Abstract: The dramatic effect of information technology on
society is undeniable. In education, it is evident in the use of terms
like active learning, blended learning, electronic learning and mobile
learning (ubiquitous learning). This study explores the perceptions of
54 learners in a higher education institution regarding the use of
mobile devices in a third year module. Using semi-structured
interviews, it was found that mobile devices had a positive impact on
learner motivation, engagement and enjoyment. It also improved the
consistency of learning material, and the convenience and flexibility
(anywhere, anytime) of learning. User-interfacelimitation, bandwidth
and cognitive overload, however, were of concern. The use of cloud
based resources like Youtube and Google Docs, through mobile
devices, positively influenced learner perceptions, making them
prosumers (both consumers and producers) of education content.
Abstract: The most widely used semiconductor memory types
are the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Static
Random Access memory (SRAM). Competition among memory
manufacturers drives the need to decrease power consumption and
reduce the probability of read failure. A technology that is relatively
new and has not been explored is the FinFET technology. In this
paper, a single cell Schmitt Trigger Based Static RAM using FinFET
technology is proposed and analyzed. The accuracy of the result is
validated by means of HSPICE simulations with 32nm FinFET
technology and the results are then compared with 6T SRAM using
the same technology.
Abstract: Fully customized hardware based technology provides high performance and low power consumption by specializing the tasks in hardware but lacks design flexibility since any kind of changes require re-design and re-fabrication. Software based solutions operate with software instructions due to which a great flexibility is achieved from the easy development and maintenance of the software code. But this execution of instructions introduces a high overhead in performance and area consumption. In past few decades the reconfigurable computing domain has been introduced which overcomes the traditional trades-off between flexibility and performance and is able to achieve high performance while maintaining a good flexibility. The dramatic gains in terms of chip performance and design flexibility achieved through the reconfigurable computing systems are greatly dependent on the design of their computational units being integrated with reconfigurable logic resources. The computational unit of any reconfigurable system plays vital role in defining its strength. In this research paper an RFU based computational unit design has been presented using the tightly coupled, multi-threaded reconfigurable cores. The proposed design has been simulated for VLIW based architectures and a high gain in performance has been observed as compared to the conventional computing systems.
Abstract: The dramatic increasing of sea-freight container
transportations and the developing trends for using containers in the
multimodal handling systems through the sea, rail, road and land in
nowadays market cause general managers of container terminals to
face challenges such as increasing demand, competitive situation,
new investments and expansion of new activities and need to use new
methods to fulfil effective operations both along quayside and within
the yard. Among these issues, minimizing the turnaround time of
vessels is considered to be the first aim of every container port
system. Regarding the complex structure of container ports, this
paper presents a simulation model that calculates the number of
trucks needed in the Iranian Shahid Rajaee Container Port for
handling containers between the berth and the yard. In this research,
some important criteria such as vessel turnaround time, gantry crane
utilization and truck utilization have been considered. By analyzing
the results of the model, it has been shown that increasing the number
of trucks to 66 units has a significant effect on the performance
indices of the port and can increase the capacity of loading and
unloading up to 10.8%.
Abstract: In most of the cases, natural disasters lead to the
necessity of evacuating people. The quality of evacuation
management is dramatically improved by the use of information
provided by decision support systems, which become indispensable
in case of large scale evacuation operations. This paper presents a
best practice case study. In November 2007, officers from the
Emergency Situations Inspectorate “Crisana" of Bihor County from
Romania participated to a cross-border evacuation exercise, when
700 people have been evacuated from Netherlands to Belgium. One
of the main objectives of the exercise was the test of four different
decision support systems. Afterwards, based on that experience,
software system called TEVAC (Trans Border Evacuation) has been
developed “in house" by the experts of this institution. This original
software system was successfully tested in September 2008, during
the deployment of the international exercise EU-HUROMEX 2008,
the scenario involving real evacuation of 200 persons from Hungary
to Romania. Based on the lessons learned and results, starting from
April 2009, the TEVAC software is used by all Emergency
Situations Inspectorates all over Romania.
