Abstract: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasing in importance everyday, especially since the 90’s (last decade of birth for the Millennials generation). While social interactions involving the Millennials generation have been studied, a lack of investigation remains regarding the use of the ICT by this generation as well as the impact on outcomes in education and professional training. Observing and interviewing students preparing a MSc, we aimed at characterizing the interaction students-ICT during the courses. We found that up to 50% of the students (mainly female) could use ICT during courses at a rate of 0.84 occurrence/minutes for some of them, and they thought this involvement did not disturb learning, even was helpful. As recent researches show that multitasking leads people think they are much better than they actually are, further observations with assessments are needed to conclude whether or not the use ICT by students during the courses is a real strength.
Abstract: A piston cylinder based high pressure differential
thermal analyzer system is developed to investigate phase
transformations, melting, glass transitions, crystallization behavior of
inorganic materials, glassy systems etc., at ambient to 4 GPa and at
room temperature to 1073 K. The pressure is calibrated by the phase
transition of bismuth and ytterbium and temperature is calibrated
by using thermocouple data chart. The system developed is
calibrated using benzoic acid, ammonium nitrate and it has a
pressure and temperature control of ± 8.9 x 10 -4 GPa , ± 2 K
respectively. The phase transition of Asx Te100-x chalcogenides,
ferrous oxide and strontium boride are studied using the
indigenously developed system.
Abstract: This paper deals with a new way for designing
external fixators applied in traumatology and orthopaedics. These
fixators can be applied in the treatment of open and unstable
fractures or for lengthening human or animal bones etc. The new
design is based on the development of Ilizarov and other techniques
(i.e. shape and weight optimalization based on composite materials,
application of smart materials, nanotechnology, low x-ray absorption,
antibacterial protection, patient's comfort, reduction in the duration
of the surgical treatment, and cost).
Abstract: Images of human iris contain specular highlights due
to the reflective properties of the cornea. This corneal reflection
causes many errors not only in iris and pupil center estimation but
also to locate iris and pupil boundaries especially for methods that
use active contour. Each iris recognition system has four steps:
Segmentation, Normalization, Encoding and Matching. In order to
address the corneal reflection, a novel reflection removal method is
proposed in this paper. Comparative experiments of two existing
methods for reflection removal method are evaluated on CASIA iris
image databases V3. The experimental results reveal that the
proposed algorithm provides higher performance in reflection
removal.
Abstract: Bones are dynamic and responsive organs, they
regulate their strength and mass according to the loads which they are subjected. Because, the Wnt/β-catenin pathway has profound
effects on the regulation of bone mass, we hypothesized that mechanical loading of bone cells stimulates Wnt/β-catenin signaling, which results in the generation of new bone mass.
Mechanical loading triggers the secretion of the Wnt molecule, which after binding to transmembrane proteins, causes GSK-3β (Glycogen synthase kinase 3 beta) to cease the phosphorylation of β-catenin. β-catenin accumulation in the cytoplasm, followed by its
transport into the nucleus, binding to transcription factors (TCF/LEF)
that initiate transcription of genes related to bone formation. To test this hypothesis, we used TOPGAL (Tcf Optimal Promoter
β-galactosidase) mice in an experiment in which cyclic loads were
applied to the forearm. TOPGAL mice are reporters for cells effected
by the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. TOPGAL mice are genetically engineered mice in which transcriptional activation of β-
catenin, results in the production of an enzyme, β-galactosidase. The
presence of this enzyme allows us to localize transcriptional
activation of β-catenin to individual cells, thereby, allowing us to quantify the effects that mechanical loading has on the Wnt/β-catenin pathway and new bone formation. The ulnae of loaded TOPGAL
mice were excised and transverse slices along different parts of the
ulnar shaft were assayed for the presence of β-galactosidase.
Our results indicate that loading increases β-catenin transcriptional
activity in regions where this pathway is already primed (i.e. where basal activity is already higher) in a load magnitude dependent
manner. Further experiments are needed to determine the temporal and spatial activation of this signaling in relation to bone formation.
Abstract: Crime is a major societal problem for most of the
world's nations. Consequently, the police need to develop new
methods to improve their efficiency in dealing with these ever increasing crime rates. Two of the common difficulties that the police
face in crime control are crime investigation and the provision of crime information to the general public to help them protect themselves. Crime control in police operations involves the use of
spatial data, crime data and the related crime data from different organizations (depending on the nature of the analysis to be made).
These types of data are collected from several heterogeneous sources
in different formats and from different platforms, resulting in a lack of standardization. Moreover, there is no standard framework for
crime data collection, integration and dissemination through mobile
devices. An investigation into the current situation in crime control was carried out to identify the needs to resolve these issues. This
paper proposes and investigates the use of service oriented
architecture (SOA) and the mobile spatial information service in crime control. SOA plays an important role in crime control as an
appropriate way to support data exchange and model sharing from
heterogeneous sources. Crime control also needs to facilitate mobile
spatial information services in order to exchange, receive, share and release information based on location to mobile users anytime and
anywhere.
