Abstract: Money laundering has been described by many as the lifeblood of crime and is a major threat to the economic and social well-being of societies. It has been recognized that the banking system has long been the central element of money laundering. This is in part due to the complexity and confidentiality of the banking system itself. It is generally accepted that effective anti-money laundering (AML) measures adopted by banks will make it tougher for criminals to get their "dirty money" into the financial system. In fact, for law enforcement agencies, banks are considered to be an important source of valuable information for the detection of money laundering. However, from the banks- perspective, the main reason for their existence is to make as much profits as possible. Hence their cultural and commercial interests are totally distinct from that of the law enforcement authorities. Undoubtedly, AML laws create a major dilemma for banks as they produce a significant shift in the way banks interact with their customers. Furthermore, the implementation of the laws not only creates significant compliance problems for banks, but also has the potential to adversely affect the operations of banks. As such, it is legitimate to ask whether these laws are effective in preventing money launderers from using banks, or whether they simply put an unreasonable burden on banks and their customers. This paper attempts to address these issues and analyze them against the background of the Malaysian AML laws. It must be said that effective coordination between AML regulator and the banking industry is vital to minimize problems faced by the banks and thereby to ensure effective implementation of the laws in combating money laundering.
Abstract: Comparison of two approaches for the simulation of
the dynamic behaviour of a permanent magnet linear actuator is
presented. These are full coupled model, where the electromagnetic
field, electric circuit and mechanical motion problems are solved
simultaneously, and decoupled model, where first a set of static
magnetic filed analysis is carried out and then the electric circuit and
mechanical motion equations are solved employing bi-cubic spline
approximations of the field analysis results. The results show that the
proposed decoupled model is of satisfactory accuracy and gives more
flexibility when the actuator response is required to be estimated for
different external conditions, e.g. external circuit parameters or
mechanical loads.
Abstract: Multi-energy systems will enhance the system
reliability and power quality. This paper presents an integrated
approach for the design and operation of distributed energy resources
(DER) systems, based on energy hub modeling. A multi-objective
optimization model is developed by considering an integrated view of
electricity and natural gas network to analyze the optimal design and
operating condition of DER systems, by considering two conflicting
objectives, namely, minimization of total cost and the minimization
of environmental impact which is assessed in terms of CO2
emissions. The mathematical model considers energy demands of the
site, local climate data, and utility tariff structure, as well as technical
and financial characteristics of the candidate DER technologies. To
provide energy demands, energy systems including photovoltaic, and
co-generation systems, boiler, central power grid are considered. As
an illustrative example, a hotel in Iran demonstrates potential
applications of the proposed method. The results prove that
increasing the satisfaction degree of environmental objective leads to
increased total cost.
Abstract: A series of microarray experiments produces observations
of differential expression for thousands of genes across multiple
conditions.
Principal component analysis(PCA) has been widely used in
multivariate data analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the data in
order to simplify subsequent analysis and allow for summarization of
the data in a parsimonious manner. PCA, which can be implemented
via a singular value decomposition(SVD), is useful for analysis of
microarray data.
For application of PCA using SVD we use the DNA microarray
data for the small round blue cell tumors(SRBCT) of childhood
by Khan et al.(2001). To decide the number of components which
account for sufficient amount of information we draw scree plot.
Biplot, a graphic display associated with PCA, reveals important
features that exhibit relationship between variables and also the
relationship of variables with observations.
Abstract: We present a novel scheme to evaluate sinusoidal functions with low complexity and high precision using cubic spline interpolation. To this end, two different approaches are proposed to find the interpolating polynomial of sin(x) within the range [- π , π]. The first one deals with only a single data point while the other with two to keep the realization cost as low as possible. An approximation error optimization technique for cubic spline interpolation is introduced next and is shown to increase the interpolator accuracy without increasing complexity of the associated hardware. The architectures for the proposed approaches are also developed, which exhibit flexibility of implementation with low power requirement.
