Adaptive Subchannel Allocation for MC-CDMA System

Multicarrier code-division multiple-access is one of the effective techniques to gain its multiple access capability, robustness against fading, and to mitigate the ISI. In this paper, we propose an improved mulcarrier CDMA system with adaptive subchannel allocation. We analyzed the performance of our proposed system in frequency selective fading environment with narrowband interference existing and compared it with that of parallel transmission over many subchannels (namely, conventional MC-CDMA scheme) and DS-CDMA system. Simulation results show that adaptive subchannel allocation scheme, when used in conventional multicarrier CDMA system, the performance will be greatly improved.

Development Techniques of Multi-Agents Based Autonomous Railway Vehicles Control Systems

This paper presents the development techniques for a complete autonomous design model of an advanced train control system and gives a new approach for the implementation of multi-agents based system. This research work proposes to develop a novel control system to enhance the efficiency of the vehicles under constraints of various conditions, and contributes in stability and controllability issues, considering relevant safety and operational requirements with command control communication and various sensors to avoid accidents. The approach of speed scheduling, management and control in local and distributed environment is given to fulfill the dire needs of modern trend and enhance the vehicles control systems in automation. These techniques suggest the state of the art microelectronic technology with accuracy and stability as forefront goals.

Fabrication of Tissue Engineering Scaffolds Using Rapid Prototyping Techniques

Rapid prototyping (RP) techniques are a group of advanced manufacturing processes that can produce custom made objects directly from computer data such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. Using RP fabrication techniques, constructs with controllable and complex internal architecture with appropriate mechanical properties can be achieved. One of the attractive and promising utilization of RP techniques is related to tissue engineering (TE) scaffold fabrication. Tissue engineering scaffold is a 3D construction that acts as a template for tissue regeneration. Although several conventional techniques such as solvent casting and gas forming are utilized in scaffold fabrication; these processes show poor interconnectivity and uncontrollable porosity of the produced scaffolds. So, RP techniques become the best alternative fabrication methods of TE scaffolds. This paper reviews the current state of the art in the area of tissue engineering scaffolds fabrication using advanced RP processes, as well as the current limitations and future trends in scaffold fabrication RP techniques.

Evolutionary Computation Technique for Solving Riccati Differential Equation of Arbitrary Order

In this article an evolutionary technique has been used for the solution of nonlinear Riccati differential equations of fractional order. In this method, genetic algorithm is used as a tool for the competent global search method hybridized with active-set algorithm for efficient local search. The proposed method has been successfully applied to solve the different forms of Riccati differential equations. The strength of proposed method has in its equal applicability for the integer order case, as well as, fractional order case. Comparison of the method has been made with standard numerical techniques as well as the analytic solutions. It is found that the designed method can provide the solution to the equation with better accuracy than its counterpart deterministic approaches. Another advantage of the given approach is to provide results on entire finite continuous domain unlike other numerical methods which provide solutions only on discrete grid of points.

An Efficient Technique for EMI Mitigation in Fluorescent Lamps using Frequency Modulation and Evolutionary Programming

Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is one of the serious problems in most electrical and electronic appliances including fluorescent lamps. The electronic ballast used to regulate the power flow through the lamp is the major cause for EMI. The interference is because of the high frequency switching operation of the ballast. Formerly, some EMI mitigation techniques were in practice, but they were not satisfactory because of the hardware complexity in the circuit design, increased parasitic components and power consumption and so on. The majority of the researchers have their spotlight only on EMI mitigation without considering the other constraints such as cost, effective operation of the equipment etc. In this paper, we propose a technique for EMI mitigation in fluorescent lamps by integrating Frequency Modulation and Evolutionary Programming. By the Frequency Modulation technique, the switching at a single central frequency is extended to a range of frequencies, and so, the power is distributed throughout the range of frequencies leading to EMI mitigation. But in order to meet the operating frequency of the ballast and the operating power of the fluorescent lamps, an optimal modulation index is necessary for Frequency Modulation. The optimal modulation index is determined using Evolutionary Programming. Thereby, the proposed technique mitigates the EMI to a satisfactory level without disturbing the operation of the fluorescent lamp.

