Abstract: In this content analysis research note the aim was to explore to how sustainability and especially environmental issues are conveyed into environmental items in annual reports and disclosures. As The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a globally wide multistakeholder process, the enterprises using voluntarily GRI framework are considered to be aware of sustainability and environmental concerns. The findings were that although these enterprises included in an environmentally sensitive industry sector and had special capabilities to consider environmental issues there were few GRIreporting enterprises presented substantially detailed environmental items in audited financial statements. There were only slight differences between publishing years 2008 and 2009 - the beginning years of economic turmoil. The environmental issues seemed not to be considered substantial enough for financial reporting as a basis for concerning investment or voting decisions.
Abstract: Software security testing is an important means to ensure software security and trustiness. This paper first mainly discusses the definition and classification of software security testing, and investigates methods and tools of software security testing widely. Then it analyzes and concludes the advantages and disadvantages of various methods and the scope of application, presents a taxonomy of security testing tools. Finally, the paper points out future focus and development directions of software security testing technology.
Abstract: The current research paper is an implementation of
Eigen Faces and Karhunen-Loeve Algorithm for face recognition.
The designed program works in a manner where a unique
identification number is given to each face under trial. These faces
are kept in a database from where any particular face can be matched
and found out of the available test faces. The Karhunen –Loeve
Algorithm has been implemented to find out the appropriate right
face (with same features) with respect to given input image as test
data image having unique identification number. The procedure
involves usage of Eigen faces for the recognition of faces.
Abstract: In Thailand, both the 1997 and the current 2007 Thai Constitutions have mentioned the establishment of independent organizations as a new mechanism to play a key role in proposing policy recommendations to national decision-makers in the interest of collective consumers. Over the last ten years, no independent organizations have yet been set up. Evidently, nobody could point out who should be key players in establishing provincial independent consumer bodies. The purpose of this study was to find definitive stakeholders in establishing and developing independent consumer bodies in a Thai context. This was a cross-sectional study between August and September 2007, using a postal questionnaire with telephone follow-up. The questionnaire was designed and used to obtain multiple stakeholder assessment of three key attributes (power, interest and influence). Study population was 153 stakeholders associated with policy decision-making, formulation and implementation processes of civil-based consumer protection in pilot provinces. The population covered key representatives from five sectors (academics, government officers, business traders, mass media and consumer networks) who participated in the deliberative forums at 10 provinces. A 49.7% response rate was achieved. Data were analyzed, comparing means of three stakeholder attributes and classification of stakeholder typology. The results showed that the provincial health officers were the definitive stakeholders as they had legal power, influence and interest in establishing and sustaining the independent consumer bodies. However, only a few key representatives of the provincial health officers expressed their own paradigm on the civil-based consumer protection. Most provincial health officers put their own standpoint of building civic participation at only a plan-implementation level. For effective policy implementation by the independent consumer bodies, the Thai government should provide budgetary support for the operation of the provincial health officers with their paradigm shift as well as their own clarified standpoint on corporate governance.
Abstract: The counting process of cell colonies is always a long
and laborious process that is dependent on the judgment and ability
of the operator. The judgment of the operator in counting can vary in
relation to fatigue. Moreover, since this activity is time consuming it
can limit the usable number of dishes for each experiment. For these
purposes, it is necessary that an automatic system of cell colony
counting is used. This article introduces a new automatic system of
counting based on the elaboration of the digital images of cellular
colonies grown on petri dishes. This system is mainly based on the
algorithms of region-growing for the recognition of the regions of
interest (ROI) in the image and a Sanger neural net for the
characterization of such regions. The better final classification is
supplied from a Feed-Forward Neural Net (FF-NN) and confronted
with the K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN) and a Linear Discriminative
Function (LDF). The preliminary results are shown.
Abstract: In this paper we present an off line system for the
recognition of the handwritten numeric chains. Our work is divided
in two big parts. The first part is the realization of a recognition
system of the isolated handwritten digits. In this case the study is
based mainly on the evaluation of neural network performances,
trained with the gradient back propagation algorithm. The used
parameters to form the input vector of the neural network are
extracted on the binary images of the digits by several methods: the
distribution sequence, the Barr features and the centred moments of
the different projections and profiles. The second part is the
extension of our system for the reading of the handwritten numeric
chains constituted of a variable number of digits. The vertical
projection is used to segment the numeric chain at isolated digits and
every digit (or segment) will be presented separately to the entry of
the system achieved in the first part (recognition system of the
isolated handwritten digits). The result of the recognition of the
numeric chain will be displayed at the exit of the global system.
Abstract: This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness (SA), the control of autonomous vertical flight for tactical unmanned aerial vehicle (TUAV). With the SA strategy, we proposed a two stage flight control procedure using two autonomous control subsystems to address the dynamics variation and performance requirement difference in initial and final stages of flight trajectory for an unmanned helicopter model with coaxial rotor and ducted fan configuration. This control strategy for chosen model of TUAV has been verified by simulation of hovering maneuvers using software package Simulink and demonstrated good performance for fast stabilization of engines in hovering, consequently, fast SA with economy in energy can be asserted during search-and-rescue operations.
