Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for inferring the
odor based on neural activities observed from rats- main olfactory
bulbs. Multi-channel extra-cellular single unit recordings were done
by micro-wire electrodes (tungsten, 50μm, 32 channels) implanted in
the mitral/tufted cell layers of the main olfactory bulb of anesthetized
rats to obtain neural responses to various odors. Neural response
as a key feature was measured by substraction of neural firing rate
before stimulus from after. For odor inference, we have developed a
decoding method based on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation.
The results have shown that the average decoding accuracy is about
100.0%, 96.0%, 84.0%, and 100.0% with four rats, respectively. This
work has profound implications for a novel brain-machine interface
system for odor inference.
Abstract: The genus Fumaria L. (Papaveraceae) in Iran
comprises 8 species with a vast medicinal use in Asian folk
medicine. These herbs are considered to be useful in the
treatment of gastrointestinal disease and skin disorders.
Antioxidant activities of alkaloids and phenolic extracts of
these species had been studied previously. These species are:
F. officinalis, F. parviflora, F. asepala, F. densiflora, F.
schleicheri, F. vaillantii and F. indica. More than 50
populations of Fumaria species were sampled from nature. In
this study different fatty acids are extracted. Their picks were
recorded by GC technique. This species contain some kind of
fatty acids with antioxidant effects. A part of these lipids are
phospholipids. As these are unsaturated fatty acids they may
have industrial use as natural additive to cosmetics, dermal
and oral medicines. The presences of different materials are
discussed. Our studies for antioxidant effects of these
substances are continued.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to test the “work values"
inventory developed by Tevruz and Turgut and to utilize the concept
in a model, which aims to create a greater understanding of the work
experience. In the study multiple effects of work values, work-value
congruence and work centrality on organizational citizenship
behavior are examined. In this respect, it is hypothesized that work
values and work-value congruence predict organizational citizenship
behavior through work centrality. Work-goal congruence test, Tevruz
and Turgut-s work values inventory are administered along with
Kanungo-s work centrality and Podsakoff et al.-s [47] organizational
citizenship behavior test to employees working in Turkish SME-s.
The study validated that Tevruz and Turgut-s work values inventory
and the work-value congruence test were reliable and could be used
for future research. The study revealed the mediating role of work
centrality only for the relationship of work values and the
responsibility dimension of citizenship behavior. Most important, this
study brought in an important concept, work-value congruence,
which enables a better understanding of work values and their
relation to various attitudinal variables.
Abstract: This research explores on the development of the structure of Carbon Credit Registry System those accords to the need of future events in Thailand. This research also explores the big picture of every connected system by referring to the design of each system, the Data Flow Diagram, and the design in term of the system-s data using DES standard. The purpose of this paper is to show how to design the model of each system. Furthermore, this paper can serve as guideline for designing an appropriate Carbon Credit Registry System.
Abstract: The performance of high-resolution schemes is investigated for unsteady, inviscid and compressible multiphase flows. An Eulerian diffuse interface approach has been chosen for the simulation of multicomponent flow problems. The reduced fiveequation and seven equation models are used with HLL and HLLC approximation. The authors demonstrated the advantages and disadvantages of both seven equations and five equations models studying their performance with HLL and HLLC algorithms on simple test case. The seven equation model is based on two pressure, two velocity concept of Baer–Nunziato [10], while five equation model is based on the mixture velocity and pressure. The numerical evaluations of two variants of Riemann solvers have been conducted for the classical one-dimensional air-water shock tube and compared with analytical solution for error analysis.
Abstract: Determining depth of anesthesia is a challenging problem
in the context of biomedical signal processing. Various methods
have been suggested to determine a quantitative index as depth of
anesthesia, but most of these methods suffer from high sensitivity
during the surgery. A novel method based on energy scattering of
samples in the wavelet domain is suggested to represent the basic
content of electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. In this method, first
EEG signal is decomposed into different sub-bands, then samples
are squared and energy of samples sequence is constructed through
each scale and time, which is normalized and finally entropy of the
resulted sequences is suggested as a reliable index. Empirical Results
showed that applying the proposed method to the EEG signals can
classify the awake, moderate and deep anesthesia states similar to
BIS.
Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive motion estimator
that can be dynamically reconfigured by the best algorithm
depending on the variation of the video nature during the lifetime
of an application under running. The 4 Step Search (4SS) and the
Gradient Search (GS) algorithms are integrated in the estimator in
order to be used in the case of rapid and slow video sequences
respectively. The Full Search Block Matching (FSBM) algorithm
has been also integrated in order to be used in the case of the
video sequences which are not real time oriented.
In order to efficiently reduce the computational cost while
achieving better visual quality with low cost power, the proposed
motion estimator is based on a Variable Block Size (VBS) scheme
that uses only the 16x16, 16x8, 8x16 and 8x8 modes.
Experimental results show that the adaptive motion estimator
allows better results in term of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio
(PSNR), computational cost, FPGA occupied area, and dissipated
power relatively to the most popular variable block size schemes
presented in the literature.
Abstract: Three novel and significant contributions are made in
this paper Firstly, non-recursive formulation of Haar connection
coefficients, pioneered by the present authors is presented, which
can be computed very efficiently and avoid stack and memory
overflows. Secondly, the generalized approach for state analysis of
singular bilinear time-invariant (TI) and time-varying (TV) systems
is presented; vis-˜a-vis diversified and complex works reported by
different authors. Thirdly, a generalized approach for parameter
estimation of bilinear TI and TV systems is also proposed. The unified
framework of the proposed method is very significant in that the
digital hardware once-designed can be used to perform the complex
tasks of state analysis and parameter estimation of different types
of bilinear systems single-handedly. The simplicity, effectiveness and
generalized nature of the proposed method is established by applying
it to different types of bilinear systems for the two tasks.
Abstract: Software development has experienced remarkable progress in the past decade. However, due to the rising complexity and magnitude of the project the development productivity has not been consistently improved. By analyzing the latest ISBSG data repository with 4106 projects, we discovered that software development productivity has actually undergone irregular variations between the years 1995 and 2005. Considering the factors significant to the productivity, we found its variations are primarily caused by the variations of average team size and the unbalanced uses of the less productive language 3GL.
Abstract: In recent years multi-agent systems have emerged as one of the interesting architectures facilitating distributed collaboration and distributed problem solving. Each node (agent) of the network might pursue its own agenda, exploit its environment, develop its own problem solving strategy and establish required communication strategies. Within each node of the network, one could encounter a diversity of problem-solving approaches. Quite commonly the agents can realize their processing at the level of information granules that is the most suitable from their local points of view. Information granules can come at various levels of granularity. Each agent could exploit a certain formalism of information granulation engaging a machinery of fuzzy sets, interval analysis, rough sets, just to name a few dominant technologies of granular computing. Having this in mind, arises a fundamental issue of forming effective interaction linkages between the agents so that they fully broadcast their findings and benefit from interacting with others.
Abstract: People detection from images has a variety of applications such as video surveillance and driver assistance system, but is still a challenging task and more difficult in crowded environments such as shopping malls in which occlusion of lower parts of human body often occurs. Lack of the full-body information requires more effective features than common features such as HOG. In this paper, new features are introduced that exploits global self-symmetry (GSS) characteristic in head-shoulder patterns. The features encode the similarity or difference of color histograms and oriented gradient histograms between two vertically symmetric blocks. The domain-specific features are rapid to compute from the integral images in Viola-Jones cascade-of-rejecters framework. The proposed features are evaluated with our own head-shoulder dataset that, in part, consists of a well-known INRIA pedestrian dataset. Experimental results show that the GSS features are effective in reduction of false alarmsmarginally and the gradient GSS features are preferred more often than the color GSS ones in the feature selection.
