Abstract: Arc welding creates a weld pool to realize continuity between pieces of assembly. The thermal history of the weld is dependent on heat transfer and fluid flow in the weld pool. The metallurgical transformation during welding and cooling are modeled in the literature only at solid state neglecting the fluid flow. In the present paper we associate a heat transfer – fluid flow and metallurgical model for the 16MnD5 steel. The metallurgical transformation model is based on Leblond model for the diffusion kinetics and on the Koistinen-Marburger equation for Marteniste transformation. The predicted thermal history and metallurgical transformations are compared to a simulation without fluid phase. This comparison shows the great importance of the fluid flow modeling.
Abstract: Parsing is important in Linguistics and Natural
Language Processing to understand the syntax and semantics of a
natural language grammar. Parsing natural language text is
challenging because of the problems like ambiguity and inefficiency.
Also the interpretation of natural language text depends on context
based techniques. A probabilistic component is essential to resolve
ambiguity in both syntax and semantics thereby increasing accuracy
and efficiency of the parser. Tamil language has some inherent
features which are more challenging. In order to obtain the solutions,
lexicalized and statistical approach is to be applied in the parsing
with the aid of a language model. Statistical models mainly focus on
semantics of the language which are suitable for large vocabulary
tasks where as structural methods focus on syntax which models
small vocabulary tasks. A statistical language model based on Trigram
for Tamil language with medium vocabulary of 5000 words has
been built. Though statistical parsing gives better performance
through tri-gram probabilities and large vocabulary size, it has some
disadvantages like focus on semantics rather than syntax, lack of
support in free ordering of words and long term relationship. To
overcome the disadvantages a structural component is to be
incorporated in statistical language models which leads to the
implementation of hybrid language models. This paper has attempted
to build phrase structured hybrid language model which resolves
above mentioned disadvantages. In the development of hybrid
language model, new part of speech tag set for Tamil language has
been developed with more than 500 tags which have the wider
coverage. A phrase structured Treebank has been developed with 326
Tamil sentences which covers more than 5000 words. A hybrid
language model has been trained with the phrase structured Treebank
using immediate head parsing technique. Lexicalized and statistical
parser which employs this hybrid language model and immediate
head parsing technique gives better results than pure grammar and
trigram based model.
Abstract: To improve the material characteristics of single- and
poly-crystals of pure copper, the respective relationships between crystallographic orientations and microstructures, and the bending and mechanical properties were examined. And texture distribution is also
analyzed. A grain refinement procedure was performed to obtain a
grained structure. Furthermore, some analytical results related to
crystal direction maps, inverse pole figures, and textures were obtained from SEM-EBSD analyses. Results showed that these
grained metallic materials have peculiar springback characteristics with various bending angles.
Abstract: Understanding the consumption and production of
various metabolites of fibroblast conditioned media is needed for its
proper and optimized use in expansion of pluripotent stem cells. For
this purpose, we have used the HPLC method to analyse the
consumption of glucose and the production of lactate over time by
mouse embryonic fibroblasts. The experimental data have also been
compared with mathematical model fits. 0.025 moles of lactate was
produced after 72 hrs while the glucose concentration decreased from
0.017 moles to 0.011 moles. The mathematical model was able to
predict the trends of glucose consumption and lactate production.
Abstract: E-Appointment Scheduling (EAS) has been developed
to handle appointment for UMP students, lecturers in Faculty of
Computer Systems & Software Engineering (FCSSE) and Student
Medical Center. The schedules are based on the timetable and
university activities. Constraints Logic Programming (CLP) has been
implemented to solve the scheduling problems by giving
recommendation to the users in part of determining any available
slots from the lecturers and doctors- timetable. By using this system,
we can avoid wasting time and cost because this application will set
an appointment by auto-generated. In addition, this system can be an
alternative to the lecturers and doctors to make decisions whether to
approve or reject the appointments.
Abstract: The mosaicing technique has been employed in more and more application fields, from entertainment to scientific ones. In the latter case, often the final evaluation is still left to human beings, that assess visually the quality of the mosaic. Many times, a lack of objective measurements in microscopic mosaicing may prevent the mosaic from being used as a starting image for further analysis. In this work we analyze three different metrics and indexes, in the domain of signal analysis, image analysis and visual quality, to measure the quality of different aspects of the mosaicing procedure, such as registration errors and visual quality. As the case study we consider the mosaicing algorithm we developed. The experiments have been carried out by considering mosaics with very different features: histological samples, that are made of detailed and contrasted images, and live stem cells, that show a very low contrast and low detail levels.
