Abstract: The study of proteomics reached unexpected levels of
interest, as a direct consequence of its discovered influence over
some complex biological phenomena, such as problematic diseases
like cancer. This paper presents a new technique that allows for an
accurate analysis of the human interactome network. It is basically
a two-step analysis process that involves, at first, the detection of
each protein-s absolute importance through the betweenness centrality
computation. Then, the second step determines the functionallyrelated
communities of proteins. For this purpose, we use a community
detection technique that is based on the edge betweenness
calculation. The new technique was thoroughly tested on real biological
data and the results prove some interesting properties of those proteins that are involved in the carcinogenesis process. Apart from its
experimental usefulness, the novel technique is also computationally
effective in terms of execution times. Based on the analysis- results, some topological features of cancer mutated proteins are presented
and a possible optimization solution for cancer drugs design is suggested.
Abstract: Computerized lip reading has been one of the most
actively researched areas of computer vision in recent past because
of its crime fighting potential and invariance to acoustic environment.
However, several factors like fast speech, bad pronunciation,
poor illumination, movement of face, moustaches and beards make
lip reading difficult. In present work, we propose a solution for
automatic lip contour tracking and recognizing letters of English
language spoken by speakers using the information available from
lip movements. Level set method is used for tracking lip contour
using a contour velocity model and a feature vector of lip movements
is then obtained. Character recognition is performed using modified
k nearest neighbor algorithm which assigns more weight to nearer
neighbors. The proposed system has been found to have accuracy
of 73.3% for character recognition with speaker lip movements as
the only input and without using any speech recognition system in
parallel. The approach used in this work is found to significantly
solve the purpose of lip reading when size of database is small.
Abstract: Project managers are the ultimate responsible for the
overall characteristics of a project, i.e. they should deliver the project
on time with minimum cost and with maximum quality. It is vital for
any manager to decide a trade-off between these conflicting
objectives and they will be benefited of any scientific decision
support tool. Our work will try to determine optimal solutions (rather
than a single optimal solution) from which the project manager will
select his desirable choice to run the project. In this paper, the
problem in project scheduling notated as
(1,T|cpm,disc,mu|curve:quality,time,cost) will be studied. The
problem is multi-objective and the purpose is finding the Pareto
optimal front of time, cost and quality of a project
(curve:quality,time,cost), whose activities belong to a start to finish
activity relationship network (cpm) and they can be done in different
possible modes (mu) which are non-continuous or discrete (disc), and
each mode has a different cost, time and quality . The project is
constrained to a non-renewable resource i.e. money (1,T). Because
the problem is NP-Hard, to solve the problem, a meta-heuristic is
developed based on a version of genetic algorithm specially adapted
to solve multi-objective problems namely FastPGA. A sample project
with 30 activities is generated and then solved by the proposed
method.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to determine the
circumstances affecting elementary school students in their family
and school lives and what kind of emotions children may feel
because of these circumstances. The study was carried out according
to the survey model. Four Turkish elementary schools provided 123
fourth grade students for participation in the study. The study-s data
were collected by using worksheets for the activity titled “Important
Days in Our Lives", which was part of the Elementary School Social
Sciences Course 4th Grade Education Program. Data analysis was
carried out according to the content analysis technique used in
qualitative research. The study detected that circumstances of their
family and school lives caused children to feel emotions such as
happiness, sadness, anger, fear and jealousy. The circumstances and
the emotions caused by these circumstances were analyzed according
to gender and interpreted by presenting them with their frequencies.
Abstract: One of the purposes of the robust method of
estimation is to reduce the influence of outliers in the data, on the
estimates. The outliers arise from gross errors or contamination from
distributions with long tails. The trimmed mean is a robust estimate.
This means that it is not sensitive to violation of distributional
assumptions of the data. It is called an adaptive estimate when the
trimming proportion is determined from the data rather than being
fixed a “priori-.
The main objective of this study is to find out the robustness
properties of the adaptive trimmed means in terms of efficiency, high
breakdown point and influence function. Specifically, it seeks to find
out the magnitude of the trimming proportion of the adaptive
trimmed mean which will yield efficient and robust estimates of the
parameter for data which follow a modified Weibull distribution with
parameter λ = 1/2 , where the trimming proportion is determined by a
ratio of two trimmed means defined as the tail length. Secondly, the
asymptotic properties of the tail length and the trimmed means are
also investigated. Finally, a comparison is made on the efficiency of
the adaptive trimmed means in terms of the standard deviation for the
trimming proportions and when these were fixed a “priori".
The asymptotic tail lengths defined as the ratio of two trimmed
means and the asymptotic variances were computed by using the
formulas derived. While the values of the standard deviations for the
derived tail lengths for data of size 40 simulated from a Weibull
distribution were computed for 100 iterations using a computer
program written in Pascal language.
