Abstract: In recent years, an increased competition and lower profit margins have necessitated a focus on improving the performance of the product development process, an area that traditionally have been excluded from detailed steering and evaluation. A systematic improvement requires a good understanding of the current performance, wherefore the interest for product development performance measurement has increased dramatically. This paper presents a case study that evaluates the performance of the product development performance measurement system used in a Swedish company that is a part of a global corporate group. The study is based on internal documentation and eighteen in-depth interviews with stakeholders involved in the product development process. The results from the case study includes a description of what metrics that are in use, how these are employed, and its affect on the quality of the performance measurement system. Especially, the importance of having a well-defined process proved to have a major impact on the quality of the performance measurement system in this particular case.
Abstract: In the context of spectrum surveillance, a new method
to recover the code of spread spectrum signal is presented, while the
receiver has no knowledge of the transmitter-s spreading sequence. In
our previous paper, we used Genetic algorithm (GA), to recover
spreading code. Although genetic algorithms (GAs) are well known
for their robustness in solving complex optimization problems, but
nonetheless, by increasing the length of the code, we will often lead
to an unacceptable slow convergence speed. To solve this problem we
introduce Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) into code estimation in
spread spectrum communication system. In searching process for
code estimation, the PSO algorithm has the merits of rapid
convergence to the global optimum, without being trapped in local
suboptimum, and good robustness to noise. In this paper we describe
how to implement PSO as a component of a searching algorithm in
code estimation. Swarm intelligence boasts a number of advantages
due to the use of mobile agents. Some of them are: Scalability, Fault
tolerance, Adaptation, Speed, Modularity, Autonomy, and
Parallelism. These properties make swarm intelligence very attractive
for spread spectrum code estimation. They also make swarm
intelligence suitable for a variety of other kinds of channels. Our
results compare between swarm-based algorithms and Genetic
algorithms, and also show PSO algorithm performance in code
estimation process.
Abstract: The objective of the paper was to understand the use
of an important element of design, namely color in a Semiotic
system. Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes, it is often
divided into three branches namely (i) Semantics that deals with the
relation between signs and the things to which they refer to mean, (ii)
Syntactics which addresses the relations among signs in formal
structures and (iii) Pragmatics that relates between signs and its
effects on they have on the people who use them to create a plan for
an object or a system referred to as design. Cubism with its versatility
was the key design tool prevalent across the 20th century. In order to
analyze the user's understanding of interaction and appreciation of
color through the movement of Cubism, an exercise was undertaken
in Dept. of Design, IIT Guwahati. This included tasks to design a
composition using color and sign process to the theme 'Between the
Lines' on a given tessellation where the users relate their work to the
world they live in, which in this case was the college campus of IIT
Guwahati. The findings demonstrate impact of the key design
element color on the principles of visual perception based on image
analysis of specific compositions.
Abstract: The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming
paradigm offers ease-of-use in expressing parallelism
through a global shared address space while emphasizing performance
by providing locality awareness through the partitioning of
this address space. Therefore, the interest in PGAS programming
languages is growing and many new languages have emerged and
are becoming ubiquitously available on nearly all modern parallel
architectures. Recently, new parallel machines with multiple cores
are designed for targeting high performance applications. Most of the
efforts have gone into benchmarking but there are a few examples of
real high performance applications running on multicore machines.
In this paper, we present and evaluate a parallelization technique
for implementing a local DNA sequence alignment algorithm using
a PGAS based language, UPC (Unified Parallel C) on a chip
multithreading architecture, the UltraSPARC T1.
Abstract: For a variety of safety and economic reasons, engineering undergraduates in Australia have experienced diminishing access to the real hardware that is typically the embodiment of their theoretical studies. This trend will delay the development of practical competence, decrease the ability to model and design, and suppress motivation. The author has attempted to address this concern by creating a software tool that contains both photographic images of real machinery, and sets of graphical modeling 'tools'. Academics from a range of disciplines can use the software to set tutorial tasks, and incorporate feedback comments for a range of student responses. An evaluation of the software demonstrated that students who had solved modeling problems with the aid of the electronic tutor performed significantly better in formal examinations with similar problems. The 2-D graphical diagnostic routines in the Tutor have the potential to be used in a wider range of problem-solving tasks.
Abstract: The wrinkling of a thin elastic bi-annular plate with piecewise-constant mechanical properties, subjected to radial stretching, is considered. The critical wrinkling stretching loading and the corresponding wrinkling patterns are extensively investigated, together with the roles played by both the geometrical and mechanical parameters.
Abstract: This paper presents the new results of energy plant –
rye and triticale at yellow ripeness and ripe, pre-treatment in high
pressure steam reactor and monosaccharide extraction. There were
investigated the influence of steam pressure (20 to 22 bar), retention
duration (180 to 240 s) and catalytic sulphuric acid concentration
strength (0 to 0.5 %) on the pre-treatment process, contents of
monosaccharides (glucose, arabinose, xylose, mannose) and
undesirable by-compounds (furfural and HMF) in the reactor. The
study has determined that the largest amount of monosaccharides
(37.2 % of glucose, 2.7 % of arabinose, 8.4 % of xylose, and 1.3 %
of mannose) was received in the rye at ripe, the samples of which
were mixed with 0.5 % concentration of catalytic sulphuric acid, and
hydrolysed in the reactor, where the pressure was 20 bar, whereas the
reaction time – 240 s.