Abstract: This paper suggests a rethinking of the existing
research about Genetically Modified (GM) food. Since the first batch
of GM food was commercialised in the UK market, GM food rapidly
received and lost media attention in the UK. Disagreement on GM
food policy between the US and the EU has also drawn scholarly
attention to this issue. Much research has been carried out intending to
understand people-s views about GM food and the shaping of these
views. This paper was based on the data collected in twenty-nine
semi-structured interviews, which were examined through Erving
Goffman-s idea of self-presentation in interactions to suggest that the
existing studies investigating “consumer attitudes" towards GM food
have only considered the “front stage" in the dramaturgic metaphor.
This paper suggests that the ways in which people choose to present
themselves when participating these studies should be taken into
account during the data analysis.
Abstract: One of the main processes of supply chain
management is supplier selection process which its accurate
implementation can dramatically increase company competitiveness.
In presented article model developed based on the features of
second tiers suppliers and four scenarios are predicted in order to
help the decision maker (DM) in making up his/her mind. In addition
two tiers of suppliers have been considered as a chain of suppliers.
Then the proposed approach is solved by a method combined of
concepts of fuzzy set theory (FST) and linear programming (LP)
which has been nourished by real data extracted from an engineering
design and supplying parts company. At the end results reveal the
high importance of considering second tier suppliers features as
criteria for selecting the best supplier.
Abstract: Based on a theoretical erbium-doped fiber amplifier
(EDFA) model, we have proposed an application of disturbance
observer(DOB) with proportional/integral/differential(PID) controller
to EDFA for minimizing gain-transient time of wavelength
-division-multiplexing (WDM) multi channels in optical amplifier in
channel add/drop networks. We have dramatically reduced the
gain-transient time to less than 30μsec by applying DOB with PID
controller to the control of amplifier gain. The proposed DOB-based
gain control algorithm for EDFA was implemented as a digital control
system using TI's DSP(TMS320C28346) chip and experimental
results of the system verify the excellent performance of the proposed
gain control methodology.
Abstract: Ant colony based routing algorithms are known to
grantee the packet delivery, but they suffer from the huge overhead
of control messages which are needed to discover the route. In this
paper we utilize the network nodes positions to group the nodes
in connected clusters. We use clusters-heads only on forwarding
the route discovery control messages. Our simulations proved that
the new algorithm has decreased the overhead dramatically without
affecting the delivery rate.
Abstract: The objective of present work is to stimulate the
machining of material by electrical discharge machining (EDM) to
give effect of input parameters like discharge current (Ip), pulse on
time (Ton), pulse off time (Toff) which can bring about changes in the
output parameter, i.e. material removal rate. Experimental data was
gathered from die sinking EDM process using copper electrode and
Medium Carbon Steel (AISI 1040) as work-piece. The rules of
membership function (MF) and the degree of closeness to the
optimum value of the MMR are within the upper and lower range of
the process parameters. It was found that proposed fuzzy model is in
close agreement with the experimental results. By Intelligent, model
based design and control of EDM process parameters in this study
will help to enable dramatically decreased product and process
development cycle times.
Abstract: Hypernetworks are a generalized graph structure
representing higher-order interactions between variables. We present a
method for self-organizing hypernetworks to learn an associative
memory of sentences and to recall the sentences from this memory.
This learning method is inspired by the “mental chemistry" model of
cognition and the “molecular self-assembly" technology in
biochemistry. Simulation experiments are performed on a corpus of
natural-language dialogues of approximately 300K sentences
collected from TV drama captions. We report on the sentence
completion performance as a function of the order of word-interaction
and the size of the learning corpus, and discuss the plausibility of this
architecture as a cognitive model of language learning and memory.
Abstract: With the increasing number of on-chip components and the critical requirement for processing power, Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) has gained wide acceptance in both academia and industry during the last decade. However, the conventional bus-based onchip communication schemes suffer from very high communication delay and low scalability in large scale systems. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed to solve the bottleneck of parallel onchip communications by applying different network topologies which separate the communication phase from the computation phase. Observing that the memory bandwidth of the communication between on-chip components and off-chip memory has become a critical problem even in NoC based systems, in this paper, we propose a novel 3D NoC with on-chip Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) in which different layers are dedicated to different functionalities such as processors, cache or memory. Results show that, by using our proposed architecture, average link utilization has reduced by 10.25% for SPLASH-2 workloads. Our proposed design costs 1.12% less execution cycles than the traditional design on average.
