Abstract: We constructed a method of noise reduction for
JPEG-compressed image based on Bayesian inference using the
maximizer of the posterior marginal (MPM) estimate. In this method,
we tried the MPM estimate using two kinds of likelihood, both of
which enhance grayscale images converted into the JPEG-compressed
image through the lossy JPEG image compression. One is the
deterministic model of the likelihood and the other is the probabilistic
one expressed by the Gaussian distribution. Then, using the Monte
Carlo simulation for grayscale images, such as the 256-grayscale
standard image “Lena" with 256 × 256 pixels, we examined the
performance of the MPM estimate based on the performance measure
using the mean square error. We clarified that the MPM estimate via
the Gaussian probabilistic model of the likelihood is effective for
reducing noises, such as the blocking artifacts and the mosquito noise,
if we set parameters appropriately. On the other hand, we found that
the MPM estimate via the deterministic model of the likelihood is not
effective for noise reduction due to the low acceptance ratio of the
Metropolis algorithm.
Abstract: Construction project control attempts to obtain real-time information and effectively enhance dynamic control and management via information sharing and analysis among project participants to eliminate construction conflicts and project delays. However, survey results for Taiwan indicate that construction commercial project management software is not widely accepted for subcontractors and suppliers. To solve the project communications problems among participants, this study presents a novel system called the Construction Dynamic Teams Communication Management (Con-DTCM) system for small-to-medium sized subcontractors and suppliers in Taiwanese Construction industry, and demonstrates that the Con-DTCM system responds to the most recent project information efficiently and enhances management of project teams (general contractor, suppliers and subcontractors) through web-based environment. Web-based technology effectively enhances information sharing during construction project management, and generates cost savings via the Internet. The main unique characteristic of the proposed Con-DTCM system is extremely user friendly and easily design compared with current commercial project management applications. The Con-DTCM system is applied to a case study of construction of a building project in Taiwan to confirm the proposed methodology and demonstrate the effectiveness of information sharing during the construction phase. The advantages of the Con-DTCM system are in improving project control and management efficiency for general contractors, and in providing dynamic project tracking and management, which enables subcontractors and suppliers to acquire the most recent project-related information. Furthermore, this study presents and implements a generic system architecture.
Abstract: The comparative analysis of different taxonomic
groups of microorganisms isolated from dark chernozem soils under
different agricultures (alfalfa, melilot, sainfoin, soybean, rapeseed) at
Almaty region of Kazakhstan was conducted. It was shown that the
greatest number of micromycetes was typical to the soil planted with
alfalfa and canola. Species diversity of micromycetes markedly
decreases as it approaches the surface of the root, so that the species
composition in the rhizosphere is much more uniform than in the
virgin soil. Promising strains of microscopic fungi and yeast with
plant growth-promoting activity to agricultures were selected. Among
the selected fungi there are representatives of Penicillium bilaiae,
Trichoderma koningii, Fusarium equiseti, Aspergillus ustus. The
highest rates of growth and development of seedlings of plants
observed under the influence of yeasts Aureobasidium pullulans,
Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, Metschnikovia pulcherrima. Using
molecular - genetic techniques confirmation of the identification
results of selected micromycetes was conducted.
Abstract: In this paper the optimal control strategy for
Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) based drive system
is presented. The designed full optimal control is available for speed
operating range up to base speed. The optimal voltage space-vector
assures input energy reduction and stator loss minimization,
maintaining the output energy in the same limits with the
conventional PMSM electrical drive. The optimal control with three
components is based on the energetically criteria and it is applicable
in numerical version, being a nonrecursive solution. The simulation
results confirm the increased efficiency of the optimal PMSM drive.
The properties of the optimal voltage space vector are shown.
Abstract: The main issue of interest here is whether individuals
who differ in arithmetical reasoning ability and levels of imagery ability display different brain activity during the conduct of mental
arithmetical reasoning tasks. This was a case study of four
participants who represented four extreme combinations of Maths –Imagery abilities: ie., low-low, high-high, high-low, low-high respectively. As the Ps performed a series of 60 arithmetical reasoning tasks, 128-channel EEG recordings were taken and the
pre-response interval subsequently analysed using EGI GeosourceTM
software. The P who was high in both imagery and maths ability
showed peak activity prior to response in BA7 (superior parietal cortex) but other Ps did not show peak activity in this region. The
results are considered in terms of the diverse routes that may be employed by individuals during the conduct of arithmetical reasoning
tasks and the possible implications of this for mathematics education.