Abstract: The consumption capability of people in China has
been a big issue to tourism business. Due to the increasing of China
tourists, Taiwan-s government rescinded the category of people in
China and opened up the non-stopped airline from China to Taiwan.
The “one-day traveling style between China and Taiwan" has formed,
hoping to bring business to Taiwan. Night market, which shows
foreigners the very local character of Taiwan, contains various
merchandise for consumers to purchase. With the increasing numbers
of non-stopped airline, visiting Taiwan-s night markets has also been
one of major activities to China-s tourists. The purpose of the present
study is to understand the consumer behavior of China tourists in
tourist night markets in Taipei and analyze that if their shopping
motives cause the different shopping behaviors and post-purchase
satisfaction and revisiting intention. The results reveled that for the
China tourists, the motives of significant influence to the shopping
behaviors. Also, the shopping behaviors significant influence to the
whole satisfaction and the whole satisfaction significant influence to
post-purchase behavior.
Abstract: This paper describes a paradigmatic approach to develop architecture of secure systems by describing the requirements from four different points of view: that of the owner, the administrator, the user, and the network. Deriving requirements and developing architecture implies the joint elicitation and describing the problem and the structure of the solution. The view points proposed in this paper are those we consider as requirements towards their contributions as major parties in the design, implementation, usage and maintenance of secure systems. The dramatic growth of the technology of Internet and the applications deployed in World Wide Web have lead to the situation where the security has become a very important concern in the development of secure systems. Many security approaches are currently being used in organizations. In spite of the widespread use of many different security solutions, the security remains a problem. It is argued that the approach that is described in this paper for the development of secure architecture is practical by all means. The models representing these multiple points of view are termed the requirements model (views of owner and administrator) and the operations model (views of user and network). In this paper, this multiple view paradigm is explained by first describing the specific requirements and or characteristics of secure systems (particularly in the domain of networks) and the secure architecture / system development methodology.
Abstract: In this study, a fuzzy similarity approach for Arabic web pages classification is presented. The approach uses a fuzzy term-category relation by manipulating membership degree for the training data and the degree value for a test web page. Six measures are used and compared in this study. These measures include: Einstein, Algebraic, Hamacher, MinMax, Special case fuzzy and Bounded Difference approaches. These measures are applied and compared using 50 different Arabic web-pages. Einstein measure was gave best performance among the other measures. An analysis of these measures and concluding remarks are drawn in this study.
Abstract: In recent years, “Bottom-up Planning Approach" has been widely accepted and expanded from planning theorists. Citizen participation becomes more important in decision-making in informal settlements. Many of previous projects and strategies due to ignorance of citizen participation, have been failed facing with informal settlements and in some cases lead physical expansion of these neighbourhoods. According to recent experiences, the new participatory approach was in somehow successful. This paper focuses on local experiences in Iran. A considerable amount of people live in informal settlements in Iran. With the previous methods, the government could not solve the problems of these settlements. It is time to examine new methods such as empowerment of the local citizens and involve them to solve the current physical, social, and economic problems. The paper aims to address the previous and new strategies facing with informal settlements, the conditions under which citizens could be involved in planning process, limits and potentials of this process, the main actors and issues and finally motivations that are able to promote citizen participation. Documentary studies, observation, interview and questionnaire have been used to achieve the above mentioned objectives. Nearly 80 percent of responder in Saadi Community are ready to participate in regularising their neighbourhoods, if pre-conditions of citizen involvement are being provided. These pre-conditions include kind of problem and its severity, the importance of issue, existence of a short-term solution, etc. Moreover, confirmation of dweller-s ownership can promote the citizen engagement in participatory projects.
Abstract: A semi-analytic boundary discretization method, the Method of Auxiliary Sources (MAS) is used to analyze Optical Antennas consisting of metallic parts. In addition to standard dipoletype antennas, consisting of two pieces of metal, a new structure consisting of a single metal piece with a tiny groove in the center is analyzed. It is demonstrated that difficult numerical problems are caused because optical antennas exhibit strong material dispersion, loss, and plasmon-polariton effects that require a very accurate numerical simulation. This structure takes advantage of the Channel Plasmon-Polariton (CPP) effect and exhibits a strong enhancement of the electric field in the groove. Also primitive 3D antenna model with spherical nano particles is analyzed.
Abstract: During signal transmission, the combined effect of the
transmitter filter, the transmission medium, and additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) are included in the channel which distort
and add noise to the signal. This causes the well defined signal
constellation to spread causing errors in bit detection. A compact pi
neural network with minimum number of nodes is proposed. The
replacement of summation at each node by multiplication results in
more powerful mapping. The resultant pi network is tested on six
different channels.
