Abstract: A model is presented to find the optimal design of the
mixed renewable warranty policy for non-repairable Weibull life
products. The optimal design considers the conflict of interests
between the customer and the manufacturer: the customer interests
are longer full rebate coverage period and longer total warranty
coverage period, the manufacturer interests are lower warranty cost
and lower risk. The design factors are full rebate and total warranty
coverage periods. Results showed that mixed policy is better than full
rebate policy in terms of risk and total warranty coverage period in all
of the three bathtub regions. In addition, results showed that linear
policy is better than mixed policy in infant mortality and constant
failure regions while the mixed policy is better than linear policy in
ageing region of the model. Furthermore, the results showed that
using burn-in period for infant mortality products reduces warranty
cost and risk.
Abstract: Given that entrepreneurship is a very significant factor of regional development, it is necessary to approach systematically the development with measures of regional politics. According to international classification The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS II), there are three regions in Croatia. The indicators of entrepreneurial activities on the national level of Croatia are analyzed in the paper, taking into consideration the results of referent research. The level of regional development is shown based on the analysis of entrepreneurs- operations. The results of the analysis show a very unfavorable situation in entrepreneurial activities on the national level of Croatia. The origin of this situation is to be found in the surroundings with an expressed inequality of regional development, which is caused by the non-existence of a strategically directed regional policy. In this paper recommendations which could contribute to the reduction of regional inequality in Croatia, have been made.
Abstract: TELMES project aims to develop a securized
multimedia system devoted to medical consultation teleservices. It
will be finalized with a pilot system for a regional telecenters
network that connects local telecenters, having as support
multimedia platforms. This network will enable the implementation
of complex medical teleservices (teleconsulations, telemonitoring,
homecare, urgency medicine, etc.) for a broader range of patients
and medical professionals, mainly for family doctors and those
people living in rural or isolated regions. Thus, a multimedia,
scalable network, based on modern IT&C paradigms, will result. It
will gather two inter-connected regional telecenters, in Iaşi and
Piteşti, Romania, each of them also permitting local connections of
hospitals, diagnostic and treatment centers, as well as local networks
of family doctors, patients, even educational entities. As
communications infrastructure, we aim to develop a combined fixmobile-
internet (broadband) links. Other possible communication
environments will be GSM/GPRS/3G and radio waves. The
electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition, internet transmission and
local analysis, using embedded technologies, was already
successfully done for patients- telemonitoring.
Abstract: The increasing industrialization and motorization of the world has led to a steep rise for the demand of petroleum-based fuels. Petroleum-based fuels are obtained from limited reserves. These finite reserves are highly concentrated in certain regions of the world. Therefore, those countries not having these resources are facing energy/foreign exchange crisis, mainly due to the import of crude petroleum. Hence, it is necessary to look for alternative fuels which can be produced from resources available locally within the country such as alcohol, biodiesel, vegetable oils etc. Biodiesel is a renewable, domestically produced fuel that has been shown to reduce particulate, hydrocarbon, and carbon monoxide emissions from combustion. In the present study an experimental investigation on emission characteristic of a liquid burner system operating on several percentage of biodiesel and gas oil is carried out. Samples of exhaust gas are analysed with Testo 350 Xl. The results show that biodiesel can lower some pollutant such as CO, CO2 and particulate matter emissions while NOx emission would increase in comparison with gas oil. The results indicate there may be benefits to using biodiesel in industrial processes.
Abstract: Insufficient Quality of Service (QoS) of Voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a growing concern that has lead the need
for research and study. In this paper we investigate the performance
of VoIP and the impact of resource limitations on the performance of
Access Networks. The impact of VoIP performance in Access
Networks is particularly important in regions where Internet
resources are limited and the cost of improving these resources is
prohibitive. It is clear that perceived VoIP performance, as measured
by mean opinion score [2] in experiments, where subjects are asked
to rate communication quality, is determined by end-to-end delay on
the communication path, delay variation, packet loss, echo, the
coding algorithm in use and noise. These performance indicators can
be measured and the affect in the Access Network can be estimated.
This paper investigates the congestion in the Access Network to the
overall performance of VoIP services with the presence of other
substantial uses of internet and ways in which Access Networks can
be designed to improve VoIP performance. Methods for analyzing
the impact of the Access Network on VoIP performance will be
surveyed and reviewed. This paper also considers some approaches
for improving performance of VoIP by carrying out experiments
using Network Simulator version 2 (NS2) software with a view to
gaining a better understanding of the design of Access Networks.