Abstract: Recently, the advanced technologies that offer high
precision product, relative easy, economical process and also rapid
production are needed to realize the high demand of ultra precision
micro part. In our research, micromanufacturing based on soft
lithography and nanopowder injection molding was investigated. The
silicone metal pattern with ultra thick and high aspect ratio succeeds to
fabricate Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) micro mold. The process
followed by nanopowder injection molding (PIM) by a simple vacuum
hot press. The 17-4ph nanopowder with diameter of 100 nm, succeed
to be injected and it forms green sample microbearing with thickness,
microchannel and aspect ratio is 700μm, 60μm and 12, respectively.
Sintering process was done in 1200 C for 2 hours and heating rate
0.83oC/min. Since low powder load (45% PL) was applied to achieve
green sample fabrication, ~15% shrinkage happen in the 86% relative
density. Several improvements should be done to produce high
accuracy and full density sintered part.
Abstract: The Taiwan government has started to promote the “Plain Landscape Afforestation and Greening Program" since 2002. A key task of the program was the payment for environmental services (PES), entitled the “Plain Landscape Afforestation Policy" (PLAP), which was certificated by the Executive Yuan on August 31, 2001 and enacted on January 1, 2002. According to the policy, it is estimated that the total area of afforestation will be 25,100 hectares by December 31, 2007. Until the end of 2007, the policy had been enacted for six years in total and the actual area of afforestation was 8,919.18 hectares. Among them, Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TSC) was accounted for 7,960 hectares (with 2,450.83 hectares as public service area) which occupied 86.22% of the total afforestation area; the private farmland promoted by local governments was accounted for 869.18 hectares which occupied 9.75% of the total afforestation area. Based on the above, we observe that most of the afforestation area in this policy is executed by TSC, and the achievement ratio by TSC is better than by others. It implies that the success of the PLAP is seriously related to the execution of TSC. The objective of this study is to analyze the relevant policy planning of TSC-s participation in the PLAP, suggest complementary measures, and draw up effective adjustment mechanisms, so as to improve the effectiveness of executing the policy. Our main conclusions and suggestions are summarized as follows: 1. The main reason for TSC-s participation in the PLAP is based on their passive cooperation with the central government or company policy. Prior to TSC-s participation in the PLAP, their lands were mainly used for growing sugarcane. 2. The main factors of TSC-s consideration on the selection of tree species are based on the suitability of land and species. The largest proportion of tree species is allocated to economic forests, and the lack of technical instruction was the main problem during afforestation. Moreover, the method of improving TSC-s future development in leisure agriculture and landscape business becomes a key topic. 3. TSC has developed short and long-term plans on participating in the PLAP for the future. However, there is no great willingness or incentive on budgeting for such detailed planning. 4. Most people from TSC interviewed consider the requirements on PLAP unreasonable. Among them, an unreasonable requirement on the number of trees accounted for the greatest proportion; furthermore, most interviewees suggested that the government should continue to provide incentives even after 20 years. 5. Since the government shares the same goals as TSC, there should be sufficient cooperation and communication that support the technical instruction and reduction of afforestation cost, which will also help to improve effectiveness of the policy.
Abstract: Speech corpus is one of the major components in a
Speech Processing System where one of the primary requirements
is to recognize an input sample. The quality and details captured
in speech corpus directly affects the precision of recognition. The
current work proposes a platform for speech corpus generation using
an adaptive LMS filter and LPC cepstrum, as a part of an ANN
based Speech Recognition System which is exclusively designed to
recognize isolated numerals of Assamese language- a major language
in the North Eastern part of India. The work focuses on designing an
optimal feature extraction block and a few ANN based cooperative
architectures so that the performance of the Speech Recognition
System can be improved.
Abstract: ISO 9000 is the most popular and widely adopted meta-standard for quality and operational improvements. However, only limited empirical research has been conducted to examine the impact of ISO 9000 on operational performance based on objective and longitudinal data. To reveal any causal relationship between the adoption of ISO 9000 and operational performance, we examined the timing and magnitude of change in time-based performance as a result of ISO 9000 adoption. We analyzed the changes in operating cycle, inventory days, and account receivable days prior and after the implementation of ISO 9000 in 695 publicly listed manufacturing firms. We found that ISO 9000 certified firms shortened their operating cycle time by 5.28 days one year after the implementation of ISO 9000. In the long-run (3 years after certification), certified firms showed continuous improvement in time-based efficiency, and experienced a shorter operating cycle time of 11 days than that of non-certified firms. There was an average of 6.5% improvement in operating cycle time for ISO 9000 certified firms. Both inventory days and account receivable days showed similar significant improvements after the implementation of ISO 9000, too.