Abstract: Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon whereby
the signal transmission or signal processing through certain nonlinear
systems can be improved by adding noise. This paper discusses SR in
nonlinear signal detection by a simple test statistic, which can be
computed from multiple noisy data in a binary decision problem based
on a maximum a posteriori probability criterion. The performance of
detection is assessed by the probability of detection error Per . When
the input signal is subthreshold signal, we establish that benefit from
noise can be gained for different noises and confirm further that the
subthreshold SR exists in nonlinear signal detection. The efficacy of
SR is significantly improved and the minimum of Per can
dramatically approach to zero as the sample number increases. These
results show the robustness of SR in signal detection and extend the
applicability of SR in signal processing.
Abstract: Content-based music retrieval generally involves analyzing, searching and retrieving music based on low or high level features of a song which normally used to represent artists, songs or music genre. Identifying them would normally involve feature extraction and classification tasks. Theoretically the greater features analyzed, the better the classification accuracy can be achieved but with longer execution time. Technique to select significant features is important as it will reduce dimensions of feature used in classification and contributes to the accuracy. Artificial Immune System (AIS) approach will be investigated and applied in the classification task. Bio-inspired audio content-based retrieval framework (B-ACRF) is proposed at the end of this paper where it embraces issues that need further consideration in music retrieval performances.
Abstract: Semantic Web Technologies enable machines to
interpret data published in a machine-interpretable form on the web.
At the present time, only human beings are able to understand the
product information published online. The emerging semantic Web
technologies have the potential to deeply influence the further
development of the Internet Economy. In this paper we propose a
scenario based research approach to predict the effects of these new
technologies on electronic markets and business models of traders
and intermediaries and customers. Over 300 million searches are
conducted everyday on the Internet by people trying to find what
they need. A majority of these searches are in the domain of
consumer ecommerce, where a web user is looking for something to
buy. This represents a huge cost in terms of people hours and an
enormous drain of resources. Agent enabled semantic search will
have a dramatic impact on the precision of these searches. It will
reduce and possibly eliminate information asymmetry where a better
informed buyer gets the best value. By impacting this key
determinant of market prices semantic web will foster the evolution
of different business and economic models. We submit that there is a
need for developing these futuristic models based on our current
understanding of e-commerce models and nascent semantic web
technologies. We believe these business models will encourage
mainstream web developers and businesses to join the “semantic web
revolution."
Abstract: According to FDA (Food and Drug Administration of the United States), vinegar is definedas a sour liquid containing at least 4 grams acetic acid in 100 cubic centimeter (4% solution of acetic acid) of solution that is produced from sugary materials by alcoholic fermentation. In the base of microbial starters, vinegars could be contained of more than 50 types of volatile and aromatic substances that responsible for their sweet taste and smelling. Recently the vinegar industry has a great proportion in agriculture, food and microbial biotechnology. The acetic acid bacteria are from the family Acetobacteraceae. Regarding to the latest version of Bergy-s Mannual of Systematic Bacteriology that has categorized bacteria in the base of their 16s RNA differences, the most important acetic acid genera are included Acetobacter (genus I), Gluconacetobacter (genus VIII) and Gluconobacter (genus IX). The genus Acetobacter that is primarily used in vinegar manufacturing plants is a gram negative, obligate aerobe coccus or rod shaped bacterium with the size 0.6 - 0.8 X 1.0 - 4.0 μm, nonmotile or motile with peritrichous flagella and catalase positive – oxidase negative biochemically. Some strains are overoxidizer that could convert acetic acid to carbon dioxide and water.In this research one Acetobacter native strain with high acetic acid productivity was isolated from Iranian white – red cherry. We used two specific culture media include Carr medium [yeast extract, 3%; ethanol, 2% (v/v); bromocresol green, 0.002%; agar, 2% and distilled water, 1000 ml], Frateur medium [yeast extract, 10 g/l; CaCO3, 20 g/l; ethanol, 20 g/l; agar, 20 g/l and distilled water, 1000 ml] and an industrial culture medium. In addition to high acetic acid production and high growth rate, this strain had a good tolerance against ethanol concentration that was examined using modified Carr media with 5%, 7% and 9% ethanol concentrations. While the industrial strains of acetic acid bacteria grow in the thermal range of 28 – 30 °C, this strain was adapted for growth in 34 – 36 °C after 96 hours incubation period. These dramatic characteristics suggest a potential biotechnological strain in production of cherry vinegar with a sweet smell and different nutritional properties in comparison to recent vinegar types. The lack of growth after 24, 48 and 72 hours incubation at 34 – 36 °C and the growth after 96 hours indicates a good and fast thermal flexibility of this strain as a significant characteristic of biotechnological and industrial strains.
