Abstract: The world of wireless telecommunications is rapidly evolving. Technologies under research and development promise to deliver more services to more users in less time. This paper presents the emerging technologies helping wireless systems grow from where we are today into our visions of the future. This paper will cover the applications and characteristics of emerging wireless technologies: Wireless Local Area Networks (WiFi-802.11n), Wireless Personal Area Networks (ZigBee) and Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WiMAX). The purpose of this paper is to explain the impending 802.11n standard and how it will enable WLANs to support emerging media-rich applications. The paper will also detail how 802.11n compares with existing WLAN standards and offer strategies for users considering higher-bandwidth alternatives. The emerging IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) standard aims to provide low data rate wireless communications with high-precision ranging and localization, by employing UWB technologies for a low-power and low cost solution. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a standard for wireless data transmission covering a range similar to cellular phone towers. With high performance in both distance and throughput, WiMAX technology could be a boon to current Internet providers seeking to become the leader of next generation wireless Internet access. This paper also explores how these emerging technologies differ from one another.
Abstract: Emotion recognition is an important research field that finds lots of applications nowadays. This work emphasizes on recognizing different emotions from speech signal. The extracted features are related to statistics of pitch, formants, and energy contours, as well as spectral, perceptual and temporal features, jitter, and shimmer. The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) was chosen as the classifier. Working on finding a robust and fast ANN classifier suitable for different real life application is our concern. Several experiments were carried out on different ANN to investigate the different factors that impact the classification success rate. Using a database containing 7 different emotions, it will be shown that with a proper and careful adjustment of features format, training data sorting, number of features selected and even the ANN type and architecture used, a success rate of 85% or even more can be achieved without increasing the system complicity and the computation time
Abstract: Organ motion, especially respiratory motion, is a technical challenge to radiation therapy planning and dosimetry. This motion induces displacements and deformation of the organ tissues within the irradiated region which need to be taken into account when simulating dose distribution during treatment. Finite element modeling (FEM) can provide a great insight into the mechanical behavior of the organs, since they are based on the biomechanical material properties, complex geometry of organs, and anatomical boundary conditions. In this paper we present an original approach that offers the possibility to combine image-based biomechanical models with particle transport simulations. We propose a new method to map material density information issued from CT images to deformable tetrahedral meshes. Based on the principle of mass conservation our method can correlate density variation of organ tissues with geometrical deformations during the different phases of the respiratory cycle. The first results are particularly encouraging, as local error quantification of density mapping on organ geometry and density variation with organ motion are performed to evaluate and validate our approach.
Abstract: We propose our genuine research of geometric
moments which detects the mineral inadequacy in the frail groundnut
plant. This plant is prone to many deficiencies as a result of the
variance in the soil nutrients. By analyzing the leaves of the plant, we
detect the visual symptoms that are not recognizable to the naked eyes.
We have collected about 160 samples of leaves from the nearby fields.
The images have been taken by keeping every leaf into a black box to
avoid the external interference. For the first time, it has been possible
to provide the farmer with the stages of deficiencies. This paper has
applied the algorithms successfully to many other plants like Lady-s
finger, Green Bean, Lablab Bean, Chilli and Tomato. But we submit
the results of the groundnut predominantly. The accuracy of our
algorithm and method is almost 93%. This will again pioneer a kind of
green revolution in the field of agriculture and will be a boon to that
field.
Abstract: There are many problems associated with the World Wide
Web: getting lost in the hyperspace; the web content is still accessible only
to humans and difficulties of web administration. The solution to these
problems is the Semantic Web which is considered to be the extension
for the current web presents information in both human readable and
machine processable form. The aim of this study is to reach new
generic foundation architecture for the Semantic Web because there
is no clear architecture for it, there are four versions, but still up to
now there is no agreement for one of these versions nor is there a
clear picture for the relation between different layers and
technologies inside this architecture. This can be done depending on
the idea of previous versions as well as Gerber-s evaluation method
as a step toward an agreement for one Semantic Web architecture.
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: Educational institutions are increasingly exploring the affordances of 3D virtual worlds for instruction and research, but few studies have been done to document current practices and uses of this emerging technology. This observational survey examines the virtual presences of 170 accredited educational institutions found in one such 3D virtual world called Second Life®, created by San- Francisco based Linden Lab®. The study focuses on what educational institutions look like in this virtual environment, the types of spaces educational institutions are creating or simulating, and what types of activities are being conducted.
Abstract: Wimax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access)
is a promising technology which can offer high speed data,
voice and video service to the customer end, which is presently, dominated
by the cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies.
The performance assessment of Wimax systems is dealt with. The
biggest advantage of Broadband wireless application (BWA) over its
wired competitors is its increased capacity and ease of deployment.
The aims of this paper are to model and simulate the fixed OFDM
IEEE 802.16d physical layer under variant combinations of digital
modulation (BPSK, QPSK, and 16-QAM) over diverse combination
of fading channels (AWGN, SUIs). Stanford University Interim (SUI)
Channel serial was proposed to simulate the fixed broadband wireless
access channel environments where IEEE 802.16d is to be deployed.
