Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to develop models that would enable predicting student success. These models could improve allocation of students among colleges and optimize the newly introduced model of government subsidies for higher education. For the purpose of collecting data, an anonymous survey was carried out in the last year of undergraduate degree student population using random sampling method. Decision trees were created of which two have been chosen that were most successful in predicting student success based on two criteria: Grade Point Average (GPA) and time that a student needs to finish the undergraduate program (time-to-degree). Decision trees have been shown as a good method of classification student success and they could be even more improved by increasing survey sample and developing specialized decision trees for each type of college. These types of methods have a big potential for use in decision support systems.
Abstract: In today-s information age, numbers of organizations
are still arguing on capitalizing the values of Information Technology
(IT) and Knowledge Management (KM) to which individuals can
benefit from and effective communication among the individuals can
be established. IT exists in enabling positive improvement for
communication among knowledge workers (k-workers) with a
number of social network technology domains at workplace. The
acceptance of digital discourse in sharing of knowledge and
facilitating the knowledge and information flows at most of the
organizations indeed impose the culture of knowledge sharing in
Digital Social Networks (DSN). Therefore, this study examines
whether the k-workers with IT background would confer an effect on
the three knowledge characteristics -- conceptual, contextual, and
operational. Derived from these three knowledge characteristics, five
potential factors will be examined on the effects of knowledge
exchange via e-mail domain as the chosen query. It is expected, that
the results could provide such a parameter in exploring how DSN
contributes in supporting the k-workers- virtues, performance and
qualities as well as revealing the mutual point between IT and KM.
Abstract: In this paper, a fuzzy algorithm and a fuzzy multicriteria
decision framework are developed and used for a practical
question of optimizing biofuels policy making. The methodological
framework shows how to incorporate fuzzy set theory in a decision
process of finding a sustainable biofuels policy among several policy
options. Fuzzy set theory is used here as a tool to deal with
uncertainties of decision environment, vagueness and ambiguities of
policy objectives, subjectivities of human assessments and imprecise
and incomplete information about the evaluated policy instruments.
Abstract: Over last two decades, due to hostilities of environment
over the internet the concerns about confidentiality of information
have increased at phenomenal rate. Therefore to safeguard the information
from attacks, number of data/information hiding methods have
evolved mostly in spatial and transformation domain.In spatial domain
data hiding techniques,the information is embedded directly on
the image plane itself. In transform domain data hiding techniques the
image is first changed from spatial domain to some other domain and
then the secret information is embedded so that the secret information
remains more secure from any attack. Information hiding algorithms
in time domain or spatial domain have high capacity and relatively
lower robustness. In contrast, the algorithms in transform domain,
such as DCT, DWT have certain robustness against some multimedia
processing.In this work the authors propose a novel steganographic
method for hiding information in the transform domain of the gray
scale image.The proposed approach works by converting the gray
level image in transform domain using discrete integer wavelet
technique through lifting scheme.This approach performs a 2-D
lifting wavelet decomposition through Haar lifted wavelet of the cover
image and computes the approximation coefficients matrix CA and
detail coefficients matrices CH, CV, and CD.Next step is to apply the
PMM technique in those coefficients to form the stego image. The
aim of this paper is to propose a high-capacity image steganography
technique that uses pixel mapping method in integer wavelet domain
with acceptable levels of imperceptibility and distortion in the cover
image and high level of overall security. This solution is independent
of the nature of the data to be hidden and produces a stego image
with minimum degradation.
Abstract: A 3.5-bit stage of the CMOS pipelined ADC is proposed. In this report, the main part of 3.5-bit stage ADC is introduced. How the MDAC, comparator and encoder worked and designed are shown in details. Besides, an OTA which is used in fully differential pipelined ADC was described. Using gain-boost architecture with differential amplifier, this OTA achieve high-gain and high-speed. This design was using CMOS 0.18um process and simulation in Cadence. The result of the simulation shows that the OTA has a gain up to 80dB, the unity gain bandwidth of about 1.138GHz with 2pF load.
