Abstract: Nowadays, engineering ceramics have significant
applications in different industries such as; automotive, aerospace,
electrical, electronics and even martial industries due to their
attractive physical and mechanical properties like very high hardness
and strength at elevated temperatures, chemical stability, low friction
and high wear resistance. However, these interesting properties plus
low heat conductivity make their machining processes too hard,
costly and time consuming. Many attempts have been made in order
to make the grinding process of engineering ceramics easier and
many scientists have tried to find proper techniques to economize
ceramics' machining processes. This paper proposes a new diamond
plunge grinding technique using ultrasonic vibration for grinding
Alumina ceramic (Al2O3). For this purpose, a set of laboratory
equipments have been designed and simulated using Finite Element
Method (FEM) and constructed in order to be used in various
measurements. The results obtained have been compared with the
conventional plunge grinding process without ultrasonic vibration
and indicated that the surface roughness and fracture strength
improved and the grinding forces decreased.
Abstract: This study applied Theory of Planned Behaviour
(TPB) to explain the knowledge sharing behaviour among academic
staff at a Public Higher Education Institution (HEI) in Malaysia. The
main objectives of this study are; to identify the components that
influence knowledge sharing behaviour and to determine the levels of
knowledge sharing behaviour among academic staff. A total of 200
respondents were participated in answering questionnaires. The
findings of this study revealed that level of perceiving and
implementing knowledge sharing behaviour among academic staff at
a Public HEI in Malaysia exist but not openly or strongly practiced.
The findings were discussed and recommendations for the future
research were also addressed.
Abstract: The necessity of accurate and timely field data is
shared among organizations engaged in fundamentally different
activities, public services or commercial operations. Basically, there
are three major components in the process of the qualitative research:
data collection, interpretation and organization of data, and analytic
process. Representative technological advancements in terms of
innovation have been made in mobile devices (mobile phone, PDA-s,
tablets, laptops, etc). Resources that can be potentially applied on the
data collection activity for field researches in order to improve this
process.
This paper presents and discuss the main features of a mobile
phone based solution for field data collection, composed of basically
three modules: a survey editor, a server web application and a client
mobile application. The data gathering process begins with the
survey creation module, which enables the production of tailored
questionnaires. The field workforce receives the questionnaire(s) on
their mobile phones to collect the interviews responses and sending
them back to a server for immediate analysis.
Abstract: Network layer multicast, i.e. IP multicast, even after
many years of research, development and standardization, is not
deployed in large scale due to both technical (e.g. upgrading of
routers) and political (e.g. policy making and negotiation) issues.
Researchers looked for alternatives and proposed application/overlay
multicast where multicast functions are handled by end hosts, not
network layer routers. Member hosts wishing to receive multicast
data form a multicast delivery tree. The intermediate hosts in the tree
act as routers also, i.e. they forward data to the lower hosts in the
tree. Unlike IP multicast, where a router cannot leave the tree until all
members below it leave, in overlay multicast any member can leave
the tree at any time thus disjoining the tree and disrupting the data
dissemination. All the disrupted hosts have to rejoin the tree. This
characteristic of the overlay multicast causes multicast tree unstable,
data loss and rejoin overhead. In this paper, we propose that each node
sets its leaving time from the tree and sends join request to a number
of nodes in the tree. The nodes in the tree will reject the request if
their leaving time is earlier than the requesting node otherwise they
will accept the request. The node can join at one of the accepting
nodes. This makes the tree more stable as the nodes will join the tree
according to their leaving time, earliest leaving time node being at the
leaf of the tree. Some intermediate nodes may not follow their leaving
time and leave earlier than their leaving time thus disrupting the tree.