Abstract: This paper presents a technique for diagnosis of the abdominal aorta aneurysm in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. First, our technique is designed to segment the aorta image in MRI images. This is a required step to determine the volume of aorta image which is the important step for diagnosis of the abdominal aorta aneurysm. Our proposed technique can detect the volume of aorta in MRI images using a new external energy for snakes model. The new external energy for snakes model is calculated from Law-s texture. The new external energy can increase the capture range of snakes model efficiently more than the old external energy of snakes models. Second, our technique is designed to diagnose the abdominal aorta aneurysm by Bayesian classifier which is classification models based on statistical theory. The feature for data classification of abdominal aorta aneurysm was derived from the contour of aorta images which was a result from segmenting of our snakes model, i.e., area, perimeter and compactness. We also compare the proposed technique with the traditional snakes model. In our experiment results, 30 images are trained, 20 images are tested and compared with expert opinion. The experimental results show that our technique is able to provide more accurate results than 95%.
Abstract: Broccoli has been widely recognized as a wealthy
vegetable which contains multiple nutrients with potent anti-cancer
properties. Lamb’s lettuce has been used as food for many centuries
but only recently became commercially available and literature is
therefore exiguous concerning these vegetables. The aim of this work
was to evaluate the influence of the extraction conditions on the yield
of phenolic compounds and the corresponding antioxidant capacity of
broccoli and lamb’s lettuce. The results indicate that lamb’s lettuce,
compared to broccoli, contains simultaneously a large amount of total
polyphenols as well as high antioxidant activity. It is clearly
demonstrated that extraction solvent significantly influences the
antioxidant activity. Methanol is the solvent that can globally
maximize the antioxidant extraction yield. The results presented
herein prove lamb’s lettuce as a very interesting source of
polyphenols, and thus a potential health-promoting food.
Abstract: A virtualized and virtual approach is presented on
academically preparing students to successfully engage at a strategic
perspective to understand those concerns and measures that are both
structured and not structured in the area of cyber security and
information assurance. The Master of Science in Cyber Security and
Information Assurance (MSCSIA) is a professional degree for those
who endeavor through technical and managerial measures to ensure
the security, confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, control,
availability and utility of the world-s computing and information
systems infrastructure. The National University Cyber Security and
Information Assurance program is offered as a Master-s degree. The
emphasis of the MSCSIA program uniquely includes hands-on
academic instruction using virtual computers. This past year, 2011,
the NU facility has become fully operational using system
architecture to provide a Virtual Education Laboratory (VEL)
accessible to both onsite and online students. The first student cohort
completed their MSCSIA training this past March 2, 2012 after
fulfilling 12 courses, for a total of 54 units of college credits. The
rapid pace scheduling of one course per month is immensely
challenging, perpetually changing, and virtually multifaceted. This
paper analyses these descriptive terms in consideration of those
globalization penetration breaches as present in today-s world of
cyber security. In addition, we present current NU practices to
mitigate risks.
Abstract: To determine if the murine insulinoma, β-TC-6, is a
suitable substitute for primary pancreatic β-cells in the study of β-
cell functional heterogeneity, we used three distinct functional assays
to ascertain the cell line-s response to glucose or a glucose analog.
These assays include: (i) a 2-NBDG uptake assay; (ii) a calcium
influx assay, and; (iii) a quinacrine secretion assay. We show that a
population of β-TC-6 cells endocytoses the glucose analog, 2-
NBDG, at different rates, has non-uniform intracellular calcium ion
concentrations and releases quinacrine at different rates when
challenged with glucose. We also measured the Km for β-TC-6
glucose uptake to be 46.9 mM and the Vm to be 8.36 x 10-5
mmole/million cells/min. These data suggest that β-TC-6 might be
used as an alternative to primary pancreatic β-cells for the study of
glucose-dependent β-cell functional heterogeneity.
