Combination of Different Classifiers for Cardiac Arrhythmia Recognition

This paper describes a new supervised fusion (hybrid) electrocardiogram (ECG) classification solution consisting of a new QRS complex geometrical feature extraction as well as a new version of the learning vector quantization (LVQ) classification algorithm aimed for overcoming the stability-plasticity dilemma. Toward this objective, after detection and delineation of the major events of ECG signal via an appropriate algorithm, each QRS region and also its corresponding discrete wavelet transform (DWT) are supposed as virtual images and each of them is divided into eight polar sectors. Then, the curve length of each excerpted segment is calculated and is used as the element of the feature space. To increase the robustness of the proposed classification algorithm versus noise, artifacts and arrhythmic outliers, a fusion structure consisting of five different classifiers namely as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Modified Learning Vector Quantization (MLVQ) and three Multi Layer Perceptron-Back Propagation (MLP–BP) neural networks with different topologies were designed and implemented. The new proposed algorithm was applied to all 48 MIT–BIH Arrhythmia Database records (within–record analysis) and the discrimination power of the classifier in isolation of different beat types of each record was assessed and as the result, the average accuracy value Acc=98.51% was obtained. Also, the proposed method was applied to 6 number of arrhythmias (Normal, LBBB, RBBB, PVC, APB, PB) belonging to 20 different records of the aforementioned database (between– record analysis) and the average value of Acc=95.6% was achieved. To evaluate performance quality of the new proposed hybrid learning machine, the obtained results were compared with similar peer– reviewed studies in this area.

Orbit Propagator and Geomagnetic Field Estimator for NanoSatellite: The ICUBE Mission

This research contribution is drafted to present the orbit design, orbit propagator and geomagnetic field estimator for the nanosatellites specifically for the upcoming CUBESAT, ICUBE-1 of the Institute of Space Technology (IST), Islamabad, Pakistan. The ICUBE mission is designed for the low earth orbit at the approximate height of 700KM. The presented research endeavor designs the Keplarian elements for ICUBE-1 orbit while incorporating the mission requirements and propagates the orbit using J2 perturbations, The attitude determination system of the ICUBE-1 consists of attitude determination sensors like magnetometer and sun sensor. The Geomagnetic field estimator is developed according to the model of International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) for comparing the magnetic field measurements by the magnetometer for attitude determination. The output of the propagator namely the Keplarians position and velocity vectors and the magnetic field vectors are compared and verified with the same scenario generated in the  Satellite Tool Kit (STK).

A Reconfigurable Processing Element for Cholesky Decomposition and Matrix Inversion

Fixed-point simulation results are used for the performance measure of inverting matrices by Cholesky decomposition. The fixed-point Cholesky decomposition algorithm is implemented using a fixed-point reconfigurable processing element. The reconfigurable processing element provides all mathematical operations required by Cholesky decomposition. The fixed-point word length analysis is based on simulations using different condition numbers and different matrix sizes. Simulation results show that 16 bits word length gives sufficient performance for small matrices with low condition number. Larger matrices and higher condition numbers require more dynamic range for a fixedpoint implementation.

Improving the Shunt Active Power Filter Performance Using Synchronous Reference Frame PI Based Controller with Anti-Windup Scheme

In this paper the reference current for Voltage Source Converter (VSC) of the Shunt Active Power Filter (SAPF) is generated using Synchronous Reference Frame method, incorporating the PI controller with anti-windup scheme. The proposed method improves the harmonic filtering by compensating the winding up phenomenon caused by the integral term of the PI controller. Using Reference Frame Transformation, the current is transformed from om a - b - c stationery frame to rotating 0 - d - q frame. Using the PI controller, the current in the 0 - d - q frame is controlled to get the desired reference signal. A controller with integral action combined with an actuator that becomes saturated can give some undesirable effects. If the control error is so large that the integrator saturates the actuator, the feedback path becomes ineffective because the actuator will remain saturated even if the process output changes. The integrator being an unstable system may then integrate to a very large value, the phenomenon known as integrator windup. Implementing the integrator anti-windup circuit turns off the integrator action when the actuator saturates, hence improving the performance of the SAPF and dynamically compensating harmonics in the power network. In this paper the system performance is examined with Shunt Active Power Filter simulation model.

