Abstract: This paper studies the effect of different compression
constraints and schemes presented in a new and flexible paradigm to
achieve high compression ratios and acceptable signal to noise ratios
of Arabic speech signals. Compression parameters are computed for
variable frame sizes of a level 5 to 7 Discrete Wavelet Transform
(DWT) representation of the signals for different analyzing mother
wavelet functions. Results are obtained and compared for Global
threshold and level dependent threshold techniques. The results
obtained also include comparisons with Signal to Noise Ratios, Peak
Signal to Noise Ratios and Normalized Root Mean Square Error.
Abstract: The construction industry is the pillar industry in
China, accounting for about 6% of the gross domestic product. Along
with changes in the external environment of the construction industry
in China, the construction firm faces fierce competition. The paper
aims to investigate the relationship between diversified types of
construction firm and its performance in China. Based on generalist
and specialist strategy in organizational ecology, we think a generalist
organization can be applied to an enterprise with diversified
developments, while specialist groups are extended to professional
enterprises .This study takes advantage of annual financial data of
listed construction firm to empirically verify the relationship between
diversification and corporation performance establishing a regression
equation to econometric analysis. We find that: 1) Specialization can
significantly improve the level of profitability of listed construction
firms, and there is a significant positive relationship with corporate
performance; 2) The level of operating performance of listed
construction enterprises which engage in unrelated diversification is
higher than those with related diversification; 3) The relationship
between state-owned construction firms and corporate performance is
negative. The more the year of foundation is, the higher performance
will be; however, the more the year of being listed, the lower
performance will be.
Abstract: In this article the investigation about installation heat
recovery steam generation (HRSG) on the exhaust of turbo generators of phases 2&3 at South Pars Gas Complex is presented.
The temperature of exhaust gas is approximately 665 degree centigrade, Installation of heat recovery boiler was simulated in
ThermoFlow 17.0.2 software, based on test operation data and the
equipments site operation conditions in Pars exclusive economical energy area, the affect of installation HRSG package on the available
gas turbine and its operation parameters, ambient temperature, the
exhaust temperatures steam flow rate were investigated. Base on the results recommended HRSG package should have the capacity for 98
ton per hour high pressure steam generation this refinery, by use of
exhaust of three gas turbines for each package in operation condition of each refinery at 30 degree centigrade. Besides saving energy this
project will be an Environment-Friendly project. The Payback Period
is estimated approximately 1.8 year, with considering Clean Development Mechanism.
Abstract: The contact width is important design parameter for
optimizing the design of new metal gasket for asbestos substitution
gasket. The contact width is found have relationship with the helium
leak quantity. In the increasing of axial load value, the helium leak
quantity is decreasing and the contact width is increasing. This study
provides validity method using simulation analysis and the result is
compared to experimental using pressure sensitive paper. The results
denote similar trend data between simulation and experimental result.
Final evaluation is determined by helium leak quantity to check
leakage performance of gasket design. Considering the phenomena of
position change on the convex contact, it can be developed the
optimization of gasket design by increasing contact width.
Abstract: Since dealing with high dimensional data is
computationally complex and sometimes even intractable, recently
several feature reductions methods have been developed to reduce
the dimensionality of the data in order to simplify the calculation
analysis in various applications such as text categorization, signal
processing, image retrieval, gene expressions and etc. Among feature
reduction techniques, feature selection is one the most popular
methods due to the preservation of the original features.
In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised feature selection
method which will remove redundant features from the original
feature space by the use of probability density functions of various
features. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, popular
feature selection methods have been implemented and compared.
Experimental results on the several datasets derived from UCI
repository database, illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed
methods in comparison with the other compared methods in terms of
both classification accuracy and the number of selected features.
