Abstract: The production of activated carbon from low or zero cost of agricultural by-products or wastes has received great attention from academics and practitioners due to its economic and environmental benefits. In the production of bamboo furniture, a significant amount of bamboo waste is inevitably generated. Therefore, this research aimed to prepare activated carbons from bamboo furniture waste by chemical (KOH) activation and determine their properties and adsorption capacities for water treatment. The influence of carbonization time on the properties and adsorption capacities of activated carbons was also investigated. The finding showed that the bamboo-derived activated carbons had microporous characteristics. They exhibited high tendency for the reduction of impurities present in effluent water. Their adsorption capacities were comparable to the adsorption capacity of a commercial activated carbon regarding to the reduction in COD, TDS and turbidity of the effluent water.
Abstract: The problem of Small Area Estimation (SAE) is complex because of various information sources and insufficient data. In this paper, an approach for SAE is presented for decision-making at national, regional and local level. We propose an Empirical Best Linear Unbiased Predictor (EBLUP) as an estimator in order to combine several information sources to evaluate various indicators. First, we present the urban audit project and its environmental, social and economic indicators. Secondly, we propose an approach for decision making in order to estimate indicators. An application is used to validate the theoretical proposal. Finally, a decision support system is presented based on open-source environment.
Abstract: Purpose of this work is to develop an automatic classification system that could be useful for radiologists in the breast cancer investigation. The software has been designed in the framework of the MAGIC-5 collaboration. In an automatic classification system the suspicious regions with high probability to include a lesion are extracted from the image as regions of interest (ROIs). Each ROI is characterized by some features based generally on morphological lesion differences. A study in the space features representation is made and some classifiers are tested to distinguish the pathological regions from the healthy ones. The results provided in terms of sensitivity and specificity will be presented through the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves. In particular the best performances are obtained with the Neural Networks in comparison with the K-Nearest Neighbours and the Support Vector Machine: The Radial Basis Function supply the best results with 0.89 ± 0.01 of area under ROC curve but similar results are obtained with the Probabilistic Neural Network and a Multi Layer Perceptron.
Abstract: TiO2 supported nano-ZnO catalyst was prepared by
deposition-precipitation and tested for the trans-esterification
reaction of soybean oil to biodiesel. The TiO2 support stabilized the
nano-ZnO in a dispersed form with limited crystallite size compared
to the unsupported ZnO. The final ZnO dispersion and crystallite size
and the material transfer resistance in the catalyst significantly
influenced the supported nano-ZnO catalyst performance.
Abstract: Traffic density, an indicator of traffic
conditions, is one of the most critical characteristics to
Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). This paper investigates
recursive traffic density estimation using the information
provided from inductive loop detectors. On the basis of the
phenomenological relationship between speed and density, the
existing studies incorporate a state space model and update the
density estimate using vehicular speed observations via the
extended Kalman filter, where an approximation is made
because of the linearization of the nonlinear observation
equation. In practice, this may lead to substantial estimation
errors. This paper incorporates a suitable transformation to
deal with the nonlinear observation equation so that the
approximation is avoided when using Kalman filter to
estimate the traffic density. A numerical study is conducted. It
is shown that the developed method outperforms the existing
methods for traffic density estimation.
Abstract: An electronic portal image device (EPID) has become
a method of patient-specific IMRT dose verification for radiotherapy.
Research studies have focused on pre and post-treatment verification,
however, there are currently no interventional procedures using EPID
dosimetry that measure the dose in real time as a mechanism to
ensure that overdoses do not occur and underdoses are detected as
soon as is practically possible. As a result, an EPID-based real time
dose verification system for dynamic IMRT was developed and was
implemented with MATLAB/Simulink. The EPID image acquisition
was set to continuous acquisition mode at 1.4 images per second. The
system defined the time constraint gap, or execution gap at the image
acquisition time, so that every calculation must be completed before
the next image capture is completed. In addition, the
Abstract: Text categorization techniques are widely used to many Information Retrieval (IR) applications. In this paper, we proposed a simple but efficient method that can automatically find the relationship between any pair of terms and documents, also an indexing matrix is established for text categorization. We call this method Indexing Matrix Categorization Machine (IMCM). Several experiments are conducted to show the efficiency and robust of our algorithm.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to compare the time
specification performance between conventional controller PID and
modern controller SMC for an inverted pendulum system. The goal is
to determine which control strategy delivers better performance with
respect to pendulum-s angle and cart-s position. The inverted
pendulum represents a challenging control problem, which
continually moves toward an uncontrolled state. Two controllers are
presented such as Sliding Mode Control (SMC) and Proportional-
Integral-Derivatives (PID) controllers for controlling the highly
nonlinear system of inverted pendulum model. Simulation study has
been done in Matlab Mfile and simulink environment shows that both
controllers are capable to control multi output inverted pendulum
system successfully. The result shows that Sliding Mode Control
(SMC) produced better response compared to PID control strategies
and the responses are presented in time domain with the details
analysis.
