Abstract: Developing a nation geared by the principle of
sustainable development has been one of the piers in moulding a
greater nation for Malaysia since its independence. This is seen by
the act of joining the United Nations in 1957, just a month after
gaining their independence. The United Nations is an international
organization that aims to unite the nations worldwide based on
justice, human dignity and human well-being. Malaysia has
established a local body called the United Nations Malaysia which
collaborates with the government to accomplish the aim of
supporting sustainable development in Malaysia. Agenda 21 is an
international document produced from the Earth Summit providing
guidelines of implementing sustainable development globally,
nationally and locally. Initiatives of applying Agenda 21 in Malaysia
have been taken by the government and non-profit organizations to
expose issues regarding sustainable development and providing
environmental education to the community to increase awareness
towards environmental protection.
Abstract: The lack of security obstructs a large scale de- ployment of the multicast communication model. There- fore, a host of research works have been achieved in order to deal with several issues relating to securing the multicast, such as confidentiality, authentication, non-repudiation, in- tegrity and access control. Many applications require au- thenticating the source of the received traffic, such as broadcasting stock quotes and videoconferencing and hence source authentication is a required component in the whole multicast security architecture. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient source au- thentication protocol which guarantees non-repudiation for multicast flows, and tolerates packet loss. We have simu- lated our protocol using NS-2, and the simulation results show that the protocol allows to achieve improvements over protocols fitting into the same category.
Abstract: Number Link is a Japanese logic puzzle where pairs of same numbers are connected using lines. Number Link can be regarded as a dynamic multiple travelers, multiple entries and exits maze, where the walls and passages are dynamically changing as the travelers move. In this paper, we apply the Tremaux’s algorithm to solve Number Link puzzles of size 8x8, 10x10 and 15x20. The algorithm works well and produces a solution for puzzles of size 8x8 and 10x10. However, solving a puzzle of size 15x20 requires high computer processing power and is time consuming.
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: This research studied recycled waste by the Recyclable Material Bank Project of 4 universities in the central region of Thailand for the evaluation of reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared with landfilling activity during July 2012 to June 2013. The results showed that the projects collected total amount of recyclable wastes of about 911,984.80 kilograms. Office paper had the largest amount among these recycled wastes (50.68% of total recycled waste). Groups of recycled waste can be prioritized from high to low according to their amount as paper, plastic, glass, mixed recyclables, and metal, respectively. The project reduced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to about 2814.969 metric tons of carbon dioxide. The most significant recycled waste that affects the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is office paper which is 70.16% of total reduced greenhouse gasses emission. According to amount of reduced greenhouse gasses emission, groups of recycled waste can be prioritized from high to low significances as paper, plastic, metals, mixed recyclables, and glass, respectively.
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: This paper presents an ESN-based Arabic phoneme
recognition system trained with supervised, forced and combined
supervised/forced supervised learning algorithms. Mel-Frequency
Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs) and Linear Predictive Code (LPC)
techniques are used and compared as the input feature extraction
technique. The system is evaluated using 6 speakers from the King
Abdulaziz Arabic Phonetics Database (KAPD) for Saudi Arabia
dialectic and 34 speakers from the Center for Spoken Language
Understanding (CSLU2002) database of speakers with different
dialectics from 12 Arabic countries. Results for the KAPD and
CSLU2002 Arabic databases show phoneme recognition
performances of 72.31% and 38.20% respectively.
Abstract: Surface sediment samples were collected from the
Canon River mouth, Taiwan and analyzed for polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons (PAHs). Total PAHs concentrations varied from 337 to
1,252 ng/g dry weight, with a mean concentration of 827 ng/g dry
weight. The spatial distribution of PAHs reveals that the PAHs
concentration is relatively high in the river mouth region, and
gradually diminishes toward the harbor region. Diagnostic ratios
showed that the possible source of PAHs in the Canon River mouth
could be petroleum combustion. The toxic equivalent concentrations
(TEQcarc) of PAHs varied from 47 to 112 ng TEQ/g dry weight. Higher
total TEQcarc values were found in the river mouth region. As
compared with the US Sediment Quality Guidelines (SQGs), the
observed levels of PAHs at Canon River mouth were lower than the
effects range low (ERL), and would probably not exert adverse
biological effects.
Abstract: The paper is concerned with the state examination as
well as the problems during the post surgical (orthopedic)
rehabilitation of the knee and ankle joint. An observation of the
current appliances for a passive rehabilitation devices is presented.
The major necessary and basic features of the intelligent
rehabilitation devices are considered. An approach for a new
intelligent appliance is suggested. The main advantages of the device
are: both active as well as passive rehabilitation of the patient based
on the human - patient reactions and a real time feedback. The basic
components: controller; electrical motor; encoder, force – torque
sensor are discussed in details. The main modes of operation of the
device are considered.
