Abstract: Sudoku is a logic-based combinatorial puzzle game
which people in different ages enjoy playing it. The challenging and
addictive nature of this game has made it a ubiquitous game. Most
magazines, newspapers, puzzle books, etc. publish lots of Sudoku
puzzles every day. These puzzles often come in different levels of
difficulty so that all people, from beginner to expert, can play the
game and enjoy it. Generating puzzles with different levels of
difficulty is a major concern of Sudoku designers. There are several
works in the literature which propose ways of generating puzzles
having a desirable level of difficulty. In this paper, we propose a
method based on constraint satisfaction problems to evaluate the
difficulty of the Sudoku puzzles. Then we propose a hill climbing
method to generate puzzles with different levels of difficulty.
Whereas other methods are usually capable of generating puzzles
with only few number of difficulty levels, our method can be used to
generate puzzles with arbitrary number of different difficulty levels.
We test our method by generating puzzles with different levels of
difficulty and having a group of 15 people solve all the puzzles and
recording the time they spend for each puzzle.
Abstract: The effect of various humidities on process yields and
degrees of crystallinity for spray-dried powders from spray drying of
lactose with humid air in a straight-through system have been
studied. It has been suggested by Williams–Landel–Ferry kinetics
(WLF) that a higher particle temperature and lower glass-transition
temperature would increase the crystallization rate of the particles
during the spray-drying process. Freshly humidified air produced by
a Buchi-B290 spray dryer as a humidifier attached to the main spray
dryer decreased the particle glass-transition temperature (Tg), while
allowing the particle temperature (Tp) to reach higher values by using
an insulated drying chamber. Differential scanning calorimetry
(DSC) and moisture sorption analysis were used to measure the
degree of crystallinity for the spray-dried lactose powders. The
results showed that higher Tp-Tg, as a result of applying humid air,
improved the process yield from 21 ± 4 to 26 ± 2% and crystallinity
of the particles by decreasing the latent heat of crystallization from
43 ± 1 to 30 ± 11 J/g and the sorption peak height from 7.3 ± 0.7% to
6 ± 0.7%.
Abstract: An analysis of the Australian Diabetes Screening
Study estimated undiagnosed diabetes mellitus [DM] prevalence in a
high risk general practice based cohort. DM prevalence varied from
9.4% to 18.1% depending upon the diagnostic criteria utilised with
age being a highly significant risk factor. Utilising the gold standard
oral glucose tolerance test, the prevalence of DM was 22-23% in
those aged >= 70 years and
Abstract: This paper presents a new meta-heuristic bio-inspired
optimization algorithm which is called Cuttlefish Algorithm (CFA).
The algorithm mimics the mechanism of color changing behavior of
the cuttlefish to solve numerical global optimization problems. The
colors and patterns of the cuttlefish are produced by reflected light
from three different layers of cells. The proposed algorithm considers
mainly two processes: reflection and visibility. Reflection process
simulates light reflection mechanism used by these layers, while
visibility process simulates visibility of matching patterns of the
cuttlefish. To show the effectiveness of the algorithm, it is tested with
some other popular bio-inspired optimization algorithms such as
Genetic Algorithms (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and
Bees Algorithm (BA) that have been previously proposed in the
literature. Simulations and obtained results indicate that the proposed
CFA is superior when compared with these algorithms.
Abstract: Three dimensional non-Interlaced carbon fibre
reinforced silicon carbide (3-D-Cf/SiC) composites with pyrocarbon
interphase were fabricated using isothermal chemical vapor
infiltration (ICVI) combined with polymer impregnation pyrolysis
(PIP) process. Polysilazane (PSZ) is used as a preceramic polymer to
obtain silicon carbide matrix. Thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA),
Infrared spectroscopic analysis (IR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD)
analysis were carried out on PSZ pyrolysed at different temperatures
to understand the pyrolysis and obtaining the optimum pyrolysing
condition to yield β-SiC phase. The density of the composites was
1.94 g cm-3 after the 3-D carbon preform was SiC infiltrated for 280 h
with one intermediate polysilazane pre-ceramic PIP process.
