Bridging skill gaps and creating future ready accounting and finance graduates: an exploratory study

Background: Changing trends in the use of technology have become an impelling force to be reckoned with for the accounting and finance profession. The curriculum offered in higher learning institutions must be quickly revamped so that students who complete a bachelor’s degree are digitally competent upon graduation. With US$55.3 billion invested in FinTech in 2019 alone and more than 72% of accounting jobs being automated, graduates must be trained on digital skills to be future proof. Accounting and finance graduates must be made competent in skills that are related to digital content such as blockchain technology, information assets and autonomous peer to peer systems, to name a few. Methods: We used a three-phase approach: 1) careful mapping of digital topics taught within the course structure offered at these institutions; 2) review of current best practices and digital learning tools for digital inclusion which was ascertained from literature; and 3) 80 experts in a think tank group were interviewed on antecedents, awareness and problems in relation to digital inclusion within the curriculum to validate our research objective. Results: Eleven key tools for inclusion in the curriculum were discussed with experts and then mapped to current curriculum offered at institutions. We discovered that less than 5% of these were being taught. In total, 78% of experts agreed that digital content is inevitable, 90% agreed that digital inclusion based on tools that were discussed will yield great benefits for students, and lastly 75% agreed that giving digital exposure to students must be standard practice. Conclusions: The response from experts confirms that digital inclusion is imperative, but instructors themselves lacked the know-how of emerging technologies. Only the curriculum of institutions with approved bachelor’s programs were included in this research. In our future work we hope to include all institutions and professional bodies as well.

ZRR-P2P: Zone-Based Mechanism for Data Replication and Research Optimization in Unstructured P2P Systems

Peer-to-peer systems (P2P) have enjoyed great popularity in terms of sharing content in distributed environments. In mobile P2P networks, how to improve the efficiency of the resource lookup has been an important topic of research. Among the existing solutions, we find lookup mechanisms based on data replication that can increase data availability and reduce search latency. On the other side, these solutions have certain limits such as in the selection of resources to be replicated and in increasing the storage space of peers with additional data. Therefore, this work ZRR-P2P (Zone-based mechanism for data Replication and Research optimization in P2P) comes with the aim of partitioning the network zone on sub-zones and of replicating popular data shared in the network. Thus, in order to improve the research process without increasing storage space of peers. The simulation results show that our strategy manages to increase data availability and improve the search process in terms of hops count and search latency, while avoiding increasing the storage space of peers.

A Novel Data Consistence Model Based on Virtual Peers in Peer-to-Peer Systems

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have become a promising paradigm to provide efficient storage service in distributed environments. Although its effectiveness has been proven in many areas, the data consistency problem in P2P systems are still an opening issue. This article proposes a novel data consistence model, virtual peers-based data consistency (VPDC), which introduces a set of virtual peers to provide guaranteed data consistency in decentralized and unstructured P2P systems. The VPDC model can be easily implemented in any P2P system without introducing any interference to data retrieval. Theoretical analysis on VPDC is presented to analyze its effectiveness and efficiency, and massive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of a VPDC model in a real-world P2P system. The results indicate that it can significantly improve the data consistence of P2P systems and outperform many similar approaches in various experimental settings.

Improve the performance of peer-to-peer networks within publish/ subscribe systems by using PeerSim simulator within Eclipse Environment: تحسين أداء شبكات الند للند ضمن أنظمة النشر والاشتراك باستخدام محاكي Peersim ضمن بيئة Eclipse

Publish/ subscribe (pub/ sub) is a popular communication paradigm in the design of large-scale distributed systems. We are witnessing an increasingly widespread use of pub/ sub for a wide array of applications in industry, academia, financial data dissemination, business process management and does not end in social networking sites which takes a large area of user interests and used network bandwidth. Social network interactions have grown exponentially in recent years to the order of billions of notifications generated by millions of users every day. So, it has become very important to access in the field of publishing and subscription networks, especially peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in many ways like the publication speed for events And the percentage of loss in the incoming events of the participants. Peer-to-peer systems can be very large and include millions of nodes, those nodes join and leave the network continuously, and these characteristics are difficult to handle. The evaluation of a new protocol in a real environment, particularly in the early stages, was considered impractical. Hence the need for a simulator to perform such a function to facilitate the simulation of researchers and this emulator is an open source simulator running within the Eclipse environment. In this research we have adopted a new method of selecting nodes within the table of vicinity protocol. This method is concentrated in that the far node increases the probability of its inclusion in the table more than the adjacent node. and The proposed network that uses the Polder Cast protocol was modelled using PeerSim software for modelling deployment and subscription networks within the eclipse environment so that the event delivery service is a Peer-2-Peer network and the method used to register is subject-based (Topic-Based). experimental results showed noticeable improvement in the publication speed for events by 51.11% compared to the original design of the protocol. And The percentage of event loss was reduced by 20%.

Three-Tier Delaunay Network as a Topology for Peer-to-Peer Overlay

This paper considers the problem of improving the routing performance of hierarchical Delaunay networks. Delaunay network is a network topology for peer-to-peer systems based on the Delaunay triangulation of a set of points associated with a set of peers. It is known that Delaunay networks have a favorable property as a topology for peer-to-peer systems such that a greedy routing scheme always delivers a given message to its destination without encountering a dead-end. The key idea used in the proposed method is to apply a hash function to the address of participant peers. More concretely, by applying a hash function to the coordinate point of the peers and by associating several points to each peer, we could realize an overlay so that the number of hops to the destination in the original network could be significantly reduced.