Abstract: The crystalline quality of the AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) structure grown on a 200 mm silicon substrate has been investigated using UV-visible micro- Raman scattering and photoluminescence (PL). The visible Raman scattering probes the whole nitride stack with the Si substrate and shows the presence of a small component of residual in-plane stress in the thick GaN buffer resulting from a wafer bowing, while the UV micro-Raman indicates a tensile interfacial stress induced at the top GaN/AlGaN/AlN layers. PL shows a good crystal quality GaN channel where the yellow band intensity is very low compared to that of the near-band-edge transition. The uniformity of this sample is shown by measurements from several points across the epiwafer.
Abstract: In this empirical research, how marketing managers evaluate their firms- performances and decide to make innovation is examined. They use some standards which are past performance of the firm, target performance of the firm, competitor performance, and average performance of the industry to compare and evaluate the firms- performances. It is hypothesized that marketing managers and owners of the firm compare the firms- current performance with these four standards at the same time to decide when to make innovation relating to any aspects of the firm, either management style or products. Relationship between the comparison of the firm-s performance with these standards and innovation are searched in the same regression model. The results of the regression analysis are discussed and some recommendations are made for future studies and applicants.
Abstract: Requirements are critical to system validation as they guide all subsequent stages of systems development. Inadequately specified requirements generate systems that require major revisions or cause system failure entirely. Use Cases have become the main vehicle for requirements capture in many current Object Oriented (OO) development methodologies, and a means for developers to communicate with different stakeholders. In this paper we present the results of a laboratory experiment that explored whether different types of use case format are equally effective in facilitating high knowledge user-s understanding. Results showed that the provision of diagrams along with the textual use case descriptions significantly improved user comprehension of system requirements in both familiar and unfamiliar application domains. However, when comparing groups that received models of textual description accompanied with diagrams of different level of details (simple and detailed) we found no significant difference in performance.
Abstract: Echocardiography imaging is one of the most common diagnostic tests that are widely used for assessing the abnormalities of the regional heart ventricle function. The main goal of the image enhancement task in 2D-echocardiography (2DE) is to solve two major anatomical structure problems; speckle noise and low quality. Therefore, speckle noise reduction is one of the important steps that used as a pre-processing to reduce the distortion effects in 2DE image segmentation. In this paper, we present the common filters that based on some form of low-pass spatial smoothing filters such as Mean, Gaussian, and Median. The Laplacian filter was used as a high-pass sharpening filter. A comparative analysis was presented to test the effectiveness of these filters after being applied to original 2DE images of 4-chamber and 2-chamber views. Three statistical quantity measures: root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal-to-ratio (PSNR) and signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) are used to evaluate the filter performance quantitatively on the output enhanced image.
Abstract: In this note, we investigate the blind source separability of linear FIR-MIMO systems. The concept of semi-reversibility of a system is presented. It is shown that for a semi-reversible system, if the input signals belong to a binary alphabet, then the source data can be blindly separated. One sufficient condition for a system to be semi-reversible is obtained. It is also shown that the proposed criteria is weaker than that in the literature which requires that the channel matrix is irreducible/invertible or reversible.
Abstract: In modern human computer interaction systems
(HCI), emotion recognition is becoming an imperative characteristic.
The quest for effective and reliable emotion recognition in HCI has
resulted in a need for better face detection, feature extraction and
classification. In this paper we present results of feature space analysis
after briefly explaining our fully automatic vision based emotion
recognition method. We demonstrate the compactness of the feature
space and show how the 2d/3d based method achieves superior features
for the purpose of emotion classification. Also it is exposed that
through feature normalization a widely person independent feature
space is created. As a consequence, the classifier architecture has
only a minor influence on the classification result. This is particularly
elucidated with the help of confusion matrices. For this purpose
advanced classification algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines
and Artificial Neural Networks are employed, as well as the simple k-
Nearest Neighbor classifier.