Mechanical properties of the composite materials were investigated
under tensile, flexural, shear and impact loading. The values of
tensile strength were 200 MPa at room temperature (RT) and 195
MPa at 500°C in air. The average RT flexural strength was 243 MPa.
The lower flexural strength of these composites is because of the
porosity. The fracture toughness obtained from single edge notched
beam (SENB) technique was 39 MPa.m1/2. The work of fracture
obtained from the load-displacement curve of SENB test was 22.8
kJ.m-2. The composites exhibited excellent impact resistance and the
dynamic fracture toughness of 44.8 kJ.m-2 is achieved as determined
from instrumented Charpy impact test. The shear strength of the
composite was 93 MPa, which is significantly higher compared 2-D
Cf/SiC composites. Microstructure evaluation of fracture surfaces
revealed the signatures of fracture processes and showed good
support for the higher toughness obtained.
Abstract: Web search engines are designed to retrieve and
extract the information in the web databases and to return dynamic
web pages. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in
which it includes semantic content in web pages. The main goal of
semantic web is to promote the quality of the current web by
changing its contents into machine understandable form. Therefore,
the milestone of semantic web is to have semantic level information
in the web. Nowadays, people use different keyword- based search
engines to find the relevant information they need from the web.
But many of the words are polysemous. When these words are
used to query a search engine, it displays the Search Result Records
(SRRs) with different meanings. The SRRs with similar meanings are
grouped together based on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). In
addition to that semantic annotation is also performed to improve the
efficiency of search result records. Semantic Annotation is the
process of adding the semantic metadata to web resources. Thus the
grouped SRRs are annotated and generate a summary which
describes the information in SRRs. But the automatic semantic
annotation is a significant challenge in the semantic web. Here
ontology and knowledge based representation are used to annotate
the web pages.
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the stability problem
with two additive time-varying delay components. By choosing one
augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, using some new zero
equalities, and combining linear matrix inequalities (LMI)
techniques, two new sufficient criteria ensuring the global stability
asymptotic stability of DNNs is obtained. These stability criteria are
present in terms of linear matrix inequalities and can be easily
checked. Finally, some examples are showed to demonstrate the
effectiveness and less conservatism of the proposed method.
Abstract: Male factor infertility due to endocrine disturbances
such as abnormalities in prolactin levels are encountered in a
significant proportion. This case control study was carried out to
determine the effects of prolactin on the male reproductive tract,
using 200 male white rats. The rats were maintained as the control
group (G1), hypoprolactinaemic group (G2), 3 hyperprolactinaemic
groups induced using oral largactil (G3), low dose fluphenazine (G4)
and high dose fluphenazine (G5). After 100 days, rats were subjected
to serum prolactin (PRL) level measurements and for basic seminal
fluid analysis (BSA). The difference between serum PRL
concentrations of rats in G2, G3, G4 and G5 as compared to the
control group were highly significant by Student’s t-test (p
Abstract: As currently various portable devices were launched,
smart business conducted using them became common. Since smart
business can use company-internal resources in an exlternal remote
place, user authentication that can identify authentic users is an
important factor. Commonly used user authentication is a method of
using user ID and Password. In the user authentication using ID and
Password, the user should see and enter authentication information
him or her. In this user authentication system depending on the user’s
vision, there is the threat of password leaks through snooping in the
process which the user enters his or her authentication information.
This study designed and produced a user authentication module
using an actuator to respond to the snooping threat.
Abstract: With the rapid progress of modern cities, the railway
construction must be developing quickly in China.As a typical
high-density country, shopping center on the subway should be one
important factor during the process of urban development. The paper
discusses the influence of the layout of shopping center on the subway,
and put it in the time and space’s axis of Shanghai urban development.
We usethe digital technology to establish the database of relevant
information. And then get the change role about shopping center on
subway in Shanghaiby the Kernel density estimate.The result shows
the development of shopping center on subway has a relationship with
local economic strength, population size, policysupport, and city
construction. And the suburbanization trend of shopping center would
be increasingly significant.By this case research, we could see the
Kernel density estimate is an efficient analysis method on the spatial
layout. It could reveal the characters of layout form of shopping center
on subway in essence. And it can also be applied to the other research
of space form.
