Taiseera Hazeem Al Balushi

Securing Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) is critical, but it is made challenging by the constant evolution of cyber threats and the scarcity of labeled attack data in these specialized environments. Standard intrusion detection systems (IDSs) often fail to adapt when transferred to new networks with limited data. To address this, this paper introduces an adaptive intrusion detection framework that combines a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) model with a novel transfer learning strategy. We employ a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent to intelligently guide the fine-tuning process, which allows the IDS to dynamically adjust its parameters such as layer freezing and learning rates in real-time based on performance feedback. We evaluated our system in a realistic data-scarce scenario using only 50 labeled training samples. Our RL-Guided model achieved a final F1-score of 0.9825, significantly outperforming a standard neural fine-tuning model (0.861) and a target baseline model (0.759). Analysis of the RL agent’s behavior confirmed that it learned a balanced and effective policy for adapting the model to the target domain. We conclude that the proposed RL-guided approach creates a highly accurate and adaptive IDS that overcomes the limitations of static transfer learning methods. This dynamic fine-tuning strategy is a powerful and promising direction for building resilient cybersecurity defenses for critical infrastructure.

Electronic service, refers to services offered over the information and communication technologies. These services are becoming increasingly important with continuously developed application in various domains (business, government, education and health) as these services provide benefits to all parties concerned from service providers, service users and the society. This chapter will shed light in e-services, definitions, components, and characteristics. As service providers want to boost the efficiency and quality to reach more users to utilize these services, a prime challenge in developing these services with high quality to meet users expectation becomes a must. Quality plays a major role to keep up a trust between service providers and users. Eight main quality dimensions are proposed as per the studies to examine the perspective of service providers and service users for government services (personalization, usability, performance, web design, security, user involvement, satisfaction and loyalty).

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to facilitate the full potential of the web for the people with disabilities. People with disabilities may fail to make full use of the potentials offered by the web even if they have the right hardware (computer and assistive technologies) as well as access to the internet because of the lack of accessibility. Design/methodology/approach: This research outlines the guidelines that provide the foundation for building an accessibility-aware framework approach, where people with disabilities can access most of the electronic contents based on their disability levels. Findings: The framework helps web engineers in developing accessible web pages for all types of users. Disability profile examples (blindness, low vision, deafness and hard of hearing) were taken to determine the performance of the framework approach. Research limitations/implications: The validation and testing was carried out on the Sultan Qaboos University website. The framework approach could be further validated by performing the tests on various other public and private websites. Practical implications: The guidelines can be used as a road map to overcome accessibility challenges during any web application development life cycle. A proper testing and evaluation is carried out on the framework to test its usability. Social implications: Although people with disabilities are perhaps the segment of society which are expected to gain the most from these technologies, they are facing barriers to access the contents of the web because of the way it is presented. This proposed framework could assist all the people with the disability of blindness and hearing impairment to have a better experience with the internet, making the technology more beneficial and usable to them. In the future, this approach can be extended for the people with other disabilities. Originality/value: This research provides a pioneering concept for accessibility-aware framework approach. This approach could be utilized for developing accessible web applications and electronic services for people with disabilities. The proposed framework can be used as a road map to overcome accessibility challenges during any web application development life cycle.