Abstract: Arc welding is an important joining process widely used in many industrial applications including production of automobile, ships structures and metal tanks. In welding process, the moving electrode causes highly non-uniform temperature distribution that leads to residual stresses and different deviations, especially buckling distortions in thin plates. In order to control the deviations and increase the quality of welded plates, a fixture can be used as a practical and low cost method with high efficiency. In this study, a coupled thermo-mechanical finite element model is coded in the software ANSYS to simulate the behavior of thin plates located by a 3-2-1 positioning system during the welding process. Computational results are compared with recent similar works to validate the finite element models. The agreement between the result of proposed model and other reported data proves that finite element modeling can accurately predict the behavior of welded thin plates.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to assessing textile porosity by the application of the image analysis techniques. The images of different types of sample fabrics, taken through a microscope when the fabric is placed over a constant light source,transfer the problem into the image analysis domain. Indeed, porosity can thus be expressed in terms of a brightness percentage index calculated on the digital microscope image. Furthermore, it is meaningful to compare the brightness percentage index with the air permeability and the tightness indices of each fabric type. We have experimentally shown that there exists an approximately linear relation between brightness percentage and air permeability indices.
Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of non-uniform
torsion in thin-walled elastic beams with asymmetric cross-section,
removing the basic concept of a fixed center of twist, necessary in the
Vlasov-s and Benscoter-s theories to obtain a warping stress field
equivalent to zero. In this new torsion/flexure theory, despite of the
classical ones, the warping function will punctually satisfy the first
indefinite equilibrium equation along the beam axis and it wont- be
necessary to introduce the classical congruence condition, to take into
account the effect of the beam restraints. The solution, based on the
Fourier development of the displacement field, is obtained assuming
that the applied external torque is constant along the beam axis and
on both beam ends the unit twist angle and the warping axial
displacement functions are totally restrained.
Finally, in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed method
and to compare it with the classical theories, two applications are
carried out. The first one, relative to an open profile, is necessary to
test the numerical method adopted to find the solution; the second
one, instead, is relative to a simplified containership section,
considered as full restrained in correspondence of two adjacent
transverse bulkheads.
Abstract: Enterprises need a strategic plan to retain their skillful employees and provide their career management, sustain their existence, to have growth and leadership qualities, to reach the objectives to increase the value of the enterprise and to not to be affected from changing demographic structure. In the cases when the long term career expectations of skillful employees are in integrity with the enterprise’s interests, skill management process is directly related to the career management. With a long term plan, the enterprises should cover the labor force need that may arise in the future by using systematic career development programs and be prepared against developments for all times. Skill management is considered as a practice with which career mobility is planned for the skillful employee to be prepared for high level positions. Career planning is the planning of an employee’s progress or promotion within an organization for which he works by developing his knowledge, skills, abilities and motives. Career planning is considered as an individual’s planning his future and the position which he wants to have, the area which he want to work in, the objectives which he want to reach. With the aim of contributing the abovementioned discussion process, career management concept and its perception manner are examined in this study in a comparative manner.
Abstract: Measures of complexity and entropy have not converged to a single quantitative description of levels of organization of complex systems. The need for such a measure is increasingly necessary in all disciplines studying complex systems. To address this problem, starting from the most fundamental principle in Physics, here a new measure for quantity of organization and rate of self-organization in complex systems based on the principle of least (stationary) action is applied to a model system - the central processing unit (CPU) of computers. The quantity of organization for several generations of CPUs shows a double exponential rate of change of organization with time. The exact functional dependence has a fine, S-shaped structure, revealing some of the mechanisms of self-organization. The principle of least action helps to explain the mechanism of increase of organization through quantity accumulation and constraint and curvature minimization with an attractor, the least average sum of actions of all elements and for all motions. This approach can help describe, quantify, measure, manage, design and predict future behavior of complex systems to achieve the highest rates of self organization to improve their quality. It can be applied to other complex systems from Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Ecology, Economics, Cities, network theory and others where complex systems are present.
Abstract: The increase on the demand of IT resources diverts
the enterprises to use the cloud as a cheap and scalable solution.
Cloud computing promises achieved by using the virtual machine as a
basic unite of computation. However, the virtual machine pre-defined
settings might be not enough to handle jobs QoS requirements. This
paper addresses the problem of mapping jobs have critical start
deadlines to virtual machines that have predefined specifications.
These virtual machines hosted by physical machines and shared a
fixed amount of bandwidth. This paper proposed an algorithm that
uses the idle virtual machines bandwidth to increase the quote of other
virtual machines nominated as executors to urgent jobs. An algorithm
with empirical study have been given to evaluate the impact of the
proposed model on impatient jobs. The results show the importance
of dynamic bandwidth allocation in virtualized environment and its
affect on throughput metric.
