Abstract: The paper proposes a new concept in developing
collaborative design system. The concept framework involves
applying simulation of supply chain management to collaborative
design called – 'SCM–Based Design Tool'. The system is developed
particularly to support design activities and to integrate all facilities
together. The system is aimed to increase design productivity and
creativity. Therefore, designers and customers can collaborate by the
system since conceptual design. JAG: Jewelry Art Generator based
on artificial intelligence techniques is integrated into the system.
Moreover, the proposed system can support users as decision tool
and data propagation. The system covers since raw material supply
until product delivery. Data management and sharing information are
visually supported to designers and customers via user interface. The
system is developed on Web–assisted product development
environment. The prototype system is presented for Thai jewelry
industry as a system prototype demonstration, but applicable for
other industry.
Abstract: In this paper, we present user pattern learning
algorithm based MDSS (Medical Decision support system) under
ubiquitous. Most of researches are focus on hardware system, hospital
management and whole concept of ubiquitous environment even
though it is hard to implement. Our objective of this paper is to design
a MDSS framework. It helps to patient for medical treatment and
prevention of the high risk patient (COPD, heart disease, Diabetes).
This framework consist database, CAD (Computer Aided diagnosis
support system) and CAP (computer aided user vital sign prediction
system). It can be applied to develop user pattern learning algorithm
based MDSS for homecare and silver town service. Especially this
CAD has wise decision making competency. It compares current vital
sign with user-s normal condition pattern data. In addition, the CAP
computes user vital sign prediction using past data of the patient. The
novel approach is using neural network method, wireless vital sign
acquisition devices and personal computer DB system. An intelligent
agent based MDSS will help elder people and high risk patients to
prevent sudden death and disease, the physician to get the online
access to patients- data, the plan of medication service priority (e.g.
emergency case).
Abstract: The symmetric solution set Σ sym is the set of all solutions to the linear systems Ax = b, where A is symmetric and lies between some given bounds A and A, and b lies between b and b. We present a contractor for Σ sym, which is an iterative method that starts with some initial enclosure of Σ sym (by means of a cartesian product of intervals) and sequentially makes the enclosure tighter. Our contractor is based on polyhedral approximation and solving a series of linear programs. Even though it does not converge to the optimal bounds in general, it may significantly reduce the overestimation. The efficiency is discussed by a number of numerical experiments.
Abstract: RF performance of SOI CMOS device has attracted
significant amount of interest recently. In order to improve RF
parameters, Strained Si/Relaxed Si0.8Ge0.2 investigated as a
replacement for Si technology .Enhancement of carrier mobility
associated with strain engineering makes Strained Si a promising
candidate for improving RF performance of CMOS technology.
From the simulation, the cut-off frequency is estimated to be 224
GHZ, whereas in SOI at similar bias is about 188 GHZ. Therefore,
Strained Si exhibits 19% improvement in cut-off frequency over
similar Si counterpart. In this paper, Ion/Ioff ratio is studied as one of
the key parameters in logic and digital application. Strained Si/SiGe
demonstrates better Ion/Ioff characteristic than SOI, in similar channel
length of 100 nm.Another important key analog figures of merit such
as Early Voltage (VEA) ,transconductance vs drain current (gm /Ids)
are studied. They introduce the efficiency of the devices to convert
dc power into ac frequency.
Abstract: The modern telecommunication industry demands
higher capacity networks with high data rate. Orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technique for high data
rate wireless communications at reasonable complexity in wireless
channels. OFDM has been adopted for many types of wireless
systems like wireless local area networks such as IEEE 802.11a, and
digital audio/video broadcasting (DAB/DVB). The proposed research
focuses on a concatenated coding scheme that improve the
performance of OFDM based wireless communications. It uses a
Redundant Residue Number System (RRNS) code as the outer code
and a convolutional code as the inner code. Here, a direct conversion
of analog signal to residue domain is done to reduce the conversion
complexity using sigma-delta based parallel analog-to-residue
converter. The bit error rate (BER) performances of the proposed
system under different channel conditions are investigated. These
include the effect of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN),
multipath delay spread, peak power clipping and frame start
synchronization error. The simulation results show that the proposed
RRNS-Convolutional concatenated coding (RCCC) scheme provides
significant improvement in the system performance by exploiting the
inherent properties of RRNS.
