Abstract: This paper provides a quantitative measure of the
time-varying multiunit neuronal spiking activity using an entropy
based approach. To verify the status embedded in the neuronal activity
of a population of neurons, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is
used to isolate the inherent spiking activity of MUA. Due to the
de-correlating property of DWT, the spiking activity would be
preserved while reducing the non-spiking component. By evaluating
the entropy of the wavelet coefficients of the de-noised MUA, a
multiresolution Shannon entropy (MRSE) of the MUA signal is
developed. The proposed entropy was tested in the analysis of both
simulated noisy MUA and actual MUA recorded from cortex in rodent
model. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the
dynamics of a population can be quantified by using the proposed
entropy.
Abstract: Reliability allocation is quite important during early
design and development stages for a system to apportion its specified
reliability goal to subsystems. This paper improves the reliability
fuzzy allocation method, and gives concrete processes on determining
the factor and sub-factor sets, weight sets, judgment set, and
multi-stage fuzzy evaluation. To determine the weight of factor and
sub-factor sets, the modified trapezoidal numbers are proposed to
reduce errors caused by subjective factors. To decrease the fuzziness
in fuzzy division, an approximation method based on linear
programming is employed. To compute the explicit values of fuzzy
numbers, centroid method of defuzzification is considered. An
example is provided to illustrate the application of the proposed
reliability allocation method based on fuzzy arithmetic.
Abstract: Taiwan is a hyper endemic area for the Hepatitis B
virus (HBV). The estimated total number of HBsAg carriers in the
general population who are more than 20 years old is more than 3
million. Therefore, a case record review is conducted from January
2003 to June 2007 for all patients with a diagnosis of acute hepatitis
who were admitted to the Emergency Department (ED) of a
well-known teaching hospital. The cost for the use of medical
resources is defined as the total medical fee. In this study, principal
component analysis (PCA) is firstly employed to reduce the number of
dimensions. Support vector regression (SVR) and artificial neural
network (ANN) are then used to develop the forecasting model. A total
of 117 patients meet the inclusion criteria. 61% patients involved in
this study are hepatitis B related. The computational result shows that
the proposed PCA-SVR model has superior performance than other
compared algorithms. In conclusion, the Child-Pugh score and
echogram can both be used to predict the cost of medical resources for
patients with acute hepatitis in the ED.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel integrated hybrid
approach for fault diagnosis (FD) of nonlinear systems. Unlike most
FD techniques, the proposed solution simultaneously accomplishes
fault detection, isolation, and identification (FDII) within a unified
diagnostic module. At the core of this solution is a bank of adaptive
neural parameter estimators (NPE) associated with a set of singleparameter
fault models. The NPEs continuously estimate unknown
fault parameters (FP) that are indicators of faults in the system. Two
NPE structures including series-parallel and parallel are developed
with their exclusive set of desirable attributes. The parallel scheme is
extremely robust to measurement noise and possesses a simpler, yet
more solid, fault isolation logic. On the contrary, the series-parallel
scheme displays short FD delays and is robust to closed-loop system
transients due to changes in control commands. Finally, a fault
tolerant observer (FTO) is designed to extend the capability of the
NPEs to systems with partial-state measurement.
Abstract: High gain broadband plasmonic slot nano-antenna has
been considered. The theory of plasmonic slot nano-antenna (PSNA)
has been developed. The analytical model takes into account also the
electrical field inside the metal due to imperfectness of metal in
optical range, as well as numerical investigation based on finite
element method (FEM) has been realized. It should be mentioned that
Yagi-Uda configuration improves directivity in the plane of structure.
In contrast, in this paper the possibility of directivity improvement of
proposed PSNA in perpendicular plane of structure by using
reflection metallic surface placed under the slot in fixed distance has
been demonstrated. It is well known that a directivity improvement
brings to the antenna gain increasing. This method of diagram
improving is also well known from RF antenna design theory.