Tool Failure Detection Based on Statistical Analysis of Metal Cutting Acoustic Emission Signals

The analysis of Acoustic Emission (AE) signal generated from metal cutting processes has often approached statistically. This is due to the stochastic nature of the emission signal as a result of factors effecting the signal from its generation through transmission and sensing. Different techniques are applied in this manner, each of which is suitable for certain processes. In metal cutting where the emission generated by the deformation process is rather continuous, an appropriate method for analysing the AE signal based on the root mean square (RMS) of the signal is often used and is suitable for use with the conventional signal processing systems. The aim of this paper is to set a strategy in tool failure detection in turning processes via the statistic analysis of the AE generated from the cutting zone. The strategy is based on the investigation of the distribution moments of the AE signal at predetermined sampling. The skews and kurtosis of these distributions are the key elements in the detection. A normal (Gaussian) distribution has first been suggested then this was eliminated due to insufficiency. The so called Beta distribution was then considered, this has been used with an assumed β density function and has given promising results with regard to chipping and tool breakage detection.

Gait Recognition System: Bundle Rectangle Approach

Biometrics methods include recognition techniques such as fingerprint, iris, hand geometry, voice, face, ears and gait. The gait recognition approach has some advantages, for example it does not need the prior concern of the observed subject and it can record many biometric features in order to make deeper analysis, but most of the research proposals use high computational cost. This paper shows a gait recognition system with feature subtraction on a bundle rectangle drawn over the observed person. Statistical results within a database of 500 videos are shown.

Split-Pipe Design of Water Distribution Network Using Simulated Annealing

In this paper a procedure for the split-pipe design of looped water distribution network based on the use of simulated annealing is proposed. Simulated annealing is a heuristic-based search algorithm, motivated by an analogy of physical annealing in solids. It is capable for solving the combinatorial optimization problem. In contrast to the split-pipe design that is derived from a continuous diameter design that has been implemented in conventional optimization techniques, the split-pipe design proposed in this paper is derived from a discrete diameter design where a set of pipe diameters is chosen directly from a specified set of commercial pipes. The optimality and feasibility of the solutions are found to be guaranteed by using the proposed method. The performance of the proposed procedure is demonstrated through solving the three well-known problems of water distribution network taken from the literature. Simulated annealing provides very promising solutions and the lowest-cost solutions are found for all of these test problems. The results obtained from these applications show that simulated annealing is able to handle a combinatorial optimization problem of the least cost design of water distribution network. The technique can be considered as an alternative tool for similar areas of research. Further applications and improvements of the technique are expected as well.

The Effect of Chemical Treatment on TL Glow Curves of CdS/ZnS Thin Films Deposited by Vacuum Deposition Method

The effect of chemical treatment in CdCl2 and thermal annealing in 400°C, on the defect structures of potentially useful ZnS\CdS solar cell thin films deposited onto quartz substrate and prepared by vacuum deposition method was studied using the Thermoluminesence (TL) techniques. A series of electron and hole traps are found in the various deposited samples studied. After annealing, however, it was observed that the intensity and activation energy of TL signal increases with loss of the low temperature electron traps.

A Software Framework for Predicting Oil-Palm Yield from Climate Data

Intelligent systems based on machine learning techniques, such as classification, clustering, are gaining wide spread popularity in real world applications. This paper presents work on developing a software system for predicting crop yield, for example oil-palm yield, from climate and plantation data. At the core of our system is a method for unsupervised partitioning of data for finding spatio-temporal patterns in climate data using kernel methods which offer strength to deal with complex data. This work gets inspiration from the notion that a non-linear data transformation into some high dimensional feature space increases the possibility of linear separability of the patterns in the transformed space. Therefore, it simplifies exploration of the associated structure in the data. Kernel methods implicitly perform a non-linear mapping of the input data into a high dimensional feature space by replacing the inner products with an appropriate positive definite function. In this paper we present a robust weighted kernel k-means algorithm incorporating spatial constraints for clustering the data. The proposed algorithm can effectively handle noise, outliers and auto-correlation in the spatial data, for effective and efficient data analysis by exploring patterns and structures in the data, and thus can be used for predicting oil-palm yield by analyzing various factors affecting the yield.