For this, we propose a proactive recovery mechanism so that disrupted
nodes can rejoin the tree at predetermined nodes immediately. We
have shown by simulation that there is less overhead when joining
the multicast tree and the recovery time of the disrupted nodes is
much less than the previous works. Keywords
Abstract: In this paper, a tooth shape optimization method for
cogging torque reduction in Permanent Magnet (PM) motors is
developed by using the Reduced Basis Technique (RBT) coupled by
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Design of Experiments (DOE)
methods. The primary objective of the method is to reduce the
enormous number of design variables required to define the tooth
shape. RBT is a weighted combination of several basis shapes. The
aim of the method is to find the best combination using the weights
for each tooth shape as the design variables. A multi-level design
process is developed to find suitable basis shapes or trial shapes at
each level that can be used in the reduced basis technique. Each level
is treated as a separated optimization problem until the required
objective – minimum cogging torque – is achieved. The process is
started with geometrically simple basis shapes that are defined by
their shape co-ordinates. The experimental design of Taguchi method
is used to build the approximation model and to perform
optimization. This method is demonstrated on the tooth shape
optimization of a 8-poles/12-slots PM motor.
Abstract: Increasing growth of information volume in the
internet causes an increasing need to develop new (semi)automatic
methods for retrieval of documents and ranking them according to
their relevance to the user query. In this paper, after a brief review
on ranking models, a new ontology based approach for ranking
HTML documents is proposed and evaluated in various
circumstances. Our approach is a combination of conceptual,
statistical and linguistic methods. This combination reserves the
precision of ranking without loosing the speed. Our approach
exploits natural language processing techniques to extract phrases
from documents and the query and doing stemming on words. Then
an ontology based conceptual method will be used to annotate
documents and expand the query. To expand a query the spread
activation algorithm is improved so that the expansion can be done
flexible and in various aspects. The annotated documents and the
expanded query will be processed to compute the relevance degree
exploiting statistical methods. The outstanding features of our
approach are (1) combining conceptual, statistical and linguistic
features of documents, (2) expanding the query with its related
concepts before comparing to documents, (3) extracting and using
both words and phrases to compute relevance degree, (4) improving
the spread activation algorithm to do the expansion based on
weighted combination of different conceptual relationships and (5)
allowing variable document vector dimensions. A ranking system
called ORank is developed to implement and test the proposed
model. The test results will be included at the end of the paper.
Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to show a possibility, how to solve numerically elliptic boundary value problems arising in 2D linear elasticity by using the fictitious domain method (FDM) and the Total-FETI domain decomposition method. We briefly mention the theoretical background of these methods and demonstrate their performance on a benchmark.
Abstract: Due to the ever growing amount of publications about
protein-protein interactions, information extraction from text is
increasingly recognized as one of crucial technologies in
bioinformatics. This paper presents a Protein Interaction Extraction
System using a Link Grammar Parser from biomedical abstracts
(PIELG). PIELG uses linkage given by the Link Grammar Parser to
start a case based analysis of contents of various syntactic roles as
well as their linguistically significant and meaningful combinations.
The system uses phrasal-prepositional verbs patterns to overcome
preposition combinations problems. The recall and precision are
74.4% and 62.65%, respectively. Experimental evaluations with two
other state-of-the-art extraction systems indicate that PIELG system
achieves better performance. For further evaluation, the system is
augmented with a graphical package (Cytoscape) for extracting
protein interaction information from sequence databases. The result
shows that the performance is remarkably promising.
Abstract: A satured liquid is warmed until boiling in a parallelepipedic boiler. The heat is supplied in a liquid through the horizontal bottom of the boiler, the other walls being adiabatic. During the process of boiling, the liquid evaporates through its free surface by deforming it. This surface which subdivides the boiler into two regions occupied on both sides by the boiled liquid (broth) and its vapor which surmounts it. The broth occupying the region and its vapor the superior region. A two- fluids model is used to describe the dynamics of the broth, its vapor and their interface. In this model, the broth is treated as a monophasic fluid (homogeneous model) and form with its vapor adiphasic pseudo fluid (two-fluid model). Furthermore, the interface is treated as a zone of mixture characterized by superficial void fraction noted α* . The aim of this article is to describe the dynamics of the interface between the boiled fluid and its vapor within a boiler. The resolution of the problem allowed us to show the evolution of the broth and the level of the liquid.