Abstract: Recent advances in both the testing and verification of software based on formal specifications of the system to be built have reached a point where the ideas can be applied in a powerful way in the design of agent-based systems. The software engineering research has highlighted a number of important issues: the importance of the type of modeling technique used; the careful design of the model to enable powerful testing techniques to be used; the automated verification of the behavioural properties of the system; the need to provide a mechanism for translating the formal models into executable software in a simple and transparent way. This paper introduces the use of the X-machine formalism as a tool for modeling biology inspired agents proposing the use of the techniques built around X-machine models for the construction of effective, and reliable agent-based software systems.
Abstract: Roadways in Amman city face many problems consequent upon poor drainage systems. Evaluation tools are necessary to identify those roads needing improvement in their drainage system, and those needing regular maintenance. This work aims at evaluating drainage conditions in selected roadways in Amman city with the intent of identifying the problems encountered in their drainage systems. Three sites in the vicinity of Amman city have been selected and then inspected via several field visits to determine the state of their existing drainage systems and define the major problems encountered in these systems. The evaluation tool used in this study is based on visual inspection supported by photographs that depicted the defined problems. Following the field assessment, the drainage system in each road was rated as excellent, fair, good, or poor. The study reveals that more than 60% of the roadways in the selected sites were in poor drainage conditions, which lead to tremendous environmental problems. This assessment serves as a guide for local decision makers to help plan for the maintenance of Amman city roadways drainage systems, and propose ways of managing the associated problems.
Abstract: This study explores perceptions of English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) learners on using computer mediated communication
technology in their learner of English. The data consists of
observations of both synchronous and asynchronous communication
participants engaged in for over a period of 4 months, which included
online, and offline communication protocols, open-ended interviews
and reflection papers composed by participants.
Content analysis of interview data and the written documents listed
above, as well as, member check and triangulation techniques are the
major data analysis strategies. The findings suggest that participants
generally do not benefit from computer-mediated communication in
terms of its effect in learning a foreign language. Participants regarded
the nature of CMC as artificial, or pseudo communication that did not
aid their authentic communicational skills in English. The results of
this study sheds lights on insufficient and inconclusive findings, which
most quantitative CMC studies previously generated.
Abstract: ZnO nanocrystals with mean diameter size 14 nm
have been prepared by precipitation method, and examined as
photocatalyst for the UV-induced degradation of insecticide diazinon
as deputy of organic pollutant in aqueous solution. The effects of
various parameters, such as illumination time, the amount of
photocatalyst, initial pH values and initial concentration of
insecticide on the photocatalytic degradation diazinon were
investigated to find desired conditions. In this case, the desired
parameters were also tested for the treatment of real water containing
the insecticide. Photodegradation efficiency of diazinon was
compared between commercial and prepared ZnO nanocrystals. The
results indicated that UV/ZnO process applying prepared
nanocrystalline ZnO offered electrical energy efficiency and
quantum yield better than commercial ZnO. The present study, on the
base of Langmuir-Hinshelwood mechanism, illustrated a pseudo
first-order kinetic model with rate constant of surface reaction equal
to 0.209 mg l-1 min-1 and adsorption equilibrium constant of 0.124 l
mg-1.
Abstract: This paper proposes new enhancement models to the
methods of nonlinear anisotropic diffusion to greatly reduce speckle
and preserve image features in medical ultrasound images. By
incorporating local physical characteristics of the image, in this case
scatterer density, in addition to the gradient, into existing tensorbased
image diffusion methods, we were able to greatly improve the
performance of the existing filtering methods, namely edge
enhancing (EE) and coherence enhancing (CE) diffusion. The new
enhancement methods were tested using various ultrasound images,
including phantom and some clinical images, to determine the
amount of speckle reduction, edge, and coherence enhancements.
Scatterer density weighted nonlinear anisotropic diffusion
(SDWNAD) for ultrasound images consistently outperformed its
traditional tensor-based counterparts that use gradient only to weight
the diffusivity function. SDWNAD is shown to greatly reduce
speckle noise while preserving image features as edges, orientation
coherence, and scatterer density. SDWNAD superior performances
over nonlinear coherent diffusion (NCD), speckle reducing
anisotropic diffusion (SRAD), adaptive weighted median filter
(AWMF), wavelet shrinkage (WS), and wavelet shrinkage with
contrast enhancement (WSCE), make these methods ideal
preprocessing steps for automatic segmentation in ultrasound
imaging.