Abstract: Point quad tree is considered as one of the most
common data organizations to deal with spatial data & can be used to
increase the efficiency for searching the point features. As the
efficiency of the searching technique depends on the height of the
tree, arbitrary insertion of the point features may make the tree
unbalanced and lead to higher time of searching. This paper attempts
to design an algorithm to make a nearly balanced quad tree. Point
pattern analysis technique has been applied for this purpose which
shows a significant enhancement of the performance and the results
are also included in the paper for the sake of completeness.
Abstract: This paper seeks to give a general idea of the universe of project portfolio management, from its multidisciplinary nature, to the many challenges it raises, passing through the different techniques, models and tools used to solve the multiple problems known. It is intended to contribute to the clarification, with great depth, of the impacts and relationships involved in managing the projects- portfolio. It aims at proposing a technique for the project alignment with the organisational strategy, in order to select projects that later on will be considered in the analysis and selection of the portfolio. We consider the development of a methodology for assessing the project alignment index very relevant in the global market scenario. It can help organisations to gain a greater awareness of market dynamics, speed up the decision process and increase its consistency, thus enabling the strategic alignment and the improvement of the organisational performance.
Abstract: Variable digital filters are useful for various signal processing and communication applications where the frequency characteristics, such as fractional delays and cutoff frequencies, can be varied. In this paper, we propose a design method of variable FIR digital filters with an approximate linear phase characteristic in the passband. The proposed variable FIR filters have some large attenuation in stopband and their large attenuation can be varied by spectrum parameters. In the proposed design method, a quasi-equiripple characteristic can be obtained by using an iterative weighted least square method. The usefulness of the proposed design method is verified through some examples.
Abstract: The usefulness of weaning foods to meet the nutrient
needs of children is well recognized, and most of them are precooked
roller dried mixtures of cereal and/or legume flours which posses a
high viscosity and bulk when reconstituted. The objective of this study
was to formulate composite weaning foods using cereals, malted
legumes and vegetable powders and analyze them for nutrients,
functional properties and sensory attributes. Selected legumes (green
gram and lentil) were germinated, dried and dehulled. Roasted wheat,
rice, carrot powder and skim milk powder also were used. All the
ingredients were mixed in different proportions to get four
formulations, made into 30% slurry and dried in roller drier. The
products were analyzed for proximate principles, mineral content,
functional and sensory qualities. The results of analysis showed
following range of constituents per 100g of formulations on dry
weight basis, protein, 18.1-18.9 g ; fat, 0.78-1.36 g ; iron, 5.09-6.53
mg; calcium, 265-310 mg. The lowest water absorption capacity was
in case of wheat green gram based and the highest was in rice lentil
based sample. Overall sensory qualities of all foods were graded as
“good" and “very good" with no significant differences. The results
confirm that formulated weaning foods were nutritionally superior,
functionally appropriate and organoleptically acceptable.
Abstract: This paper addresses a current problem that occurs among Thai internet service providers with regard to bandwidth network quality management. The IPSTAR department of Telecom Organization of Thailand public company (TOT); the largest internet service provider in Thailand, is the case study to analyze the problem that exists. The Internet bandwidth network quality management (iBWQM) framework is mainly applied to the problem that has been found. Bandwidth management policy (BMP) and quality of service (QoS) are two antecedents of iBWQM. This paper investigates internet user behavior, marketing demand and network operation views in order to determine bandwidth management policy (e.g. quota management, scheduling and malicious management). The congestion of bandwidth is also analyzed to enhance quality of service (QoS). Moreover, the iBWQM framework is able to improve the quality of service and increase bandwidth utilization, minimize complaint rate concerns to slow speed, and provide network planning guidelines through Thai Internet services providers.
Abstract: The present paper is oriented to problems of simulation of anticipatory systems, namely those that use simulation models for the aid of anticipation. A certain analogy between use of simulation and imagining will be applied to make the explication more comprehensible. The paper will be completed by notes of problems and by some existing applications. The problems consist in the fact that simulation of the mentioned anticipatory systems end is simulation of simulating systems, i.e. in computer models handling two or more modeled time axes that should be mapped to real time flow in a nondescent manner. Languages oriented to objects, processes and blocks can be used to surmount the problems.
Abstract: The main aims in this research are to study the solid
waste generation in the Faculty of Engineering and Built
Environment in the UKM and at the same time to determine
composition and some of the waste characteristics likewise: moisture
content, density, pH and C/N ratio. For this purpose multiple
campaigns were conducted to collect the wastes produced in all
hostels, faculties, offices and so on, during 24th of February till 2nd
of March 2009, measure and investigate them with regard to both
physical and chemical characteristics leading to highlight the
necessary management policies. Research locations are Faculty of
Engineering and the Canteen nearby that. From the result gained, the
most suitable solid waste management solution will be proposed to
UKM. The average solid waste generation rate in UKM is 203.38
kg/day. The composition of solid waste generated are glass, plastic,
metal, aluminum, organic and inorganic waste and others waste.
From the laboratory result, the average moisture content, density, pH
and C/N ratio values from the solid waste generated are 49.74%,
165.1 kg/m3, 5.3, and 7:1 respectively. Since, the food waste (organic
waste) were the most dominant component, around 62% from the
total waste generated hence, the most suitable solid waste
management solution is composting.