Abstract: For scores of years now, several microfinance
organizations, non governmental organizations and other welfare
organizations have, with a view to aiding the progress of
communities rooted in poverty have been focusing on creating
microentrepreneurs, besides taking several other measures. In recent
times, business corporations have joined forces to combat poverty by
taking up microenterprise development. Hindustan Unilever Limited
(HUL), the Indian subsidiary of Unilever Limited exemplifies this
through its Project Shakti. The company through the Project creates
rural women entrepreneurs by making them direct to home sales
distributors of its products in villages that have thus far been ignored
by multinational corporations. The members participating in Project
Shakti are largely self help group members. The paper focuses on
assessing the impact made by the company on the members engaged
in Project Shakti. The analysis involves use of quantitative methods
to study the effect of Project Shakti on those self help group
members engaged in Project Shakti and those not engaged with
Project Shakti. Path analysis has been used to study the impact made
on those members engaged in Project Shakti. Significant differences
were observed on fronts of entrepreneurial development, economic
empowerment and social empowerment between members associated
with Project Shakti and those not associated with Project Shakti.
Path analysis demonstrated that involvement in Project Shakti led to
entrepreneurial development resulting in economic empowerment
that in turn led to social empowerment and that these three elements
independently induced a feeling of privilege in the women for being
associated with the Project.
Abstract: Hidden failure in a protection system has been
recognized as one of the main reasons which may cause to a power
system instability leading to a system cascading collapse. This paper
presents a computationally systematic approach used to obtain the
estimated average probability of a system cascading collapse by
considering the effect of probability hidden failure in a protection
system. The estimated average probability of a system cascading
collapse is then used to determine the severe loading condition
contributing to the higher risk of critical system cascading collapse.
This information is essential to the system utility since it will assist
the operator to determine the highest point of increased system
loading condition prior to the event of critical system cascading
collapse.
Abstract: Thermoacoustic instabilities in combustors have
remained a topic of investigation for over a few decades due to the
challenges it posses to the operation of low emission gas turbines.
For combustors burning liquid fuel, understanding the cause-andeffect
relationship between spray combustion dynamics and
thermoacoustic oscillations is imperative for the successful
development of any control methodology for its mitigation. The
paper presents some very unique operating characteristics of a
kerosene-fueled diffusion type combustor undergoing limit-cycle
oscillations. Combustor stability limits were mapped using three
different-sized injectors. The results show that combustor instability
depends on the characteristics of the fuel spray. A simple analytic
analysis is also reported in support of a plausible explanation for the
unique combustor behavior. The study indicates that high amplitude
acoustic pressure in the combustor may cause secondary breakdown
of fuel droplets resulting in premixed pre-vaporized type burning of
the diffusion type combustor.
Abstract: Quality evaluation of urban environment is an integral
part of efficient urban environment planning and management. The
development of fuzzy set theory (FST) and the introduction of FST
to the urban study field attempts to incorporate the gradual variation
and avoid loss of information. Urban environmental quality
assessment pertain to interpretation and forecast of the urban
environmental quality according to the national regulation about the
permitted content of contamination for the sake of protecting human
health and subsistence environment . A strategic motor vehicle
control strategy has to be proposed to mitigate the air pollution in the
city. There is no well defined guideline for the assessment of urban
air pollution and no systematic study has been reported so far for
Indian cities. The methodology adopted may be useful in similar
cities of India. Remote sensing & GIS can play significant role in
mapping air pollution.
Abstract: Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a widely used
method for material identification for laboratory and industrial applications.
While standard spectrometers only allow measurements at
one sampling point at a time, NIR Spectral Imaging techniques can
measure, in real-time, both the size and shape of an object as well as
identify the material the object is made of. The online classification
and sorting of recovered paper with NIR Spectral Imaging (SI)
is used with success in the paper recycling industry throughout
Europe. Recently, the globalisation of the recycling material streams
caused that water-based flexographic-printed newspapers mainly from
UK and Italy appear also in central Europe. These flexo-printed
newspapers are not sufficiently de-inkable with the standard de-inking
process originally developed for offset-printed paper. This de-inking
process removes the ink from recovered paper and is the fundamental
processing step to produce high-quality paper from recovered paper.
Thus, the flexo-printed newspapers are a growing problem for the
recycling industry as they reduce the quality of the produced paper
if their amount exceeds a certain limit within the recovered paper
material.
This paper presents the results of a research project for the
development of an automated entry inspection system for recovered
paper that was jointly conducted by CTR AG (Austria) and PTS
Papiertechnische Stiftung (Germany). Within the project an NIR
SI prototype for the identification of flexo-printed newspaper has
been developed. The prototype can identify and sort out flexoprinted
newspapers in real-time and achieves a detection accuracy
for flexo-printed newspaper of over 95%. NIR SI, the technology the
prototype is based on, allows the development of inspection systems
for incoming goods in a paper production facility as well as industrial
sorting systems for recovered paper in the recycling industry in the
near future.
