Abstract: We propose that Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) should be designed by taking into account the characteristics, the special needs and the specific operating rules of the academic institutions in which they are employed. In this context, we describe a VLE module that extends the support of the organization and delivery of course material by including administration activities related to the various stages of teaching. These include the co-ordination, collaboration and monitoring of the course material development process and institution-specific course material delivery modes. Our specialized module, which enhances VLE capabilities by Helping Educators and Learners through a Laboratory Assistance System, is willing to assist the Greek tertiary technological sector, which includes Technological Educational Institutes (T.E.I.).
Abstract: The evaluation of residual reliability of large sized
parallel computer interconnection systems is not practicable with
the existing methods. Under such conditions, one must go for
approximation techniques which provide the upper bound and lower
bound on this reliability. In this context, a new approximation method
for providing bounds on residual reliability is proposed here. The
proposed method is well supported by two algorithms for simulation
purpose. The bounds on residual reliability of three different categories
of interconnection topologies are efficiently found by using
the proposed method
Abstract: This paper unifies power optimization approaches in
various energy converters, such as: thermal, solar, chemical, and
electrochemical engines, in particular fuel cells. Thermodynamics
leads to converter-s efficiency and limiting power. Efficiency
equations serve to solve problems of upgrading and downgrading of
resources. While optimization of steady systems applies the
differential calculus and Lagrange multipliers, dynamic optimization
involves variational calculus and dynamic programming. In reacting
systems chemical affinity constitutes a prevailing component of an
overall efficiency, thus the power is analyzed in terms of an active
part of chemical affinity. The main novelty of the present paper in the
energy yield context consists in showing that the generalized heat
flux Q (involving the traditional heat flux q plus the product of
temperature and the sum products of partial entropies and fluxes of
species) plays in complex cases (solar, chemical and electrochemical)
the same role as the traditional heat q in pure heat engines.
The presented methodology is also applied to power limits in fuel
cells as to systems which are electrochemical flow engines propelled
by chemical reactions. The performance of fuel cells is determined by
magnitudes and directions of participating streams and mechanism of
electric current generation. Voltage lowering below the reversible
voltage is a proper measure of cells imperfection. The voltage losses,
called polarization, include the contributions of three main sources:
activation, ohmic and concentration. Examples show power maxima
in fuel cells and prove the relevance of the extension of the thermal
machine theory to chemical and electrochemical systems. The main
novelty of the present paper in the FC context consists in introducing
an effective or reduced Gibbs free energy change between products p
and reactants s which take into account the decrease of voltage and
power caused by the incomplete conversion of the overall reaction.
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: PT XYZ is a bottled drinking water company. To preserve production resources owned by the company so that the resources could be utilized well, it has implemented maintenance management system, which has important role in company's profitability, and is one of the factors influenced overall company's performance. Yet, up to now the company has never measured maintenance activities' contribution to company's performance. Performance evaluation is done according to adapted Balanced Scorecard model fitted to maintenance function context. This model includes six perspectives: innovation and growth, production, maintenance, environment, costumer, and finance. Actual performance measurement is done through Analytic Hierarchy Process and Objective Matrix. From the research done, we can conclude that the company's maintenance function is categorized in moderate performance. But, there are some indicators which has high priority but low performance, which are: costumers' complain rate, work lateness rate, and Return on Investment.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to identify the practical strategies of R&D (research and development) entities for developing converging technology in organizational context. Based on the multi-assignation technological domains of patents derived from entire government-supported R&D projects for 13 years, we find that technology convergence is likely to occur when a university solely develops technology or when university develops technology as one of the collaborators. These results reflect the important role of universities in developing converging technology
Abstract: This work presents a new phonetic transcription system based on a tree of hierarchical pronunciation rules expressed as context-specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The tree is automatically inferred from a phonetic dictionary by incrementally analyzing deeper context levels, eventually representing a minimum set of exhaustive rules that pronounce without errors all the words in the training dictionary and that can be applied to out-of-vocabulary words. The proposed approach improves upon existing rule-tree-based techniques in that it makes use of graphemes, rather than letters, as elementary orthographic units. A new linear algorithm for the segmentation of a word in graphemes is introduced to enable outof- vocabulary grapheme-based phonetic transcription. Exhaustive rule trees provide a canonical representation of the pronunciation rules of a language that can be used not only to pronounce out-of-vocabulary words, but also to analyze and compare the pronunciation rules inferred from different dictionaries. The proposed approach has been implemented in C and tested on Oxford British English and Basic English. Experimental results show that grapheme-based rule trees represent phonetically sound rules and provide better performance than letter-based rule trees.