Abstract: With the development of Internet and databases application techniques, the demand that lots of databases in the Internet are permitted to remote query and access for authorized users becomes common, and the problem that how to protect the copyright of relational databases arises. This paper simply introduces the knowledge of cloud model firstly, includes cloud generators and similar cloud. And then combined with the property of the cloud, a method of protecting relational databases copyright with cloud watermark is proposed according to the idea of digital watermark and the property of relational databases. Meanwhile, the corresponding watermark algorithms such as cloud watermark embedding algorithm and detection algorithm are proposed. Then, some experiments are run and the results are analyzed to validate the correctness and feasibility of the watermark scheme. In the end, the foreground of watermarking relational database and its research direction are prospected.
Abstract: Research in quantum computation is looking for the consequences of having information encoding, processing and communication exploit the laws of quantum physics, i.e. the laws which govern the ultimate knowledge that we have, today, of the foreign world of elementary particles, as described by quantum mechanics. This paper starts with a short survey of the principles which underlie quantum computing, and of some of the major breakthroughs brought by the first ten to fifteen years of research in this domain; quantum algorithms and quantum teleportation are very biefly presented. The next sections are devoted to one among the many directions of current research in the quantum computation paradigm, namely quantum programming languages and their semantics. A few other hot topics and open problems in quantum information processing and communication are mentionned in few words in the concluding remarks, the most difficult of them being the physical implementation of a quantum computer. The interested reader will find a list of useful references at the end of the paper.
Abstract: A review of the literature found that Domestic
violence and child maltreatment co-occur in many families, the
purpose of this study attempts to emphasize the factors relating to
intra-family relationships (order point of view) on violence against
the children, For this purpose a survey technique on the sample size
amounted 200 students of governmental guidance schools of city of
Gilanegharb in country of Iran were considered. For measurement of
violence against the children (VAC) the CTS scaled has been used
.The results showed that children have experienced the violence more
than once during the last year. degree of order in family is high.
Explanation result indicated that the order variables in family
including collective thinking, empathy, communal co-circumstance
have significant effects on VAC.
Abstract: In this manuscript, a wavelet-based blind
watermarking scheme has been proposed as a means to provide
security to authenticity of a fingerprint. The information used for
identification or verification of a fingerprint mainly lies in its
minutiae. By robust watermarking of the minutiae in the fingerprint
image itself, the useful information can be extracted accurately even
if the fingerprint is severely degraded. The minutiae are converted in
a binary watermark and embedding these watermarks in the detail
regions increases the robustness of watermarking, at little to no
additional impact on image quality. It has been experimentally shown
that when the minutiae is embedded into wavelet detail coefficients
of a fingerprint image in spread spectrum fashion using a
pseudorandom sequence, the robustness is observed to have a
proportional response while perceptual invisibility has an inversely
proportional response to amplification factor “K". The DWT-based
technique has been found to be very robust against noises,
geometrical distortions filtering and JPEG compression attacks and is
also found to give remarkably better performance than DCT-based
technique in terms of correlation coefficient and number of erroneous
minutiae.
Abstract: Jordan exerts many efforts to nurture their academically gifted students in special schools since 2001. During
the past nine years of launching these schools, their learning and excellence environments were believed to be distinguished compared
to public schools. This study investigated the environments of gifted
students compared with other non-gifted, using a survey instrument
that measures the dimensions of family, peers, teachers, school- support, society, and resources –dimensions rooted deeply in supporting gifted education, learning, and achievement. A total
number of 109 were selected from excellence schools for
academically gifted students, and 119 non-gifted students were selected from public schools. Around 8.3% of the non-gifted students
reported that they “Never" received any support from their surrounding environments, 14.9% reported “Seldom" support, 23.7% reported “ Often" support, 26.0% reported “Frequent" support, and
32.8% reported “Very frequent" support. Where the gifted students reported more “Never" support than the non-gifted did with 11.3%,
“Seldom" support with 15.4%, “Often" support with 26.6%,
“Frequent" support with 29.0%, and reported “Very frequent" support less than the non-gifted students with 23.6%. Unexpectedly,
statistical differences were found between the two groups favoring
non-gifted students in perception of their surrounding environments
in specific dimensions, namely, school- support, teachers, and society. No statistical differences were found in the other dimensions
of the survey, namely, family, peers, and resources. As the
differences were found in teachers, school- support, and society, the
nurturing environments for the excellence schools need to be revised to adopt more creative teaching styles, rich school atmosphere and
infrastructures, interactive guiding for the students and their parents, promoting for the excellence environments, and re-build successful
identification models. Thus, families, schools, and society should
increase their cooperation, communication, and awareness of the
gifted supportive environments. However, more studies to investigate
other aspects of promoting academic giftedness and excellence are recommended.
