Retina Based Mouse Control (RBMC)

The paper presents a novel idea to control computer mouse cursor movement with human eyes. In this paper, a working of the product has been described as to how it helps the special people share their knowledge with the world. Number of traditional techniques such as Head and Eye Movement Tracking Systems etc. exist for cursor control by making use of image processing in which light is the primary source. Electro-oculography (EOG) is a new technology to sense eye signals with which the mouse cursor can be controlled. The signals captured using sensors, are first amplified, then noise is removed and then digitized, before being transferred to PC for software interfacing.

Soft-Sensor for Estimation of Gasoline Octane Number in Platforming Processes with Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS)

Gasoline Octane Number is the standard measure of the anti-knock properties of a motor in platforming processes, that is one of the important unit operations for oil refineries and can be determined with online measurement or use CFR (Cooperative Fuel Research) engines. Online measurements of the Octane number can be done using direct octane number analyzers, that it is too expensive, so we have to find feasible analyzer, like ANFIS estimators. ANFIS is the systems that neural network incorporated in fuzzy systems, using data automatically by learning algorithms of NNs. ANFIS constructs an input-output mapping based both on human knowledge and on generated input-output data pairs. In this research, 31 industrial data sets are used (21 data for training and the rest of the data used for generalization). Results show that, according to this simulation, hybrid method training algorithm in ANFIS has good agreements between industrial data and simulated results.

Modeling Reaction Time in Car-Following Behaviour Based on Human Factors

This paper develops driver reaction-time models for car-following analysis based on human factors. The reaction time was classified as brake-reaction time (BRT) and acceleration/deceleration reaction time (ADRT). The BRT occurs when the lead vehicle is barking and its brake light is on, while the ADRT occurs when the driver reacts to adjust his/her speed using the gas pedal only. The study evaluates the effect of driver characteristics and traffic kinematic conditions on the driver reaction time in a car-following environment. The kinematic conditions introduced urgency and expectancy based on the braking behaviour of the lead vehicle at different speeds and spacing. The kinematic conditions were used for evaluating the BRT and are classified as normal, surprised, and stationary. Data were collected on a driving simulator integrated into a real car and included the BRT and ADRT (as dependent variables) and driver-s age, gender, driving experience, driving intensity (driving hours per week), vehicle speed, and spacing (as independent variables). The results showed that there was a significant difference in the BRT at normal, surprised, and stationary scenarios and supported the hypothesis that both urgency and expectancy had significant effects on BRT. Driver-s age, gender, speed, and spacing were found to be significant variables for the BRT in all scenarios. The results also showed that driver-s age and gender were significant variables for the ADRT. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger project to develop a driversensitive in-vehicle rear-end collision warning system.

Evaluation of Haar Cascade Classifiers Designed for Face Detection

In the past years a lot of effort has been made in the field of face detection. The human face contains important features that can be used by vision-based automated systems in order to identify and recognize individuals. Face location, the primary step of the vision-based automated systems, finds the face area in the input image. An accurate location of the face is still a challenging task. Viola-Jones framework has been widely used by researchers in order to detect the location of faces and objects in a given image. Face detection classifiers are shared by public communities, such as OpenCV. An evaluation of these classifiers will help researchers to choose the best classifier for their particular need. This work focuses of the evaluation of face detection classifiers minding facial landmarks.

The International Labor Standard on the Elimination of Discrimination in Employment: Response and Prospect of Malaysia

Discrimination in employment has its wider social and economic consequences other than mere violating a basic human right. Discrimination involves treating people differently because of certain grounds such as race, color, or sex, which results in the impairment of equality of opportunity and treatment. As an essential part of promoting decent work, combating discrimination through the principle of non-discrimination has been established by the International Labor Organization (ILO) through the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work 1998. Considering elimination of discrimination in employment as a core labor standard, member states are expected to respect, promote and implement it to their national laws and policies. Being a member state, Malaysia has to position herself align with this international requirement. The author discusses the related convention together with Malaysia-s responses on the matter. At the closing stage, the prospect of Malaysia is presumed taking into account of the current positions and reports submitted to the ILO.

Developing Vision-Based Digital Public Display as an Interactive Media

Interactive public displays give access as an innovative media to promote enhanced communication between people and information. However, digital public displays are subject to a few constraints, such as content presentation. Content presentation needs to be developed to be more interesting to attract people’s attention and motivate people to interact with the display. In this paper, we proposed idea to implement contents with interaction elements for vision-based digital public display. Vision-based techniques are applied as a sensor to detect passers-by and theme contents are suggested to attract their attention for encouraging them to interact with the announcement content. Virtual object, gesture detection and projection installation are applied for attracting attention from passers-by. Preliminary study showed positive feedback of interactive content designing towards the public display. This new trend would be a valuable innovation as delivery of announcement content and information communication through this media is proven to be more engaging.