Abstract: Tourism is a phenomenon respected by the human communities since a long time ago. It has been evoloving continually based on a variety of social and economic needs and with respect to increasingly development of communication and considerable increase of tourist-s number and resulted exchange income has attained much out come such as employment for the communities. or the purpose of tourism development in this zone suitable times and locations need to be specified in the zone for the tourist-s attendance. One of the most important needs of the tourists is the knowledge of climate conditions and suitable times for sightseeing. In this survey, the climate trend condition has been identified for attending the tourists in Isfahan province using the modified tourism climate index (TCI) as well as SPSS, GIS, excel, surfer softwares. This index evoluates systematically the climate conditions for tourism affairs and activities using the monthly maximum mean parameters of daily temperature, daily mean temperature, minimum relative humidity, daily mean relative humidity, precipitation (mm), total sunny hours, wind speed and dust. The results obtaind using kendal-s correlation test show that the months January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December are significant and have an increasing trend that indicates the best condition for attending the tourists. S, P, T mean , T max and dust are estimated from 1976-2005 and do kendal-s correlation test again to see which parameter has been effective. Based on the test, we also observed on the effective parameters that the rate of dust in February, March, April, May, June, July, August, October and November is decreasing and precipitation in September and January is increasing and also the radiation rate in May and August is increasing that indicate a better condition of convenience. Maximum temperature in June is also decreasing. Isfahan province has two spring and fall peaks and the best places for tourism are in the north and western areas.
Abstract: This paper presented a proposed design for
transcutaneous inductive powering links. The design used to transfer
power and data to the implanted devices such as implanted
Microsystems to stimulate and monitoring the nerves and muscles.
The system operated with low band frequency 13.56 MHZ according
to industrial- scientific – medical (ISM) band to avoid the tissue
heating. For external part, the modulation index is 13 % and the
modulation rate 7.3% with data rate 1 Mbit/s assuming Tbit=1us. The
system has been designed using 0.35-μm fabricated CMOS
technology. The mathematical model is given and the design is
simulated using OrCAD P Spice 16.2 software tool and for real-time
simulation the electronic workbench MULISIM 11 has been used.
The novel circular plane (pancake) coils was simulated using
ANSOFT- HFss software.
Abstract: Electro-optical devices are increasingly used for
military sea-, land- and air applications to detect, recognize and track
objects. Typically, these devices produce video information that is
presented to an operator. However, with increasing availability of
electro-optical devices the data volume is becoming very large,
creating a rising need for automated analysis. In a military setting,
this typically involves detecting and recognizing objects at a large
distance, i.e. when they are difficult to distinguish from background
and noise. One may consider combining multiple images from a
video stream into a single enhanced image that provides more
information for the operator. In this paper we investigate a simple
algorithm to enhance simulated images from a military context and
investigate how the enhancement is affected by various types of
disturbance.
Abstract: This paper presents a review on published literature
and experimental works on local sands for possible use as proppant,
specifically those from Terengganu coastal area. This includes
examination on characteristics of sand samples and selection of
experiments for proppant testing. Sand samples from identified areas
were tested according to particle size distribution, density, roundness
and sphericity, turbidity and mineralogy. Results from sand samples
were compared against proppant specifications set by API RP 56 and
selected commercial proppants. The present study found that the size
distribution, sphericity, turbidity and bulk density of Terengganu
sands are at par with some of commercial proppants. Nevertheless,
Terengganu sand samples do not completely surpass the required
roundness for use as proppant.
Abstract: The curves, of which the square of the distance
between the two points equal to zero, are called minimal or isotropic
curves [4]. In this work, first, necessary and sufficient conditions to
be a Pseudo Helix, which is a special case of such curves, are
presented. Thereafter, it is proven that an isotropic curve-s position
vector and pseudo curvature satisfy a vector differential equation of
fourth order. Additionally, In view of solution of mentioned
equation, position vector of pseudo helices is obtained.
Abstract: One of the disadvantages of using OFDM is the larger
peak to averaged power ratio (PAPR) in its time domain signal. The
larger PAPR signal would course the fatal degradation of bit error
rate performance (BER) due to the inter-modulation noise in the nonlinear
channel. This paper proposes an improved DSI (Dummy
Sequence Insertion) method, which can achieve the better PAPR and
BER performances. The feature of proposed method is to optimize
the phase of each dummy sub-carrier so as to reduce the PAPR
performance by changing all predetermined phase coefficients in the
time domain signal, which is calculated for data sub-carriers and
dummy sub-carriers separately. To achieve the better PAPR
performance, this paper also proposes to employ the time-frequency
domain swapping algorithm for fine adjustment of phase coefficient
of the dummy subcarriers, which can achieve the less complexity of
processing and achieves the better PAPR and BER performances
than those for the conventional DSI method. This paper presents
various computer simulation results to verify the effectiveness of
proposed method as comparing with the conventional methods in the
non-linear channel.