It has six channel models that are grouped into three categories
according to three typical different outdoor Terrains, in order to give
a comprehensive effect of fading channels on the overall performance
of the system.
Abstract: This paper investigates the use of mobile phones and
tablets for learning purposes among university students in Saudi
Arabia. For this purpose, an extended Technology Acceptance Model
(TAM) is proposed to analyze the adoption of mobile devices and
smart phones by Saudi university students for accessing course
materials, searching the web for information related to their
discipline, sharing knowledge, conducting assignments etc.
Abstract: The development of Artificial Neural Networks
(ANNs) is usually a slow process in which the human expert has to
test several architectures until he finds the one that achieves best
results to solve a certain problem. This work presents a new
technique that uses Genetic Programming (GP) for automatically
generating ANNs. To do this, the GP algorithm had to be changed in
order to work with graph structures, so ANNs can be developed. This
technique also allows the obtaining of simplified networks that solve
the problem with a small group of neurons. In order to measure the
performance of the system and to compare the results with other
ANN development methods by means of Evolutionary Computation
(EC) techniques, several tests were performed with problems based
on some of the most used test databases. The results of those
comparisons show that the system achieves good results comparable
with the already existing techniques and, in most of the cases, they
worked better than those techniques.
Abstract: As far as the latest technological improvements are concerned, digital systems more become popular than the past. Despite this growing demand to the digital systems, content copy and attack against the digital cinema contents becomes a serious problem. To solve the above security problem, we propose “traceable watermarking using Hash functions for digital cinema system. Digital Cinema is a great application for traceable watermarking since it uses watermarking technology during content play as well as content transmission. The watermark is embedded into the randomly selected movie frames using CRC-32 techniques. CRC-32 is a Hash function. Using it, the embedding position is distributed by Hash Function so that any party cannot break off the watermarking or will not be able to change. Finally, our experimental results show that proposed DWT watermarking method using CRC-32 is much better than the convenient watermarking techniques in terms of robustness, image quality and its simple but unbreakable algorithm.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to design a portable virtual
piano. By utilizing optical fiber gloves and the virtual piano software
designed by this study, the user can play the piano anywhere at any
time. This virtual piano consists of three major parts: finger tapping
identification, hand movement and positioning identification, and
MIDI software sound effect simulation. To play the virtual piano, the
user wears optical fiber gloves and simulates piano key tapping
motions. The finger bending information detected by the optical fiber
gloves can tell when piano key tapping motions are made. Images
captured by a video camera are analyzed, hand locations and moving
directions are positioned, and the corresponding scales are found. The
system integrates finger tapping identification with information about
hand placement in relation to corresponding piano key positions, and
generates MIDI piano sound effects based on this data. This
experiment shows that the proposed method achieves an accuracy rate
of 95% for determining when a piano key is tapped.
Abstract: This paper presents an approach for repairing word order errors in English text by reordering words in a sentence and choosing the version that maximizes the number of trigram hits according to a language model. A possible way for reordering the words is to use all the permutations. The problem is that for a sentence with length N words the number of all permutations is N!. The novelty of this method concerns the use of an efficient confusion matrix technique for reordering the words. The confusion matrix technique has been designed in order to reduce the search space among permuted sentences. The limitation of search space is succeeded using the statistical inference of N-grams. The results of this technique are very interesting and prove that the number of permuted sentences can be reduced by 98,16%. For experimental purposes a test set of TOEFL sentences was used and the results show that more than 95% can be repaired using the proposed method.
Abstract: In this paper an algorithm for fast wavelength calibration of Optical Spectrum Analyzers (OSAs) using low power reference gas spectra is proposed. In existing OSAs a reference spectrum with low noise for precise detection of the reference extreme values is needed. To generate this spectrum costly hardware with high optical power is necessary. With this new wavelength calibration algorithm it is possible to use a noisy reference spectrum and therefore hardware costs can be cut. With this algorithm the reference spectrum is filtered and the key information is extracted by segmenting and finding the local minima and maxima. Afterwards slope and offset of a linear correction function for best matching the measured and theoretical spectra are found by correlating the measured with the stored minima. With this algorithm a reliable wavelength referencing of an OSA can be implemented on a microcontroller with a calculation time of less than one second.
Abstract: This article presents the implementation of several
different e/b-Learning collaborative activities, used to improve the
students learning process in an high school Polytechnic Institution. A
new learning model arises, based on a combination between face-toface
and distance leaning. Learning is now becoming centered with
the development of collaborative activities, and its actors (teachers
and students) have to be re-socialized to a new e/b-Learning
paradigm. Measuring approaches are proposed for this model and
results are presented, showing prospective correlation between
students learning success and the use of online collaborative
activities.