Abstract: Grid environments include aggregation of
geographical distributed resources. Grid is put forward in three types
of computational, data and storage. This paper presents a research on
data grid. Data grid is used for covering and securing accessibility to
data from among many heterogeneous sources. Users are not worry
on the place where data is located in it, provided that, they should get
access to the data. Metadata is used for getting access to data in data
grid. Presently, application metadata catalogue and SRB middle-ware
package are used in data grids for management of metadata. At this
paper, possibility of updating, streamlining and searching is provided
simultaneously and rapidly through classified table of preserving
metadata and conversion of each table to numerous tables.
Meanwhile, with regard to the specific application, the most
appropriate and best division is set and determined. Concurrency of
implementation of some of requests and execution of pipeline is
adaptability as a result of this technique.
Abstract: Fecal sterol has been proposed as a chemical indicator
of human fecal pollution even when fecal coliform populations have
diminished due to water chlorination or toxic effects of industrial
effluents. This paper describes an improved derivatization procedure
for simultaneous determination of four fecal sterols including
coprostanol, epicholestanol, cholesterol and cholestanol using gas
chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), via optimization study
on silylation procedures using N-O-bis
(trimethylsilyl)-trifluoroacetamide (BSTFA), and
N-(tert-butyldimethylsilyl)-N-methyltrifluoroacetamide
(MTBSTFA), which lead to the formation of trimethylsilyl (TMS) and
tert-butyldimethylsilyl (TBS) derivatives, respectively. Two
derivatization processes of injection-port derivatization and water bath
derivatization (60 oC, 1h) were inspected and compared. Furthermore,
the methylation procedure at 25 oC for 2h with
trimethylsilydiazomethane (TMSD) for fecal sterols analysis was also
studied. It was found that most of TMS derivatives demonstrated the
highest sensitivities, followed by methylated derivatives. For BSTFA
or MTBSTFA derivatization processes, the simple injection-port
derivatization process could achieve the same efficiency as that in the
tedious water bath derivatization procedure.
Abstract: The school / university orientation interests a broad and
often badly informed public. Technically, it is an important
multicriterion decision problem, which supposes the combination of
much academic professional and/or lawful knowledge, which in turn
justifies software resorting to the techniques of Artificial Intelligence.
CORUS is an expert system of the "Conseil et ORientation
Universitaire et Scolaire", based on a knowledge representation
language (KRL) with rules and objects, called/ known as Ibn Rochd.
CORUS was developed thanks to DéGSE, a workshop of cognitive
engineering which supports this LRC. CORUS works out many
acceptable solutions for the case considered, and retains the most
satisfactory among them. Several versions of CORUS have extended
its services gradually.
Abstract: The daily growing use of agents in software environments, because of many reasons such as independence and intelligence is not a secret anymore. One of such environments in which there is a prominent job for the agents would be emarketplaces in which a user is able to give those agents the responsibility of buying and selling, instead of searching the emarketplace himself. Making up a framework which has sufficient attention to the required roles and their relations, is the first step of achieving such e-markets. In this paper, we suggest a framework in order to establish such e-markets and we will continue investigating the roles such as seller or buyer and the relations in JADE environment in details.
Abstract: Petrology and geochemical characteristics of granitic
rocks from South Sulawesi, especially from Polewaliand Masamba
area are presented in order to elucidate their origin of magma and
geodynamic setting. The granitic rocks in these areas are dominated by
granodiorite and granite in composition. Quartz, K-feldspar and
plagioclase occur as major phases with hornblende and biotite as
major ferromagnesian minerals. All of the samples were plotted in
calc-alkaline field, show metaluminous affinity and typical of I-type
granitic rock. Harker diagram indicates that granitic rocks experienced
fractional crystallization during magmatic evolution. Both groups
displayed an extreme enrichment of LILE, LREE and a slight negative
Eu anomaly which resemble upper continental crust affinity. They
were produced from partial melting of upper continental crust and
have close relationship of sources composition within a suite. The
geochemical characteristics explained the arc related subduction
environment which later give an evidence of continent-continent
collision between Australia-derived microcontinent and Sundalandto
form continental arc environment.