Abstract: The possibility of using cassava residue containing
49.66% starch, 21.47% cellulose, 12.97% hemicellulose, and 21.86%
lignin as a raw material to produce glucose using enzymatic
hydrolysis was investigated. In the experiment, each reactor
contained the cassava residue, bacteria cells, and production medium.
The effects of particles size (40 mesh and 60 mesh) and strains of
bacteria (A002 and M015) isolated from Thai higher termites,
Microcerotermes sp., on the glucose concentration at 37°C were
focused. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with a
refractive index detector was used to determine the quantity of
glucose. The maximum glucose concentration obtained at 37°C using
strain A002 and 60 mesh of the cassava residue was 1.51 g/L at 10 h.
Abstract: Studies on Simultaneous Saccharification and Fermentation (SSF) of corn flour, a major agricultural product as the substrate using starch digesting glucoamylase enzyme derived from Aspergillus niger and non starch digesting and sugar fermenting Saccharomyces cerevisiae in a batch fermentation. Experiments based on Central Composite Design (CCD) were conducted to study the effect of substrate concentration, pH, temperature, enzyme concentration on Ethanol Concentration and the above parameters were optimized using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The optimum values of substrate concentration, pH, temperature and enzyme concentration were found to be 160 g/l, 5.5, 30°C and 50 IU respectively. The effect of inoculums age on ethanol concentration was also investigated. The corn flour solution equivalent to 16% initial starch concentration gave the highest ethanol concentration of 63.04 g/l after 48 h of fermentation at optimum conditions of pH and temperature. Monod model and Logistic model were used for growth kinetics and Leudeking – Piret model was used for product formation kinetics.
Abstract: Recently, a great amount of interest has been shown
in the field of modeling and controlling hybrid systems. One of the
efficient and common methods in this area utilizes the mixed logicaldynamical
(MLD) systems in the modeling. In this method, the
system constraints are transformed into mixed-integer inequalities by
defining some logic statements. In this paper, a system containing
three tanks is modeled as a nonlinear switched system by using the
MLD framework. Comparing the model size of the three-tank system
with that of a two-tank system, it is deduced that the number of
binary variables, the size of the system and its complexity
tremendously increases with the number of tanks, which makes the
control of the system more difficult. Therefore, methods should be
found which result in fewer mixed-integer inequalities.
Abstract: Tool Tracker is a client-server based application. It is essentially a catalogue of various network monitoring and management tools that are available online. There is a database maintained on the server side that contains the information about various tools. Several clients can access this information simultaneously and utilize this information. The various categories of tools considered are packet sniffers, port mappers, port scanners, encryption tools, and vulnerability scanners etc for the development of this application. This application provides a front end through which the user can invoke any tool from a central repository for the purpose of packet sniffing, port scanning, network analysis etc. Apart from the tool, its description and the help files associated with it would also be stored in the central repository. This facility will enable the user to view the documentation pertaining to the tool without having to download and install the tool. The application would update the central repository with the latest versions of the tools. The application would inform the user about the availability of a newer version of the tool currently being used and give the choice of installing the newer version to the user. Thus ToolTracker provides any network administrator that much needed abstraction and ease-ofuse with respect to the tools that he can use to efficiently monitor a network.
Abstract: EGOTHOR is a search engine that indexes the Web
and allows us to search the Web documents. Its hit list contains URL
and title of the hits, and also some snippet which tries to shortly
show a match. The snippet can be almost always assembled by an
algorithm that has a full knowledge of the original document (mostly
HTML page). It implies that the search engine is required to store
the full text of the documents as a part of the index.
Such a requirement leads us to pick up an appropriate compression
algorithm which would reduce the space demand. One of the solutions
could be to use common compression methods, for instance gzip or
bzip2, but it might be preferable if we develop a new method which
would take advantage of the document structure, or rather, the textual
character of the documents.
There already exist a special compression text algorithms and
methods for a compression of XML documents. The aim of this
paper is an integration of the two approaches to achieve an optimal
level of the compression ratio
Abstract: This paper presents an effective traffic lights
recognition method at the daytime. First, Potential Traffic Lights
Detector (PTLD) use whole color source of YCbCr channel image and
make each binary image of green and red traffic lights. After PTLD
step, Shape Filter (SF) use to remove noise such as traffic sign, street
tree, vehicle, and building. At this time, noise removal properties
consist of information of blobs of binary image; length, area, area of
boundary box, etc. Finally, after an intermediate association step witch
goal is to define relevant candidates region from the previously
detected traffic lights, Adaptive Multi-class Classifier (AMC) is
executed. The classification method uses Haar-like feature and
Adaboost algorithm. For simulation, we are implemented through Intel
Core CPU with 2.80 GHz and 4 GB RAM and tested in the urban and
rural roads. Through the test, we are compared with our method and
standard object-recognition learning processes and proved that it
reached up to 94 % of detection rate which is better than the results
achieved with cascade classifiers. Computation time of our proposed
method is 15 ms.
Abstract: Retrieval image by shape similarity, given a template
shape is particularly challenging, owning to the difficulty to derive a
similarity measurement that closely conforms to the common
perception of similarity by humans. In this paper, a new method for the
representation and comparison of shapes is present which is based on
the shape matrix and snake model. It is scaling, rotation, translation
invariant. And it can retrieve the shape images with some missing or
occluded parts. In the method, the deformation spent by the template
to match the shape images and the matching degree is used to evaluate
the similarity between them.
