Abstract: Recently, the findings on the MEG iterative scheme has demonstrated to accelerate the convergence rate in solving any system of linear equations generated by using approximation equations of boundary value problems. Based on the same scheme, the aim of this paper is to investigate the capability of a family of four-point block iterative methods with a weighted parameter, ω such as the 4 Point-EGSOR, 4 Point-EDGSOR, and 4 Point-MEGSOR in solving two-dimensional elliptic partial differential equations by using the second-order finite difference approximation. In fact, the formulation and implementation of three four-point block iterative methods are also presented. Finally, the experimental results show that the Four Point MEGSOR iterative scheme is superior as compared with the existing four point block schemes.
Abstract: This study employs a bivariate asymmetric GARCH
model to reveal the hidden dynamics price changes and volatility
among the emerging markets of Thailand and Malaysian after the
Asian financial crisis from January 2001 to December 2008. Our
results indicated that the equity markets are sharing the common
information (shock) that transmitted among each others. These
empirical findings are used to demonstrate the importance of shock
and volatility dynamic transmissions in the cross-market hedging and
market risk.
Abstract: One of the main concerns about parallel mechanisms
is the presence of singular points within their workspaces. In singular
positions the mechanism gains or loses one or several degrees of
freedom. It is impossible to control the mechanism in singular
positions. Therefore, these positions have to be avoided. This is a
vital need especially in computer controlled machine tools designed
and manufactured on the basis of parallel mechanisms. This need has
to be taken into consideration when selecting design parameters. A
prerequisite to this is a thorough knowledge about the effect of
design parameters and constraints on singularity. In this paper,
quality condition index was introduced as a criterion for evaluating
singularities of different configurations of a hexapod mechanism
obtainable by different design parameters. It was illustrated that this
method can effectively be employed to obtain the optimum
configuration of hexapod mechanism with the aim of avoiding
singularity within the workspace. This method was then employed to
design the hexapod table of a CNC milling machine.
Abstract: Discourse pronominal anaphora resolution must be part of any efficient information processing systems, since the reference of a pronoun is dependent on an antecedent located in the discourse. Contrary to knowledge-poor approaches, this paper shows that syntax-semantic relations are basic in pronominal anaphora resolution. The identification of quantified expressions to which pronouns can be anaphorically related provides further evidence that pronominal anaphora is based on domains of interpretation where asymmetric agreement holds.
Abstract: The general idea behind the filter is to average a pixel
using other pixel values from its neighborhood, but simultaneously to
take care of important image structures such as edges. The main
concern of the proposed filter is to distinguish between any variations
of the captured digital image due to noise and due to image structure.
The edges give the image the appearance depth and sharpness. A
loss of edges makes the image appear blurred or unfocused.
However, noise smoothing and edge enhancement are traditionally
conflicting tasks. Since most noise filtering behaves like a low pass
filter, the blurring of edges and loss of detail seems a natural
consequence. Techniques to remedy this inherent conflict often
encompass generation of new noise due to enhancement.
In this work a new fuzzy filter is presented for the noise reduction
of images corrupted with additive noise. The filter consists of three
stages. (1) Define fuzzy sets in the input space to computes a fuzzy
derivative for eight different directions (2) construct a set of IFTHEN
rules by to perform fuzzy smoothing according to
contributions of neighboring pixel values and (3) define fuzzy sets in
the output space to get the filtered and edged image.
Experimental results are obtained to show the feasibility of the
proposed approach with two dimensional objects.
Abstract: Extracting in-play scenes in sport videos is essential for
quantitative analysis and effective video browsing of the sport
activities. Game analysis of badminton as of the other racket sports
requires detecting the start and end of each rally period in an
automated manner. This paper describes an automatic serve scene
detection method employing cubic higher-order local auto-correlation
(CHLAC) and multiple regression analysis (MRA). CHLAC can
extract features of postures and motions of multiple persons without
segmenting and tracking each person by virtue of shift-invariance and
additivity, and necessitate no prior knowledge. Then, the specific
scenes, such as serve, are detected by linear regression (MRA) from
the CHLAC features. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method,
the experiment was conducted on video sequences of five badminton
matches captured by a single ceiling camera. The averaged precision
and recall rates for the serve scene detection were 95.1% and 96.3%,
respectively.
Abstract: Decisions are regularly made during a project or
daily life. Some decisions are critical and have a direct impact on
project or human success. Formal evaluation is thus required,
especially for crucial decisions, to arrive at the optimal solution
among alternatives to address issues. According to microeconomic
theory, all people-s decisions can be modeled as indifference curves.