Abstract: Transferring information developed by other peoples is an ordinary event that happens during daily conversations, for example when employees sea each other in the organization, or when they are having lunch together, or attending a meeting, they use to talk about their experience, and discuss about their current projects, and talk about their successes over some specific problems. Despite the potential value of leveraging organizational memory and expertise by using OMS and ER, still small organizations haven-t been able to capitalize on its promised value. Each organization has its internal knowledge management system, in some of organizations the system face the lack of expert people to save their experience in the repository and in another hand on some other organizations there are lots of expert people but the organization doesn-t have the maximum use of their knowledge.
Abstract: Mobile Ad hoc Networks is an autonomous system of
mobile nodes connected by multi-hop wireless links without
centralized infrastructure support. As mobile communication gains
popularity, the need for suitable ad hoc routing protocols will
continue to grow. Efficient dynamic routing is an important research
challenge in such a network. Bandwidth constrained mobile devices
use on-demand approach in their routing protocols because of its
effectiveness and efficiency. Many researchers have conducted
numerous simulations for comparing the performance of these
protocols under varying conditions and constraints. Most of them are
not aware of MAC Protocols, which will impact the relative
performance of routing protocols considered in different network
scenarios. In this paper we investigate the choice of MAC protocols
affects the relative performance of ad hoc routing protocols under
different scenarios. We have evaluated the performance of these
protocols using NS2 simulations. Our results show that the
performance of routing protocols of ad hoc networks will suffer when
run over different MAC Layer protocols.
Abstract: Recently, there have been an increasing interest in RFID system and RFID systems have been applied to various applications. Load balancing is a fundamental technique for providing scalability of systems by moving workload from overloaded nodes to under-loaded nodes. This paper presents an approach to adaptive load balancing for RFID middlewares. Workloads of RFID middlewares can have a considerable variation according to the location of the connected RFID readers and can abruptly change at a particular instance. The proposed approach considers those characteristics of RFID middle- wares to provide an efficient load balancing.
Abstract: This article presents the results using a parametric approach and a Wavelet Transform in analysing signals emitting from the sperm whale. The extraction of intrinsic characteristics of these unique signals emitted by marine mammals is still at present a difficult exercise for various reasons: firstly, it concerns non-stationary signals, and secondly, these signals are obstructed by interfering background noise. In this article, we compare the advantages and disadvantages of both methods: Auto Regressive models and Wavelet Transform. These approaches serve as an alternative to the commonly used estimators which are based on the Fourier Transform for which the hypotheses necessary for its application are in certain cases, not sufficiently proven. These modern approaches provide effective results particularly for the periodic tracking of the signal's characteristics and notably when the signal-to-noise ratio negatively effects signal tracking. Our objectives are twofold. Our first goal is to identify the animal through its acoustic signature. This includes recognition of the marine mammal species and ultimately of the individual animal (within the species). The second is much more ambitious and directly involves the intervention of cetologists to study the sounds emitted by marine mammals in an effort to characterize their behaviour. We are working on an approach based on the recordings of marine mammal signals and the findings from this data result from the Wavelet Transform. This article will explore the reasons for using this approach. In addition, thanks to the use of new processors, these algorithms once heavy in calculation time can be integrated in a real-time system.
Abstract: Lung cancer accounts for the most cancer related deaths for men as well as for women. The identification of cancer associated genes and the related pathways are essential to provide an important possibility in the prevention of many types of cancer. In this work two filter approaches, namely the information gain and the biomarker identifier (BMI) are used for the identification of different types of small-cell and non-small-cell lung cancer. A new method to determine the BMI thresholds is proposed to prioritize genes (i.e., primary, secondary and tertiary) using a k-means clustering approach. Sets of key genes were identified that can be found in several pathways. It turned out that the modified BMI is well suited for microarray data and therefore BMI is proposed as a powerful tool for the search for new and so far undiscovered genes related to cancer.
Abstract: One of object oriented software developing problem
is the difficulty of searching the appropriate and suitable objects for
starting the system. In this work, ontologies appear in the part of
supporting the object discovering in the initial of object oriented
software developing. There are many researches try to demonstrate
that there is a great potential between object model and ontologies.
Constructing ontology from object model is called ontology
engineering can be done; On the other hand, this research is aiming to
support the idea of building object model from ontology is also
promising and practical. Ontology classes are available online in any
specific areas, which can be searched by semantic search engine.
There are also many helping tools to do so; one of them which are
used in this research is Protégé ontology editor and Visual Paradigm.
To put them together give a great outcome. This research will be
shown how it works efficiently with the real case study by using
ontology classes in travel/tourism domain area. It needs to combine
classes, properties, and relationships from more than two ontologies
in order to generate the object model. In this paper presents a simple
methodology framework which explains the process of discovering
objects. The results show that this framework has great value while
there is possible for expansion. Reusing of existing ontologies offers
a much cheaper alternative than building new ones from scratch.
More ontologies are becoming available on the web, and online
ontologies libraries for storing and indexing ontologies are increasing
in number and demand. Semantic and Ontologies search engines have
also started to appear, to facilitate search and retrieval of online
ontologies.