Abstract: Developing a nation geared by the principle of
sustainable development has been one of the piers in moulding a
greater nation for Malaysia since its independence. This is seen by
the act of joining the United Nations in 1957, just a month after
gaining their independence. The United Nations is an international
organization that aims to unite the nations worldwide based on
justice, human dignity and human well-being. Malaysia has
established a local body called the United Nations Malaysia which
collaborates with the government to accomplish the aim of
supporting sustainable development in Malaysia. Agenda 21 is an
international document produced from the Earth Summit providing
guidelines of implementing sustainable development globally,
nationally and locally. Initiatives of applying Agenda 21 in Malaysia
have been taken by the government and non-profit organizations to
expose issues regarding sustainable development and providing
environmental education to the community to increase awareness
towards environmental protection.
Abstract: Measures of complexity and entropy have not converged to a single quantitative description of levels of organization of complex systems. The need for such a measure is increasingly necessary in all disciplines studying complex systems. To address this problem, starting from the most fundamental principle in Physics, here a new measure for quantity of organization and rate of self-organization in complex systems based on the principle of least (stationary) action is applied to a model system - the central processing unit (CPU) of computers. The quantity of organization for several generations of CPUs shows a double exponential rate of change of organization with time. The exact functional dependence has a fine, S-shaped structure, revealing some of the mechanisms of self-organization. The principle of least action helps to explain the mechanism of increase of organization through quantity accumulation and constraint and curvature minimization with an attractor, the least average sum of actions of all elements and for all motions. This approach can help describe, quantify, measure, manage, design and predict future behavior of complex systems to achieve the highest rates of self organization to improve their quality. It can be applied to other complex systems from Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Ecology, Economics, Cities, network theory and others where complex systems are present.
Abstract: B2E portals represent a new class of web-based
information technologies which many organisations are introducing
in recent years to stay in touch with their distributed workforces and
enable them to perform value added activities for organisations.
However, actual usage of these emerging systems (measured using
suitable instruments) has not been reported in the contemporary
scholarly literature. We argue that many of the instruments to
measure usage of various types of IT-enabled information systems
are not directly applicable for B2E portals because they were
developed for the context of traditional mainframe and PC-based
information systems. It is therefore important to develop a new
instrument for web-based portal technologies aimed at employees. In
this article, we report on the development and initial qualitative
evaluation of an instrument that seeks to operationaise a set of
independent factors affecting the usage of portals by employees. The
proposed instrument is useful to IT/e-commerce researchers and
practitioners alike as it enhances their confidence in predicting
employee usage of portals in organisations.
Abstract: Biologically human brain processes information in both unimodal and multimodal approaches. In fact, information is progressively abstracted and seamlessly fused. Subsequently, the fusion of multimodal inputs allows a holistic understanding of a problem. The proliferation of technology has exponentially produced various sources of data, which could be likened to being the state of multimodality in human brain. Therefore, this is an inspiration to develop a methodology for exploring multimodal data and further identifying multi-view patterns. Specifically, we propose a brain inspired conceptual model that allows exploration and identification of patterns at different levels of granularity, different types of hierarchies and different types of modalities. A structurally adaptive neural network is deployed to implement the proposed model. Furthermore, the acquisition of multi-view patterns with the proposed model is demonstrated and discussed with some experimental results.
Abstract: This paper discusses about an intelligent system to be
installed in ambulances providing professional support to the paramedics on board. A video conferencing device over mobile 4G services enables specialists virtually attending the patient being transferred to the hospital. The data centre holds detailed databases
on the patients past medical history and hospitals with the specialists. It also hosts various software modules that compute the shortest traffic –less path to the closest hospital with the required facilities, on inputting the symptoms of the patient, on a real time basis.
Abstract: Clusters of microcalcifications in mammograms are an
important sign of breast cancer. This paper presents a complete
Computer Aided Detection (CAD) scheme for automatic detection of
clustered microcalcifications in digital mammograms. The proposed
system, MammoScan μCaD, consists of three main steps. Firstly
all potential microcalcifications are detected using a a method for
feature extraction, VarMet, and adaptive thresholding. This will also
give a number of false detections. The goal of the second step,
Classifier level 1, is to remove everything but microcalcifications.
The last step, Classifier level 2, uses learned dictionaries and sparse
representations as a texture classification technique to distinguish
single, benign microcalcifications from clustered microcalcifications,
in addition to remove some remaining false detections. The system
is trained and tested on true digital data from Stavanger University
Hospital, and the results are evaluated by radiologists. The overall
results are promising, with a sensitivity > 90 % and a low false
detection rate (approx 1 unwanted pr. image, or 0.3 false pr. image).
Abstract: To motivate users to adopt and use information
systems effectively, the nature of motivation should be carefully
investigated. People are usually motivated within ongoing processes
which include a chain of states such as perception, stimulation,
motivation, actions and reactions and finally, satisfaction. This study
assumes that the relevant motivation processes should be executed in
a proper and continuous manner to be able to persistently motivate
and re-motivate people in organizational settings and towards
information systems. On this basis, the study attempts to propose
possible relationships between this process-nature view of
motivation in terms of the common chain of states and the nearly
unique properties of information systems as is perceived by users in
the sense of a knowledgeable and authoritative entity. In the
conclusion section, some guidelines for practitioners are suggested to
ease their tasks for motivating people to adopt and use information
systems.
