Recent regulations in the United States (U.S.) such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 require top management of a public firm to provide reasonable assurance that they institute internal controls that minimize risks over the firm’s operations and financial reporting. External auditors are required to attest to the management’s assertions over the effectiveness of those internal controls. As fir...

The digital revolution has brought about a massive increase in the availability and distribution of musicrelated documents of various modalities comprising textual, audio, as well as visual material. Therefore, the development of techniques and tools for organizing, structuring, retrieving, navigating, and presenting music-related data has become a major strand of research—the field is often re...

The increasing dependency of many businesses with information technology (IT)and the high percentage of the IT investment in all invested capital in businessenvironment ask for more attention to this important driver of business. Thelimitation of capital budget forces the managers to look for more wise investment inIT. There are many cost-cutting techniques in the literature and each of them ha...

Almost all of electric utility companies are planning to improve their management automation system, in order to meet the changing requirements of new liberalized energy market and to benefit from the innovations in information and communication technology (ICT or IT). Architectural design of the utility management automation (UMA) systems for their IT-enabling requires proper selection of ...

Recently, a novel approach towards semi-quantitative IT security risk assessment has been proposed in the draft IEC 62443-3-2. This approach is analyzed from several different angles, e.g. embedding into the overall standard series, semantic and methodological aspects. As a result, several systematic flaws in the approach are exposed. As a way forward, an alternative approach is proposed which ...