Abstract: Bloom filter is a probabilistic and memory efficient
data structure designed to answer rapidly whether an element is
present in a set. It tells that the element is definitely not in the set but
its presence is with certain probability. The trade-off to use Bloom
filter is a certain configurable risk of false positives. The odds of a
false positive can be made very low if the number of hash function is
sufficiently large. For spam detection, weight is attached to each set
of elements. The spam weight for a word is a measure used to rate the
e-mail. Each word is assigned to a Bloom filter based on its weight.
The proposed work introduces an enhanced concept in Bloom filter
called Bin Bloom Filter (BBF). The performance of BBF over
conventional Bloom filter is evaluated under various optimization
techniques. Real time data set and synthetic data sets are used for
experimental analysis and the results are demonstrated for bin sizes 4,
5, 6 and 7. Finally analyzing the results, it is found that the BBF
which uses heuristic techniques performs better than the traditional
Bloom filter in spam detection.
Abstract: Missing data yields many analysis challenges. In case of complex survey design, in addition to dealing with missing data, researchers need to account for the sampling design to achieve useful inferences. Methods for incorporating sampling weights in neural network imputation were investigated to account for complex survey designs. An estimate of variance to account for the imputation uncertainty as well as the sampling design using neural networks will be provided. A simulation study was conducted to compare estimation results based on complete case analysis, multiple imputation using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo, and neural network imputation. Furthermore, a public-use dataset was used as an example to illustrate neural networks imputation under a complex survey design
Abstract: Composite pins of rubber dust collected from tyre
retreading centres of trucks, cars and buses etc.and epoxy with
weight percentages of 10. 15, and 20 % of rubber (weight fractions of
9, 13 and 17 % respectively) have been prepared in house with the
help of a split wooden mould. The pins were tested in a pin-on-disc
wear monitor to determine the co-efficient of friction and weight
losses with varying speeds, loads and time. The wear volume and
wear rates have also been found out for all these three specimens.. It
is observed that all the specimens have exhibited very low coefficient
of friction and low wear rates under dry sliding condition. Out of the
above three samples tested, the specimen with 10 % rubber dust by
weight has shown lowest wear rates. However a peculiar result i.e
decreasing trend has been obtained with 20% reinforcement of rubber
in epoxy while rubbed against steel at varying speeds. This might
have occurred due to high surface finish of the disc and formation of
a thin transfer layer from the composite
Abstract: This paper aimed to study the factors that relate to
working behavior of employees at Pakkred Municipality, Nonthaburi
Province. A questionnaire was utilized as the tool in collecting
information. Descriptive statistics included frequency, percentage,
mean and standard deviation. Independent- sample t- test, analysis of
variance and Pearson Correlation were also used. The findings of this
research revealed that the majority of the respondents were female,
between 25- 35 years old, married, with a Bachelor degree. The
average monthly salary of respondents was between 8,001- 12,000
Baht, and having about 4-7 years of working experience. Regarding
the overall working motivation factors, the findings showed that
interrelationship, respect, and acceptance were ranked as highly
important factors, whereas motivation, remunerations & welfare,
career growth, and working conditions were ranked as moderately
important factors. Also, overall working behavior was ranked as high.
The hypotheses testing revealed that different genders had a
different working behavior and had a different way of working as a
team, which was significant at the 0.05 confidence level, Moreover,
there was a difference among employees with different monthly
salary in working behavior, problem- solving and decision making,
which all were significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Employees
with different years of working experience were found to have work
working behavior both individual and as a team at the statistical
significance level of 0.01 and 0.05. The result of testing the
relationship between motivation in overall working revealed that
interrelationship, respect and acceptance from others, career growth,
and working conditions related to working behavior at a moderate
level, while motivation in performing duties and remunerations and
welfares related to working behavior towards the same direction at a
low level, with a statistical significance of 0.01.
Abstract: In this work, a special case of the image superresolution
problem where the only type of motion is global
translational motion and the blurs are shift-invariant is investigated.
The necessary conditions for exact reconstruction of the original
image by using finite impulse-response reconstruction filters are
developed. Given that the conditions are satisfied, a method for exact
super-resolution is presented and some simulation results are shown.