Operative Public Space for Rural Brazil Strategies for Starting Up Economic, Social and Environmental Development of Rural Communities in Emerging Countries: The Goiabeira Case

This article stands in the context of rural communities in Brazil, where, like many others emerging countries, the overwhelming increasing markets and the overcrowded cities are leaving behind informal settlements based on obsolete agricultural economies and techniques. The pilot project for the community of Goiabeira reflects the attempt to imagine a development model that privileges the actual improvement of living conditions, the education and training, the social inclusion and participation of the dwellers of rural communities. Through the inclusion of operative public space, the aim is for them to become self-sustaining, encouraging the use of local resources for appropriate architectural, ecological and energy technologies and devices, that are efficient, affordable and foster community participation, in the respect of the surrounding environment.

Web Content Mining: A Solution to Consumer's Product Hunt

With the rapid growth in business size, today's businesses orient towards electronic technologies. Amazon.com and e-bay.com are some of the major stakeholders in this regard. Unfortunately the enormous size and hugely unstructured data on the web, even for a single commodity, has become a cause of ambiguity for consumers. Extracting valuable information from such an everincreasing data is an extremely tedious task and is fast becoming critical towards the success of businesses. Web content mining can play a major role in solving these issues. It involves using efficient algorithmic techniques to search and retrieve the desired information from a seemingly impossible to search unstructured data on the Internet. Application of web content mining can be very encouraging in the areas of Customer Relations Modeling, billing records, logistics investigations, product cataloguing and quality management. In this paper we present a review of some very interesting, efficient yet implementable techniques from the field of web content mining and study their impact in the area specific to business user needs focusing both on the customer as well as the producer. The techniques we would be reviewing include, mining by developing a knowledge-base repository of the domain, iterative refinement of user queries for personalized search, using a graphbased approach for the development of a web-crawler and filtering information for personalized search using website captions. These techniques have been analyzed and compared on the basis of their execution time and relevance of the result they produced against a particular search.

Initialization Method of Reference Vectors for Improvement of Recognition Accuracy in LVQ

Initial values of reference vectors have significant influence on recognition accuracy in LVQ. There are several existing techniques, such as SOM and k-means, for setting initial values of reference vectors, each of which has provided some positive results. However, those results are not sufficient for the improvement of recognition accuracy. This study proposes an ACO-used method for initializing reference vectors with an aim to achieve recognition accuracy higher than those obtained through conventional methods. Moreover, we will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by applying it to the wine data and English vowel data and comparing its results with those of conventional methods.

A Network Traffic Prediction Algorithm Based On Data Mining Technique

This paper is a description approach to predict incoming and outgoing data rate in network system by using association rule discover, which is one of the data mining techniques. Information of incoming and outgoing data in each times and network bandwidth are network performance parameters, which needed to solve in the traffic problem. Since congestion and data loss are important network problems. The result of this technique can predicted future network traffic. In addition, this research is useful for network routing selection and network performance improvement.

A Digital Media e-Learning Training Strategy for Healthcare Employees: Cost effective Distance Learning by Collaborative offline / online Engagement and Assessment

Within the healthcare system, training and continued professional development although essential, can be effected by cost and logistical restraints due to the nature of healthcare provision e.g employee shift patterns, access to expertise, cost factors in releasing staff to attend training etc. The use of multimedia technology for the development of e-learning applications is also a major cost consideration for healthcare management staff, and this type of media whether optical or on line requires careful planning in order to remain inclusive of all staff with potentially varied access to multimedia computing. This paper discusses a project in which the use of DVD authoring technology has been successfully implemented to meet the needs of distance learning and user considerations, and is based on film production techniques and reduced product turnaround deadlines.

Adequacy of Object-Oriented Framework System-Based Testing Techniques

An application framework provides a reusable design and implementation for a family of software systems. If the framework contains defects, the defects will be passed on to the applications developed from the framework. Framework defects are hard to discover at the time the framework is instantiated. Therefore, it is important to remove all defects before instantiating the framework. In this paper, two measures for the adequacy of an object-oriented system-based testing technique are introduced. The measures assess the usefulness and uniqueness of the testing technique. The two measures are applied to experimentally compare the adequacy of two testing techniques introduced to test objectoriented frameworks at the system level. The two considered testing techniques are the New Framework Test Approach and Testing Frameworks Through Hooks (TFTH). The techniques are also compared analytically in terms of their coverage power of objectoriented aspects. The comparison study results show that the TFTH technique is better than the New Framework Test Approach in terms of usefulness degree, uniqueness degree, and coverage power.