Making Computer Learn Color

Color categorization is shared among members in a society. This allows communication of color, especially when using natural language such as English. Hence sociable robot, to live coexist with human in human society, must also have the shared color categorization. To achieve this, many works have been done relying on modeling of human color perception and mathematical complexities. In contrast, in this work, the computer as brain of the robot learns color categorization through interaction with humans without much mathematical complexities.

Hardiness vs Alienation Personality Construct Essentially Explains Burnout Proclivity and Erroneous Computer Entry Problems in Rural Hellenic Hospital Labs

Erroneous computer entry problems [here: 'e'errors] in hospital labs threaten the patients-–health carers- relationship, undermining the health system credibility. Are e-errors random, and do lab professionals make them accidentally, or may they be traced through meaningful determinants? Theories on internal causality of mistakes compel to seek specific causal ascriptions of hospital lab eerrors instead of accepting some inescapability. Undeniably, 'To Err is Human'. But in view of rapid global health organizational changes, e-errors are too expensive to lack in-depth considerations. Yet, that efunction might supposedly be entrenched in the health carers- job description remains under dispute – at least for Hellenic labs, where e-use falls behind generalized(able) appreciation and application. In this study: i) an empirical basis of a truly high annual cost of e-errors at about €498,000.00 per rural Hellenic hospital was established, hence interest in exploring the issue was sufficiently substantiated; ii) a sample of 270 lab-expert nurses, technicians and doctors were assessed on several personality, burnout and e-error measures, and iii) the hypothesis that the Hardiness vs Alienation personality construct disposition explains resistance vs proclivity to e-errors was tested and verified: Hardiness operates as a resilience source in the encounter of high pressures experienced in the hospital lab, whereas its 'opposite', i.e., Alienation, functions as a predictor, not only of making e-errors, but also of leading to burn-out. Implications for apt interventions are discussed.

Gait Recognition System: Bundle Rectangle Approach

Biometrics methods include recognition techniques such as fingerprint, iris, hand geometry, voice, face, ears and gait. The gait recognition approach has some advantages, for example it does not need the prior concern of the observed subject and it can record many biometric features in order to make deeper analysis, but most of the research proposals use high computational cost. This paper shows a gait recognition system with feature subtraction on a bundle rectangle drawn over the observed person. Statistical results within a database of 500 videos are shown.

Real Time Multi-Sensory Force Sensing Mat for Sports Biomechanics and Human Gait Analysis

This paper presents a real time force sensing instrument that is designed for human gait analysis purposes. It is capable of recording and monitoring ground reaction forces exerted by human foot during various activities such as walking, running and jumping in real time. In overall, force sensing mat mainly consists of three elements: the force sensing mat, signal conditioning circuit and data acquisition device. Force sensing mat is the mat that contains an array of force sensing elements. To control and process the incoming signal from the force sensing mat, Force-Logger and Force-Reloader are developed using National Instrument Labview. This paper describes the architecture of the force sensing mat, signal conditioning circuit and the real time streaming of the incoming data from the force sensing mat. Additionally, a preliminary experiment dataset is presented in this paper.

Some Remarkable Properties of a Hopfield Neural Network with Time Delay

It is known that an analog Hopfield neural network with time delay can generate the outputs which are similar to the human electroencephalogram. To gain deeper insights into the mechanisms of rhythm generation by the Hopfield neural networks and to study the effects of noise on their activities, we investigated the behaviors of the networks with symmetric and asymmetric interneuron connections. The neural network under the study consists of 10 identical neurons. For symmetric (fully connected) networks all interneuron connections aij = +1; the interneuron connections for asymmetric networks form an upper triangular matrix with non-zero entries aij = +1. The behavior of the network is described by 10 differential equations, which are solved numerically. The results of simulations demonstrate some remarkable properties of a Hopfield neural network, such as linear growth of outputs, dependence of synchronization properties on the connection type, huge amplification of oscillation by the external uniform noise, and the capability of the neural network to transform one type of noise to another.

