Abstract: Mammographic images and data analysis to
facilitate modelling or computer aided diagnostic (CAD) software development should best be done using a common database that can handle various mammographic image file
formats and relate these to other patient information.
This would optimize the use of the data as both primary
reporting and enhanced information extraction of research data could be performed from the single dataset. One desired
improvement is the integration of DICOM file header information into the database, as an efficient and reliable source of supplementary patient information intrinsically
available in the images.
The purpose of this paper was to design a suitable database to link and integrate different types of image files and gather common information that can be further used for research
purposes. An interface was developed for accessing, adding,
updating, modifying and extracting data from the common
database, enhancing the future possible application of the data in CAD processing.
Technically, future developments envisaged include the creation of an advanced search function to selects image files
based on descriptor combinations. Results can be further used for specific CAD processing and other research. Design of a
user friendly configuration utility for importing of the required fields from the DICOM files must be done.
Abstract: Amazing development of the information technology,
communications and internet expansion as well as the requirements
of the city managers to new ideas to run the city and higher
participation of the citizens encourage us to complete the electronic
city as soon as possible. The foundations of this electronic city are in
information technology. People-s participation in metropolitan
management is a crucial topic. Information technology does not
impede this matter. It can ameliorate populace-s participation and
better interactions between the citizens and the city managers.
Citizens can proffer their ideas, beliefs and votes through digital
mass media based upon the internet and computerization plexuses on
the topical matters to receive appropriate replies and services. They
can participate in urban projects by becoming cognizant of the city
views. The most significant challenges are as follows: information
and communicative management, altering citizens- views, as well as
legal and office documents
Electronic city obstacles have been identified in this research. The
required data were forgathered through questionnaires to identify the
barriers from a statistical community comprising specialists and
practitioners of the ministry of information technology and
communication, the municipality information technology
organization.
The conclusions demonstrate that the prioritized electronic city
application barriers in Iran are as follows:
The support quandaries (non-financial ones), behavioral, cultural
and educational plights, the security, legal and license predicaments,
the hardware, orismological and infrastructural curbs, the software
and fiscal problems.
Abstract: The task of face recognition has been actively
researched in recent years. This paper provides an up-to-date review of major human face recognition research. We first present an
overview of face recognition and its applications. Then, a literature review of the most recent face recognition techniques is presented.
Description and limitations of face databases which are used to test
the performance of these face recognition algorithms are given. A
brief summary of the face recognition vendor test (FRVT) 2002, a
large scale evaluation of automatic face recognition technology, and
its conclusions are also given. Finally, we give a summary of the research results.
Abstract: Antioxidant activities of ethanolic extracts of Ardisia
japonica Blume., Ageartum conyzoides Linn., and Cocculus hirsutus
Linn Diels. leaves was determined qualitatively and quantitatively in
this research. 1, 1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical
solution was used to investigate free radical scavenging activity of
these leaves extracts. Ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) was used as the
standard. In the present investigation, it is found that all of these
extracts have remarkable antioxidant activities. The EC50 values of
these ethanolic extracts were 12.72 μg/ml for A. japonica, 15.19
μg/ml for A. conyzoides, 10.68 μg/ml for C. hirsutus respectively.
Among these Myanmar medicinal plants, C. hirsutus showed higher
antioxidant activities as well as free radical scavenging activity than
black tea (Camellia sinensis), the famous antioxidant, and A.
japonica and A. conyzoides showed a rather lower antioxidant
activity than tea extracts. According to results from bioassay with
carrot discs infected with Agrobacterium tumefaciens, all extracts
showed anti-tumor activity after 3 weeks of incubation. No gall was
detected in carrot disks treated with C. hirsutus and A. japonica
extracts in the dose of 100ppm and in carrot discs treated with A.
conyzoides extract in the dose of 1000 ppm. Therefore, the research
clearly indicates that these weedy plants of dry farm land are
exceptionally advantageous for human health.
Abstract: Attitude Determination (AD) of a spacecraft using the
phase measurements of the Global Navigation Satellite System
(GNSS) is an active area of research. Various attitude determination
algorithms have been developed in yester years for spacecrafts using
different sensors but the last two decades have witnessed a
phenomenal increase in research related with GPS receivers as a
stand-alone sensor for determining the attitude of satellite using the
phase measurements of the signals from GNSS. The GNSS-based
Attitude determination algorithms have been experimented in many
real missions. The problem of AD algorithms using GNSS phase
measurements has two important parts; the ambiguity resolution and
the determining of attitude. Ambiguity resolution is the widely
addressed topic in literature for implementing the AD algorithm
using GNSS phase measurements for achieving the accuracy of
millimeter level. This paper broadly overviews the different
techniques for resolving the integer ambiguities encountered in AD
using GNSS phase measurements.