Abstract: With the advent of emerging personal computing paradigms such as ubiquitous and mobile computing, Web contents are becoming accessible from a wide range of mobile devices. Since these devices do not have the same rendering capabilities, Web contents need to be adapted for transparent access from a variety of client agents. Such content adaptation is exploited for either an individual element or a set of consecutive elements in a Web document and results in better rendering and faster delivery to the client device. Nevertheless, Web content adaptation sets new challenges for semantic markup. This paper presents an advanced components platform, called SMC, enabling the development of mobility applications and services according to a channel model based on the principles of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). It then goes on to describe the potential for integration with the Semantic Web through a novel framework of external semantic annotation that prescribes a scheme for representing semantic markup files and a way of associating Web documents with these external annotations. The role of semantic annotation in this framework is to describe the contents of individual documents themselves, assuring the preservation of the semantics during the process of adapting content rendering. Semantic Web content adaptation is a way of adding value to Web contents and facilitates repurposing of Web contents (enhanced browsing, Web Services location and access, etc).
Abstract: This paper is motivated by the aspect of uncertainty in
financial decision making, and how artificial intelligence and soft
computing, with its uncertainty reducing aspects can be used for
algorithmic trading applications that trade in high frequency.
This paper presents an optimized high frequency trading system that
has been combined with various moving averages to produce a hybrid
system that outperforms trading systems that rely solely on moving
averages. The paper optimizes an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference
system that takes both the price and its moving average as input,
learns to predict price movements from training data consisting of
intraday data, dynamically switches between the best performing
moving averages, and performs decision making of when to buy or
sell a certain currency in high frequency.
Abstract: This study deals with evaluation of influence of salinity (NaCl) onto equilibrium of Cu and Ni removal from aqueous solutions by natural sorbent – zeolite. Equilibrium data were obtained by batch experiments. The salinity of the aqueous solution was influenced by dissolving NaCl in distilled water. It was studied in the range of NaCl concentrations from 1 g.l-1 to 100g.l-1. For Cu sorption there is a significant influence of salinity. The maximum capacity of zeolite for Cu was decreasing with growing concentration of NaCl. For Ni sorption there is not so significant influence of salinity as for Cu. The maximum capacity of zeolite for Ni was slightly decreasing with growing concentration of NaCl.
Abstract: This paper demonstrates the bus location system for
the route bus through the experiment in the real environment. A
bus location system is a system that provides information such as
the bus delay and positions. This system uses actual services and
positions data of buses, and those information should match data
on the database. The system has two possible problems. One, the
system could cost high in preparing devices to get bus positions.
Two, it could be difficult to match services data of buses. To avoid
these problems, we have developed this system at low cost and short
time by using the smart phone with GPS and the bus route system.
This system realizes the path planning considering bus delay and
displaying position of buses on the map. The bus location system
was demonstrated on route buses with smart phones for two months.
Abstract: Models are placed by modeling paradigm at the center of development process. These models are represented by languages, like UML the language standardized by the OMG which became necessary for development. Moreover the ontology engineering paradigm places ontologies at the center of development process; in this paradigm we find OWL the principal language for knowledge representation. Building ontologies from scratch is generally a difficult task. The bridging between UML and OWL appeared on several regards such as the classes and associations. In this paper, we have to profit from convergence between UML and OWL to propose an approach based on Meta-Modelling and Graph Grammars and registered in the MDA architecture for the automatic generation of OWL ontologies from UML class diagrams. The transformation is based on transformation rules; the level of abstraction in these rules is close to the application in order to have usable ontologies. We illustrate this approach by an example.
Abstract: Smart Dust particles, are small smart materials used for generating weather maps. We investigate question of the optimal number of Smart Dust particles necessary for generating precise, computationally feasible and cost effective 3–D weather maps. We also give an optimal matching algorithm for the generalized scenario, when there are N Smart Dust particles and M ground receivers.
Abstract: In view of their importance and usefulness in reliability theory and probability distributions, several generalizations of the inverse Gaussian distribution and the Krtzel function are investigated in recent years. This has motivated the authors to introduce and study a new generalization of the inverse Gaussian distribution and the Krtzel function associated with a product of a Bessel function of the third kind )(zKQ and a Z - Fox-Wright generalized hyper geometric function introduced in this paper. The introduced function turns out to be a unified gamma-type function. Its incomplete forms are also discussed. Several properties of this gamma-type function are obtained. By means of this generalized function, we introduce a generalization of inverse Gaussian distribution, which is useful in reliability analysis, diffusion processes, and radio techniques etc. The inverse Gaussian distribution thus introduced also provides a generalization of the Krtzel function. Some basic statistical functions associated with this probability density function, such as moments, the Mellin transform, the moment generating function, the hazard rate function, and the mean residue life function are also obtained.KeywordsFox-Wright function, Inverse Gaussian distribution, Krtzel function & Bessel function of the third kind.