Abstract: A major requirement for Grid application developers is ensuring performance and scalability of their applications. Predicting the performance of an application demands understanding its specific features. This paper discusses performance modeling and prediction of multi-agent based simulation (MABS) applications on the Grid. An experiment conducted using a synthetic MABS workload explains the key features to be included in the performance model. The results obtained from the experiment show that the prediction model developed for the synthetic workload can be used as a guideline to understand to estimate the performance characteristics of real world simulation applications.
Abstract: Measurement of competitiveness between countries or regions is an important topic of many economic analysis and scientific papers. In European Union (EU), there is no mainstream approach of competitiveness evaluation and measuring. There are many opinions and methods of measurement and evaluation of competitiveness between states or regions at national and European level. The methods differ in structure of using the indicators of competitiveness and ways of their processing. The aim of the paper is to analyze main sources of competitive potential of the EU Member States with the help of Factor analysis (FA) and to classify the EU Member States to homogeneous units (clusters) according to the similarity of selected indicators of competitiveness factors by Cluster analysis (CA) in reference years 2000 and 2011. The theoretical part of the paper is devoted to the fundamental bases of competitiveness and the methodology of FA and CA methods. The empirical part of the paper deals with the evaluation of competitiveness factors in the EU Member States and cluster comparison of evaluated countries by cluster analysis.
Abstract: With the development of the Internet, E-commerce is
growing at an exponential rate, and lots of online stores are built up to
sell their goods online. A major factor influencing the successful
adoption of E-commerce is consumer-s trust. For new or unknown
Internet business, consumers- lack of trust has been cited as a major
barrier to its proliferation. As web sites provide key interface for
consumer use of E-Commerce, we investigate the design of web site to
build trust in E-Commerce from a design science approach. A
conceptual model is proposed in this paper to describe the ontology of
online transaction and human-computer interaction. Based on this
conceptual model, we provide a personalized webpage design
approach using Bayesian networks learning method. Experimental
evaluation are designed to show the effectiveness of web
personalization in improving consumer-s trust in new or unknown
online store.
Abstract: In this paper, a generalized form of the Banzhaf-Owen value for cooperative fuzzy games with a coalition structure is proposed. Its axiomatic system is given by extending crisp case. In order to better understand the Banzhaf-Owen value for fuzzy games with a coalition structure, we briefly introduce the Banzhaf-Owen values for two special kinds of fuzzy games with a coalition structure, and give their explicit forms.
Abstract: Internet computer games turn to be more and more
attractive within the context of technology enhanced learning.
Educational games as quizzes and quests have gained significant
success in appealing and motivating learners to study in a different
way and provoke steadily increasing interest in new methods of
application. Board games are specific group of games where figures
are manipulated in competitive play mode with race conditions on a
surface according predefined rules. The article represents a new,
formalized model of traditional quizzes, puzzles and quests shown as
multimedia board games which facilitates the construction process of
such games. Authors provide different examples of quizzes and their
models in order to demonstrate the model is quite general and does
support not only quizzes, mazes and quests but also any set of
teaching activities. The execution process of such models is
explained and, as well, how they can be useful for creation and
delivery of adaptive e-learning courseware.
Abstract: Understanding the cell's large-scale organization is an
interesting task in computational biology. Thus, protein-protein
interactions can reveal important organization and function of the
cell. Here, we investigated the correspondence between protein
interactions and function for the yeast. We obtained the correlations
among the set of proteins. Then these correlations are clustered using
both the hierarchical and biclustering methods. The detailed analyses
of proteins in each cluster were carried out by making use of their
functional annotations. As a result, we found that some functional
classes appear together in almost all biclusters. On the other hand, in
hierarchical clustering, the dominancy of one functional class is
observed. In brief, from interaction data to function, some correlated
results are noticed about the relationship between interaction and
function which might give clues about the organization of the
proteins.