Abstract: This paper presents an experimental investigation using Acoustic Emission (AE) technology to monitor sand transportation in multiphase flow. The investigations were undertaken on three-phase (air-water-sand) flow in a horizontal pipe where the superficial gas velocity (VSG) had a range of between 0.2msˉ¹ to 2.0msˉ¹ and superficial liquid velocity (VSL) had a range of between 0.2msˉ¹ to 1.0msˉ¹. The experimental findings clearly show a correlation exists between AE energy levels, sand concentration, superficial gas velocity (VSG), and superficial liquid velocity (VSL).
Abstract: With the explosive growth of data available on the
Internet, personalization of this information space become a
necessity. At present time with the rapid increasing popularity of the
WWW, Websites are playing a crucial role to convey knowledge and
information to the end users. Discovering hidden and meaningful
information about Web users usage patterns is critical to determine
effective marketing strategies to optimize the Web server usage for
accommodating future growth. The task of mining useful information
becomes more challenging when the Web traffic volume is enormous
and keeps on growing. In this paper, we propose a intelligent model
to discover and analyze useful knowledge from the available Web
log data.
Abstract: The evaluation of conversational agents or chatterbots question answering systems is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented conversational agents based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when chatterbots began to become more domain specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a wider variety of questions and at the same time to achieve high quality responses. This paper discusses the inappropriateness of the existing measures for response quality evaluation and the call for new standard measures and related considerations are brought forward. As a short-term solution for evaluating response quality of conversational agents, and to demonstrate the challenges in evaluating systems of different nature, this research proposes a blackbox approach using observation, classification scheme and a scoring mechanism to assess and rank three example systems, AnswerBus, START and AINI.
Abstract: Global temperature had increased by about 0.5oC over
the past century, increasing temperature leads to a loss or a decrease
of soil organic matter (SOM). Whereas soil organic matter in many
tropical soils is less stable than that of temperate soils, and it will be
easily affected by climate change. Therefore, conservation of soil
organic matter is urgent issue nowadays. This paper presents the
effect of different doses (5%, 15%) of Ca-type zeolite in conjunction
with organic manure, applied to soil samples from Philippines,
Paraguay and Japan, on the decomposition resistance of soil organic
matter under high temperature. Results showed that a remain or
slightly increase the C/N ratio of soil. There are an increase in
percent of humic acid (PQ) that extracted with Na4P2O7. A decrease
of percent of free humus (fH) after incubation was determined. A
larger the relative color intensity (RF) value and a lower the color
coefficient (6logK) value following increasing zeolite rates leading
to a higher degrees of humification. The increase in the aromatic
condensation of humic acid (HA) after incubation, as indicates by the
decrease of H/C and O/C ratios of HA. This finding indicates that the
use of zeolite could be beneficial with respect to SOM conservation
under global warming condition.
Abstract: Boron minerals are very useful for various industrial
activities, such as glass industry and detergent industry, due to its
mechanical and chemical properties. During the production of boron
compounds, many of these are introduced into the environment in the
form of waste. Boron is also an important micro nutrient for the
plants to vegetate but if it exists in high concentrations, it could have
toxic effects. The maximum boron level in drinking water for human
health is given as 0.3 mg/L in World Health Organization (WHO)
standards. The toxic effects of boron should be noted especially for
dry regions, thus, in recent years, increasing attention has been paid
to remove the boron from waste waters. In this study, boron removal
is implemented by ion exchange process using Amberlite IRA-743
resin. Amberlite IRA-743 resin is a boron specific resin and it
belongs to the polymerizate sorbent group within the aminopolyol
functional group. Batch studies were performed to investigate the
effects of various experimental parameters, such as adsorbent dose,
initial concentration and pH, on the removal of boron. It is found
that, when the adsorbent dose increases removal of boron from the
liquid phase increases. However, an increase in the initial
concentration decreases the removal of boron. The effective pH
values for removal of boron are determined between 8.5 and 9.
Equilibrium isotherms were also analyzed by Langmuir and
Freundlich isotherm models. The Langmuir isotherm is obeyed better
than the Freundlich isotherm.
Abstract: The main purpose of this research aimed to create tactile texture designed media for the blind used for extra learning outside classrooms in order to enhance imagination of the blind about Himmapan creatures, furthermore, the main objective of the research focused on improving the visual disabled perception to be equal to normal people. The target group of the research is blinded students studying in The Bangkok school for the blind between grade 4-6 in the second semester of 2011 who are able to read the braille language. The research methodology consisted of the field study and the documentary study related to the blind, tactile texture designed media and Himmapan creatures. 10 pictures of tactile texture designed media were created in the designing process which began after the analysis had conducted based the primary and secondary data. The works had presented to experts in the visual disabled field who evaluated the works. After approval, the works used as prototype to teach the blind. KeywordsBlind, Himmapan Creatures, Tactile Texture.