Abstract: Experiments were carried out at the Faculty of Food
Technology of Latvia University of Agriculture (LLU). Soft cheese
Kleo produced in Latvia was packed in a biodegradable PLA without
barrierproperties and VC999 BioPack lidding film PLA, coated with
a barrier of pure silicon oxide (SiOx) and in combination with
modified atmosphere (MAP) the influence on the shelf life was
investigated and compared with some conventional (OPP, PE/PA,
PE/OPA and Multibarrier 60) polymer film impact. Modified
atmosphere consisted of carbon dioxide CO2 (E 290) 30% and
nitrogen N2 (E 941) 70%. The analyzable samples were stored at the
temperature of +4.0±0.5 °C up to 32 days- and analyzed before
packaging and in the 0, 5th, 11th, 15th, 18th, 22nd, 25th, 29th and 32nd
day of storage. The shelf life was extended along to 32 days, good
outside appearance and lactic acid aroma was observed.
Abstract: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the
mucoadhesion and the release of nicotinamide gel formulations using
in vitro methods. An agar plate technique was used to investigate the
adhesiveness of the gels whereas a diffusion apparatus was employed
to determine the release of nicotinamide from the gels. In this
respect, 10% w/w nicotinamide gels containing bioadhesive
polymers: Carbopol 934P (0.5-2% w/w), hydroxypropylmethyl
cellulose (HPMC) (4-10% w/w), sodium carboxymethyl cellulose
(SCMC) (4-6% w/w) and methylcellulose 4000 (MC) (3-5% w/w)
were prepared. The gel formulations had pH values in the range of
7.14 - 8.17, which were considered appropriate to oral mucosa
application. In general, the rank order of pH values appeared to be
SCMC > MC4000 > HPMC > Carbopol 934P. Types and
concentrations of polymers used somewhat affected the
adhesiveness. It was found that anionic polymers (Carbopol 934 and
SCMC) adhered more firmly to the agar plate than the neutral
polymers (HPMC and MC 4000). The formulation containing 0.5%
Carbopol 934P (F1) showed the highest release rate. With the
exception of the formulation F1, the neutral polymers tended to give
higher relate rates than the anionic polymers. For oral tissue
treatment, the optimum has to be balanced between the residence
time (adhesiveness) of the formulations and the release rate of the
drug. The formulations containing the anionic polymers: Carbopol
934P or SCMC possessed suitable physical properties (appearance,
pH and viscosity). In addition, for anionic polymer formulations,
justifiable mucoadhesive properties and reasonable release rates of
nicotinamide were achieved. Accordingly, these gel formulations
may be applied for the treatment of oral mucosal lesions.
Abstract: The disaster from functional gastrointestinal disorders has detrimental impact on the quality of life of the effected population and imposes a tremendous social and economic burden. There are, however, rare diagnostic methods for the functional gastrointestinal disorders. Our research group identified recently that the gastrointestinal tract well in the patients with the functional gastrointestinal disorders becomes more rigid than healthy people when palpating the abdominal regions overlaying the gastrointestinal tract. Objective of current study is, therefore, identify feasibility of a diagnostic system for the functional gastrointestinal disorders based on ultrasound technique, which can quantify the characteristics above. Two-dimensional finite difference (FD) models (one normal and two rigid model) were developed to analyze the reflective characteristic (displacement) on each soft-tissue layer responded after application of ultrasound signals. The FD analysis was then based on elastic ultrasound theory. Validation of the model was performed via comparison of the characteristic of the ultrasonic responses predicted by FD analysis with that determined from the actual specimens for the normal and rigid conditions. Based on the results from FD analysis, ultrasound system for diagnosis of the functional gastrointestinal disorders was developed and clinically tested via application of it to 40 human subjects with/without functional gastrointestinal disorders who were assigned to Normal and Patient Groups. The FD models were favorably validated. The results from FD analysis showed that the maximum displacement amplitude in the rigid models (0.12 and 0.16) at the interface between the fat and muscle layers was explicitly less than that in the normal model (0.29). The results from actual specimens showed that the maximum amplitude of the ultrasonic reflective signal in the rigid models (0.2±0.1Vp-p) at the interface between the fat and muscle layers was explicitly higher than that in the normal model (0.1±0.2 Vp-p). Clinical tests using our customized ultrasound system showed that the maximum amplitudes of the ultrasonic reflective signals near to the gastrointestinal tract well for the patient group (2.6±0.3 Vp-p) were generally higher than those in normal group (0.1±0.2 Vp-p). Here, maximum reflective signals was appeared at 20mm depth approximately from abdominal skin for all human subjects, corresponding to the location of the boundary layer close to gastrointestinal tract well. These findings suggest that our customized ultrasound system using the ultrasonic reflective signal may be helpful to the diagnosis of the functional gastrointestinal disorders.
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: In the package design industry, there are a lot of tacit knowledge resided within each designer. The objectives are to capture them and compile it to be used as a teaching resource and to create a video clip of package design process as well as to evaluate its quality and learning effectiveness. Interview were used as a technique for capturing knowledge in brand design concept, differentiation, recognition, rank of recognition factor, consumer survey, knowledge about marketing, research, graphic design, the effect of color, and law and regulation. Video clip about package design were created. The clip consisted of both the speech and clip of actual process. The quality of the video in term of media was ranked as good while the content was ranked as excellent. The students- score on post-test was significantly greater than that of pretest (p>0.001).