Moreover the improvement of directivity in the perpendicular plane
gives more flexibility in such application as improving the light and
atom, ion, molecule interactions by using such type of plasmonic slot
antenna. By the analogy of dipole type optical antennas the widening
of working wavelengths has been realized by using bowtie geometry
of slots, which made the antenna broadband.
Abstract: Nanofibers of PVA /nickel nitrate/silica/alumina
izopropoxide/boric acid composite were prepared by using sol-gel
processing and electrospinning technique. By high temperature
calcinations of the above precursor fibers, nanofibers of
NiO/Al2O3/B2O3/SiO2 composite with diameters about 500 nm
could be successfully obtained. The fibers were characterized by
XRD and SEM analyses.
Abstract: Increasing prevalence of childhood obesity has
increased the interest in early and late indicators of gaining weight.
Cell blood counts may be indicators of pro-inflammatory states. The
aim was to evaluate associations of hematological parameters,
including hematocrit (HTC), hemoglobin, blood cell counts and their
indices with the degree of obesity in pediatric population. A total of
249; -139 morbidly obese (MO), 82 healthy normal weight (NW) and
28 overweight (OW) children were included into the scope of the
study. WHO BMI-for age percentiles were used to form age- and sexmatched
groups. Informed consent forms and the Ethics Committee
approval were obtained. Anthropometric measurements were
performed. Hematological parameters were determined. Statistical
analyses were performed using SPSS. The degree for statistical
significance was p≤0.05. Significant differences (p=0.000) between
waist-to-hip ratios and head-to- neck ratios (hnrs) of MO and NW
children were detected. A significant difference between hnrs of OW
and MO children (p=0.000) was observed. Red cell distribution width
(RDW) was higher in OW children than NW group (p=0.030). Such
finding couldn’t be detected between MO and NW groups. Increased
RDW was prominent in OW children. The decrease in mean
corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC) values in MO
children was sharper than the values in OW children (p=0.006 vs
p=0.042) compared to those in NW group. Statistically higher HTC
levels were observed between MO-NW (p=0.014), but none between
OW-NW. Though the cause-effect relationship between obesity and
erythrocyte indices still needs further investigation, alterations in
RDW, HTC, MCHC during obesity may be of significance in the
early life.
Abstract: Many organizations are investing in web applications
and technologies in order to be competitive, some of them could not
achieve its goals. The quality of web-based applications could play
an important role for organizations to be competitive. So the aim of
this study is to investigate the impact of quality of web-based
applications to achieve a competitive advantage. A new model has
been developed. An empirical investigation was performed on a
banking sector in Jordan to test the new model. The results show that
impact of web-based applications on competitive advantage is
significant. Finally, further work is planned to validate and evaluate
the proposed model using several domains.
Abstract: In order to protect data privacy, image with sensitive or
private information needs to be encrypted before being outsourced to
the cloud. However, this causes difficulties in image retrieval and data
management. A secure image retrieval method based on orthogonal
decomposition is proposed in the paper. The image is divided into two
different components, for which encryption and feature extraction are
executed separately. As a result, cloud server can extract features from
an encrypted image directly and compare them with the features of the
queried images, so that the user can thus obtain the image. Different
from other methods, the proposed method has no special requirements
to encryption algorithms. Experimental results prove that the proposed
method can achieve better security and better retrieval precision.
Abstract: Non-water based fixed abrasive polishing was adopted
to manufacture LBO crystal for nano precision surface quality because
of its deliquescent. Ethyl alcohol was selected as the non-water based
slurry solvent and ethanediamine, lactic acid, hydrogen peroxide was
added in the slurry as a chemical additive, respectively. Effect of
different additives with non-water based slurry on material removal
rate, surface topography, microscopic appearances, and surface
roughness were investigated in fixed abrasive polishing of LBO
crystal. The results show the best surface quality of LBO crystal with
surface roughness Sa 8.2 nm and small damages was obtained by
non-water based slurry with lactic acid. Non-water based fixed
abrasive polishing can achieve nano precision surface quality of LBO
crystal with high material removal.