Abstract: One of the main trouble in a steel strip manufacturing
line is the breakage of whatever weld carried out between steel coils,
that are used to produce the continuous strip to be processed. A weld
breakage results in a several hours stop of the manufacturing line. In
this process the damages caused by the breakage must be repaired.
After the reparation and in order to go on with the production it will
be necessary a restarting process of the line. For minimizing this
problem, a human operator must inspect visually and manually each
weld in order to avoid its breakage during the manufacturing process.
The work presented in this paper is based on the Bayesian decision
theory and it presents an approach to detect, on real-time, steel strip
defective welds. This approach is based on quantifying the tradeoffs
between various classification decisions using probability and the
costs that accompany such decisions.
Abstract: Character segmentation is an important preprocessing step for text recognition. In degraded documents, existence of touching characters decreases recognition rate drastically, for any optical character recognition (OCR) system. In this paper a study of touching Gurmukhi characters is carried out and these characters have been divided into various categories after a careful analysis.Structural properties of the Gurmukhi characters are used for defining the categories. New algorithms have been proposed to segment the touching characters in middle zone. These algorithms have shown a reasonable improvement in segmenting the touching characters in degraded Gurmukhi script. The algorithms proposed in this paper are applicable only to machine printed text.
Abstract: The incorporation of renewable energy sources for the sustainable electricity production is undertaking a more prominent role in electric power systems. Thus, it will be an indispensable incident that the characteristics of future power networks, their prospective stability for instance, get influenced by the imposed features of sustainable energy sources. One of the distinctive attributes of the sustainable energy sources is exhibiting the stochastic behavior. This paper investigates the impacts of this stochastic behavior on the small disturbance rotor angle stability in the upcoming electric power networks. Considering the various types of renewable energy sources and the vast variety of system configurations, the sensitivity analysis can be an efficient breakthrough towards generalizing the effects of new energy sources on the concept of stability. In this paper, the definition of small disturbance angle stability for future power systems and the iterative-stochastic way of its analysis are presented. Also, the effects of system parameters on this type of stability are described by performing a sensitivity analysis for an electric power test system.
Abstract: In this paper we proposed comparison of four content based objective metrics with results of subjective tests from 80 video sequences. We also include two objective metrics VQM and SSIM to our comparison to serve as “reference” objective metrics because their pros and cons have already been published. Each of the video sequence was preprocessed by the region recognition algorithm and then the particular objective video quality metric were calculated i.e. mutual information, angular distance, moment of angle and normalized cross-correlation measure. The Pearson coefficient was calculated to express metrics relationship to accuracy of the model and the Spearman rank order correlation coefficient to represent the metrics relationship to monotonicity. The results show that model with the mutual information as objective metric provides best result and it is suitable for evaluating quality of video sequences.
Abstract: The protection of parallel transmission lines has been a challenging task due to mutual coupling between the adjacent circuits of the line. This paper presents a novel scheme for detection and classification of faults on parallel transmission lines. The proposed approach uses combination of wavelet transform and neural network, to solve the problem. While wavelet transform is a powerful mathematical tool which can be employed as a fast and very effective means of analyzing power system transient signals, artificial neural network has a ability to classify non-linear relationship between measured signals by identifying different patterns of the associated signals. The proposed algorithm consists of time-frequency analysis of fault generated transients using wavelet transform, followed by pattern recognition using artificial neural network to identify the type of the fault. MATLAB/Simulink is used to generate fault signals and verify the correctness of the algorithm. The adaptive discrimination scheme is tested by simulating different types of fault and varying fault resistance, fault location and fault inception time, on a given power system model. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme for fault diagnosis is able to classify all the faults on the parallel transmission line rapidly and correctly.
Abstract: The purposes of the paper are to know and improve
the legal awareness of Surakarta local government officer to Law
No.12/2006 on Citizenship in vanishing civic discrimination to
Chinese Indonesians. Some issues of the Chinese Indonesian are the
definitions of Indonesian citizens and native Indonesian people or
“warga negara Indonesia (WNI) asli" and their obligation to show
Indonesian Citizenship Certificate (SBKRI) in processing civil
documents. Legal awareness of Surakarta local government officer
can be categorized as “legal knowledge" only. They know the laws
but they do not implement it yet. Nevertheless, at least this research
has given the new awareness in citizenship law for the officers.
Abstract: This paper presents a new version of the SVM mixture algorithm initially proposed by Kwok for classification and regression problems. For both cases, a slight modification of the mixture model leads to a standard SVM training problem, to the existence of an exact solution and allows the direct use of well known decomposition and working set selection algorithms. Only the regression case is considered in this paper but classification has been addressed in a very similar way. This method has been successfully applied to engine pollutants emission modeling.
Abstract: Automatic currency note recognition invariably
depends on the currency note characteristics of a particular country
and the extraction of features directly affects the recognition ability.
Sri Lanka has not been involved in any kind of research or
implementation of this kind. The proposed system “SLCRec" comes
up with a solution focusing on minimizing false rejection of notes.