Abstract: For lack of the visualization of the ultrasonic detection
method of partial discharge (PD), the ultrasonic detection technology
combined with the X-ray visual detection method (UXV) is proposed.
The method can conduct qualitative analysis accurately and conduct
reliable positioning diagnosis to the internal insulation defects of
GIS, and while it could make up the blindness of the X-ray visual
detection method and improve the detection rate. In this paper, an
experimental model of GIS is used as the trial platform, a variety of
insulation defects are set inside the GIS cavity. With the proposed
method, the ultrasonic method is used to conduct the preliminary
detection, and then the X-ray visual detection is used to locate and
diagnose precisely. Therefore, the proposed UXV technology is
feasible and practical.
Abstract: Springback is a significant problem in the sheet metal
forming process. When the tools are released after the stage of
forming, the product springs out, because of the action of the internal
stresses. In many cases the deviation of form is too large and the
compensation of the springback is necessary. The precise prediction
of the springback of product is increasingly significant for the design
of the tools and for compensation because of the higher ratio of the
yield stress to the elastic modulus.
The main object in this paper was to study the effect of the
anisotropy on the springback for three directions of rolling: 0°, 45°
and 90°. At the same time, we highlighted the influence of three
different metallic materials: Aluminum, Steel and Galvanized steel.
The original of our purpose consist on tests which are ensured by
adapting a U-type stretching-bending device on a tensile testing
machine, where we studied and quantified the variation of the
springback according to the direction of rolling. We also showed the
role of lubrication in the reduction of the springback.
Moreover, in this work, we have studied important characteristics
in deep drawing process which is a springback. We have presented
defaults that are showed in this process and many parameters
influenced a springback.
Finally, our results works lead us to understand the influence of
grains orientation with different metallic materials on the springback
and drawing some conclusions how to concept deep drawing tools. In
addition, the conducted work represents a fundamental contribution
in the discussion the industry application.
Abstract: At present, it is very common to find renewable
energy resources, especially wind power, connected to distribution
systems. The impact of this wind power on voltage distribution levels
has been addressed in the literature. The majority of this works deals
with the determination of the maximum active and reactive power
that is possible to be connected on a system load bus, until the
voltage at that bus reaches the voltage collapse point. It is done by the
traditional methods of PV curves reported in many references.
Theoretical expression of maximum power limited by voltage
stability transfer through a grid is formulated using an exact
representation of distribution line with ABCD parameters. The
expression is used to plot PV curves at various power factors of a
radial system. Limited values of reactive power can be obtained. This
paper presents a method to study the relationship between the active
power and voltage (PV) at the load bus to identify the voltage
stability limit. It is a foundation to build a permitted working
operation region in complying with the voltage stability limit at the
point of common coupling (PCC) connected wind farm.
Abstract: Traditionally, Internet has provided best-effort service to every user regardless of its requirements. However, as Internet becomes universally available, users demand more bandwidth and applications require more and more resources, and interest has developed in having the Internet provide some degree of Quality of Service. Although QoS is an important issue, the question of how it will be brought into the Internet has not been solved yet. Researches, due to the rapid advances in technology are proposing new and more desirable capabilities for the next generation of IP infrastructures. But neither all applications demand the same amount of resources, nor all users are service providers. In this way, this paper is the first of a series of papers that presents an architecture as a first step to the optimization of QoS in the Internet environment as a solution to a SMSE's problem whose objective is to provide public service to internet with certain Quality of Service expectations. The service provides new business opportunities, but also presents new challenges. We have designed and implemented a scalable service framework that supports adaptive bandwidth based on user demands, and the billing based on usage and on QoS. The developed application has been evaluated and the results show that traffic limiting works at optimum and so it does exceeding bandwidth distribution. However, some considerations are done and currently research is under way in two basic areas: (i) development and testing new transfer protocols, and (ii) developing new strategies for traffic improvements based on service differentiation.