Abstract: This study aimed to evaluate regional soil Borkhar of
the metals Lead has been made. In this field study fires visits to the
regions. The limit of this study located in the East refineries,
petrochemical and power plant to 20 km was selected. The 41 soil
samples from depths of 0 to 10 cm in area and were randomized. Soil
samples were transported to the laboratory and by air was dry and
passed through 2-mil thickness sieve. In the laboratory of physical
and chemical characteristics and concentrations of total absorption
was measured. The results showed that the amount of lead in soil in
many parts of the range higher than the standard limit. Survey maps
show that the lead spatial distribution of the region does not special
pattern.
Abstract: We report a lithography-free approach to fabricate the
biomimetics, quasi-beehive Si nanostructures (QBSNs), on
Si-substrates. The self-assembled SiGe nanoislands via the strain
induced surface roughening (Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld instability) during
in-situ annealing play a key role as patterned sacrifice regions for
subsequent reactive ion etching (RIE) process performed for
fabricating quasi-beehive nanostructures on Si-substrates. As the
measurements of field emission, the bare QBSNs show poor field
emission performance, resulted from the existence of the native oxide
layer which forms an insurmountable barrier for electron emission. In
order to dramatically improve the field emission characteristics, the
platinum nanopillars (Pt-NPs) were deposited on QBSNs to form
Pt-NPs/QBSNs heterostructures. The turn-on field of Pt-NPs/QBSNs
is as low as 2.29 V/μm (corresponding current density of 1 μA/cm2),
and the field enhancement factor (β-value) is significantly increased to
6067. More importantly, the uniform and continuous electrons excite
light emission, due to the surrounding filed emitters from
Pt-NPs/QBSNs, can be easily obtained. This approach does not require
an expensive photolithographic process and possesses great potential
for applications.
Abstract: Data of wave height and wind speed were collected
from three existing oil fields in South China Sea – offshore
Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah regions. Extreme values
and other significant data were employed for analysis. The data were
recorded from 1999 until 2008. The results show that offshore
structures are susceptible to unacceptable motions initiated by wind
and waves with worst structural impacts caused by extreme wave
heights. To protect offshore structures from damage, there is a need
to quantify descriptive statistics and determine spectra envelope of
wind speed and wave height, and to ascertain the frequency content
of each spectrum for offshore structures in the South China Sea
shallow waters using measured time series. The results indicate that
the process is nonstationary; it is converted to stationary process by
first differencing the time series. For descriptive statistical analysis,
both wind speed and wave height have significant influence on the
offshore structure during the northeast monsoon with high mean wind
speed of 13.5195 knots ( = 6.3566 knots) and the high mean wave
height of 2.3597 m ( = 0.8690 m). Through observation of the
spectra, there is no clear dominant peak and the peaks fluctuate
randomly. Each wind speed spectrum and wave height spectrum has
its individual identifiable pattern. The wind speed spectrum tends to
grow gradually at the lower frequency range and increasing till it
doubles at the higher frequency range with the mean peak frequency
range of 0.4104 Hz to 0.4721 Hz, while the wave height tends to
grow drastically at the low frequency range, which then fluctuates
and decreases slightly at the high frequency range with the mean
peak frequency range of 0.2911 Hz to 0.3425 Hz.
Abstract: The uses of road map in daily activities are numerous
but it is a hassle to construct and update a road map whenever there
are changes. In Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, research on Automatic
Road Extraction (ARE) was explored to solve the difficulties in
updating road map. The research started with using Satellite Image
(SI), or in short, the ARE-SI project. A Hybrid Simple Colour Space
Segmentation & Edge Detection (Hybrid SCSS-EDGE) algorithm
was developed to extract roads automatically from satellite-taken
images. In order to extract the road network accurately, the satellite
image must be analyzed prior to the extraction process. The
characteristics of these elements are analyzed and consequently the
relationships among them are determined. In this study, the road
regions are extracted based on colour space elements and edge details
of roads. Besides, edge detection method is applied to further filter
out the non-road regions. The extracted road regions are validated by
using a segmentation method. These results are valuable for building
road map and detecting the changes of the existing road database.