The proposed approach supports formal analysis and decision by
constructing indifference curve model from the previous experts-
decision criteria. These knowledge embedded in the system can be
reused or help naïve users select alternative solution of the similar
problem. Moreover, the method is flexible to cope with unlimited
number of factors influencing the decision-making. The preliminary
experimental results of the alternative selection are accurately
matched with the expert-s decisions.
Abstract: Image interpolation is a common problem in imaging applications. However, most interpolation algorithms in existence suffer visually the effects of blurred edges and jagged artifacts in the image to some extent. This paper presents an adaptive feature preserving bidirectional flow process, where an inverse diffusion is performed to sharpen edges along the normal directions to the isophote lines (edges), while a normal diffusion is done to remove artifacts (“jaggies") along the tangent directions. In order to preserve image features such as edges, corners and textures, the nonlinear diffusion coefficients are locally adjusted according to the directional derivatives of the image. Experimental results on synthetic images and nature images demonstrate that our interpolation algorithm substantially improves the subjective quality of the interpolated images over conventional interpolations.
Abstract: Social resilience has role to govern the local community and coastal fisheries resources toward sustainable fisheries development in tsunami affected area. This paper asses, explore and investigates of indigenous institutions, external and internal facilitators toward strengthening social resilience. Identification of the genuine organizations role had been conducted twice by using Rapid Assessment Appraisal, Focus Group Discussion, and in-depth interview for collecting primary and secondary data. Local wisdom had a contribution and adaptable to rebound social resilience. The Panglima Laot Lhok (sea commander) had determined and adapted role on recovery of the fishing community, particularly facilitated aid delivery to fishermen, as shown in anchovy fisheries relief case in Krueng Raya Bay. Toke Bangku (financial trader) had stimulated for reinforcement of advance payment and market channel. The other institutions supported upon linking and bridging connectivity among stakeholders. Collaborative governance can avoid conflict, reduce donor dependency and strengthen social resilience within fishing community.
Abstract: The use of polypropylene mesh devices for Pelvic
Organ Prolapse (POP) spread rapidly during the last decade, yet our
knowledge of the mesh-tissue interaction is far from complete. We
aimed to perform a thorough pathological examination of explanted
POP meshes and describe findings that may explain mechanisms of
complications resulting in product excision. We report a spectrum of
important findings, including nerve ingrowth, mesh deformation,
involvement of detrusor muscle with neural ganglia, and
polypropylene degradation. Analysis of these findings may improve
and guide future treatment strategies.
Abstract: Recently, distributed generation technologies have received much attention for the potential energy savings and reliability assurances that might be achieved as a result of their widespread adoption. Fueling the attention have been the possibilities of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, electricity sector restructuring, high power reliability requirements for certain activities, and concern about easing transmission and distribution capacity bottlenecks and congestion. So it is necessary that impact of these kinds of generators on distribution feeder reconfiguration would be investigated. This paper presents an approach for distribution reconfiguration considering Distributed Generators (DGs). The objective function is summation of electrical power losses A Tabu search optimization is used to solve the optimal operation problem. The approach is tested on a real distribution feeder.
Abstract: An edge based local search algorithm, called ELS, is proposed for the maximum clique problem (MCP), a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. ELS is a two phased local search method effectively £nds the near optimal solutions for the MCP. A parameter ’support’ of vertices de£ned in the ELS greatly reduces the more number of random selections among vertices and also the number of iterations and running times. Computational results on BHOSLIB and DIMACS benchmark graphs indicate that ELS is capable of achieving state-of-the-art-performance for the maximum clique with reasonable average running times.
Abstract: Analytical investigation of the free vibration behavior
of circular functionally graded (FG) plates integrated with two
uniformly distributed actuator layers made of piezoelectric (PZT4)
material on the top and bottom surfaces of the circular FG plate
based on the classical plate theory (CPT) is presented in this paper.
The material properties of the functionally graded substrate plate are
assumed to be graded in the thickness direction according to the
power-law distribution in terms of the volume fractions of the
constituents and the distribution of electric potential field along the
thickness direction of piezoelectric layers is simulated by a quadratic
function. The differential equations of motion are solved analytically
for clamped edge boundary condition of the plate. The detailed
mathematical derivations are presented and Numerical investigations
are performed for FG plates with two surface-bonded piezoelectric
layers. Emphasis is placed on investigating the effect of varying the
gradient index of FG plate on the free vibration characteristics of the
structure. The results are verified by those obtained from threedimensional
finite element analyses.