SAF: A Substitution and Alignment Free Similarity Measure for Protein Sequences

The literature reports a large number of approaches for measuring the similarity between protein sequences. Most of these approaches estimate this similarity using alignment-based techniques that do not necessarily yield biologically plausible results, for two reasons. First, for the case of non-alignable (i.e., not yet definitively aligned and biologically approved) sequences such as multi-domain, circular permutation and tandem repeat protein sequences, alignment-based approaches do not succeed in producing biologically plausible results. This is due to the nature of the alignment, which is based on the matching of subsequences in equivalent positions, while non-alignable proteins often have similar and conserved domains in non-equivalent positions. Second, the alignment-based approaches lead to similarity measures that depend heavily on the parameters set by the user for the alignment (e.g., gap penalties and substitution matrices). For easily alignable protein sequences, it's possible to supply a suitable combination of input parameters that allows such an approach to yield biologically plausible results. However, for difficult-to-align protein sequences, supplying different combinations of input parameters yields different results. Such variable results create ambiguities and complicate the similarity measurement task. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper describes a novel and effective approach for measuring the similarity between protein sequences, called SAF for Substitution and Alignment Free. Without resorting either to the alignment of protein sequences or to substitution relations between amino acids, SAF is able to efficiently detect the significant subsequences that best represent the intrinsic properties of protein sequences, those underlying the chronological dependencies of structural features and biochemical activities of protein sequences. Moreover, by using a new efficient subsequence matching scheme, SAF more efficiently handles protein sequences that contain similar structural features with significant meaning in chronologically non-equivalent positions. To show the effectiveness of SAF, extensive experiments were performed on protein datasets from different databases, and the results were compared with those obtained by several mainstream algorithms.

Mining Genes Relations in Microarray Data Combined with Ontology in Colon Cancer Automated Diagnosis System

MATCH project [1] entitle the development of an automatic diagnosis system that aims to support treatment of colon cancer diseases by discovering mutations that occurs to tumour suppressor genes (TSGs) and contributes to the development of cancerous tumours. The constitution of the system is based on a) colon cancer clinical data and b) biological information that will be derived by data mining techniques from genomic and proteomic sources The core mining module will consist of the popular, well tested hybrid feature extraction methods, and new combined algorithms, designed especially for the project. Elements of rough sets, evolutionary computing, cluster analysis, self-organization maps and association rules will be used to discover the annotations between genes, and their influence on tumours [2]-[11]. The methods used to process the data have to address their high complexity, potential inconsistency and problems of dealing with the missing values. They must integrate all the useful information necessary to solve the expert's question. For this purpose, the system has to learn from data, or be able to interactively specify by a domain specialist, the part of the knowledge structure it needs to answer a given query. The program should also take into account the importance/rank of the particular parts of data it analyses, and adjusts the used algorithms accordingly.

Exponential Stability of Uncertain Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Hopfield Neural Networks with Time Delays

In this paper, based on linear matrix inequality (LMI), by using Lyapunov functional theory, the exponential stability criterion is obtained for a class of uncertain Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy Hopfield neural networks (TSFHNNs) with time delays. Here we choose a generalized Lyapunov functional and introduce a parameterized model transformation with free weighting matrices to it, these techniques lead to generalized and less conservative stability condition that guarantee the wide stability region. Finally, an example is given to illustrate our results by using MATLAB LMI toolbox.

Discovering Complex Regularities by Adaptive Self Organizing Classification

Data mining uses a variety of techniques each of which is useful for some particular task. It is important to have a deep understanding of each technique and be able to perform sophisticated analysis. In this article we describe a tool built to simulate a variation of the Kohonen network to perform unsupervised clustering and support the entire data mining process up to results visualization. A graphical representation helps the user to find out a strategy to optmize classification by adding, moving or delete a neuron in order to change the number of classes. The tool is also able to automatically suggest a strategy for number of classes optimization.The tool is used to classify macroeconomic data that report the most developed countries? import and export. It is possible to classify the countries based on their economic behaviour and use an ad hoc tool to characterize the commercial behaviour of a country in a selected class from the analysis of positive and negative features that contribute to classes formation.