Abstract: With the implied volatility as an important factor in
financial decision-making, in particular in option pricing valuation,
and also the given fact that the pricing biases of Leland option pricing
models and the implied volatility structure for the options are related,
this study considers examining the implied adjusted volatility smile
patterns and term structures in the S&P/ASX 200 index options using
the different Leland option pricing models. The examination of the
implied adjusted volatility smiles and term structures in the
Australian index options market covers the global financial crisis in
the mid-2007. The implied adjusted volatility was found to escalate
approximately triple the rate prior the crisis.
Abstract: Small tanks, the ancient man-made rain water storage
systems, support the pheasant life and agriculture of the dry zone of
Sri Lanka. Many small tanks were abandoned with time due to
various reasons. Such tanks, rehabilitated in the recent past, were
found to be less sustainable and most of these rehabilitation
approaches have failed. The objective of this research is to assess the
impact of the rehabilitation approaches in the management of small
tanks in the Kurunegala District of Sri Lanka with respect to eight
small tanks. A Sustainability index was developed using seven
indicators representing the ability and commitment of the villagers to
maintain these tanks. The sustainability index of the eight tanks
varied between 79.2 and 47.2 out of a total score of 100. The
conclusion is that, the approaches used for tank rehabilitation have a
significant effect on the sustainability of the management of these
small tanks.
Abstract: Crucial information barely visible to the human eye is
often embedded in a series of low resolution images taken of the
same scene. Super resolution reconstruction is the process of
combining several low resolution images into a single higher
resolution image. The ideal algorithm should be fast, and should add
sharpness and details, both at edges and in regions without adding
artifacts. In this paper we propose a super resolution blind
reconstruction technique for linearly degraded images. In our
proposed technique the algorithm is divided into three parts an image
registration, wavelets based fusion and an image restoration. In this
paper three low resolution images are considered which may sub
pixels shifted, rotated, blurred or noisy, the sub pixel shifted images
are registered using affine transformation model; A wavelet based
fusion is performed and the noise is removed using soft thresolding.
Our proposed technique reduces blocking artifacts and also
smoothens the edges and it is also able to restore high frequency
details in an image. Our technique is efficient and computationally
fast having clear perspective of real time implementation.
Abstract: This study was investigated on sampling and
analyzing water quality in water reservoir & water tower installed in
two kind of residential buildings and school facilities. Data of water
quality was collected for correlation analysis with frequency of
sanitization of water reservoir through questioning managers of
building about the inspection charts recorded on equipment for water
reservoir. Statistical software packages (SPSS) were applied to the
data of two groups (cleaning frequency and water quality) for
regression analysis to determine the optimal cleaning frequency of
sanitization. The correlation coefficient (R) in this paper represented
the degree of correlation, with values of R ranging from +1 to -1.After
investigating three categories of drinking water users; this study found
that the frequency of sanitization of water reservoir significantly
influenced the water quality of drinking water. A higher frequency of
sanitization (more than four times per 1 year) implied a higher quality
of drinking water. Results indicated that sanitizing water reservoir &
water tower should at least twice annually for achieving the aim of
safety of drinking water.
Abstract: This paper reports work done to improve the modeling of complex processes when only small experimental data sets are available. Neural networks are used to capture the nonlinear underlying phenomena contained in the data set and to partly eliminate the burden of having to specify completely the structure of the model. Two different types of neural networks were used for the application of pulping problem. A three layer feed forward neural networks, using the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) methods were used in this investigation. Preconditioning is a method to improve convergence by lowering the condition number and increasing the eigenvalues clustering. The idea is to solve the modified odified problem M-1 Ax= M-1b where M is a positive-definite preconditioner that is closely related to A. We mainly focused on Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient- based training methods which originated from optimization theory, namely Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient with Fletcher-Reeves Update (PCGF), Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient with Polak-Ribiere Update (PCGP) and Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient with Powell-Beale Restarts (PCGB). The behavior of the PCG methods in the simulations proved to be robust against phenomenon such as oscillations due to large step size.