Abstract: An immunomodulator bioproduct is prepared in a
batch bioprocess with a modified bacterium Pseudomonas
aeruginosa. The bioprocess is performed in 100 L Bioengineering
bioreactor with 42 L cultivation medium made of peptone, meat
extract and sodium chloride. The optimal bioprocess parameters were
determined: temperature – 37 0C, agitation speed - 300 rpm, aeration
rate – 40 L/min, pressure – 0.5 bar, Dow Corning Antifoam M-max.
4 % of the medium volume, duration - 6 hours. This kind of
bioprocesses are appreciated as difficult to control because their
dynamic behavior is highly nonlinear and time varying. The aim of
the paper is to present (by comparison) different models based on
experimental data.
The analysis criteria were modeling error and convergence rate.
The estimated values and the modeling analysis were done by using
the Table Curve 2D.
The preliminary conclusions indicate Andrews-s model with a
maximum specific growth rate of the bacterium in the range of
0.8 h-1.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a modified version of the
Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA) tailored for blind Decision
Feedback Equalizer (DFE) of first order Markovian time varying
channels. The proposed NonStationary CMA (NSCMA) is designed
so that it explicitly takes into account the Markovian structure of
the channel nonstationarity. Hence, unlike the classical CMA, the
NSCMA is not blind with respect to the channel time variations.
This greatly helps the equalizer in the case of realistic channels, and
avoids frequent transmissions of training sequences.
This paper develops a theoretical analysis of the steady state
performance of the CMA and the NSCMA for DFEs within a time
varying context. Therefore, approximate expressions of the mean
square errors are derived. We prove that in the steady state, the
NSCMA exhibits better performance than the classical CMA. These
new results are confirmed by simulation.
Through an experimental study, we demonstrate that the Bit Error
Rate (BER) is reduced by the NSCMA-DFE, and the improvement
of the BER achieved by the NSCMA-DFE is as significant as the
channel time variations are severe.
Abstract: There is a real threat on the VIPs personal pages on
the Social Network Sites (SNS). The real threats to these pages is
violation of privacy and theft of identity through creating fake pages
that exploit their names and pictures to attract the victims and spread
of lies. In this paper, we propose a new secure architecture that
improves the trusting and finds an effective solution to reduce fake
pages and possibility of recognizing VIP pages on SNS. The
proposed architecture works as a third party that is added to
Facebook to provide the trust service to personal pages for VIPs.
Through this mechanism, it works to ensure the real identity of the
applicant through the electronic authentication of personal
information by storing this information within content of their
website. As a result, the significance of the proposed architecture is
that it secures and provides trust to the VIPs personal pages.
Furthermore, it can help to discover fake page, protect the privacy,
reduce crimes of personality-theft, and increase the sense of trust and
satisfaction by friends and admirers in interacting with SNS.
Abstract: An Optimal Power Flow based on Improved Particle
Swarm Optimization (OPF-IPSO) with Generator Capability Curve
Constraint is used by NN-OPF as a reference to get pattern of
generator scheduling. There are three stages in Designing NN-OPF.
The first stage is design of OPF-IPSO with generator capability curve
constraint. The second stage is clustering load to specific range and
calculating its index. The third stage is training NN-OPF using
constructive back propagation method. In training process total load
and load index used as input, and pattern of generator scheduling
used as output. Data used in this paper is power system of Java-Bali.
Software used in this simulation is MATLAB.