Abstract: With today's fast lifestyles and busy schedule, nuclear
families are becoming popular. Thus, the elderly members of these
families are often neglected. This has lead to the popularity of the
concept of Community living for the aged. The elders reside at a
centre, which is controlled by the MANAGER. The manager takes
responsibility of the functioning of the centre which includes taking
care of 'residents' at the centre along with managing the daily chores
of the centre, which he accomplishes with the help of a number of
staff members and volunteers Often the Manager is not an employee
but a volunteer. In such cases especially, time is an important
constraint. A system, which provides an easy and efficient manner of
managing the working of an old age home in detail, will prove to be
of great benefit. We have developed a P.C. based organizer used to
monitor the various activities of an old age home. It is an effective
and easy-to-use system which will enable the manager to keep an
account of all the residents, their accounts, staff members, volunteers,
the centre-s logistic requirements etc. It is thus, a comprehensive
'Organizer' for Old Age Homes.
Abstract: In image processing and visualization, comparing two
bitmapped images needs to be compared from their pixels by matching
pixel-by-pixel. Consequently, it takes a lot of computational time
while the comparison of two vector-based images is significantly
faster. Sometimes these raster graphics images can be approximately
converted into the vector-based images by various techniques. After
conversion, the problem of comparing two raster graphics images
can be reduced to the problem of comparing vector graphics images.
Hence, the problem of comparing pixel-by-pixel can be reduced to
the problem of polynomial comparisons. In computer aided geometric
design (CAGD), the vector graphics images are the composition of
curves and surfaces. Curves are defined by a sequence of control
points and their polynomials. In this paper, the control points will be
considerably used to compare curves. The same curves after relocated
or rotated are treated to be equivalent while two curves after different
scaled are considered to be similar curves. This paper proposed an
algorithm for comparing the polynomial curves by using the control
points for equivalence and similarity. In addition, the geometric
object-oriented database used to keep the curve information has also
been defined in XML format for further used in curve comparisons.
Abstract: In this paper we present an adaptive method for image
compression that is based on complexity level of the image. The
basic compressor/de-compressor structure of this method is a multilayer
perceptron artificial neural network. In adaptive approach
different Back-Propagation artificial neural networks are used as
compressor and de-compressor and this is done by dividing the
image into blocks, computing the complexity of each block and then
selecting one network for each block according to its complexity
value. Three complexity measure methods, called Entropy, Activity
and Pattern-based are used to determine the level of complexity in
image blocks and their ability in complexity estimation are evaluated
and compared. In training and evaluation, each image block is
assigned to a network based on its complexity value. Best-SNR is
another alternative in selecting compressor network for image blocks
in evolution phase which chooses one of the trained networks such
that results best SNR in compressing the input image block. In our
evaluations, best results are obtained when overlapping the blocks is
allowed and choosing the networks in compressor is based on the
Best-SNR. In this case, the results demonstrate superiority of this
method comparing with previous similar works and JPEG standard
coding.
Abstract: In the present work we model a Multiquantum Well
structure Separate Absorption and Charge Multiplication Avalanche
Photodiode (MQW-SACM-APD), while the Absorption region
coincide with the MQW. We consider the nonuniformity of electric
field using split-step method in active region. This model is based on
the carrier rate equations in the different regions of the device. Using
the model we obtain the photocurrent, and dark current. As an
example, InGaAs/InP SACM-APD and MQW-SACM-APD are
simulated. There is a good agreement between the simulation and
experimental results.
Abstract: In today-s era of plasma and laser cutting, machines using oxy-acetylene flame are also meritorious due to their simplicity and cost effectiveness. The objective to devise a Computer controlled Oxy-Fuel profile cutting machine arose from the increasing demand for metal cutting with respect to edge quality, circularity and lesser formation of redeposit material. The System has an 8 bit micro controller based embedded system, which assures stipulated time response. A new window based Application software was devised which takes a standard CAD file .DXF as input and converts it into numerical data required for the controller. It uses VB6 as a front end whereas MS-ACCESS and AutoCAD as back end. The system is designed around AT89C51RD2, powerful 8 bit, ISP micro controller from Atmel and is optimized to achieve cost effectiveness and also maintains the required accuracy and reliability for complex shapes. The backbone of the system is a cleverly designed mechanical assembly along with the embedded system resulting in an accuracy of about 10 microns while maintaining perfect linearity in the cut. This results in substantial increase in productivity. The observed results also indicate reduced inter laminar spacing of pearlite with an increase in the hardness of the edge region.