Abstract: Predicting the collapse potential of a structure during
earthquakes is an important issue in earthquake engineering. Many
researchers proposed different methods to assess the collapse
potential of structures under the effect of strong ground motions.
However most of them did not consider degradation and softening
effect in hysteretic behavior. In this study, collapse potential of
SDOF systems caused by dynamic instability with stiffness and
strength degradation has been investigated. An equation was
proposed for the estimation of collapse period of SDOF system which
is a limit value of period for dynamic instability. If period of the
considered SDOF system is shorter than the collapse period then the
relevant system exhibits dynamic instability and collapse occurs.
Abstract: In general, classical methods such as maximum
likelihood (ML) and least squares (LS) estimation methods are used
to estimate the shape parameters of the Burr XII distribution.
However, these estimators are very sensitive to the outliers. To
overcome this problem we propose alternative robust estimators
based on the M-estimation method for the shape parameters of the
Burr XII distribution. We provide a small simulation study and a real
data example to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimators
over the ML and the LS estimators. The simulation results show that
the proposed robust estimators generally outperform the classical
estimators in terms of bias and root mean square errors when there
are outliers in data.
Abstract: In medical investigations, uncertainty is a major
challenging problem in making decision for doctors/experts to
identify the diseases with a common set of symptoms and also has
been extensively increasing in medical diagnosis problems. The
theory of cross entropy for intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) is an
effective approach in coping uncertainty in decision making for
medical diagnosis problem. The main focus of this paper is to
propose a new intuitionistic fuzzy cross entropy measure (IFCEM),
which aid in reducing the uncertainty and doctors/experts will take
their decision easily in context of patient’s disease. It is shown that
the proposed measure has some elegant properties, which
demonstrates its potency. Further, it is also exemplified in detail the
efficiency and utility of the proposed measure by using a real life
case study of diagnosis the disease in medical science.
Abstract: In this paper, a direct power control (DPC)
strategies have been investigated in order to control a high
power AC/DC converter with time variable load. This converter
is composed of a three level three phase neutral point clamped
(NPC) converter as rectifier and an H-bridge four quadrant
current control converter. In the high power application,
controller not only must adjust the desire outputs but also
decrease the level of distortions which are injected to the network
from the converter. Regarding to this reason and nonlinearity
of the power electronic converter, the conventional controllers
cannot achieve appropriate responses. In this research, the
precise mathematical analysis has been employed to design the
appropriate controller in order to control the time variable
load. A DPC controller has been proposed and simulated using
Matlab/ Simulink. In order to verify the simulation result, a real
time simulator- OPAL-RT- has been employed. In this paper,
the dynamic response and stability of the high power NPC
with variable load has been investigated and compared with
conventional types using a real time simulator. The results proved
that the DPC controller is more stable and has more precise
outputs in comparison with conventional controller.
Abstract: Traditional document representation for classification
follows Bag of Words (BoW) approach to represent the term weights.
The conventional method uses the Vector Space Model (VSM) to
exploit the statistical information of terms in the documents and they
fail to address the semantic information as well as order of the terms
present in the documents. Although, the phrase based approach
follows the order of the terms present in the documents rather than
semantics behind the word. Therefore, a semantic concept based
approach is used in this paper for enhancing the semantics by
incorporating the ontology information. In this paper a novel method
is proposed to forecast the intraday stock market price directional
movement based on the sentiments from Twitter and money control
news articles. The stock market forecasting is a very difficult and
highly complicated task because it is affected by many factors such
as economic conditions, political events and investor’s sentiment etc.
The stock market series are generally dynamic, nonparametric, noisy
and chaotic by nature. The sentiment analysis along with wisdom of
crowds can automatically compute the collective intelligence of
future performance in many areas like stock market, box office sales
and election outcomes. The proposed method utilizes collective
sentiments for stock market to predict the stock price directional
movements. The collective sentiments in the above social media have
powerful prediction on the stock price directional movements as
up/down by using Granger Causality test.