Microstructural and In-Vitro Characterization of Glass-Reinforced Hydroxyapatite Composites

Commercial hydroxyapatite (HA) was reinforced by adding 2, 5, and 10 wt % of 28.5%CaO-28.5%P2O5-38%Na2 O- 5%CaF2 based glass and then sintered. Although HA shows good biocompatibility with the human body, its applications are limited to non load-bearing areas and coatings due to its poor mechanical properties. These mechanical properties can be improved substantially with addition of glass ceramics by sintering. In this study, the effects of sintering hydroxyapatite with above specified phosphate glass additions are quantified. Each composition was sintered over a range of temperatures. Scanning electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction were used to characterize the microstructure and phases of the composites. The density, microhardness, and compressive strength were measured using Archimedes Principle, Vickers Microhardness Tester (at 0.98 N), and Instron Universal Testing Machine (cross speed of 0.5 mm/min) respectively. These results were used to indicate which composition provided suitable material for use in hard tissue replacement. Composites containing 10 wt % glass additions formed dense HA/TCP (tricalcium phosphate) composite materials possessing good compressive strength and hardness than HA. In-vitro bioactivity was assessed by evaluating changes in pH and Ca2+ ion concentration of SBF-simulated body fluid on immersion of these composites in it for two weeks.

A Neural Network Based Facial Expression Analysis using Gabor Wavelets

Facial expression analysis is rapidly becoming an area of intense interest in computer science and human-computer interaction design communities. The most expressive way humans display emotions is through facial expressions. In this paper we present a method to analyze facial expression from images by applying Gabor wavelet transform (GWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) on face images. Radial Basis Function (RBF) Network is used to classify the facial expressions. As a second stage, the images are preprocessed to enhance the edge details and non uniform down sampling is done to reduce the computational complexity and processing time. Our method reliably works even with faces, which carry heavy expressions.

Green Lean TQM Human Resource Management Practices in Malaysian Automotive Companies

Green Lean Total Quality Management (LTQM) Human Resource Management (HRM) System is a system comprises of HRM in Environmental Management System (EMS) practices which is integrated to TQM with Lean Manufacturing (LM) principles. HRM is essential especially in dealing with low motivation and less productive employees. The ultimate goal of this system is to focus on achieving total human resource development that is motivated and capable to optimize their creativity to be a part of Green and Lean TQM organization. A survey questionnaire was developed and distributed to 30 highly active automotive vendors in Malaysia and analyzed by Minitab v16 and SPSS v17. It was found out companies that are practicing Green LTQM HRM practices have generated more revenue and have RND capability. However, years of company establishment do not affect the openness of the company to adapt new initiatives that can help to improve the effectiveness of the operations. It was also found out the importance of training, communication and rewards for employees. The Green LTQM HRM practices framework model established in this study hopefully will give preliminary insight especially to companies that are still looking for system that can improve their productivity from managing human resource. This is preliminary study that combined 4 awards practices, ISO/TS16949, Toyota Production System SAEJ4000, MAJAICO Lean Production System and EMS focusing on highly active companies that have been involved in MAJAICO Program and Proton Vendor Development Program. Future study can be conducted to know the status at other industry as well as case study pertaining to this system.

Human Induced Dynamic Loading on Stairs

Based on experimental data using accelerometry technology there was developed an analytical model that approximates human induced ground reaction forces in vertical, longitudinal and lateral directions ascending and descending the stairs. Proposed dynamic loading factors and corresponding phase shifts for the first five harmonics of continuous walking force history in case of stair ascend and descend. Into account is taken imperfectness of individual footfall forcing functions, differences between continuous walking force histories among individuals. There is proposed mean synthetic continuous walking force history that can be used in numerical simulations of human movement on the stairs.

An HCI Template for Distributed Applications

Both software applications and their development environment are becoming more and more distributed. This trend impacts not only the way software computes, but also how it looks. This article proposes a Human Computer Interface (HCI) template from three representative applications we have developed. These applications include a Multi-Agent System based software, a 3D Internet computer game with distributed game world logic, and a programming language environment used in constructing distributed neural network and its visualizations. HCI concepts that are common to these applications are described in abstract terms in the template. These include off-line presentation of global entities, entities inside a hierarchical namespace, communication and languages, reconfiguration of entity references in a graph, impersonation and access right, etc. We believe the metaphor that underlies an HCI concept as well as the relationships between a bunch of HCI concepts are crucial to the design of software systems and vice versa.