Abstract: The growth of wireless devices affects the availability
of limited frequencies or spectrum bands as it has been known that
spectrum bands are a natural resource that cannot be added.
Meanwhile, the licensed frequencies are idle most of the time.
Cognitive radio is one of the solutions to solve those problems.
Cognitive radio is a promising technology that allows the unlicensed
users known as secondary users (SUs) to access licensed bands
without making interference to licensed users or primary users (PUs).
As cloud computing has become popular in recent years, cognitive
radio networks (CRNs) can be integrated with cloud platform. One of
the important issues in CRNs is security. It becomes a problem since
CRNs use radio frequencies as a medium for transmitting and CRNs
share the same issues with wireless communication systems. Another
critical issue in CRNs is performance. Security has adverse effect to
performance and there are trade-offs between them. The goal of this
paper is to investigate the performance related to security trade-off in
CRNs with supporting cloud platforms. Furthermore, Queuing
Network Models with preemptive resume and preemptive repeat
identical priority are applied in this project to measure the impact of
security to performance in CRNs with or without cloud platform. The
generalized exponential (GE) type distribution is used to reflect the
bursty inter-arrival and service times at the servers. The results show
that the best performance is obtained when security is disabled and
cloud platform is enabled.
Abstract: This paper presents the design and analysis of Liquid
Crystal (LC) based tunable reflectarray antenna with different design
configurations within X-band frequency range. The effect of LC
volume used for unit cell element on frequency tunability and
reflection loss performance has been investigated. Moreover different
slot embedded patch element configurations have been proposed for
LC based tunable reflectarray antenna design with enhanced
performance. The detailed fabrication and measurement procedure
for different LC based unit cells has been presented. The waveguide
scattering parameter measured results demonstrated that by using the
circular slot embedded patch elements, the frequency tunability and
dynamic phase range can be increased from 180MHz to 200MHz and
120° to 124° respectively. Furthermore the circular slot embedded
patch element can be designed at 10GHz resonant frequency with a
patch volume of 2.71mm3 as compared to 3.47mm3 required for
rectangular patch without slot.
Abstract: Despite four years of study in the tourism industry, the
Bachelor’s graduates cannot perform their jobs as experienced tour
guides. This research aimed to develop French teaching and studying
for Tourism with two main purposes: to analyze ‘Moves’ used in oral
presentations at tourist attraction; and to study content in guiding
presentations or 'Guide Speak'. The study employed audio recording
of these presentations as an interview method in authentic situations,
having four tour guides as respondents and information providers.
The data was analyzed via moves and content analysis. The results
found that there were eight Moves used; namely, Welcoming,
Introducing oneself, Drawing someone’s attention, Giving
information, Explaining, Highlighting, Persuading and Saying
goodbye. In terms of content, the information being presented
covered the outstanding characteristics of the places and wellintegrated
with other related content. The findings were used as
guidelines for curriculum development; in particular, the core content
and the presentation forming the basis for students to meet the
standard requirements of the labor-market and professional schemes.
Abstract: A blood pressure monitor or sphygmomanometer can
be either manual or automatic, employing respectively either the
auscultatory method or the oscillometric method.
The manual version of the sphygmomanometer involves an
inflatable cuff with a stethoscope adopted to detect the sounds
generated by the arterial walls to measure blood pressure in an artery.
An automatic sphygmomanometer can be effectively used to
monitor blood pressure through a pressure sensor, which detects
vibrations provoked by oscillations of the arterial walls.
The pressure sensor implemented in this device improves the
accuracy of the measurements taken.
Abstract: In this paper, an edge-strength guided multiscale
retinex (EGMSR) approach will be proposed for color image contrast
enhancement. In EGMSR, the pixel-dependent weight associated with
each pixel in the single scale retinex output image is computed
according to the edge strength around this pixel in order to prevent
from over-enhancing the noises contained in the smooth dark/bright
regions. Further, by fusing together the enhanced results of EGMSR
and adaptive multiscale retinex (AMSR), we can get a natural fused
image having high contrast and proper tonal rendition. Experimental
results on several low-contrast images have shown that our proposed
approach can produce natural and appealing enhanced images.