Abstract: This study used Item Analysis, Exploratory Factor
Analysis (EFA) and Reliability Analysis (Cronbach-s α value) to
exam the Questions which selected by the Delphi method based on the
issue of “Socio-technical system (STS)" and user-centered
perspective. A structure questionnaire with seventy-four questions
which could be categorized into nine dimensions (healthcare
environment, organization behaviour, system quality, medical data
quality, service quality, safety quality, user usage, user satisfaction,
and organization net benefits) was provided to evaluate EMR of the
Taiwanese healthcare environment.
Abstract: As a result of the ever-changing environment and the demands of rganisations- customers, it is important to recognise the importance of some important managerial challenges. It is the sincere belief that failure to meet these challenges, will ultimately contribute to inevitable problems for organisations. This recognition
requires from managers and by implication organisations to be engaged in ethical behaviour, identity awareness and learning organisational behaviour. All these aspects actually reflect on the
importance of intellectual capital as the competitive weapons for
organisations in the future.
Abstract: In this article has been analyzed Kazakhstani
experience in organizing the system after the institute of higher education, legislative-regulative assurance of master preparation, and
statistic data in the republic. Have been the features of projecting the master programs, a condition of realization of studying credit system, have been analyzed the technologies of research teaching masters. In
conclusion have been given some recommendation on creating personal-oriented environment of research teaching masters.
Abstract: The given work is devoted to the description of
Information Technologies NAS of Azerbaijan created and
successfully maintained in Institute. On the basis of the decision of
board of the Supreme Certifying commission at the President of the
Azerbaijan Republic and Presidium of National Academy of
Sciences of the Azerbaijan Republic, the organization of training
courses on Computer Sciences for all post-graduate students and
dissertators of the republic, taking of examinations of candidate
minima, it was on-line entrusted to Institute of Information
Technologies of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan.
Therefore, teaching the computer sciences to post-graduate
students and dissertators a scientific - methodological manual on
effective application of new information technologies for research
works by post-graduate students and dissertators and taking of
candidate minima is carried out in the Educational Center.
Information and communication technologies offer new
opportunities and prospects of their application for teaching and
training. The new level of literacy demands creation of essentially
new technology of obtaining of scientific knowledge. Methods of
training and development, social and professional requirements,
globalization of the communicative economic and political projects
connected with construction of a new society, depends on a level of
application of information and communication technologies in the
educational process. Computer technologies develop ideas of
programmed training, open completely new, not investigated
technological ways of training connected to unique opportunities of
modern computers and telecommunications. Computer technologies
of training are processes of preparation and transfer of the
information to the trainee by means of computer. Scientific and
technical progress as well as global spread of the technologies
created in the most developed countries of the world is the main
proof of the leading role of education in XXI century. Information
society needs individuals having modern knowledge. In practice, all
technologies, using special technical information means (computer,
audio, video) are called information technologies of education.
Abstract: The comparative analysis of different taxonomic
groups of microorganisms isolated from dark chernozem soils under
different agricultures (alfalfa, melilot, sainfoin, soybean, rapeseed) at
Almaty region of Kazakhstan was conducted. It was shown that the
greatest number of micromycetes was typical to the soil planted with
alfalfa and canola. Species diversity of micromycetes markedly
decreases as it approaches the surface of the root, so that the species
composition in the rhizosphere is much more uniform than in the
virgin soil. Promising strains of microscopic fungi and yeast with
plant growth-promoting activity to agricultures were selected. Among
the selected fungi there are representatives of Penicillium bilaiae,
Trichoderma koningii, Fusarium equiseti, Aspergillus ustus. The
highest rates of growth and development of seedlings of plants
observed under the influence of yeasts Aureobasidium pullulans,
Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, Metschnikovia pulcherrima. Using
molecular - genetic techniques confirmation of the identification
results of selected micromycetes was conducted.
Abstract: Like any sentient organism, a smart environment
relies first and foremost on sensory data captured from the real
world. The sensory data come from sensor nodes of different
modalities deployed on different locations forming a Wireless Sensor
Network (WSN). Embedding smart sensors in humans has been a
research challenge due to the limitations imposed by these sensors
from computational capabilities to limited power. In this paper, we
first propose a practical WSN application that will enable blind
people to see what their neighboring partners can see. The challenge
is that the actual mapping between the input images to brain pattern
is too complex and not well understood. We also study the
connectivity problem in 3D/2D wireless sensor networks and propose
distributed efficient algorithms to accomplish the required
connectivity of the system. We provide a new connectivity algorithm
CDCA to connect disconnected parts of a network using cooperative
diversity. Through simulations, we analyze the connectivity gains
and energy savings provided by this novel form of cooperative
diversity in WSNs.
Abstract: An on chip low drop out voltage regulator that
employs elegant compensation scheme is presented in this paper. The
novelty in this design is that the device parasitic capacitances are
exploited for compensation at different loads. The proposed LDO is
designed to provide a constant voltage of 1.2V and is implemented in
UMC 180 nano meter CMOS technology. The voltage regulator
presented improves stability even at lighter loads and enhances line
and load regulation.