In Silico Analysis of Pax6 Interacting Proteins Indicates Missing Molecular Links in Development of Brain and Associated Disease

The PAX6, a transcription factor, is essential for the morphogenesis of the eyes, brain, pituitary and pancreatic islets. In rodents, the loss of Pax6 function leads to central nervous system defects, anophthalmia, and nasal hypoplasia. The haplo-insufficiency of Pax6 causes microphthalmia, aggression and other behavioral abnormalities. It is also required in brain patterning and neuronal plasticity. In human, heterozygous mutation of Pax6 causes loss of iris [aniridia], mental retardation and glucose intolerance. The 3- deletion in Pax6 leads to autism and aniridia. The phenotypes are variable in peneterance and expressivity. However, mechanism of function and interaction of PAX6 with other proteins during development and associated disease are not clear. It is intended to explore interactors of PAX6 to elucidated biology of PAX6 function in the tissues where it is expressed and also in the central regulatory pathway. This report describes In-silico approaches to explore interacting proteins of PAX6. The models show several possible proteins interacting with PAX6 like MITF, SIX3, SOX2, SOX3, IPO13, TRIM, and OGT. Since the Pax6 is a critical transcriptional regulator and master control gene of eye and brain development it might be interacting with other protein involved in morphogenesis [TGIF, TGF, Ras etc]. It is also presumed that matricelluar proteins [SPARC, thrombospondin-1 and osteonectin etc] are likely to interact during transport and processing of PAX6 and are somewhere its cascade. The proteins involved in cell survival and cell proliferation can also not be ignored.

Designing a Rescue System for Earthquake-Stricken Area with the Aim of Facilitation and Accelerating Accessibilities (Case Study: City of Tehran)

Natural disasters, including earthquake, kill many people around the world every year. Society rescue actions, which start after the earthquake and are called LAST in abbreviation, include locating, access, stabilization and transportation. In the present article, we have studied the process of local accessibility to the injured and transporting them to health care centers. With regard the heavy traffic load due to earthquake, the destruction of connecting roads and bridges and the heavy debris in alleys and street, which put the lives of the injured and the people buried under the debris in danger, accelerating the rescue actions and facilitating the accessibilities are of great importance, obviously. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is among the crowded cities in the world and is the center of extensive economic, political, cultural and social activities. Tehran has a population of about 9.5 millions and because of the immigration of people from the surrounding cities. Furthermore, considering the fact that Tehran is located on two important and large faults, a 6 Richter magnitude earthquake in this city could lead to the greatest catastrophe during the entire human history. The present study is a kind of review and a major part of the required information for it, has been obtained from libraries all of the rescue vehicles around the world, including rescue helicopters, ambulances, fire fighting vehicles and rescue boats, and their applied technology, and also the robots specifically designed for the rescue system and the advantages and disadvantages of them, have been investigated. The studies show that there is a significant relationship between the rescue team-s arrival time at the incident zone and the number of saved people; so that, if the duration of burial under debris 30 minutes, the probability of survival is %99.3, after a day is %81, after 2days is %19 and after 5days is %7.4. The exiting transport systems all have some defects. If these defects are removed, more people could be saved each hour and the preparedness against natural disasters is increased. In this study, transport system has been designed for the rescue team and the injured; which could carry the rescue team to the incident zone and the injured to the health care centers. In addition, this system is able to fly in the air and move on the earth as well; so that the destruction of roads and the heavy traffic load could not prevent the rescue team from arriving early at the incident zone. The system also has the equipment required firebird for debris removing, optimum transport of the injured and first aid.

Recognition of Obstacles and Providing Different Guidelines and Promotion of Electronic Government in Iran

Electronic Government is one of the special concepts which has been performed successfully within recent decades. Electronic government is a digital, wall-free government with a virtual organization for presenting of online governmental services and further cooperation in different political/social activities. In order to have a successful implementation of electronic government strategy and benefiting from its complete potential and benefits and generally for establishment and applying of electronic government, it is necessary to have different infrastructures as the basics of electronic government with lack of which it is impossible to benefit from mentioned services. For this purpose, in this paper we have managed to recognize relevant obstacles for establishment of electronic government in Iran. All required data for recognition of obstacles were collected from statistical society of involved specialists of Ministry of Communications & Information Technology of Iran and Information Technology Organization of Tehran Municipality through questionnaire. Then by considering of five-point Likert scope and μ =3 as the index of relevant factors of proposed model, we could specify current obstacles against electronic government in Iran along with some guidelines and proposal in this regard. According to the results, mentioned obstacles for applying of electronic government in Iran are as follows: Technical & technological problems, Legal, judicial & safety problems, Economic problems and Humanistic Problems.

Graphical Password Security Evaluation by Fuzzy AHP

In today's day and age, one of the important topics in information security is authentication. There are several alternatives to text-based authentication of which includes Graphical Password (GP) or Graphical User Authentication (GUA). These methods stems from the fact that humans recognized and remembers images better than alphanumerical text characters. This paper will focus on the security aspect of GP algorithms and what most researchers have been working on trying to define these security features and attributes. The goal of this study is to develop a fuzzy decision model that allows automatic selection of available GP algorithms by taking into considerations the subjective judgments of the decision makers who are more than 50 postgraduate students of computer science. The approach that is being proposed is based on the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) which determines the criteria weight as a linear formula.