Stress Analysis of Adhesively Bonded Double- Lap Joints Subjected to Combined Loading

Adhesively bonded joints are preferred over the conventional methods of joining such as riveting, welding, bolting and soldering. Some of the main advantages of adhesive joints compared to conventional joints are the ability to join dissimilar materials and damage-sensitive materials, better stress distribution, weight reduction, fabrication of complicated shapes, excellent thermal and insulation properties, vibration response and enhanced damping control, smoother aerodynamic surfaces and an improvement in corrosion and fatigue resistance. This paper presents the behavior of adhesively bonded joints subjected to combined thermal loadings, using the numerical methods. The joint configuration considers aluminum as central adherend with six different outer adherends including aluminum, steel, titanium, boronepoxy, unidirectional graphite-epoxy and cross-ply graphite-epoxy and epoxy-based adhesives. Free expansion of the joint in x direction was permitted and stresses in adhesive layer and interfaces calculated for different adherends.

An Intelligent System for Phish Detection, using Dynamic Analysis and Template Matching

Phishing, or stealing of sensitive information on the web, has dealt a major blow to Internet Security in recent times. Most of the existing anti-phishing solutions fail to handle the fuzziness involved in phish detection, thus leading to a large number of false positives. This fuzziness is attributed to the use of highly flexible and at the same time, highly ambiguous HTML language. We introduce a new perspective against phishing, that tries to systematically prove, whether a given page is phished or not, using the corresponding original page as the basis of the comparison. It analyzes the layout of the pages under consideration to determine the percentage distortion between them, indicative of any form of malicious alteration. The system design represents an intelligent system, employing dynamic assessment which accurately identifies brand new phishing attacks and will prove effective in reducing the number of false positives. This framework could potentially be used as a knowledge base, in educating the internet users against phishing.

Stability Issues on an Implemented All-Pass Filter Circuitry

The so-called all-pass filter circuits are commonly used in the field of signal processing, control and measurement. Being connected to capacitive loads, these circuits tend to loose their stability; therefore the elaborate analysis of their dynamic behavior is necessary. The compensation methods intending to increase the stability of such circuits are discussed in this paper, including the socalled lead-lag compensation technique being treated in detail. For the dynamic modeling, a two-port network model of the all-pass filter is being derived. The results of the model analysis show, that effective lead-lag compensation can be achieved, alone by the optimization of the circuit parameters; therefore the application of additional electric components are not needed to fulfill the stability requirement.

Improved Closed Set Text-Independent Speaker Identification by Combining MFCC with Evidence from Flipped Filter Banks

A state of the art Speaker Identification (SI) system requires a robust feature extraction unit followed by a speaker modeling scheme for generalized representation of these features. Over the years, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) modeled on the human auditory system has been used as a standard acoustic feature set for SI applications. However, due to the structure of its filter bank, it captures vocal tract characteristics more effectively in the lower frequency regions. This paper proposes a new set of features using a complementary filter bank structure which improves distinguishability of speaker specific cues present in the higher frequency zone. Unlike high level features that are difficult to extract, the proposed feature set involves little computational burden during the extraction process. When combined with MFCC via a parallel implementation of speaker models, the proposed feature set outperforms baseline MFCC significantly. This proposition is validated by experiments conducted on two different kinds of public databases namely YOHO (microphone speech) and POLYCOST (telephone speech) with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) as a Classifier for various model orders.