The findings of the study revealed that the tail lengths of the
Weibull distribution increase in magnitudes as the trimming
proportions increase, the measure of the tail length and the adaptive
trimmed mean are asymptotically independent as the number of
observations n becomes very large or approaching infinity, the tail
length is asymptotically distributed as the ratio of two independent
normal random variables, and the asymptotic variances decrease as
the trimming proportions increase. The simulation study revealed
empirically that the standard error of the adaptive trimmed mean
using the ratio of tail lengths is relatively smaller for different values
of trimming proportions than its counterpart when the trimming
proportions were fixed a 'priori'.
Abstract: The machining performance is determined by the
frequency characteristics of the machine-tool structure and the
dynamics of the cutting process. Therefore, the prediction of dynamic
vibration behavior of spindle tool system is of great importance for the
design of a machine tool capable of high-precision and high-speed
machining. The aim of this study is to develop a finite element model
to predict the dynamic characteristics of milling machine tool and
hence evaluate the influence of the preload of the spindle bearings. To
this purpose, a three dimensional spindle bearing model of a high
speed engraving spindle tool was created. In this model, the rolling
interfaces with contact stiffness defined by Harris model were used to
simulate the spindle bearing components. Then a full finite element
model of a vertical milling machine was established by coupling the
spindle tool unit with the machine frame structure. Using this model,
the vibration mode that had a dominant influence on the dynamic
stiffness was determined. The results of the finite element simulations
reveal that spindle bearing with different preloads greatly affect the
dynamic behavior of the spindle tool unit and hence the dynamic
responses of the vertical column milling system. These results were
validated by performing vibration on the individual spindle tool unit
and the milling machine prototype, respectively. We conclude that
preload of the spindle bearings is an important component affecting
the dynamic characteristics and machining performance of the entire
vertical column structure of the milling machine.
Abstract: To support mobility in ATM networks, a number of
technical challenges need to be resolved. The impact of handoff
schemes in terms of service disruption, handoff latency, cost
implications and excess resources required during handoffs needs to
be addressed. In this paper, a one phase handoff and route
optimization solution using reserved PVCs between adjacent ATM
switches to reroute connections during inter-switch handoff is
studied. In the second phase, a distributed optimization process is
initiated to optimally reroute handoff connections. The main
objective is to find the optimal operating point at which to perform
optimization subject to cost constraint with the purpose of reducing
blocking probability of inter-switch handoff calls for delay tolerant
traffic. We examine the relation between the required bandwidth
resources and optimization rate. Also we calculate and study the
handoff blocking probability due to lack of bandwidth for resources
reserved to facilitate the rapid rerouting.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new performance characterization for the test strategy intended for second order filters denominated Transient Analysis Method (TRAM). We evaluate the ability of the addressed test strategy for detecting deviation faults under simultaneous statistical fluctuation of the non-faulty parameters. For this purpose, we use Monte Carlo simulations and a fault model that considers as faulty only one component of the filter under test while the others components adopt random values (within their tolerance band) obtained from their statistical distributions. The new data reported here show (for the filters under study) the presence of hard-to-test components and relatively low fault coverage values for small deviation faults. These results suggest that the fault coverage value obtained using only nominal values for the non-faulty components (the traditional evaluation of TRAM) seem to be a poor predictor of the test performance.
Abstract: Agriculture products are being more demanding in
market today. To increase its productivity, automation to produce
these products will be very helpful. The purpose of this work is to
measure and determine the ripeness and quality of watermelon. The
textures on watermelon skin will be captured using digital camera.
These images will be filtered using image processing technique. All
these information gathered will be trained using ANN to determine
the watermelon ripeness accuracy. Initial results showed that the best
model has produced percentage accuracy of 86.51%, when measured
at 32 hidden units with a balanced percentage rate of training dataset.
Abstract: The purposes of the study are to study and to
investigate the relationship among exposure, uses and gratifications
of television morning news among undergraduate students in
Bangkok. This study also compares differences in information
exposure, uses and gratifications of television morning news among
these students.
The research methodology employed a questionnaire as a
quantitative method. The respondents were undergraduate students at
public and private universities in Bangkok. Totally, 400 usable
questionnaires were received. Descriptive and inferential statistics
were used in data analysis.
The results indicated that information exposure of undergraduate
students in Bangkok was at a high level. Students’ uses and
gratifications were also at high level. Information exposure was
positively correlated with uses and gratifications. Uses of information
were positively correlated with satisfaction with information. The
results also showed that students with differences in sex and type of
university were not significantly different in information exposure,
and uses and gratifications.
Abstract: Topology Optimization is a defined as the method of
determining optimal distribution of material for the assumed design
space with functionality, loads and boundary conditions [1].
Topology optimization can be used to optimize shape for the
purposes of weight reduction, minimizing material requirements or
selecting cost effective materials [2]. Topology optimization has been
implemented through the use of finite element methods for the
analysis, and optimization techniques based on the method of moving
asymptotes, genetic algorithms, optimality criteria method, level sets
and topological derivatives. Case study of Typical “Fuselage design"
is considered for this paper to explain the benefits of Topology
Optimization in the design cycle. A cylindrical shell is assumed as
the design space and aerospace standard pay loads were applied on
the fuselage with wing attachments as constraints. Then topological
optimization is done using Finite Element (FE) based software. This
optimization results in the structural concept design which satisfies
all the design constraints using minimum material.