Abstract: The paper deals with an analysis of visibility records collected from 210 European airports to obtain a realistic estimation of the availability of Free Space Optical (FSO) data links. Commercially available optical links usually operate in the 850nm waveband. Thus the influence of the atmosphere on the optical beam and on the visible light is similar. Long-term visibility records represent an invaluable source of data for the estimation of the quality of service of FSO links. The model used characterizes both the statistical properties of fade depths and the statistical properties of individual fade durations. Results are presented for Italy, France, and Germany.
Abstract: Self-organizing map (SOM) is a well known data reduction technique used in data mining. Data visualization can reveal structure in data sets that is otherwise hard to detect from raw data alone. However, interpretation through visual inspection is prone to errors and can be very tedious. There are several techniques for the automatic detection of clusters of code vectors found by SOMs, but they generally do not take into account the distribution of code vectors; this may lead to unsatisfactory clustering and poor definition of cluster boundaries, particularly where the density of data points is low. In this paper, we propose the use of a generic particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for finding cluster boundaries directly from the code vectors obtained from SOMs. The application of our method to unlabeled call data for a mobile phone operator demonstrates its feasibility. PSO algorithm utilizes U-matrix of SOMs to determine cluster boundaries; the results of this novel automatic method correspond well to boundary detection through visual inspection of code vectors and k-means algorithm.
Abstract: Particulate reinforced metal matrix composites
(MMCs) are potential materials for various applications due to their
advantageous of physical and mechanical properties. This paper
presents a study on the performance of stir cast Al2O3 SiC reinforced
metal matrix composite materials. The results indicate that the
composite materials exhibit improved physical and mechanical
properties, such as, low coefficient of thermal expansion, high
ultimate tensile strength, high impact strength, and hardness. It has
been found that with the increase of weight percentage of
reinforcement particles in the aluminium metal matrix, the new
material exhibits lower wear rate against abrasive wearing. Being
extremely lighter than the conventional gray cast iron material, the
Al-Al2O3 and Al-SiC composites could be potential green materials
for applications in the automobile industry, for instance, in making
car disc brake rotors.
Abstract: This paper presents an efficient algorithm for
optimization of radial distribution systems by a network
reconfiguration to balance feeder loads and eliminate overload
conditions. The system load-balancing index is used to determine the
loading conditions of the system and maximum system loading
capacity. The index value has to be minimum in the optimal network
reconfiguration of load balancing. A method based on Tabu search
algorithm, The Tabu search algorithm is employed to search for the
optimal network reconfiguration. The basic idea behind the search is
a move from a current solution to its neighborhood by effectively
utilizing a memory to provide an efficient search for optimality. It
presents low computational effort and is able to find good quality
configurations. Simulation results for a radial 69-bus system with
distributed generations and capacitors placement. The study results
show that the optimal on/off patterns of the switches can be identified
to give the best network reconfiguration involving balancing of
feeder loads while respecting all the constraints.
Abstract: A data warehouse (DW) is a system which has value and role for decision-making by querying. Queries to DW are critical regarding to their complexity and length. They often access millions of tuples, and involve joins between relations and aggregations. Materialized views are able to provide the better performance for DW queries. However, these views have maintenance cost, so materialization of all views is not possible. An important challenge of DW environment is materialized view selection because we have to realize the trade-off between performance and view maintenance. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new approach aimed to solve this challenge based on Two-Phase Optimization (2PO), which is a combination of Simulated Annealing (SA) and Iterative Improvement (II), with the use of Multiple View Processing Plan (MVPP). Our experiments show that 2PO outperform the original algorithms in terms of query processing cost and view maintenance cost.
Abstract: Game theory could be used to analyze the conflicted
issues in the field of information hiding. In this paper, 2-phase game
can be used to build the embedder-attacker system to analyze the
limits of hiding capacity of embedding algorithms: the embedder
minimizes the expected damage and the attacker maximizes it. In the
system, the embedder first consumes its resource to build embedded
units (EU) and insert the secret information into EU. Then the attacker
distributes its resource evenly to the attacked EU. The expected
equilibrium damage, which is maximum damage in value from the
point of view of the attacker and minimum from the embedder against
the attacker, is evaluated by the case when the attacker attacks a
subset from all the EU. Furthermore, the optimal equilibrium capacity
of hiding information is calculated through the optimal number of EU
with the embedded secret information. Finally, illustrative examples
of the optimal equilibrium capacity are presented.