Experimental Studies on Multiphase Flow in Porous Media and Pore Wettability

Multiphase flow transport in porous medium is very common and significant in science and engineering applications. For example, in CO2 Storage and Enhanced Oil Recovery processes, CO2 has to be delivered to the pore spaces in reservoirs and aquifers. CO2 storage and enhance oil recovery are actually displacement processes, in which oil or water is displaced by CO2. This displacement is controlled by pore size, chemical and physical properties of pore surfaces and fluids, and also pore wettability. In this study, a technique was developed to measure the pressure profile for driving gas/liquid to displace water in pores. Through this pressure profile, the impact of pore size on the multiphase flow transport and displacement can be analyzed. The other rig developed can be used to measure the static and dynamic pore wettability and investigate the effects of pore size, surface tension, viscosity and chemical structure of liquids on pore wettability.

Corporate Credit Rating using Multiclass Classification Models with order Information

Corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has been one of the attractive research topics in the literature. In recent years, multiclass classification models such as artificial neural network (ANN) or multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have become a very appealing machine learning approaches due to their good performance. However, most of them have only focused on classifying samples into nominal categories, thus the unique characteristic of the credit rating - ordinality - has been seldom considered in their approaches. This study proposes new types of ANN and MSVM classifiers, which are named OMANN and OMSVM respectively. OMANN and OMSVM are designed to extend binary ANN or SVM classifiers by applying ordinal pairwise partitioning (OPP) strategy. These models can handle ordinal multiple classes efficiently and effectively. To validate the usefulness of these two models, we applied them to the real-world bond rating case. We compared the results of our models to those of conventional approaches. The experimental results showed that our proposed models improve classification accuracy in comparison to typical multiclass classification techniques with the reduced computation resource.

Extended Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for the Non Co-Operating Nodes in Mobile Adhoc Networks

In this paper, a new approach based on the extent of friendship between the nodes is proposed which makes the nodes to co-operate in an ad hoc environment. The extended DSR protocol is tested under different scenarios by varying the number of malicious nodes and node moving speed. It is also tested varying the number of nodes in simulation used. The result indicates the achieved throughput by extended DSR is greater than the standard DSR and indicates the percentage of malicious drops over total drops are less in the case of extended DSR than the standard DSR.

Employee Loyalty and Telecommuting

Telecommuting has become an increasingly popular work arrangement. However, little research has examined the impact of telecommuting on the relationship between employees and the organization. This study aims to shed light on this aspect by comparing the loyalty of telecommuters and non telecommuters as it can be viewed from three angles: organizational loyalty, peer loyalty, and professional loyalty. Furthermore, this paper will explore the dynamics among employee loyalty, productivity, and job satisfaction. Whereas previous studies had looked on employees that are not fully telecommuting, the current study concentrates on employees that are exclusively working from home.

A Systematic Construction of Instability Bounds in LIS Networks

In this work, we study the impact of dynamically changing link slowdowns on the stability properties of packetswitched networks under the Adversarial Queueing Theory framework. Especially, we consider the Adversarial, Quasi-Static Slowdown Queueing Theory model, where each link slowdown may take on values in the two-valued set of integers {1, D} with D > 1 which remain fixed for a long time, under a (w, p)-adversary. In this framework, we present an innovative systematic construction for the estimation of adversarial injection rate lower bounds, which, if exceeded, cause instability in networks that use the LIS (Longest-in- System) protocol for contention-resolution. In addition, we show that a network that uses the LIS protocol for contention-resolution may result in dropping its instability bound at injection rates p > 0 when the network size and the high slowdown D take large values. This is the best ever known instability lower bound for LIS networks.

Dynamic Voltage Stability Estimation using Particle Filter

Estimation of voltage stability based on optimal filtering method is presented. PV curve is used as a tool for voltage stability analysis. Dynamic voltage stability estimation is done by using particle filter method. Optimum value (nose point) of PV curve can be estimated by estimating parameter of PV curve equation optimal value represents critical voltage and condition at specified point of measurement. Voltage stability is then estimated by analyzing loading margin condition c stimating equation. This maximum loading ecified dynamically.

