Globalisation and rapid environmental change have created many challenges for public and private organisations across Iraq as a developing country, particularly in the higher education sector. This includes, for example, decreases in government funding; increased demand for higher education; a need for economic transformation, and related competitiveness of organizations. Such challenges require exceptional leaders and strategic planning in order to take action to improve. In Iraq, the higher education sector is still one of the main foundations in progressing the knowledge economy. Studies into leadership style, strategic planning processes, and the importance of leadership and organisational culture to an organisation’s success have been used to assist both public and private Iraqi colleges in responding to the challenges they face. Although, some studies have examined the interaction between leadership and strategic planning, and leadership and organisational success, there has been no empirical study that has investigated how these three variables interact together. Thus, this study aimed, firstly, to identify the current leadership styles and strategic planning processes in the colleges and the challenges they faced, and to gain an understanding from the perspective of the senior leaders themselves as to how they might best respond to the current situation. Secondly, based on the participants’ experiences, knowledge and perceptions, the study aimed to identify implications for both practice and policy to help improve the colleges’ outcomes. The study involved a mixed-methods approach and was conducted in two stages. During the first stage, the researcher gathered quantitative data by administering a survey package to 129 leaders (deans, associate deans, and heads of departments) across both public and private colleges in the capital city of Baghdad. During the second stage, the researcher gathered qualitative data to more deeply explore the survey results by conducting individual interviews with a sub-sample of 21 leaders from both college types (ten public and 11 private). In the data analyses stages, both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were applied to compiling tables and charts, and to test hypotheses, by employing the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), Microsoft Excel, and NVivo. The results of study showed that both transformational and transactional leadership styles played a varied and vital role in the colleges’ strategic planning processes, and in turn their success. The fact that private colleges were ‘for profit’ and public colleges were ‘not for profit’, as well as their contrasting funding models, highlighted key differences between the two college types’ leadership and general modus operandi. While it was found that both transformative leadership and transactional leadership styles were necessary to address the challenges colleges faced in the Iraqi educational context, the impetus for change extended far beyond the need for professional development of leaders. The embracing of information communication technologies, and reliable Internet was seen as necessary in all aspects of the colleges’ work and provision for teaching and learning, and students’ success. This applied to both college types along with the need for closer adherence to government regulations and more focused government coordination of colleges’ administrative functions. Furthermore, implications for making successful improvements to practice also identified the need to manage the challenge of sociocultural influences on the appointments and promotions of leaders. It was concluded that a greater emphasis on teamwork and provision of incentives for staff, along with a ‘boost’ to pedagogy and practice, which could be provided through the adoption of information communication technologies and appropriate professional development strategies, would enhance the colleges’ ranks and the status of their qualifications. Also, theoretically, the study offers a value-add to leadership, strategic planning process, and organisational success literature in the form of a conceptual model that links these variables in the context of Iraqi higher education sector.
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is an information network that connects gadgets and sensors to allow new autonomous tasks. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the integration of IoT with industrial applications. Some vital infrastructures, such as water delivery networks, use IIoT. The scattered topology of IIoT and resource limits of edge computing provide new difficulties to traditional data storage, transport, and security protection with the rapid expansion of the IIoT. In this paper, a recovery mechanism to recover the edge network failure is proposed by considering repair cost and computational demands. The NP-hard problem was divided into interdependent major and minor problems that could be solved in polynomial t
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The convolutional neural networks (CNN) are among the most utilized neural networks in various applications, including deep learning. In recent years, the continuing extension of CNN into increasingly complicated domains has made its training process more difficult. Thus, researchers adopted optimized hybrid algorithms to address this problem. In this work, a novel chaotic black hole algorithm-based approach was created for the training of CNN to optimize its performance via avoidance of entrapment in the local minima. The logistic chaotic map was used to initialize the population instead of using the uniform distribution. The proposed training algorithm was developed based on a specific benchmark problem for optical character recog
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Scheduling Timetables for courses in the big departments in the universities is a very hard problem and is often be solved by many previous works although results are partially optimal. This work implements the principle of an evolutionary algorithm by using genetic theories to solve the timetabling problem to get a random and full optimal timetable with the ability to generate a multi-solution timetable for each stage in the collage. The major idea is to generate course timetables automatically while discovering the area of constraints to get an optimal and flexible schedule with no redundancy through the change of a viable course timetable. The main contribution in this work is indicated by increasing the flexibility of generating opti
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Any software application can be divided into four distinct interconnected domains namely, problem domain, usage domain, development domain and system domain. A methodology for assistive technology software development is presented here that seeks to provide a framework for requirements elicitation studies together with their subsequent mapping implementing use-case driven object-oriented analysis for component based software architectures. Early feedback on user interface components effectiveness is adopted through process usability evaluation. A model is suggested that consists of the three environments; problem, conceptual, and representational environments or worlds. This model aims to emphasize on the relationship between the objects
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The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated new methods for controlling the spread of the virus, and machine learning (ML) holds promise in this regard. Our study aims to explore the latest ML algorithms utilized for COVID-19 prediction, with a focus on their potential to optimize decision-making and resource allocation during peak periods of the pandemic. Our review stands out from others as it concentrates primarily on ML methods for disease prediction.To conduct this scoping review, we performed a Google Scholar literature search using "COVID-19," "prediction," and "machine learning" as keywords, with a custom range from 2020 to 2022. Of the 99 articles that were screened for eligibility, we selected 20 for the final review.Our system
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Most intrusion detection systems are signature based that work similar to anti-virus but they are unable to detect the zero-day attacks. The importance of the anomaly based IDS has raised because of its ability to deal with the unknown attacks. However smart attacks are appeared to compromise the detection ability of the anomaly based IDS. By considering these weak points the proposed
system is developed to overcome them. The proposed system is a development to the well-known payload anomaly detector (PAYL). By
combining two stages with the PAYL detector, it gives good detection ability and acceptable ratio of false positive. The proposed system improve the models recognition ability in the PAYL detector, for a filtered unencrypt
Herein, an efficient inorganic/organic hybrid photocatalyst composed of zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF-67) decorated with Cd0.5Zn0.5S solid solution semiconductor was constructed. The properties of prepared ZIF- [email protected] nanocomposite and its components (ZIF-67 and Cd0.5Zn0.5S) were investigated using XRD, FESEM, EDX, TEM, DRS and BET methods. The photocatalytic activity of fabricated [email protected] nanocomposite were measured toward removal of methyl violet (MV) dye as a simulated organic contaminant. Under visible-light and specific conditions (photocatalyst dose 1 g/l, MV dye 10 mg/l, unmodified solution pH 6.7 and reaction time 60 min.), the acquired [email protected] photocatalyst showed advanced photocatalytic activity
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