Abstract: In this paper the issue of dimensionality reduction is
investigated in finger vein recognition systems using kernel Principal
Component Analysis (KPCA). One aspect of KPCA is to find the
most appropriate kernel function on finger vein recognition as there
are several kernel functions which can be used within PCA-based
algorithms. In this paper, however, another side of PCA-based
algorithms -particularly KPCA- is investigated. The aspect of
dimension of feature vector in PCA-based algorithms is of
importance especially when it comes to the real-world applications
and usage of such algorithms. It means that a fixed dimension of
feature vector has to be set to reduce the dimension of the input and
output data and extract the features from them. Then a classifier is
performed to classify the data and make the final decision. We
analyze KPCA (Polynomial, Gaussian, and Laplacian) in details in
this paper and investigate the optimal feature extraction dimension in
finger vein recognition using KPCA.
Abstract: Multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs)
possess immunomodulatory properties. The effect of MSCs on the
crucial cellular immunity compartment – T-cells is of a special
interest. It is known that MSC tissue niche and expected milieu of
their interaction with T- cells are characterized by low oxygen
concentration, whereas the in vitro experiments usually are carried
out at a much higher ambient oxygen (20%). We firstly evaluated
immunomodulatory effects of MSCs on T-cells at tissue-related
oxygen (5%) after interaction implied cell-to-cell contacts and
paracrine factors only. It turned out that MSCs under reduced oxygen
can effectively suppress the activation and proliferation of PHAstimulated
T-cells and can provoke decrease in the production of
proinflammatory and increase in anti-inflammatory cytokines. In
hypoxia some effects were amplified (inhibition of proliferation, antiinflammatory
cytokine profile shift). This impact was more evident
after direct cell-to-cell interaction; lack of intercellular contacts could
revoke the potentiating effect of hypoxia.
Abstract: This paper presents the variation of the dynamic
characteristics of a spindle with the change of bearing preload. The
correlations between the variation of bearing preload and fundamental
modal parameters were first examined by conducting vibration tests on
physical spindle units. Experimental measurements show that the
dynamic compliance and damping ratio associated with the
dominating modes were affected to vary with variation of the bearing
preload. When the bearing preload was slightly deviated from a
standard value, the modal frequency and damping ability also vary to
different extent, which further enable the spindle to perform with
different compliance. For the spindle used in this study, a standard
preload value set on bearings would enable the spindle to behave a
higher stiffness as compared with others with a preload variation. This
characteristic can be served as a reference to examine the variation of
bearing preload of spindle in assemblage or operation.
Abstract: The purposes of this study were to design and find
users’ satisfaction after using the decision support system for tourism
northern part of Thailand, which can provide tourists touristic
information and plan their personal voyage. Such information can be
retrieved systematically based on personal budget and provinces. The
samples of this study were five experts and users 30 persons white
collars in Bangkok. This decision support system was designed via
ASP.NET. Its database was developed by using MySQL, for
administrators are able to effectively manage the database. The
application outcome revealed that the innovation works properly as
sought in objectives. Specialists and white collars in Bangkok have
evaluated the decision support system; the result was satisfactorily
positive.
Abstract: In order to evaluate the performance of a unified power
flow controller (UPFC), mathematical models for steady state and
dynamic analysis are to be developed. The steady state model is
mainly concerned with the incorporation of the UPFC in load flow
studies. Several load flow models for UPFC have been introduced
in literature, and one of the most reliable models is the decoupled
UPFC model. In spite of UPFC decoupled load flow model simplicity,
it is more robust compared to other UPFC load flow models and it
contains unique capabilities. Some shortcoming such as additional
set of nonlinear equations are to be solved separately after the load
flow solution is obtained. The aim of this study is to investigate the
different control strategies that can be realized in the decoupled load
flow model (individual control and combined control), and the impact
of the location of the UPFC in the network on its control parameters.