Abstract: We introduce a new interactive 3D simulator of ocular motion and expressions suitable for: (1) character animation applications to game design, film production, HCI (Human Computer Interface), conversational animated agents, and virtual reality; (2) medical applications (ophthalmic neurological and muscular pathologies: research and education); and (3) real time simulation of unconscious cognitive and emotional responses (for use, e.g., in psychological research). Using state-of-the-art computer animation technology we have modeled and rigged a physiologically accurate 3D model of the eyes, eyelids, and eyebrow regions and we have 'optimized' it for use with an interactive and web deliverable platform. In addition, we have realized a prototype device for realtime control of eye motions and expressions, including unconsciously produced expressions, for application as in (1), (2), and (3) above. The 3D simulator of eye motion and ocular expression is, to our knowledge, the most advanced/realistic available so far for applications in character animation and medical pedagogy.
Abstract: Achieving success is a highly critical issue for the
companies to survive in a competitive business environment. The
construction industry is also an area where there is strong
competition due to a large number of construction contractors. There
have been many factors such as qualified employees, quality
workmanship and financial management that can lead to company
success in the construction industry. The aim of this study was to
investigate the critical factors leading to construction company
success. Within this context, a survey was carried out among 40
Turkish construction companies which are located in the Northwest
region of Turkey. In this survey, top-level managers and owners of
the companies were interviewed. The interviews took place over a
five month period between January and May 2007. Finally, the
ranking of the critical success factors has been determined by using
the Simple Multi Attribute Rating Technique (SMART). Based on
the results, business management, financial conditions and
owner/manager characteristics were determined as the most
important factors to company success.
Abstract: The use of wind energy for electricity generation is
growing rapidly across the world and in Portugal. However, the
geographical characteristics of the country along with the average
wind regime and with the environmental restrictions imposed to these
projects create limitations to the exploit of the onshore wind
resource. The best onshore wind spots are already committed and the
possibility of offshore wind farms in the Portuguese cost is now
being considered. This paper aims to make a contribution to the
evaluation of offshore wind power projects in Portugal. The technical
restrictions are addressed and the strategic, environmental and
financial interest of the project is analysed from the private company
and public points of view. The results suggest that additional support
schemes are required to ensure private investors interest for these
projects. Assuming an approach of direct substitution of energy
sources for electricity generation, the avoided CO2 equivalent
emissions for an offshore wind power project were quantified. Based
on the conclusions, future research is proposed to address the
environmental and social impacts of these projects.
Abstract: Repeated additions of the unfertilized bacteria led to
increase the activity of Nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the root zone with
drip irrigation system compared to traditional manual vaccination to
increase the proportion of Nitrogen from 29% to 64%, and the
efficiency of adding Nitrogen fertilizer did not exceed 9.5% while
dropped to 4%, due to the amount of fertilizer added was not exceed
20kg N/h, and the second was the existence of a large amount of
available Nitrogen in the soil by fixation, while the efficiency of
irrigation system between 2.08 to 2.26 kg/m3.
Abstract: This paper presents the experimental results of
comparison between leakage currents and discharge currents. The leakage currents were obtained on polluted porcelain insulator.
Whereas, the discharge currents were obtained on lightly artificial
polluted porcelain specimen. The conducted measurements were
leakage current or discharge current and applied voltage. The insulator or specimen was in a hermetically sealed chamber, and the
current waveforms were analyzed using FFT.
The result indicated that the leakage current (LC) on low RH condition the fifth harmonic would be visible, and followed by the
seventh harmonic. The insulator had capacitive property. Otherwise,
on 99% relative humidity, the fifth harmonic would also be visible,
and the phase angle reached up to 12.2 degree. Whereas, on discharge current, the third harmonic would be visible, and followed
by fifth harmonic. The third harmonic would increase as pressure reduced. On this condition, the specimen had a non-linear characteristics
Abstract: Flow-shop scheduling problem (FSP) deals with the
scheduling of a set of jobs that visit a set of machines in the same
order. The FSP is NP-hard, which means that an efficient algorithm
for solving the problem to optimality is unavailable. To meet the
requirements on time and to minimize the make-span performance of
large permutation flow-shop scheduling problems in which there are
sequence dependent setup times on each machine, this paper
develops one hybrid genetic algorithms (HGA). Proposed HGA
apply a modified approach to generate population of initial
chromosomes and also use an improved heuristic called the iterated
swap procedure to improve initial solutions. Also the author uses
three genetic operators to make good new offspring. The results are
compared to some recently developed heuristics and computational
experimental results show that the proposed HGA performs very
competitively with respect to accuracy and efficiency of solution.