Abstract: The element of justice or al-‘adl in the context of
Islamic critical thinking deals with the notion of justice in a thinking
process which critically rationalizes the truth in a fair and objective
manner with no irrelevant interference that can jeopardize a sound
judgment. This Islamic axiological element is vital in technological
decision making as it addresses the issues of religious values and
ethics that are primarily set to fulfill the purpose of human life on
earth. The main objective of this study was to examine and analyze
the perception of Muslim engineering students in Malaysian higher
education institutions towards the concept of al-‘adl as an essential
element of Islamic critical thinking. The study employed mixed
methods approach that comprises data collection from the
questionnaire survey and the interview responses. A total of 557
Muslim engineering undergraduates from six Malaysian universities
participated in the study. The study generally indicated that Muslim
engineering undergraduates in the higher institutions have rather
good comprehension and consciousness for al-‘adl with a slight
awareness on the importance of objective thinking. Nonetheless there
were a few items on the concept that have implied a comparatively
low perception on the rational justice in Islam as the means to grasp
the ultimate truth.
Abstract: Wind farms (WFs) with high level of penetration are
being established in power systems worldwide more rapidly than
other renewable resources. The Independent System Operator (ISO),
as a policy maker, should propose appropriate places for WF
installation in order to maximize the benefits for the investors. There
is also a possibility of congestion relief using the new installation of
WFs which should be taken into account by the ISO when proposing
the locations for WF installation. In this context, efficient wind farm
(WF) placement method is proposed in order to reduce burdens on
congested lines. Since the wind speed is a random variable and load
forecasts also contain uncertainties, probabilistic approaches are used
for this type of study. AC probabilistic optimal power flow (P-OPF)
is formulated and solved using Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS). In
order to reduce computation time, point estimate methods (PEM) are
introduced as efficient alternative for time-demanding MCS.
Subsequently, WF optimal placement is determined using generation
shift distribution factors (GSDF) considering a new parameter
entitled, wind availability factor (WAF). In order to obtain more
realistic results, N-1 contingency analysis is employed to find the
optimal size of WF, by means of line outage distribution factors
(LODF). The IEEE 30-bus test system is used to show and compare
the accuracy of proposed methodology.
Abstract: The article is about government programs and projects
and their description which are aimed at improving the socioeconomic
situation in the Republic of Kazakhstan. A brief historical
overview, as well as information about current socio-economic,
political and transitional contexts of the country are provided. Two
theories were described in the article to inform this descriptive study.
According to the United Nation's Development Reports for 2005 and
2011, the country's human development index (HDI) rose by several
points despite the socio-economic and political imbalances taking
place in the republic since it gained its independence in 1991. It is
stated in the article that government support programs are one of the
crucial factors that increase the population welfare which in its turn
may lead to reduction of social crisis processes in the country.
Abstract: Lurking behavior is common in information-seeking oriented communities. Transferring users with lurking behavior to be contributors can assist virtual communities to obtain competitive advantages. Based on the ecological cognition framework, this study proposes a model to examine the antecedents of lurking behavior in information-seeking oriented virtual communities. This study argues desire for emotional support, desire for information support, desire for performance-approach, desire for performance -avoidance, desire for mastery-approach, desire for mastery-avoidance, desire for ability trust, desire for benevolence trust, and desire for integrity trust effect on lurking behavior. This study offers an approach to understanding the determinants of lurking behavior in online contexts.
Abstract: Context awareness is a capability whereby mobile
computing devices can sense their physical environment and adapt
their behavior accordingly. The term context-awareness, in
ubiquitous computing, was introduced by Schilit in 1994 and has
become one of the most exciting concepts in early 21st-century
computing, fueled by recent developments in pervasive computing
(i.e. mobile and ubiquitous computing). These include computing
devices worn by users, embedded devices, smart appliances, sensors
surrounding users and a variety of wireless networking technologies.
Context-aware applications use context information to adapt
interfaces, tailor the set of application-relevant data, increase the
precision of information retrieval, discover services, make the user
interaction implicit, or build smart environments. For example: A
context aware mobile phone will know that the user is currently in a
meeting room, and reject any unimportant calls. One of the major
challenges in providing users with context-aware services lies in
continuously monitoring their contexts based on numerous sensors
connected to the context aware system through wireless
communication. A number of context aware frameworks based on
sensors have been proposed, but many of them have neglected the
fact that monitoring with sensors imposes heavy workloads on
ubiquitous devices with limited computing power and battery. In this
paper, we present CALEEF, a lightweight and energy efficient
context aware framework for resource limited ubiquitous devices.