Abstract: The most common result of analysis of highthroughput
data in molecular biology represents a global list of
genes, ranked accordingly to a certain score. The score can be a
measure of differential expression. Recent work proposed a new
method for selecting a number of genes in a ranked gene list from
microarray gene expression data such that this set forms the
Optimally Functionally Enriched Network (OFTEN), formed by
known physical interactions between genes or their products. Here
we present calculation results of relative connectivity of genes from
META-OFTEN network and tentative biological interpretation of the
most reproducible signal. The relative connectivity and
inbetweenness values of genes from META-OFTEN network were
estimated.
Abstract: Interest in Human Consciousness has been revived in the late 20th century from different scientific disciplines. Consciousness studies involve both its understanding and its application. In this paper, a computational model of the minimum consciousness functions necessary in my point of view for Artificial Intelligence applications is presented with the aim of improving the way computations will be made in the future. In section I, human consciousness is briefly described according to the scope of this paper. In section II, a minimum set of consciousness functions is defined - based on the literature reviewed - to be modelled, and then a computational model of these functions is presented in section III. In section IV, an analysis of the model is carried out to describe its functioning in detail.
Abstract: Over a million tonnes of cigarette butts (CBs) are produced worldwide annually. These CBs accumulate in the environment due to the poor biodegradability of the cellulose acetate filters and pose a serious environmental risk. This paper presents some of the results from a continuing study on recycling CBs into fired clay bricks. Properties including compressive strength, flexural strength, density, water absorption and thermal conductivity of fired clay bricks are reported and discussed. Furthermore, leaching of heavy metals from the manufactured clay bricks was tested. The results show that the density of fired bricks was reduced by about 8 – 30 %, depending on the percentage of CBs incorporated into the raw materials. The compressive strength of bricks tested was 12.57, 5.22 and 3.00 MPa for 2.5, 5.0 and 10 % CB content respectively. Water absorption and initial rate of absorption values increased as density, and hence porosity, of bricks decreased with increasing CB volume. The leaching test results revealed trace amounts of heavy metals.
Abstract: Contour filter strips planted with perennial vegetation
can be used to improve surface and ground water quality by reducing
pollutant, such as NO3-N, and sediment outflow from cropland to a
river or lake. Meanwhile, the filter strips of perennial grass with biofuel
potentials also have economic benefits of producing ethanol. In
this study, The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was
applied to the Walnut Creek Watershed to examine the effectiveness
of contour strips in reducing NO3-N outflows from crop fields to the
river or lake. Required input data include watershed topography,
slope, soil type, land-use, management practices in the watershed and
climate parameters (precipitation, maximum/minimum air
temperature, solar radiation, wind speed and relative humidity).
Numerical experiments were conducted to identify potential
subbasins in the watershed that have high water quality impact, and
to examine the effects of strip size and location on NO3-N reduction
in the subbasins under various meteorological conditions (dry,
average and wet). Variable sizes of contour strips (10%, 20%, 30%
and 50%, respectively, of a subbasin area) planted with perennial
switchgrass were selected for simulating the effects of strip size and
location on stream water quality. Simulation results showed that a
filter strip having 10%-50% of the subbasin area could lead to 55%-
90% NO3-N reduction in the subbasin during an average rainfall
year. Strips occupying 10-20% of the subbasin area were found to be
more efficient in reducing NO3-N when placed along the contour
than that when placed along the river. The results of this study can
assist in cost-benefit analysis and decision-making in best water
resources management practices for environmental protection.
Abstract: Cancer classification to their corresponding cohorts has been key area of research in bioinformatics aiming better prognosis of the disease. High dimensionality of gene data has been makes it a complex task and requires significance data identification technique in order to reducing the dimensionality and identification of significant information. In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach for classification of oral cancer into metastasis positive and negative patients. We have used significance analysis of microarrays (SAM) for identifying significant genes which constitutes gene signature. 3 different gene signatures were identified using SAM from 3 different combination of training datasets and their classification accuracy was calculated on corresponding testing datasets using k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Fuzzy C-Means Clustering (FCM), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN). A final gene signature of only 9 genes was obtained from above 3 individual gene signatures. 9 gene signature-s classification capability was compared using same classifiers on same testing datasets. Results obtained from experimentation shows that 9 gene signature classified all samples in testing dataset accurately while individual genes could not classify all accurately.