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: The problem of robust fuzzy control for a class of
nonlinear fuzzy impulsive singular perturbed systems with
time-varying delay is investigated by employing Lyapunov functions.
The nonlinear delay system is built based on the well-known T–S
fuzzy model. The so-called parallel distributed compensation idea is
employed to design the state feedback controller. Sufficient conditions
for global exponential stability of the closed-loop system are derived
in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be easily
solved by LMI technique. Some simulations illustrate the effectiveness
of the proposed method.
Abstract: The 15-a-side Fiji rugby team trains well in preparations for any rugby competition but rarely performs to expectations. In order to help the Fiji local based rugby players to identify some key basic areas in improving their performance, a series of workshops were conducted to assess their nutritional status and dietary habits in relation to energy demand during rugby matches. The nutrition workshop included the administration of questionnaires to 19 local based rugby players, requesting the following information: usual food intakes, training camp food intakes, carbohydrate loading, pre-game meals and post-game meals. The study revealed that poor eating habits of the players resulted in the low carbohydrate intake, which may have contributed to increase levels of fatigue leading to loss of stamina even before the second half of the game. It appears that the diet of most 15-a-side players does not provide enough energy to enable them to last the full eightyminutes of the game.
Abstract: This paper presents a method for the detection of OD in the retina which takes advantage of the powerful preprocessing techniques such as the contrast enhancement, Gabor wavelet transform for vessel segmentation, mathematical morphology and Earth Mover-s distance (EMD) as the matching process. The OD detection algorithm is based on matching the expected directional pattern of the retinal blood vessels. Vessel segmentation method produces segmentations by classifying each image pixel as vessel or nonvessel, based on the pixel-s feature vector. Feature vectors are composed of the pixel-s intensity and 2D Gabor wavelet transform responses taken at multiple scales. A simple matched filter is proposed to roughly match the direction of the vessels at the OD vicinity using the EMD. The minimum distance provides an estimate of the OD center coordinates. The method-s performance is evaluated on publicly available DRIVE and STARE databases. On the DRIVE database the OD center was detected correctly in all of the 40 images (100%) and on the STARE database the OD was detected correctly in 76 out of the 81 images, even in rather difficult pathological situations.
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: The building of a factory can be a strategic investment
owing to its long service life. An evaluation that only focuses, for
example, on payments for the building, the technical equipment of
the factory, and the personnel for the enterprise is – considering the
complexity of the system factory – not sufficient for this long-term
view. The success of an investment is secured, among other things,
by the attainment of nonmonetary goals, too, like transformability.
Such aspects are not considered in traditional investment calculations
like the net present value method. This paper closes this gap with the
enhanced economic evaluation (EWR) for factory planning. The
procedure and the first results of an application in a project are
presented.
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: In this paper, a mathematical model for data object replication in ad hoc networks is formulated. The derived model is general, flexible and adaptable to cater for various applications in ad hoc networks. We propose a game theoretical technique in which players (mobile hosts) continuously compete in a non-cooperative environment to improve data accessibility by replicating data objects. The technique incorporates the access frequency from mobile hosts to each data object, the status of the network connectivity, and communication costs. The proposed technique is extensively evaluated against four well-known ad hoc network replica allocation methods. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms the four techniques in both the execution time and solution quality
Abstract: Selected Mapping (SLM) is a PAPR reduction technique, which converts the OFDM signal into several independent signals by multiplication with the phase sequence set and transmits one of the signals with lowest PAPR. But it requires the index of the selected signal i.e. side information (SI) to be transmitted with each OFDM symbol. The PAPR reduction capability of the SLM scheme depends on the selection of phase sequence set. In this paper, we have proposed a new phase sequence set generation scheme based on M-ary chaotic sequence and a mapping scheme to map quaternary data to concentric circle constellation (CCC) is used. It is shown that this method does not require SI and provides better SER performance with good PAPR reduction capability as compared to existing SLMOFDM methods.
Abstract: A novel physico-chemical route to produce few layer graphene nanoribbons with atomically smooth edges is reported, via acid treatment (H2SO4:HNO3) followed by characteristic thermal shock processes involving extremely cold substances. Samples were studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. This method demonstrates the importance of having the nanotubes open ended for an efficient uniform unzipping along the nanotube axis. The average dimensions of these nanoribbons are approximately ca. 210 nm wide and consist of few layers, as observed by transmission electron microscopy. The produced nanoribbons exhibit different chiralities, as observed by high resolution transmission electron microscopy. This method is able to provide graphene nanoribbons with atomically smooth edges which could be used in various applications including sensors, gas adsorption materials, composite fillers, among others.