Abstract: In wavelet regression, choosing threshold value is a crucial issue. A too large value cuts too many coefficients resulting in over smoothing. Conversely, a too small threshold value allows many coefficients to be included in reconstruction, giving a wiggly estimate which result in under smoothing. However, the proper choice of threshold can be considered as a careful balance of these principles. This paper gives a very brief introduction to some thresholding selection methods. These methods include: Universal, Sure, Ebays, Two fold cross validation and level dependent cross validation. A simulation study on a variety of sample sizes, test functions, signal-to-noise ratios is conducted to compare their numerical performances using three different noise structures. For Gaussian noise, EBayes outperforms in all cases for all used functions while Two fold cross validation provides the best results in the case of long tail noise. For large values of signal-to-noise ratios, level dependent cross validation works well under correlated noises case. As expected, increasing both sample size and level of signal to noise ratio, increases estimation efficiency.
Abstract: Brassinosteroids (BRs) regulate cell elongation,
vascular differentiation, senescence, and stress responses. BRs signal
through the BES1/BZR1 family of transcription factors, which
regulate hundreds of target genes involved in this pathway. In this
research a comprehensive genome-wide analysis was carried out in
BES1/BZR1 gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana, Cucumis sativus,
Vitis vinifera, Glycin max and Brachypodium distachyon.
Specifications of the desired sequences, dot plot and hydropathy plot
were analyzed in the protein and genome sequences of five plant
species. The maximum amino acid length was attributed to protein
sequence Brdic3g with 374aa and the minimum amino acid length
was attributed to protein sequence Gm7g with 163aa. The maximum
Instability index was attributed to protein sequence AT1G19350
equal with 79.99 and the minimum Instability index was attributed to
protein sequence Gm5g equal with 33.22. Aliphatic index of these
protein sequences ranged from 47.82 to 78.79 in Arabidopsis
thaliana, 49.91 to 57.50 in Vitis vinifera, 55.09 to 82.43 in Glycin
max, 54.09 to 54.28 in Brachypodium distachyon 55.36 to 56.83 in
Cucumis sativus. Overall, data obtained from our investigation
contributes a better understanding of the complexity of the
BES1/BZR1 gene family and provides the first step towards directing
future experimental designs to perform systematic analysis of the
functions of the BES1/BZR1 gene family.
Abstract: Segmenting the lungs in medical images is a
challenging and important task for many applications. In particular,
automatic segmentation of lung cavities from multiple magnetic
resonance (MR) images is very useful for oncological applications
such as radiotherapy treatment planning. However, distinguishing of
the lung areas is not trivial due to largely changing lung shapes, low
contrast and poorly defined boundaries. In this paper, we address
lung segmentation problem from pulmonary magnetic resonance
images and propose an automated method based on a robust regionaided
geometric snake with a modified diffused region force into the
standard geometric model definition. The extra region force gives the
snake a global complementary view of the lung boundary
information within the image which along with the local gradient
flow, helps detect fuzzy boundaries. The proposed method has been
successful in segmenting the lungs in every slice of 30 magnetic
resonance images with 80 consecutive slices in each image. We
present results by comparing our automatic method to manually
segmented lung cavities provided by an expert radiologist and with
those of previous works, showing encouraging results and high
robustness of our approach.
Abstract: Biological sequences from different species are called or-thologs if they evolved from a sequence of a common ancestor species and they have the same biological function. Approximations of Kolmogorov complexity or entropy of biological sequences are already well known to be useful in extracting similarity information between such sequences -in the interest, for example, of ortholog detection. As is well known, the exact Kolmogorov complexity is not algorithmically computable. In prac-tice one can approximate it by computable compression methods. How-ever, such compression methods do not provide a good approximation to Kolmogorov complexity for short sequences. Herein is suggested a new ap-proach to overcome the problem that compression approximations may notwork well on short sequences. This approach is inspired by new, conditional computations of Kolmogorov entropy. A main contribution of the empir-ical work described shows the new set of entropy-based machine learning attributes provides good separation between positive (ortholog) and nega-tive (non-ortholog) data - better than with good, previously known alter-natives (which do not employ some means to handle short sequences well).Also empirically compared are the new entropy based attribute set and a number of other, more standard similarity attributes sets commonly used in genomic analysis. The various similarity attributes are evaluated by cross validation, through boosted decision tree induction C5.0, and by Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. The results point to the conclu-sion: the new, entropy based attribute set by itself is not the one giving the best prediction; however, it is the best attribute set for use in improving the other, standard attribute sets when conjoined with them.