Abstract: Timing driven physical design, synthesis, and
optimization tools need efficient closed-form delay models for
estimating the delay associated with each net in an integrated circuit
(IC) design. The total number of nets in a modern IC design has
increased dramatically and exceeded millions. Therefore efficient
modeling of interconnection is needed for high speed IC-s. This
paper presents closed–form expressions for RC and RLC
interconnection trees in current mode signaling, which can be
implemented in VLSI design tool. These analytical model
expressions can be used for accurate calculation of delay after the
design clock tree has been laid out and the design is fully routed.
Evaluation of these analytical models is several orders of magnitude
faster than simulation using SPICE.
Abstract: We report a lithography-free approach to fabricate the
biomimetics, quasi-beehive Si nanostructures (QBSNs), on
Si-substrates. The self-assembled SiGe nanoislands via the strain
induced surface roughening (Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld instability) during
in-situ annealing play a key role as patterned sacrifice regions for
subsequent reactive ion etching (RIE) process performed for
fabricating quasi-beehive nanostructures on Si-substrates. As the
measurements of field emission, the bare QBSNs show poor field
emission performance, resulted from the existence of the native oxide
layer which forms an insurmountable barrier for electron emission. In
order to dramatically improve the field emission characteristics, the
platinum nanopillars (Pt-NPs) were deposited on QBSNs to form
Pt-NPs/QBSNs heterostructures. The turn-on field of Pt-NPs/QBSNs
is as low as 2.29 V/μm (corresponding current density of 1 μA/cm2),
and the field enhancement factor (β-value) is significantly increased to
6067. More importantly, the uniform and continuous electrons excite
light emission, due to the surrounding filed emitters from
Pt-NPs/QBSNs, can be easily obtained. This approach does not require
an expensive photolithographic process and possesses great potential
for applications.
Abstract: The changes in quality properties and nutritional
components in two fermented mugworts (Artemisia capillaries
Thumberg, Artemisiaeasiaticae Nakai) were characterized followed
by the rapid pattern analysis of volatile flavor compounds by Electric
Nose based on SAW(Surface Acoustic Wave) sensor in GC system.
There were remarkable decreases in the pH and small changes in the
total soluble solids after fermentation. The L (lightness) and b
(yellowness) values in Hunter's color system were shown to be
decreased, whilst the a (redness) value was increased by fermentation.
The HPLC analysis demonstrated that total amino acids were
increased in quantity and the essential amino acids were contained
higher in A. asiaticaeNakai than in A. capillaries Thumberg. While
the total polyphenol contents were not affected by fermentation, the
total sugar contents were dramatically decreased. Scopoletinwere
highly abundant in A. capillarisThumberg, however, it was not
detected in A. asiaticaeNakai. Volatile flavor compounds by Electric
Nose showed that the intensity of several peaks were increased much
and seven additional flavor peaks were newly produced after
fermentation. The flavor differences of two mugworts were clearly
distinguished from the image patterns of VaporPrintTM which indicate
that the fermentation enables the two mugworts to have subtle flavor
differences.
Abstract: In the recent years multimedia traffic and in particular
VoIP services are growing dramatically. We present a new algorithm
to control the resource utilization and to optimize the voice codec
selection during SIP call setup on behalf of the traffic condition
estimated on the network path.
The most suitable methodologies and the tools that perform realtime
evaluation of the available bandwidth on a network path have
been integrated with our proposed algorithm: this selects the best
codec for a VoIP call in function of the instantaneous available
bandwidth on the path. The algorithm does not require any explicit
feedback from the network, and this makes it easily deployable over
the Internet. We have also performed intensive tests on real network
scenarios with a software prototype, verifying the algorithm
efficiency with different network topologies and traffic patterns
between two SIP PBXs.
The promising results obtained during the experimental validation
of the algorithm are now the basis for the extension towards a larger
set of multimedia services and the integration of our methodology
with existing PBX appliances.