The proposed Hybrid Simple Colour Space Segmentation and Edge
Detection (Hybrid SCSS-EDGE) algorithm can perform the tasks
fully automatic, where the user only needs to input a high-resolution
satellite image and wait for the result. Moreover, this system can
work on complex road network and generate the extraction result in
seconds.
Abstract: Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features
are widely used as acoustic features for speech recognition as well
as speaker recognition. In MFCC feature representation, the Mel frequency
scale is used to get a high resolution in low frequency region,
and a low resolution in high frequency region. This kind of processing
is good for obtaining stable phonetic information, but not suitable
for speaker features that are located in high frequency regions. The
speaker individual information, which is non-uniformly distributed
in the high frequencies, is equally important for speaker recognition.
Based on this fact we proposed an admissible wavelet packet based
filter structure for speaker identification. Multiresolution capabilities
of wavelet packet transform are used to derive the new features.
The proposed scheme differs from previous wavelet based works,
mainly in designing the filter structure. Unlike others, the proposed
filter structure does not follow Mel scale. The closed-set speaker
identification experiments performed on the TIMIT database shows
improved identification performance compared to other commonly
used Mel scale based filter structures using wavelets.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to finding a
priori interesting regions in mammograms. In order to delineate those
regions of interest (ROI-s) in mammograms, which appear to be
prominent, a topographic representation called the iso-level contour
map consisting of iso-level contours at multiple intensity levels and
region segmentation based-thresholding have been proposed. The
simulation results indicate that the computed boundary gives the
detection rate of 99.5% accuracy.
Abstract: Regulatory relationships of 686 intronic miRNA and 784 intergenic miRNAs with mRNAs of 51 intronic miRNA coding genes were established. Interaction features of studied miRNAs with 5'UTR, CDS and 3'UTR of mRNA of each gene were revealed. Functional regions of mRNA were shown to be significantly heterogenous according to the number of binding sites of miRNA and to the location density of these sites.
Abstract: An enhanced particle swarm optimization algorithm
(PSO) is presented in this work to solve the non-convex OPF
problem that has both discrete and continuous optimization variables.
The objective functions considered are the conventional quadratic
function and the augmented quadratic function. The latter model
presents non-differentiable and non-convex regions that challenge
most gradient-based optimization algorithms. The optimization
variables to be optimized are the generator real power outputs and
voltage magnitudes, discrete transformer tap settings, and discrete
reactive power injections due to capacitor banks. The set of equality
constraints taken into account are the power flow equations while the
inequality ones are the limits of the real and reactive power of the
generators, voltage magnitude at each bus, transformer tap settings,
and capacitor banks reactive power injections. The proposed
algorithm combines PSO with Newton-Raphson algorithm to
minimize the fuel cost function. The IEEE 30-bus system with six
generating units is used to test the proposed algorithm. Several cases
were investigated to test and validate the consistency of detecting
optimal or near optimal solution for each objective. Results are
compared to solutions obtained using sequential quadratic
programming and Genetic Algorithms.
Abstract: Segmentation techniques based on Active Contour
Models have been strongly benefited from the use of prior information
during their evolution. Shape prior information is captured from
a training set and is introduced in the optimization procedure to
restrict the evolution into allowable shapes. In this way, the evolution
converges onto regions even with weak boundaries. Although
significant effort has been devoted on different ways of capturing
and analyzing prior information, very little thought has been devoted
on the way of combining image information with prior information.
This paper focuses on a more natural way of incorporating the
prior information in the level set framework. For proof of concept
the method is applied on hippocampus segmentation in T1-MR
images. Hippocampus segmentation is a very challenging task, due
to the multivariate surrounding region and the missing boundary
with the neighboring amygdala, whose intensities are identical. The
proposed method, mimics the human segmentation way and thus
shows enhancements in the segmentation accuracy.
Abstract: A state of the art Speaker Identification (SI) system requires a robust feature extraction unit followed by a speaker modeling scheme for generalized representation of these features. Over the years, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) modeled on the human auditory system has been used as a standard acoustic feature set for SI applications. However, due to the structure of its filter bank, it captures vocal tract characteristics more effectively in the lower frequency regions. This paper proposes a new set of features using a complementary filter bank structure which improves distinguishability of speaker specific cues present in the higher frequency zone. Unlike high level features that are difficult to extract, the proposed feature set involves little computational burden during the extraction process. When combined with MFCC via a parallel implementation of speaker models, the proposed feature set outperforms baseline MFCC significantly. This proposition is validated by experiments conducted on two different kinds of public databases namely YOHO (microphone speech) and POLYCOST (telephone speech) with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) as a Classifier for various model orders.