Abstract: To meet the demands of wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) where data are usually aggregated at a single source prior to
transmitting to any distant user, there is a need to establish a tree
structure inside any given event region. In this paper , a novel
technique to create one such tree is proposed .This tree preserves the
energy and maximizes the lifetime of event sources while they are
constantly transmitting for data aggregation. The term Decentralized
Lifetime Maximizing Tree (DLMT) is used to denote this tree.
DLMT features in nodes with higher energy tend to be chosen as data
aggregating parents so that the time to detect the first broken tree link
can be extended and less energy is involved in tree maintenance. By
constructing the tree in such a way, the protocol is able to reduce the
frequency of tree reconstruction, minimize the amount of data loss
,minimize the delay during data collection and preserves the energy.
Abstract: Telemedicine is brought to life by contemporary changes of our world and summarizes the entire range of services that are at the crossroad of traditional healthcare and information technology. It is believed that eHealth can help in solving critical issues of rising costs, care for ageing and housebound population, staff shortage. It is a feasible tool to provide routine as well as specialized health service as it has the potential to improve both the access to and the standard of care. eHealth is no more an optional choice. It has already made quite a way but it still remains a fantastic challenge for the future requiring cooperation and coordination at all possible levels. The strategic objectives of this paper are: 1. To start with an attempt to clarify the mass of terms used nowadays; 2. To answer the question “Who needs eHealth"; 3. To focus on the necessity of bridging telemedicine and medical (health) informatics as well as on the dual relationship between them; as well as 4. To underline the need of networking in understanding, developing and implementing eHealth.
Abstract: Human skull is shown to exhibit numerous sexually dimorphic traits. Estimation of sex is a challenging task especially when a part of skull is brought for medicolegal investigation. The present research was planned to evaluate the sexing potential of the dimensions of foramen magnum in forensic identification by craniometric analysis. Length and breadth of the foramen magnum was measured using Vernier calipers and the area of foramen magnum was calculated. The length, breadth, and area of foramen magnum were found to be larger in males than females. Sexual dimorphism index was calculated to estimate the sexing potential of each variable. The study observations are suggestive of the limited utility of the craniometric analysis of foramen magnum during the examination of skull and its parts in estimation of sex.
Abstract: A water reuse system in wetland paddy was simulated
to supply water for industrial in this paper. A two-tank model was employed to represent the return flow of the wetland paddy.Historical data were performed for parameter estimation and model verification. With parameters estimated from the data, the model was then used to simulate a reasonable return flow rate from the wetland
paddy. The simulation results show that the return flow ratio was 11.56% in the first crop season and 35.66% in the second crop
season individually; the difference may result from the heavy rainfall in the second crop season. Under the existent pond with surplus
active capacity, the water reuse ratio was 17.14%, and the water supplementary ratio was 21.56%. However, the pattern of rainfall, the
active capacity of the pond, and the rate of water treatment limit the
volume of reuse water. Increasing the irrigation water, dredging the
depth of pond before rainy season and enlarging the scale of module are help to develop water reuse system to support for the industrial
water use around wetland paddy.
Abstract: Automatic segmentation of skin lesions is the first step
towards the automated analysis of malignant melanoma. Although
numerous segmentation methods have been developed, few studies
have focused on determining the most effective color space for
melanoma application. This paper proposes an automatic segmentation
algorithm based on color space analysis and clustering-based histogram
thresholding, a process which is able to determine the optimal
color channel for detecting the borders in dermoscopy images. The
algorithm is tested on a set of 30 high resolution dermoscopy images.
A comprehensive evaluation of the results is provided, where borders
manually drawn by four dermatologists, are compared to automated
borders detected by the proposed algorithm, applying three previously
used metrics of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity and a new metric
of similarity. By performing ROC analysis and ranking the metrics,
it is demonstrated that the best results are obtained with the X and
XoYoR color channels, resulting in an accuracy of approximately
97%. The proposed method is also compared with two state-of-theart
skin lesion segmentation methods.