Abstract: In order to develop forest management strategies in
tropical forest in Malaysia, surveying the forest resources and
monitoring the forest area affected by logging activities is essential.
There are tremendous effort has been done in classification of land
cover related to forest resource management in this country as it is a
priority in all aspects of forest mapping using remote sensing and
related technology such as GIS. In fact classification process is a
compulsory step in any remote sensing research. Therefore, the main
objective of this paper is to assess classification accuracy of
classified forest map on Landsat TM data from difference number of
reference data (200 and 388 reference data). This comparison was
made through observation (200 reference data), and interpretation
and observation approaches (388 reference data). Five land cover
classes namely primary forest, logged over forest, water bodies, bare
land and agricultural crop/mixed horticultural can be identified by
the differences in spectral wavelength. Result showed that an overall
accuracy from 200 reference data was 83.5 % (kappa value
0.7502459; kappa variance 0.002871), which was considered
acceptable or good for optical data. However, when 200 reference
data was increased to 388 in the confusion matrix, the accuracy
slightly improved from 83.5% to 89.17%, with Kappa statistic
increased from 0.7502459 to 0.8026135, respectively. The accuracy
in this classification suggested that this strategy for the selection of
training area, interpretation approaches and number of reference data
used were importance to perform better classification result.
Abstract: The paper is intended to declare and apply ethics, i. e.
moral principles, rules in marketing environment. Ethical behavior of
selected pharmaceutical companies in the Slovak Republic is the
object of our research. The aim of our research is to determine
perception of ethical behavior of the pharmaceutical industry in
Slovakia by the medicine representatives in comparison with the
assessment of doctors and patients. The experimental sample
included 90 participants who were divided into three groups:
medicine representatives of the pharmaceutical companies (N=30),
doctors (N=30) and patients (N=30). The research method was a
Questionnaire of ethical behavior, created by us, that describes
individual areas included in the Code of ethics of the pharmaceutical
industry in Slovakia. The results showed influence of professional
status on ethical behavior perception, not gender. Higher perception
was indicated at patients rather than doctors and medicine
representatives.
Abstract: Gene, principal unit of inheritance, is an ordered
sequence of nucleotides. The genes of eukaryotic organisms include
alternating segments of exons and introns. The region of
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) within a gene containing instructions
for coding a protein is called exon. On the other hand, non-coding
regions called introns are another part of DNA that regulates gene
expression by removing from the messenger Ribonucleic acid (RNA)
in a splicing process. This paper proposes to determine splice
junctions that are exon-intron boundaries by analyzing DNA
sequences. A splice junction can be either exon-intron (EI) or intron
exon (IE). Because of the popularity and compatibility of the
artificial neural network (ANN) in genetic fields; various ANN
models are applied in this research. Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP),
Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Generalized Regression Neural
Networks (GRNN) are used to analyze and detect the splice junctions
of gene sequences. 10-fold cross validation is used to demonstrate
the accuracy of networks. The real performances of these networks
are found by applying Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC)
analysis.
Abstract: The paper deals with quality labels used in the food products market, especially with labels of quality, labels of origin, and labels of organic farming. The aim of the paper is to identify perception of these labels by consumers in the Czech Republic. The first part refers to the definition and specification of food quality labels that are relevant in the Czech Republic. The second part includes the discussion of marketing research results. Data were collected with personal questioning method. Empirical findings on 150 respondents are related to consumer awareness and perception of national and European food quality labels used in the Czech Republic, attitudes to purchases of labelled products, and interest in information regarding the labels. Statistical methods, in the concrete Pearson´s chi-square test of independence, coefficient of contingency, and coefficient of association are used to determinate if significant differences do exist among selected demographic categories of Czech consumers.
Abstract: The ElectroEncephaloGram (EEG) is useful for
clinical diagnosis and biomedical research. EEG signals often
contain strong ElectroOculoGram (EOG) artifacts produced
by eye movements and eye blinks especially in EEG recorded
from frontal channels. These artifacts obscure the underlying
brain activity, making its visual or automated inspection
difficult. The goal of ocular artifact removal is to remove
ocular artifacts from the recorded EEG, leaving the underlying
background signals due to brain activity. In recent times,
Independent Component Analysis (ICA) algorithms have
demonstrated superior potential in obtaining the least
dependent source components. In this paper, the independent
components are obtained by using the JADE algorithm (best
separating algorithm) and are classified into either artifact
component or neural component. Neural Network is used for
the classification of the obtained independent components.