Abstract: The arm length, hand length, hand breadth and middle
finger length of 1540 right-handed industrial workers of Haryana
state was used to assess the relationship between the upper limb
dimensions and stature. Initially, the data were analyzed using basic
univariate analysis and independent t-tests; then simple and multiple
linear regression models were used to estimate stature using SPSS
(version 17). There was a positive correlation between upper limb
measurements (hand length, hand breadth, arm length and middle
finger length) and stature (p < 0.01), which was highest for hand
length. The accuracy of stature prediction ranged from ± 54.897 mm
to ± 58.307 mm. The use of multiple regression equations gave better
results than simple regression equations. This study provides new
forensic standards for stature estimation from the upper limb
measurements of male industrial workers of Haryana (India). The
results of this research indicate that stature can be determined using
hand dimensions with accuracy, when only upper limb is available
due to any reasons likewise explosions, train/plane crashes, mutilated
bodies, etc. The regression formula derived in this study will be
useful for anatomists, archaeologists, anthropologists, design
engineers and forensic scientists for fairly prediction of stature using
regression equations.
Abstract: These days customer satisfaction plays vital role in
any business. When customer searches for a product, significantly a
junk of irrelevant information is what is given, leading to customer
dissatisfaction. To provide exactly relevant information on the
searched product, we are proposing a model of KaaS (Knowledge as
a Service), which pre-processes the information using decision
making paradigm using Multi-agents.
Information obtained from various sources is taken to derive
knowledge and they are linked to Cloud to capture new idea. The
main focus of this work is to acquire relevant information
(knowledge) related to product, then convert this knowledge into a
service for customer satisfaction and deploy on cloud.
For achieving these objectives we are have opted to use multi
agents. They are communicating and interacting with each other,
manipulate information, provide knowledge, to take decisions. The
paper discusses about KaaS as an intelligent approach for Knowledge
acquisition.
Abstract: A three-dimensional numerical model of
thermoelectric generator (TEG) modules attached to a large chimney
plate is proposed and solved numerically using a control volume based
finite difference formulation. The TEG module consists of a
thermoelectric generator, an elliptical pin-fin heat sink, and a cold
plate for water cooling. In the chimney, the temperature of flue gases is
450-650K. Although the TEG hot-side temperature and thus the
electric power output can be increased by inserting an elliptical pin-fin
heat sink into the chimney tunnel to increase the heat transfer area, the
pin fin heat sink would cause extra pumping power at the same time.
The main purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of geometrical
parameters on the electric power output and chimney pressure drop
characteristics. The effects of different operating conditions, including
various inlet velocities (Vin= 1, 3, 5 m/s), inlet temperatures (Tgas = 450,
550, 650K) and different fin height (0 to 150 mm) are discussed in
detail. The predicted numerical data for the power vs. current (P-I)
curve are in good agreement (within 11%) with the experimental data.
Abstract: R.C.C. buildings with dual structural system
consisting of shear walls (or braces) and moment resisting frames
have been widely used to resist lateral forces during earthquakes. The
dual systems are designed to resist the total design lateral force in
proportion to their lateral stiffness. The response of combination of
braces and shear walls has not yet been studied. The combination
may prove to be more effective to resist lateral forces during
earthquakes. This concept has been applied to regular R.C.C.
buildings provided with shear walls, braces and their combinations.
Abstract: The adaptation of social networking sites within
higher education has garnered significant interest in the recent years
with numerous researches considering it as a possible shift from the
traditional classroom based learning paradigm. Notwithstanding this
increase in research and conducted studies however, the adaption of
SNS based modules have failed to proliferate within Universities.
This paper commences its contribution by analyzing the various
models and theories proposed in literature and amalgamate together
various effective aspects for the inclusion of social technology within
e-Learning. A three phased framework is further proposed which
details the necessary considerations for the successful adaptation of
SNS in enhancing the students learning experience. This proposal
outlines the theoretical foundations which will be analyzed in
practical implementation across international university campuses.