Abstract: For positive integer s and t, the Ramsey number R(s, t)
is the least positive integer n such that for every graph G of order n, either G contains Ks as a subgraph or G contains Kt as a subgraph.
We construct the circulant graphs and use them to obtain lower bounds of some small Ramsey numbers.
Abstract: The fluorescent pseudomonad strain R81 is a root
colonizing rhizobacteria which promotes the growth of many plants
by various mechanisms. Its broth containing siderophore (ironchelating
compound) and 2,4- diacetyl phloroglucinol (DAPG) is
used for preparing bioinoculant formulations for agronomical
applications. Glycerol was found to be the best carbon source for
improved biomass production. Splitting of nitrogen source to NH4Cl
and urea had a stabilizing effect on pH during batch cultivation. Ltryptophan
at 0.5 % in the medium increased the siderophore
production to 850 mg/l. During batch cultivation of the strain in a
bioreactor, a maximum of 4 g/l of dry cell mass, 1.8 g/l of
siderophore and 20 mg/l of DAPG was achieved when glycerol was
15 g/l and C/N ratio was maintained at 12.5. In case of intermittent
feeding of fresh medium during fed-batch cultivation, the dry cell
mass was increased to 25 g/l with improved production of DAPG to
70 mg/l.
Abstract: Dengue fever has become a major concern for health
authorities all over the world particularly in the tropical countries.
These countries, in particular are experiencing the most worrying
outbreak of dengue fever (DF) and dengue haemorrhagic fever
(DHF). The DF and DHF epidemics, thus, have become the main
causes of hospital admissions and deaths in Malaysia. This paper,
therefore, attempts to examine the environmental factors that may
influence the recent dengue outbreak. The aim of this study is twofold,
firstly is to establish a statistical model to describe the
relationship between the number of dengue cases and a range of
explanatory variables and secondly, to identify the lag operator for
explanatory variables which affect the dengue incidence the most.
The explanatory variables involved include the level of cloud cover,
percentage of relative humidity, amount of rainfall, maximum
temperature, minimum temperature and wind speed. The Poisson and
Negative Binomial regression analyses were used in this study. The
results of the analyses on the 915 observations (daily data taken from
July 2006 to Dec 2008), reveal that the climatic factors comprising of
daily temperature and wind speed were found to significantly
influence the incidence of dengue fever after 2 and 3 weeks of their
occurrences. The effect of humidity, on the other hand, appears to be
significant only after 2 weeks.
Abstract: This study aims to assess the vulnerability and risk of
the coastal areas of Taijiang to abnormal oceanographic phenomena.
In addition, this study aims to investigate and collect data regarding
the disaster losses, land utilization, and other social, economic, and
environmental issues in these coastal areas to construct a coastal
vulnerability and risk map based on the obtained climate-change risk
assessment results. Considering the indexes of the three coastal
vulnerability dimensions, namely, man-made facilities, environmental
geography, and social economy, this study adopted the equal
weighting process and Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze the
vulnerability of these coastal areas to disasters caused by climatic
changes. Among the areas with high coastal vulnerability to climatic
changes, three towns had the highest coastal vulnerability and four had
the highest relative vulnerability. Areas with lower disaster risks were
found to be increasingly vulnerable to disasters caused by climatic
changes as time progresses.
Abstract: Space Vector Modulation (SVM) is an optimum Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technique for an inverter used in a variable frequency drive applications. It is computationally rigorous and hence limits the inverter switching frequency. Increase in switching frequency can be achieved using Neural Network (NN) based SVM, implemented on application specific chips. This paper proposes a neural network based SVM technique for a Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). The network proposed is independent of switching frequency. Different architectures are investigated keeping the total number of neurons constant. The performance of the inverter is compared for various switching frequencies for different architectures of NN based SVM. From the results obtained, the network with minimum resource and appropriate word length is identified. The bit precision required for this application is identified. The network with 8-bit precision is implemented in the IC XCV 400 and the results are presented. The performance of NN based general purpose SVM with higher bit precision is discussed.
Abstract: In this paper, many techniques for blind identification of moving average (MA) process are presented. These methods utilize third- and fourth-order cumulants of the noisy observations of the system output. The system is driven by an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) non-Gaussian sequence that is not observed. Two nonlinear optimization algorithms, namely the Gradient Descent and the Gauss-Newton algorithms are exposed. An algorithm based on the joint-diagonalization of the fourth-order cumulant matrices (FOSI) is also considered, as well as an improved version of the classical C(q, 0, k) algorithm based on the choice of the Best 1-D Slice of fourth-order cumulants. To illustrate the effectiveness of our methods, various simulation examples are presented.