Abstract: We have measured the pressure drop and convective
heat transfer coefficient of water – based AL(25nm),AL2O3(30nm)
and CuO(50nm) Nanofluids flowing through a uniform heated
circular tube in the fully developed laminar flow regime. The
experimental results show that the data for Nanofluids friction factor
show a good agreement with analytical prediction from the Darcy's
equation for single-phase flow. After reducing the experimental
results to the form of Reynolds, Rayleigh and Nusselt numbers. The
results show the local Nusselt number and temperature have
distribution with the non-dimensional axial distance from the tube
entry. Study decided that thenNanofluid as Newtonian fluids through
the design of the linear relationship between shear stress and the rate
of stress has been the study of three chains of the Nanofluid with
different concentrations and where the AL, AL2O3 and CuO – water
ranging from (0.25 - 2.5 vol %). In addition to measuring the four
properties of the Nanofluid in practice so as to ensure the validity of
equations of properties developed by the researchers in this area and
these properties is viscosity, specific heat, and density and found that
the difference does not exceed 3.5% for the experimental equations
between them and the practical. The study also demonstrated that the
amount of the increase in heat transfer coefficient for three types of
Nano fluid is AL, AL2O3, and CuO – Water and these ratios are
respectively (45%, 32%, 25%) with insulation and without insulation
(36%, 23%, 19%), and the statement of any of the cases the best
increase in heat transfer has been proven that using insulation is
better than not using it. I have been using three types of Nano
particles and one metallic Nanoparticle and two oxide Nanoparticle
and a statement, whichever gives the best increase in heat transfer.
Abstract: In this paper, a novel approach for the multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) of complex mechatronic systems. This approach, which is a part of a global project aiming to include the MDO aspect inside an innovative design process. As a first step, the paper considers the MDO as a redesign approach which is limited to the parametric optimization. After defining and introducing the different keywords, the proposed method which is based on the V-Model which is commonly used in mechatronics.
Abstract: One of the main advantages of the LO paradigm is to
allow the availability of good quality, shareable learning material
through the Web. The effectiveness of the retrieval process requires a
formal description of the resources (metadata) that closely fits the
user-s search criteria; in spite of the huge international efforts in this
field, educational metadata schemata often fail to fulfil this
requirement. This work aims to improve the situation, by the
definition of a metadata model capturing specific didactic features of
shareable learning resources. It classifies LOs into “teacher-oriented"
and “student-oriented" categories, in order to describe the role a LO
is to play when it is integrated into the educational process. This
article describes the model and a first experimental validation process
that has been carried out in a controlled environment.
Abstract: This paper explores the effectiveness of machine
learning techniques in detecting firms that issue fraudulent financial
statements (FFS) and deals with the identification of factors
associated to FFS. To this end, a number of experiments have been
conducted using representative learning algorithms, which were
trained using a data set of 164 fraud and non-fraud Greek firms in the
recent period 2001-2002. The decision of which particular method to
choose is a complicated problem. A good alternative to choosing
only one method is to create a hybrid forecasting system
incorporating a number of possible solution methods as components
(an ensemble of classifiers). For this purpose, we have implemented
a hybrid decision support system that combines the representative
algorithms using a stacking variant methodology and achieves better
performance than any examined simple and ensemble method. To
sum up, this study indicates that the investigation of financial
information can be used in the identification of FFS and underline the
importance of financial ratios.
Abstract: Chronic conditions carry with them strong emotions
and often lead to charged relationships between patients and their
health providers and, by extension, patients and health researchers.
Persons are both autonomous and relational and a purely cognitive
model of autonomy neglects the social and relational basis of chronic
illness. Ensuring genuine informed consent in research requires a
thorough understanding of how participants perceive a study and
their reasons for participation. Surveys may not capture the
complexities of reasoning that underlies study participation.
Contradictory reasons for participation, for instance an initial claim
of altruism as rationale and a subsequent claim of personal benefit
(therapeutic misconception), affect the quality of informed consent.
Individuals apply principles through the filter of personal values and
lived experience. Authentic autonomy, and hence authentic consent
to research, occurs within the context of patients- unique life
narratives and illness experiences.
Abstract: The flash memory has many advantages such as low power consumption, strong shock resistance, fast I/O and non-volatility. And it is increasingly used in the mobile storage device. The YAFFS, one of the NAND flash file system, is widely used in the embedded device. However, the existing YAFFS takes long time to mount the file system because it scans whole spare areas in all pages of NAND flash memory. In order to solve this problem, we propose a new content-based flash file system using a mounting time reduction technique. The proposed method only scans partial spare areas of some special pages by using content-based block management. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the average mounting time by 87.2% comparing with JFFS2 and 69.9% comparing with YAFFS.