Magnetohydrodynamics Boundary Layer Flows over a Stretching Surface with Radiation Effect and Embedded in Porous Medium

A steady two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics flow and heat transfer over a stretching vertical sheet influenced by radiation and porosity is studied. The governing boundary layer equations of partial differential equations are reduced to a system of ordinary differential equations using similarity transformation. The system is solved numerically by using a finite difference scheme known as the Keller-box method for some values of parameters, namely the radiation parameter N, magnetic parameter M, buoyancy parameter l , Prandtl number Pr and permeability parameter K. The effects of the parameters on the heat transfer characteristics are analyzed and discussed. It is found that both the skin friction coefficient and the local Nusselt number decrease as the magnetic parameter M and permeability parameter K increase. Heat transfer rate at the surface decreases as the radiation parameter increases.

Bandwidth Estimation Algorithms for the Dynamic Adaptation of Voice Codec

In the recent years multimedia traffic and in particular VoIP services are growing dramatically. We present a new algorithm to control the resource utilization and to optimize the voice codec selection during SIP call setup on behalf of the traffic condition estimated on the network path. The most suitable methodologies and the tools that perform realtime evaluation of the available bandwidth on a network path have been integrated with our proposed algorithm: this selects the best codec for a VoIP call in function of the instantaneous available bandwidth on the path. The algorithm does not require any explicit feedback from the network, and this makes it easily deployable over the Internet. We have also performed intensive tests on real network scenarios with a software prototype, verifying the algorithm efficiency with different network topologies and traffic patterns between two SIP PBXs. The promising results obtained during the experimental validation of the algorithm are now the basis for the extension towards a larger set of multimedia services and the integration of our methodology with existing PBX appliances.

Entropy Generation Analysis of Free Convection Film Condensation on a Vertical Ellipsoid with Variable Wall Temperature

This paper aims to perform the second law analysis of thermodynamics on the laminar film condensation of pure saturated vapor flowing in the direction of gravity on an ellipsoid with variable wall temperature. The analysis provides us understanding how the geometric parameter- ellipticity and non-isothermal wall temperature variation amplitude “A." affect entropy generation during film-wise condensation heat transfer process. To understand of which irreversibility involved in this condensation process, we derived an expression for the entropy generation number in terms of ellipticity and A. The result indicates that entropy generation increases with ellipticity. Furthermore, the irreversibility due to finite temperature difference heat transfer dominates over that due to condensate film flow friction and the local entropy generation rate decreases with increasing A in the upper half of ellipsoid. Meanwhile, the local entropy generation rate enhances with A around the rear lower half of ellipsoid.

Models to Customise Web Service Discovery Result using Static and Dynamic Parameters

This paper presents three models which enable the customisation of Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) query results, based on some pre-defined and/or real-time changing parameters. These proposed models detail the requirements, design and techniques which make ranking of Web service discovery results from a service registry possible. Our contribution is two fold: First, we present an extension to the UDDI inquiry capabilities. This enables a private UDDI registry owner to customise or rank the query results, based on its business requirements. Second, our proposal utilises existing technologies and standards which require minimal changes to existing UDDI interfaces or its data structures. We believe these models will serve as valuable reference for enhancing the service discovery methods within a private UDDI registry environment.

Application of Life Data Analysis for the Reliability Assessment of Numerical Overcurrent Relays

Protective relays are components of a protection system in a power system domain that provides decision making element for correct protection and fault clearing operations. Failure of the protection devices may reduce the integrity and reliability of the power system protection that will impact the overall performance of the power system. Hence it is imperative for power utilities to assess the reliability of protective relays to assure it will perform its intended function without failure. This paper will discuss the application of reliability analysis using statistical method called Life Data Analysis in Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB), a government linked power utility company in Malaysia, namely Transmission Division, to assess and evaluate the reliability of numerical overcurrent protective relays from two different manufacturers.