Abstract: Using bottom-up image processing algorithms to predict human eye fixations and extract the relevant embedded information in images has been widely applied in the design of active machine vision systems. Scene text is an important feature to be extracted, especially in vision-based mobile robot navigation as many potential landmarks such as nameplates and information signs contain text. This paper proposes an edge-based text region extraction algorithm, which is robust with respect to font sizes, styles, color/intensity, orientations, and effects of illumination, reflections, shadows, perspective distortion, and the complexity of image backgrounds. Performance of the proposed algorithm is compared against a number of widely used text localization algorithms and the results show that this method can quickly and effectively localize and extract text regions from real scenes and can be used in mobile robot navigation under an indoor environment to detect text based landmarks.
Abstract: This study adopts a qualitative approach, which
engages in the dialectical discussion on two levels of dyad opposite
views. The first level of the dyad opposite views is the Western
strategic perspective and the Eastern Tai-Chi thinking. The second
level of the dyad opposite views is resource-based view and resource
dependence theory. This study concludes the resource-oriented actions
for competitive advantage as the metaphor of Tai-Chi consisted of yin
and yang. This study argues that the focal firm should adopt bridging
strategy during the core competence development period because its
core competence development is likely to meet its competitor’s needs
of exploring strategy during the competitor’s external resource
development stage. In addition, the focal firm should adopt buffering
strategy during the external resource development period to prevent its
competitor’s the exploiting strategy from attack during the
competitor’s core competence development stage. Consequently, this
study takes a significant first step toward a novel contextualize
understanding of resource development based on strategic perspective
and Tai-Chi thinking providing more fully sustainable strategy for
competitive advantage.
Abstract: We developed a GPS-based navigation device for the
blind, with audio guidance in Thai language. The device is composed
of simple and inexpensive hardware components. Its user interface is
quite simple. It determines optimal routes to various landmarks in our
university campus by using heuristic search for the next waypoints.
We tested the device and made note of its limitations and possible
extensions.
Abstract: The main objective of this paper is a comparative
investigate in enhancement of damping power system oscillation via
coordinated design of the power system stabilizer (PSS) and static
synchronous series compensator (SSSC) and static synchronous
compensator (STATCOM). The design problem of FACTS-based
stabilizers is formulated as a GA based optimization problem. In this
paper eigenvalue analysis method is used on small signal stability of
single machine infinite bus (SMIB) system installed with SSSC and
STATCOM. The generator is equipped with a PSS. The proposed
stabilizers are tested on a weakly connected power system with
different disturbances and loading conditions. This aim is to enhance
both rotor angle and power system stability. The eigenvalue analysis
and non-linear simulation results are presented to show the effects of
these FACTS-based stabilizers and reveal that SSSC exhibits the best
effectiveness on damping power system oscillation.
Abstract: This paper addresses integration issues in supply
chain, and tries to investigate how different aspects of integration are
linked with some product features. Integration in this study is
interpreted as "internal", "upstream" (supply), and "downstream"
(demand). Two features of product innovative and quality are
considered. To examine the relationships between supply chain
integrations – as mentioned above, and product features, this research
follows the survey method in automotive industry.The results imply
that supply chain upstream integration has a higher impact on product
quality, comparing to internal and supply chain downstream
integrations. It is also found that the influence of supply chain
downstream integration on product innovation is greater than other
variables. In brief, this study mainly tackles the importance of
specific level of supply chain integrations and its effects on two
product features.
Abstract: Research results and optimal parameters investigation
of laser cut and profiling of diamond and quartz substrates by
femtosecond laser pulses are presented. Profiles 10 μm in width, ~25
μm in depth and several millimeters long were made. Investigation of
boundaries quality has been carried out with the use of AFM
«Vecco». Possibility of technological formation of profiles and
micro-holes in diamond and quartz substrates with nanometer-scale
boundaries is shown. Experimental results of multilayer dielectric
cover treatment are also presented. Possibility of precise upper layer
(thickness of 70–140 nm) removal is demonstrated. Processes of thin
metal film (60 nm and 350 nm thick) treatment are considered.
Isolation tracks (conductance ~ 10-11 S) 1.6–2.5 μm in width in
conductive metal layers are formed.
Abstract: We investigate the sufficient condition under which each positive b-weakly compact operator is Dunford-Pettis. We also investigate the necessary condition on which each positive b-weakly compact operator is Dunford-Pettis. Necessary condition on which each positive b-weakly compact operator is weakly compact is also considered. We give the operator that is semi-compact, but it is not bweakly. We present a necessary and sufficient condition under which each positive semi-compact operator is b-weakly compact.