Abstract: Recent years have seen a growing trend towards the
integration of multiple information sources to support large-scale
prediction of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks in model
organisms. Despite advances in computational approaches, the
combination of multiple “omic" datasets representing the same type
of data, e.g. different gene expression datasets, has not been
rigorously studied. Furthermore, there is a need to further investigate
the inference capability of powerful approaches, such as fullyconnected
Bayesian networks, in the context of the prediction of PPI
networks. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a
Bayesian approach to integrate multiple datasets, some of which
encode the same type of “omic" data to support the identification of
PPI networks. The case study reported involved the combination of
three gene expression datasets relevant to human heart failure (HF).
In comparison with two traditional methods, Naive Bayesian and
maximum likelihood ratio approaches, the proposed technique can
accurately identify known PPI and can be applied to infer potentially
novel interactions.
Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm which
combining ant colony optimization in the dynamic
programming for solving a dynamic facility layout problem.
The problem is separated into 2 phases, static and dynamic
phase. In static phase, ant colony optimization is used to find
the best ranked of layouts for each period. Then the dynamic
programming (DP) procedure is performed in the dynamic
phase to evaluate the layout set during multi-period planning
horizon. The proposed algorithm is tested over many
problems with size ranging from 9 to 49 departments, 2 and 4
periods. The experimental results show that the proposed
method is an alternative way for the plant layout designer to
determine the layouts during multi-period planning horizon.
Abstract: There are three distinct stages in the evolution of
economic thought, namely:
1. in the first stage, the major concern was to accelerate
economic growth with increased availability of material
goods, especially in developing economies with very low
living standards, because poverty eradication meant faster
economic growth.
2. in the second stage, economists made distinction between
growth and development. Development was seen as going
beyond economic growth, and bringing certain changes in
the structure of the economy with more equitable
distribution of the benefits of growth, with the growth
coming automatic and sustained.
3. the third stage is now reached. Our concern is now with
“sustainable development", that is, development not only
for the present but also of the future.
Thus the focus changed from “sustained growth" to “sustained
development". Sustained development brings to the fore the long
term relationship between the ecology and economic development.
Since the creation of UNEP in 1972 it has worked for
development without destruction for environmentally sound and
sustained development. It was realised that the environment cannot
be viewed in a vaccum, it is not separate from development, nor is it
competing. It suggested for the integration of the environment with
development whereby ecological factors enter development planning,
socio-economic policies, cost-benefit analysis, trade, technology
transfer, waste management, educational and other specific areas.
Industrialisation has contributed to the growth of economy of
several countries. It has improved the standards of living of its people
and provided benefits to the society. It has also created in the process
great environmental problems like climate change, forest destruction
and denudation, soil erosion and desertification etc.
On the other hand, industry has provided jobs and improved the
prospects of wealth for the industrialists. The working class
communities had to simply put up with the high levels of pollution in
order to keep up their jobs and also to save their income.
There are many roots of the environmental problem. They may be
political, economic, cultural and technological conditions of the
modern society. The experts concede that industrial growth lies
somewhere close to the heart of the matter. Therefore, the objective
of this paper is not to document all roots of an environmental crisis
but rather to discuss the effects of industrial growth and
development.
We have come to the conclusion that although public intervention
is often unnecessary to ensure that perfectly competitive markets will
function in society-s best interests, such intervention is necessary
when firms or consumers pollute.
Abstract: Identifying the nature of protein-nanoparticle
interactions and favored binding sites is an important issue in
functional characterization of biomolecules and their physiological
responses. Herein, interaction of silver nanoparticles with lysozyme
as a model protein has been monitored via fluorescence spectroscopy.
Formation of complex between the biomolecule and silver
nanoparticles (AgNPs) induced a steady state reduction in the
fluorescence intensity of protein at different concentrations of
nanoparticles. Tryptophan fluorescence quenching spectra suggested
that silver nanoparticles act as a foreign quencher, approaching the
protein via this residue. Analysis of the Stern-Volmer plot showed
quenching constant of 3.73 μM−1. Moreover, a single binding site in
lysozyme is suggested to play role during interaction with AgNPs,
having low affinity of binding compared to gold nanoparticles.
Unfolding studies of lysozyme showed that complex of lysozyme-
AgNPs has not undergone structural perturbations compared to the
bare protein. Results of this effort will pave the way for utilization of
sensitive spectroscopic techniques for rational design of
nanobiomaterials in biomedical applications.