Abstract: An adaptive spatial Gaussian mixture model is proposed for clustering based color image segmentation. A new clustering objective function which incorporates the spatial information is introduced in the Bayesian framework. The weighting parameter for controlling the importance of spatial information is made adaptive to the image content to augment the smoothness towards piecewisehomogeneous region and diminish the edge-blurring effect and hence the name adaptive spatial finite mixture model. The proposed approach is compared with the spatially variant finite mixture model for pixel labeling. The experimental results with synthetic and Berkeley dataset demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in improving the segmentation and it can be employed in different practical image content understanding applications.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to detect human in images.
This paper proposes a method for extracting human body feature descriptors consisting of projected edge component series. The feature descriptor can express appearances and shapes of human with local
and global distribution of edges. Our method evaluated with a linear SVM classifier on Daimler-Chrysler pedestrian dataset, and test with
various sub-region size. The result shows that the accuracy level of
proposed method similar to Histogram of Oriented Gradients(HOG)
feature descriptor and feature extraction process is simple and faster than existing methods.
Abstract: Recently the use of data mining to scientific bibliographic data bases has been implemented to analyze the pathways of the knowledge or the core scientific relevances of a laureated novel or a country. This specific case of data mining has been named citation mining, and it is the integration of citation bibliometrics and text mining. In this paper we present an improved WEB implementation of statistical physics algorithms to perform the text mining component of citation mining. In particular we use an entropic like distance between the compression of text as an indicator of the similarity between them. Finally, we have included the recently proposed index h to characterize the scientific production. We have used this web implementation to identify users, applications and impact of the Mexican scientific institutions located in the State of Morelos.
Abstract: The Spiral development model has been used
successfully in many commercial systems and in a good number of
defense systems. This is due to the fact that cost-effective
incremental commitment of funds, via an analogy of the spiral model
to stud poker and also can be used to develop hardware or integrate
software, hardware, and systems. To support adaptive, semantic
collaboration between domain experts and knowledge engineers, a
new knowledge engineering process, called Spiral_OWL is proposed.
This model is based on the idea of iterative refinement, annotation
and structuring of knowledge base. The Spiral_OWL model is
generated base on spiral model and knowledge engineering
methodology. A central paradigm for Spiral_OWL model is the
concentration on risk-driven determination of knowledge engineering
process. The collaboration aspect comes into play during knowledge
acquisition and knowledge validation phase. Design rationales for the
Spiral_OWL model are to be easy-to-implement, well-organized, and
iterative development cycle as an expanding spiral.
Abstract: This paper presents the design and implementation of
the WebGD, a CORBA-based document classification and retrieval
system on Internet. The WebGD makes use of such techniques as Web,
CORBA, Java, NLP, fuzzy technique, knowledge-based processing
and database technology. Unified classification and retrieval model,
classifying and retrieving with one reasoning engine and flexible
working mode configuration are some of its main features. The
architecture of WebGD, the unified classification and retrieval model,
the components of the WebGD server and the fuzzy inference engine
are discussed in this paper in detail.
Abstract: In this work, we developed the concept of
supercompression, i.e., compression above the compression standard
used. In this context, both compression rates are multiplied. In fact,
supercompression is based on super-resolution. That is to say,
supercompression is a data compression technique that superpose
spatial image compression on top of bit-per-pixel compression to
achieve very high compression ratios. If the compression ratio is very
high, then we use a convolutive mask inside decoder that restores the
edges, eliminating the blur. Finally, both, the encoder and the
complete decoder are implemented on General-Purpose computation
on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) cards. Specifically, the
mentio-ned mask is coded inside texture memory of a GPGPU.
Abstract: This paper is intended to assist anyone with some general technical experience, but perhaps limited specific knowledge of heat transfer equipment. A characteristic of heat exchanger design is the procedure of specifying a design, heat transfer area and pressure drops and checking whether the assumed design satisfies all requirements or not. The purpose of this paper is how to design the oil cooler (heat exchanger) especially for shell-and-tube heat exchanger which is the majority type of liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger. General design considerations and design procedure are also illustrated in this paper and a flow diagram is provided as an aid of design procedure. In design calculation, the MatLAB and AutoCAD software are used. Fundamental heat transfer concepts and complex relationships involved in such exchanger are also presented in this paper. The primary aim of this design is to obtain a high heat transfer rate without exceeding the allowable pressure drop. This computer program is highly useful to design the shell-and-tube type heat exchanger and to modify existing deign.