Abstract: Sustainability in rural production system can only be achieved if it can suitably satisfy the local requirement as well as the outside demand with the changing time. With the increased pressure from the food sector in a globalised world, the agrarian economy
needs to re-organise its cultivable land system to be compatible with new management practices as well as the multiple needs of various stakeholders and the changing resource scenario. An attempt has been made to transform this problem into a multi-objective decisionmaking problem considering various objectives, resource constraints and conditional constraints. An interactive fuzzy multi-objective
programming approach has been used for such a purpose taking a
case study in Indian context to demonstrate the validity of the method.
Abstract: In this article, we expose our research work in
Human-machine Interaction. The research consists in manipulating
the workspace by eyes. We present some of our results, in particular
the detection of eyes and the mouse actions recognition. Indeed, the
handicaped user becomes able to interact with the machine in a more
intuitive way in diverse applications and contexts. To test our
application we have chooses to work in real time on videos captured
by a camera placed in front of the user.
Abstract: This paper shows the results of empirical research. It
presents experiences of Polish companies from the Podkarpackie
voivodeship connected with implementing EMS according to the
requirements of the ISO 14001 international standard. The incentives
to introduce and certify organizational eco-innovation, which formal
EMSs are treated as, are presented in this paper.
Abstract: To realize the vision of ubiquitous computing, it is
important to develop a context-aware infrastructure which can help
ubiquitous agents, services, and devices become aware of their
contexts because such computational entities need to adapt themselves
to changing situations. A context-aware infrastructure manages the
context model representing contextual information and provides
appropriate information. In this paper, we introduce Context-Aware
Middleware for URC System (hereafter CAMUS) as a context-aware
infrastructure for a network-based intelligent robot system and discuss
the ontology-based context modeling and reasoning approach which is
used in that infrastructure.
Abstract: A novel concept to balance and tradeoff between
make-to-stock and make-to-order has been hybrid MTS/MTO production context. One of the most important decisions involved in
the hybrid MTS/MTO environment is determining whether a product
is manufactured to stock, to order, or hybrid MTS/MTO strategy. In this paper, a model based on analytic network process is developed to tackle the addressed decision. Since the regarded decision deals with
the uncertainty and ambiguity of data as well as experts- and
managers- linguistic judgments, the proposed model is equipped with
fuzzy sets theory. An important attribute of the model is its generality due to diverse decision factors which are elicited from the
literature and developed by the authors. Finally, the model is validated by applying to a real case study to reveal how the proposed
model can actually be implemented.
Abstract: Location-based services (LBS) exploit the known
location of a user to provide services dependent on their geographic
context and personalized needs [1].
The development and arrival of broadband mobile data networks
supported with mobile terminals equipped with new location
technologies like GPS have finally created opportunities for
implementation of LBS applications. But, from the other side,
collecting location information data in general raises privacy
concerns.
This paper presents results from two surveys of LBS acceptance in
Croatia. The first survey was administered on 181 students, and the
second extended survey involved pattern of 180 Croatian citizens.
We developed questionnaire which consists of descriptions of 15
different applications with scale which measures perceptions and
attitudes of users towards these applications.
We report the results to identify potential commercial applications
for LBS in B2C segment. Our findings suggest that some types of
applications like emergency&safety services and navigation have
significantly higher rate of acceptance than other types.
Abstract: Food mileage is one of the important issues concerning environmental sustainability. In this research we have utilized a prototype platform with iterative user-centered testing. With these findings we successfully demonstrate the use of the context of persuasive methods to influence users- attitudes towards the sustainable concept.
Abstract: CIM is the standard formalism for modeling management
information developed by the Distributed Management Task
Force (DMTF) in the context of its WBEM proposal, designed to
provide a conceptual view of the managed environment. In this
paper, we propose the inclusion of formal knowledge representation
techniques, based on Description Logics (DLs) and the Web Ontology
Language (OWL), in CIM-based conceptual modeling, and then we
examine the benefits of such a decision. The proposal is specified
as a CIM metamodel level mapping to a highly expressive subset
of DLs capable of capturing all the semantics of the models. The
paper shows how the proposed mapping provides CIM diagrams with
precise semantics and can be used for automatic reasoning about the
management information models, as a design aid, by means of newgeneration
CASE tools, thanks to the use of state-of-the-art automatic
reasoning systems that support the proposed logic and use algorithms
that are sound and complete with respect to the semantics. Such a
CASE tool framework has been developed by the authors and its
architecture is also introduced. The proposed formalization is not
only useful at design time, but also at run time through the use of
rational autonomous agents, in response to a need recently recognized
by the DMTF.