Abstract: Biologically human brain processes information in both unimodal and multimodal approaches. In fact, information is progressively abstracted and seamlessly fused. Subsequently, the fusion of multimodal inputs allows a holistic understanding of a problem. The proliferation of technology has exponentially produced various sources of data, which could be likened to being the state of multimodality in human brain. Therefore, this is an inspiration to develop a methodology for exploring multimodal data and further identifying multi-view patterns. Specifically, we propose a brain inspired conceptual model that allows exploration and identification of patterns at different levels of granularity, different types of hierarchies and different types of modalities. A structurally adaptive neural network is deployed to implement the proposed model. Furthermore, the acquisition of multi-view patterns with the proposed model is demonstrated and discussed with some experimental results.
Abstract: Toxic and bloom-forming cyanobacterium Microcystis
aeruginosa was exposed to antialgal allelochemical gramine (0, 0.5, 1,
2, 4, 8 mg·L-1), The effects of gramine on photosynthetic pigments
(lipid soluble: chlorophyll a and β-carotene; water soluble:
phycocyanin, allophycocyanin, phycoerythrin, and total phycobilins)
and absorption spectra were studied in order to identify the most
sensitive pigment probe implicating the crucial suppression site on
photosynthetic apparatus. The results obtained indicated that all
pigment parameters were decreased with gramine concentration
increasing and exposure time extending. The above serious bleaching
of pigments was also reflected on the scanning results of absorption
spectra. Phycoerytherin exhibited the highest sensitivity to gramine
added, following by the largest relative decrease. It was concluded that
gramine seriously influenced algal photosynthetic activity by
destroying photosynthetic pigments and phycoerythrin most sensitive
to gramine might be contributed to its placing the outside of
phycobilins.
Abstract: One of the main issues in Computer Vision is to extract the movement of one or several points or objects of interest in an image or video sequence to conduct any kind of study or control process. Different techniques to solve this problem have been applied in numerous areas such as surveillance systems, analysis of traffic, motion capture, image compression, navigation systems and others, where the specific characteristics of each scenario determine the approximation to the problem. This paper puts forward a Computer Vision based algorithm to analyze fish trajectories in high turbulence conditions in artificial structures called vertical slot fishways, designed to allow the upstream migration of fish through obstructions in rivers. The suggested algorithm calculates the position of the fish at every instant starting from images recorded with a camera and using neural networks to execute fish detection on images. Different laboratory tests have been carried out in a full scale fishway model and with living fishes, allowing the reconstruction of the fish trajectory and the measurement of velocities and accelerations of the fish. These data can provide useful information to design more effective vertical slot fishways.
Abstract: Our adaptive multimodal system aims at correctly
presenting a mathematical expression to visually impaired users.
Given an interaction context (i.e. combination of user, environment
and system resources) as well as the complexity of the expression
itself and the user-s preferences, the suitability scores of different
presentation format are calculated. Unlike the current state-of-the art
solutions, our approach takes into account the user-s situation and not
imposes a solution that is not suitable to his context and capacity. In
this wok, we present our methodology for calculating the
mathematical expression complexity and the results of our
experiment. Finally, this paper discusses the concepts and principles
applied on our system as well as their validation through cases
studies. This work is our original contribution to an ongoing research
to make informatics more accessible to handicapped users.
Abstract: This paper addresses the controller synthesis problem of discrete-time switched positive systems with bounded time-varying delays. Based on the switched copositive Lyapunov function approach, some necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of state-feedback controller are presented as a set of linear programming and linear matrix inequality problems, hence easy to be verified. Another advantage is that the state-feedback law is independent on time-varying delays and initial conditions. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the developed controller.