Neural Network requires input features that exactly represent
the true character of the input signals so that the neural
network could classify the signals based on those key
characters that differentiate between various signals. In this
work, Auto Regressive (AR) coefficients are used as the input
features for classification. Two neural network approaches
are used to learn classification rules from EEG data. First, a
Polynomial Neural Network (PNN) trained by GMDH (Group
Method of Data Handling) algorithm is used and secondly,
feed-forward neural network classifier trained by a standard
back-propagation algorithm is used for classification and the
results show that JADE-FNN performs better than JADEPNN.
Abstract: Nanophotocatalysts such as titanium (TiO2), zinc (ZnO), and iron (Fe2O3) oxides can be used in organic pollutants oxidation, and in many other applications. But among the challenges for technological application (scale-up) of the nanotechnology scientific developments two aspects are still little explored: research on environmental risk of the nanomaterials preparation methods, and the study of nanomaterials properties and/or performance variability. The environmental analysis was performed for six different methods of ZnO nanoparticles synthesis, and showed that it is possible to identify the more environmentally compatible process even at laboratory scale research. The obtained ZnO nanoparticles were tested as photocatalysts, and increased the degradation rate of the Rhodamine B dye up to 30 times.
Abstract: For over a decade, the Pulse Coupled Neural Network
(PCNN) based algorithms have been successfully used in image
interpretation applications including image segmentation. There are
several versions of the PCNN based image segmentation methods,
and the segmentation accuracy of all of them is very sensitive to the
values of the network parameters. Most methods treat PCNN
parameters like linking coefficient and primary firing threshold as
global parameters, and determine them by trial-and-error. The
automatic determination of appropriate values for linking coefficient,
and primary firing threshold is a challenging problem and deserves
further research. This paper presents a method for obtaining global as
well as local values for the linking coefficient and the primary firing
threshold for neurons directly from the image statistics. Extensive
simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves
excellent segmentation accuracy comparable to the best accuracy
obtainable by trial-and-error for a variety of images.
Abstract: The request for a sustainable development challenges
both managers and consumers to rethink habitual practices and
activities. While consumers are challenged to develop sustainable
consumption patterns, companies are asked to establish managerial
systems and structures considering economical, ecological, and social
issues. As this is in particular true for housing associations, this paper
aims first, at providing an understanding of sustainability strategy in
residential trade and industry (RTI) by identifying relevant facets of
this construct and second, at conceptually analyzing the impact of
sustainability strategy in RTI on operational efficiency and
performance of municipal housing companies. The author develops a
model of sustainability strategy in RTI and its effects and further,
sheds light in priorities for future research.
Abstract: In a complex project environment, project teams face
multi-dimensional communication problems that can ultimately lead
to project breakdown. Team Performance varies in Face-to-Face
(FTF) environment versus groups working remotely in a computermediated
communication (CMC) environment. A brief review of the
Input_Process_Output model suggested by James E. Driskell, Paul H.
Radtke and Eduardo Salas in “Virtual Teams: Effects of
Technological Mediation on Team Performance (2003)", has been
done to develop the basis of this research. This model theoretically
analyzes the effects of technological mediation on team processes,
such as, cohesiveness, status and authority relations, counternormative
behavior and communication. An empirical study
described in this paper has been undertaken to test the
“cohesiveness" of diverse project teams in a multi-national
organization. This study uses both quantitative and qualitative
techniques for data gathering and analysis. These techniques include
interviews, questionnaires for data collection and graphical data
representation for analyzing the collected data. Computer-mediated
technology may impact team performance because of difference in
cohesiveness among teams and this difference may be moderated by
factors, such as, the type of communication environment, the type of
task and the temporal context of the team. Based on the reviewed
model, sets of hypotheses are devised and tested. This research,
reports on a study that compared team cohesiveness among virtual
teams using CMC and non-CMC communication mediums. The
findings suggest that CMC can help virtual teams increase team
cohesiveness among their members, making CMC an effective
medium for increasing productivity and team performance.