Abstract: Octree compression techniques have been used
for several years for compressing large three dimensional data
sets into homogeneous regions. This compression technique
is ideally suited to datasets which have similar values in
clusters. Oil engineers represent reservoirs as a three dimensional
grid where hydrocarbons occur naturally in clusters. This
research looks at the efficiency of storing these grids using
octree compression techniques where grid cells are broken
into active and inactive regions. Initial experiments yielded
high compression ratios as only active leaf nodes and their
ancestor, header nodes are stored as a bitstream to file on
disk. Savings in computational time and memory were possible
at decompression, as only active leaf nodes are sent to the
graphics card eliminating the need of reconstructing the original
matrix. This results in a more compact vertex table, which can
be loaded into the graphics card quicker and generating shorter
refresh delay times.
Abstract: Whole genome duplication (WGD) increased the
number of yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosomes from 8 to
16. In spite of retention the number of chromosomes in the genome
of this organism after WGD to date, chromosomal rearrangement
events have caused an evolutionary distance between current genome
and its ancestor. Studies under evolutionary-based approaches on
eukaryotic genomes have shown that the rearrangement distance is an
approximable problem. In the case of S. cerevisiae, we describe that
rearrangement distance is accessible by using dedoubled adjacency
graph drawn for 55 large paired chromosomal regions originated
from WGD. Then, we provide a program extracted from a C program
database to draw a dedoubled genome adjacency graph for S.
cerevisiae. From a bioinformatical perspective, using the duplicated
blocks of current genome in S. cerevisiae, we infer that genomic
organization of eukaryotes has the potential to provide valuable
detailed information about their ancestrygenome.
Abstract: This study investigates the possibility providing gully
erosion map by the supervised classification of satellite images
(ETM+) in two mountainous and plain land types. These land types
were the part of Varamin plain, Tehran province, and Roodbar subbasin,
Guilan province, as plain and mountain land types,
respectively. The position of 652 and 124 ground control points were
recorded by GPS respectively in mountain and plain land types. Soil
gully erosion, land uses or plant covers were investigated in these
points. Regarding ground control points and auxiliary points, training
points of gully erosion and other surface features were introduced to
software (Ilwis 3.3 Academic). The supervised classified map of
gully erosion was prepared by maximum likelihood method and then,
overall accuracy of this map was computed. Results showed that the
possibility supervised classification of gully erosion isn-t possible,
although it need more studies for results generalization to other
mountainous regions. Also, with increasing land uses and other
surface features in plain physiography, it decreases the classification
of accuracy.
Abstract: The index of sustainable functionality (ISF) is an adaptive, multi-criteria technique that is used to measure sustainability; it is a concept that can be transposed to many regions throughout the world. An ISF application of the Southern Regional Organisation of Councils (SouthROC) in South East Queensland (SEQ) – the fastest growing region in Australia – indicated over a 25 year period an increase of over 10% level of functionality from 58.0% to 68.3%. The ISF of SouthROC utilised methodologies that derived from an expert panel based approach. The overall results attained an intermediate level of functionality which amounted to related concerns of economic progress and lack of social awareness. Within the region, a solid basis for future testing by way of measured changes and developed trends can be established. In this regard as management tool, the ISF record offers support for regional sustainability practice and decision making alike. This research adaptively analyses sustainability – a concept that is lacking throughout much of the academic literature and any reciprocal experimentation. This lack of knowledge base has been the emphasis of where future sustainability research can grow from and prove useful in rapidly growing regions. It is the intentions of this research to help further develop the notions of index-based quantitative sustainability.
Abstract: This study investigated the pattern and seasonal index of influenza cases in Thailand. Our results showed that southern Thailand had the highest influenza incidence among the four regions of Thailand (i.e. north, northeast, central and southern Thailand). The influenza pattern in southern Thailand was similar to that of northeastern Thailand. Seasonal index values of influenza cases in Thailand were higher in the hot season than in the wet season. Influenza cases started to increase at the beginning of the hot season (April), reached a maximum in August, rapidly declined in the middle of the wet season and reached the lowest value in December. Seasonal index values for northern Thailand differed from other regions of Thailand.