Sri Lankan currency notes undergo severe changes in image quality
in usage. Hence a special linear transformation function is adapted to
wipe out noise patterns from backgrounds without affecting the
notes- characteristic images and re-appear images of interest. The
transformation maps the original gray scale range into a smaller
range of 0 to 125. Applying Edge detection after the transformation
provided better robustness for noise and fair representation of edges
for new and old damaged notes. A three layer back propagation
neural network is presented with the number of edges detected in row
order of the notes and classification is accepted in four classes of
interest which are 100, 500, 1000 and 2000 rupee notes. The
experiments showed good classification results and proved that the
proposed methodology has the capability of separating classes
properly in varying image conditions.
Abstract: A feasibility study for the design and construction of a
pilot plant for the extraction of castor oil in South Africa was
conducted. The study emphasized the four critical aspects of project
feasibility analysis, namely technical, financial, market and
managerial aspects. The technical aspect involved research on
existing oil extraction technologies, namely: mechanical pressing and
solvent extraction, as well as assessment of the proposed production
site for both short and long term viability of the project. The site is
on the outskirts of Nkomazi village in the Mpumalanga province,
where connections for water and electricity are currently underway,
potential raw material supply proves to be reliable since the province
is known for its commercial farming. The managerial aspect was
evaluated based on the fact that the current producer of castor oil will
be fully involved in the project while receiving training and technical
assistance from Sasol Technology, the TSC and SEDA. Market and
financial aspects were evaluated and the project was considered
financially viable with a Net Present Value (NPV) of R2 731 687 and
an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 18% at an annual interest rate of
10.5%. The payback time is 6years for analysis over the first 10
years with a net income of R1 971 000 in the first year. The project
was thus found to be feasible with high chance of success while
contributing to socio-economic development. It was recommended
for lab tests to be conducted to establish process kinetics that would
be used in the initial design of the plant.
Abstract: The task of strategic information technology
management is to focus on adapting technology to ensure
competitiveness. A key factor for success in this sector is awareness
and readiness to deploy new technologies and exploit the services
they offer. Recently, the need for more flexible and dynamic user
interfaces (UIs) has been recognized, especially in mobile
applications. An ongoing research project (MOP), initiated by TUT
in Finland, is looking at how mobile device UIs can be adapted for
different needs and contexts. It focuses on examining the possibilities
to develop adapter software for solving the challenges related to the
UI and its flexibility in mobile devices. This approach has great
potential for enhancing information transfer in mobile devices, and
consequently for improving information management. The
technology presented here could be one of the key emerging
technologies in the information technology sector in relation to
mobile devices and telecommunications.
Abstract: Full search block matching algorithm is widely used for hardware implementation of motion estimators in video compression algorithms. In this paper we are proposing a new architecture, which consists of a 2D parallel processing unit and a 1D unit both working in parallel. The proposed architecture reduces both data access power and computational power which are the main causes of power consumption in integer motion estimation. It also completes the operations with nearly the same number of clock cycles as compared to a 2D systolic array architecture. In this work sum of absolute difference (SAD)-the most repeated operation in block matching, is calculated in two steps. The first step is to calculate the SAD for alternate rows by a 2D parallel unit. If the SAD calculated by the parallel unit is less than the stored minimum SAD, the SAD of the remaining rows is calculated by the 1D unit. Early termination, which stops avoidable computations has been achieved with the help of alternate rows method proposed in this paper and by finding a low initial SAD value based on motion vector prediction. Data reuse has been applied to the reference blocks in the same search area which significantly reduced the memory access.
Abstract: This paper explores the issues that influence online retailing in Saudi Arabia. Retailers in Saudi Arabia have been reserved in their adoption of electronically delivered aspects of their business. Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia has the largest and fastest growth of ICT marketplaces in the Arab region, e-commerce activities are not progressing at the same speed. Only very few Saudi companies, mostly medium and large companies from the manufacturing sector, are involved in e-commerce implementation. Based on qualitative data collected by conducting interviews with 16 retailers and 16 potential customers in Saudi Arabia, several factors influencing online retailing diffusion in Saudi Arabia are identified. However, government support comes the highest and most influencing factor for online retailing growth as identified by both parties; retailers and potential customers in Saudi Arabia.
Abstract: This paper proposed high level feature for online Lao handwritten recognition. This feature must be high level enough so that the feature is not change when characters are written by different persons at different speed and different proportion (shorter or longer stroke, head, tail, loop, curve). In this high level feature, a character is divided in to sequence of curve segments where a segment start where curve reverse rotation (counter clockwise and clockwise). In each segment, following features are gathered cumulative change in direction of curve (- for clockwise), cumulative curve length, cumulative length of left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top ( cumulative change in X and Y axis of segment). This feature is simple yet robust for high accuracy recognition. The feature can be gather from parsing the original time sampling sequence X, Y point of the pen location without re-sampling. We also experiment on other segmentation point such as the maximum curvature point which was widely used by other researcher. Experiments results show that the recognition rates are at 94.62% in comparing to using maximum curvature point 75.07%. This is due to a lot of variations of turning points in handwritten.