Abstract: The goal of this study was to disclose the core of the advertising research based on the psychological aspects by acquainting with the nature of advertising research and revealing the importance of psychological aspects of advertising during the advertising research. The growing interest in consumer response to advertisement served as an encouragement to make the analysis of psychological aspects of the advertising research, because the information obtained during the advertising research helps to answer the question how advertising really works. In the research analysis focuses on the nature of advertising research. The place of advertising research in advertisement planning process and the advertising research process are unfolded. Moreover, the importance of psychological aspects in the advertising research is being examined. The certain psychological aspects like the particularities of advertising communication process, psychological process that are active at advertising acceptance and awareness process as well as the advertising effects are analysed in more detail.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an e-collaborative learning circles methodology which utilizes the information and communication technologies (ICTs) in e-educational processes. In e-collaborative learning circles methodology, the teachers and students announce their research projects on various mailing lists and discussion boards using available ICTs. The teachers & moderators and students who are already members of the e-forums, discuss the project proposals in their classrooms sent out by the potential global partner schools and return the requested feed back to the proposing school(s) about their level of the participation and contribution in the research. In general, an e-collaborative learning circle project is implemented with a small and diverse group (usually 8-10 participants) from around the world. The students meet regularly over a period of weeks/months through the ICTs during the ecollaborative learning process. When the project is completed, a project product (e-book / DVD) is prepared and sent to the circle members. In this research, when taking into account the interests and motivation of the participating students with the facilitating role of the teacher(s), the students in each circle do research to obtain new data and information, thus enabling them to have the opportunity to meet both different cultures and international understandings across the globe. However, while the participants communicate along with the members in the circle they also practice and develop their communication language skills. Finally, teachers and students find the possibility to develop their skills in using the ICTs as well.
Abstract: In this paper, an inventory model with finite and
constant replenishment rate, price dependant demand rate, time
value of money and inflation, finite time horizon, lead time and
exponential deterioration rate and with the objective of maximizing
the present worth of the total system profit is developed. Using a
dynamic programming based solution algorithm, the optimal
sequence of the cycles can be found and also different optimal
selling prices, optimal order quantities and optimal maximum
inventories can be obtained for the cycles with unequal lengths,
which have never been done before for this model. Also, a
numerical example is used to show accuracy of the solution
procedure.
Abstract: Grid computing is a form of distributed computing
that involves coordinating and sharing computational power, data
storage and network resources across dynamic and geographically
dispersed organizations. Scheduling onto the Grid is NP-complete,
so there is no best scheduling algorithm for all grid computing
systems. An alternative is to select an appropriate scheduling
algorithm to use in a given grid environment because of the
characteristics of the tasks, machines and network connectivity. Job
and resource scheduling is one of the key research area in grid
computing. The goal of scheduling is to achieve highest possible
system throughput and to match the application need with the
available computing resources. Motivation of the survey is to
encourage the amateur researcher in the field of grid computing, so
that they can understand easily the concept of scheduling and can
contribute in developing more efficient scheduling algorithm. This
will benefit interested researchers to carry out further work in this
thrust area of research.
Abstract: The connection between solar activity and adverse phenomena in the Earth’s environment that can affect space and ground based technologies has spurred interest in Space Weather (SW) research. A great effort has been put on the development of suitable models that can provide advanced forecast of SW events. With the progress in computational technology, it is becoming possible to develop operational large scale physics based models which can incorporate the most important physical processes and domains of the Sun-Earth system. In order to enhance our SW prediction capabilities we are developing advanced numerical tools. With operational requirements in mind, our goal is to develop a modular simulation framework of propagation of the disturbances from the Sun through interplanetary space to the Earth. Here, we report and discuss on the development of coronal field and solar wind components for a large scale MHD code. The model for these components is based on a potential field source surface model and an empirical Wang-Sheeley-Arge solar wind relation.
Abstract: Fast development of technologies, economic globalization and many other external circumstances stimulate company’s competitiveness. One of the major trends in today’s business is the shift to the exploitation of the Internet and electronic environment for entrepreneurial needs. Latest researches confirm that e-environment provides a range of possibilities and opportunities for companies, especially for micro-, small- and medium-sized companies, which have limited resources. The usage of e-tools raises the effectiveness and the profitability of an organization, as well as its competitiveness.
In the electronic market, as in the classic one, there are factors, such as globalization, development of new technology, price sensitive consumers, Internet, new distribution and communication channels that influence entrepreneurship. As a result of eenvironment development, e-commerce and e-marketing grow as well.
Objective of the paper: To describe and identify factors influencing company’s competitiveness in e-environment.
Research methodology: The authors employ well-established quantitative and qualitative methods of research: grouping, analysis, statistics method, factor analysis in SPSS 20 environment, etc. The theoretical and methodological background of the research is formed by using scientific researches and publications, such as that from mass media and professional literature; statistical information from legal institutions as well as information collected by the authors during the surveying process.
Research result: The authors detected and classified factors influencing competitiveness in e-environment.
In this paper, the authors presented their findings based on theoretical, scientific, and field research. Authors have conducted a research on e-environment utilization among Latvian enterprises.