Abstract: In this paper a novel approach for generalized image
retrieval based on semantic contents is presented. A combination of
three feature extraction methods namely color, texture, and edge
histogram descriptor. There is a provision to add new features in
future for better retrieval efficiency. Any combination of these
methods, which is more appropriate for the application, can be used
for retrieval. This is provided through User Interface (UI) in the
form of relevance feedback. The image properties analyzed in this
work are by using computer vision and image processing algorithms.
For color the histogram of images are computed, for texture cooccurrence
matrix based entropy, energy, etc, are calculated and for
edge density it is Edge Histogram Descriptor (EHD) that is found.
For retrieval of images, a novel idea is developed based on greedy
strategy to reduce the computational complexity. The entire system
was developed using AForge.Imaging (an open source product),
MATLAB .NET Builder, C#, and Oracle 10g. The system was tested
with Coral Image database containing 1000 natural images and
achieved better results.
Abstract: It was determined that woody biomass and livestock excreta can be utilized as hydrogen resources and hydrogen produced from such sources can be used to fill fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) at hydrogen stations. It was shown that the biomass transport costs for hydrogen production may be reduced the costs for co-generation. In the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, there are only a few sites capable of producing hydrogen from woody biomass in amounts greater than 200 m3/h-the scale required for a hydrogen station to be operationally practical. However, in the case of livestock excreta, it was shown that 15% of the municipalities in this area are capable of securing sufficient biomass to be operationally practical for hydrogen production. The differences in feasibility of practical operation depend on the type of biomass.
Abstract: Under the limitation of investment budget, a utility
company is required to maximize the utilization of their existing
assets during their life cycle satisfying both engineering and financial
requirements. However, utility does not have knowledge about the
status of each asset in the portfolio neither in terms of technical nor
financial values. This paper presents a knowledge based model for
the utility companies in order to make an optimal decision on power
transformer with their utilization. CommonKADS methodology, a
structured development for knowledge and expertise representation,
is utilized for designing and developing knowledge based model. A
case study of One MVA power transformer of Nepal Electricity
Authority is presented. The results show that the reusable knowledge
can be categorized, modeled and utilized within the utility company
using the proposed methodologies. Moreover, the results depict that
utility company can achieve both engineering and financial benefits
from its utilization.
Abstract: This paper presents a generalized form of the
mechanistic deconvolution technique (GMD) to modeling image sensors applicable in various pan–tilt planes of view. The mechanistic deconvolution technique (UMD) is modified with the
given angles of a pan–tilt plane of view to formulate constraint parameters and characterize distortion effects, and thereby, determine
the corrected image data. This, as a result, does not require experimental setup or calibration. Due to the mechanistic nature of
the sensor model, the necessity for the sensor image plane to be
orthogonal to its z-axis is eliminated, and it reduces the dependency on image data. An experiment was constructed to evaluate the
accuracy of a model created by GMD and its insensitivity to changes in sensor properties and in pan and tilt angles. This was compared
with a pre-calibrated model and a model created by UMD using two sensors with different specifications. It achieved similar accuracy
with one-seventh the number of iterations and attained lower mean error by a factor of 2.4 when compared to the pre-calibrated and
UMD model respectively. The model has also shown itself to be robust and, in comparison to pre-calibrated and UMD model, improved the accuracy significantly.
Abstract: The objective of the paper is to develop the forecast
model for the HW flows. The methodology of the research included
6 modules: historical data, assumptions, choose of indicators, data
processing, and data analysis with STATGRAPHICS, and forecast
models. The proposed methodology was validated for the case study
for Latvia. Hypothesis on the changes in HW for time period of
2010-2020 have been developed and mathematically described with
confidence level of 95.0% and 50.0%. Sensitivity analysis for the
analyzed scenarios was done. The results show that the growth of
GDP affects the total amount of HW in the country. The total amount
of the HW is projected to be within the corridor of – 27.7% in the
optimistic scenario up to +87.8% in the pessimistic scenario with
confidence level of 50.0% for period of 2010-2020. The optimistic
scenario has shown to be the least flexible to the changes in the GDP
growth.