One opportunity for organizations to participate in open source software (OSS) development is throughorganizations OSS(orgsOSS), a term we use to describe a group of organizations that commit resources to collectively develop OSS. This archetype of OSS development is distinct from other types that include organizations, yet is understudied. As organizations increasingly contribute to and rely on OSS as part of their strategy, understanding how they can collaborate to build software holds importance for the future of software development. This study collects a unique dataset of development tasks from a large orgsOSS project spanning over two years and seven releases. Building on existing OSS research, we explore norms with respect to collaboration, i.e., how developers assign, discuss, and complete tasks, in an orgsOSS project. Interestingly, our analysis reveals that developers in orgsOSS do not always adhere to ideals of widespread sharing and participation espoused by traditional OSS, however some developer and task characteristics helped foster these ideals. Based on these and other findings, we develop a set of propositions and associated collaboration mechanisms that are important to future orgsOSS and other similarly structured software development projects.

Medical images are watermarked with patient data to enforce patient authentication and identification in radiology practices. In addition to common threats such as signal processing and geometric attacks, medical image watermarking systems are susceptible to a new class of threats called ‘inversion attack’, leading to ambiguities in establishing rightful ownership. This study presents an ‘inversion attack’ resilient zero‐watermarking system, in the hybrid Contourlet transform – singular value decomposition domain for medical image authentication. This scheme preserves the fidelity of the host image without introducing any artefacts and employs triangular number generating function and Hu's image invariants to confront ‘inversion attacks’. The performance of the system is evaluated with medical images of different modalities and a quick response code watermark that contains patient data. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the system against ‘ambiguity attacks’ and signify its appropriateness for secured medical image exchange between remote radiologists.

We present an Internet based multi-agent system for portfolio management. This system is designed to assist investment banking firms in serving small investors. In particular, we target mutual fund supermarkets which are essentially funds of funds. There are two types of agents: banker agents and investor agents. Banker agents assist mutual fund managers in devising a global efficient frontier from the individual risk-return characteristics of each of the funds from which a portfolio can be constructed. Each point on this efficient frontier constitutes a particular allocation of resources (i.e. a particular portfolio) among the funds. Investor agents offer personalized advice to each individual investor regarding the choice of a portfolio. Each investor agent gradually learns factors peculiar to the individual served; examples of such factors are risk tolerance, age, income, net worth and investment duration. The banker and investor agents (all implemented in Java) interact with each other over the Internet thereby allowing the investment firm to serve a large number of individual investors with minimal overhead. The various investor agents also learn from each other by swapping experiences in specially designed "forums" hosted by the concerned bank.