Abstract: Sequential pattern mining is a challenging task in data mining area with large applications. One among those applications is mining patterns from weblog. Recent times, weblog is highly dynamic and some of them may become absolute over time. In addition, users may frequently change the threshold value during the data mining process until acquiring required output or mining interesting rules. Some of the recently proposed algorithms for mining weblog, build the tree with two scans and always consume large time and space. In this paper, we build Revised PLWAP with Non-frequent Items (RePLNI-tree) with single scan for all items. While mining sequential patterns, the links related to the nonfrequent items are not considered. Hence, it is not required to delete or maintain the information of nodes while revising the tree for mining updated transactions. The algorithm supports both incremental and interactive mining. It is not required to re-compute the patterns each time, while weblog is updated or minimum support changed. The performance of the proposed tree is better, even the size of incremental database is more than 50% of existing one. For evaluation purpose, we have used the benchmark weblog dataset and found that the performance of proposed tree is encouraging compared to some of the recently proposed approaches.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, it attempts to explore potential opportunities for utilizing visual interactive simulations along with Business Intelligence (BI) as a decision support tool for strategic decision making. Second, it tries to figure out the essential top-level managerial requirements that would transform strategic decision simulation into an integral component of BI systems. The domain of particular interest was the application of visual interactive simulation capabilities in the field of supply chains. A qualitative exploratory method was applied, through the use of interviews with two leading companies. The collected data was then analysed to demonstrate the difference between the literature perspective and the practical managerial perspective on the issue. The results of the study suggest that although the use of simulation particularly in managing supply chains is very evident in literature, yet, in practice such utilization is still in its infancy, particularly regarding strategic decisions. Based on the insights a prototype of a simulation based BI-solution-extension was developed and evaluated.
Abstract: The environment pollution with pesticides and heavy
metals is a recognized problem nowadays, with extension to the
global scale the tendency of amplification. Even with all the progress
in the environmental field, both in the emphasize of the effect of the
pollutants upon health, the linked studies environment-health are
insufficient, not only in Romania but all over the world also. We aim
to describe the particular situation in Romania regarding the
uncontrolled use of pesticides, to identify and evaluate the risk zones
for health and the environment in Romania, with the final goal of
designing adequate programs for reduction and control of the risk
sources. An exploratory study was conducted to determine the
magnitude of the pesticide use problem in a population living in
Saliste, a rural setting in Transylvania, Romania. The significant
stakeholders in Saliste region were interviewed and a sample from
the population living in Saliste area was selected to fill in a designed
questionnaire. All the selected participants declared that they used
pesticides in their activities for more than one purpose. They
declared they annually applied pesticides for a period of time
between 11 and 30 years, from 5 to 9 days per year on average,
mainly on crops situated at some distance from the houses but high
risk behavior was identified as the volunteers declared the use of
pesticides in the backyard gardens, near their homes, where children
were playing. The pesticide applicators did not have the necessary
knowledge about safety and exposure. The health data must be
correlated with exposure biomarkers in attempt to identify the
possible health effects of the pesticides exposure. Future plans
include educational campaigns to raise the awareness of the
population on the danger of uncontrolled use of pesticides.
Abstract: The plastic flow of metal in the extrusion process is
an important factor in controlling the mechanical properties of the
extruded products. It is, however, difficult to predict the metal flow
in three dimensional extrusions of sections due to the involvement of
re-entrant corners. The present study is to find an upper bound
solution for the extrusion of triangular sectioned through taper dies
from round sectioned billet. A discontinuous kinematically
admissible velocity field (KAVF) is proposed. From the proposed
KAVF, the upper bound solution on non-dimensional extrusion
pressure is determined with respect to the chosen process parameters.
The theoretical results are compared with experimental results to
check the validity of the proposed velocity field. An extrusion setup
is designed and fabricated for the said purpose, and all extrusions are
carried out using circular billets. Experiments are carried out with
commercially available lead at room temperature.
Abstract: Many Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications necessitate secure multicast services for the purpose of broadcasting delay sensitive data like video files and live telecast at fixed time-slot. This work provides a novel method to deal with end-to-end delay and drop rate of packets. Opportunistic Routing chooses a link based on the maximum probability of packet delivery ratio. Null Key Generation helps in authenticating packets to the receiver. Markov Decision Process based Adaptive Scheduling algorithm determines the time slot for packet transmission. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol ensures better performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing overhead.
Abstract: Virtual environment induces simulator sickness effect
for some users. The purpose of this research is to compare the
simulation sickness relative with parallax affect in one-screen and
three-screen HoloStageTM system, measured by Simulation Sickness
Questionnaire (SSQ). The results show the subjects tested in
three-screen has less sickness than one-screen and effect from the
Oculomotor (O) more than from the Disorientation (D) and more than
from the Nausea (N) or represented in O>D>N.
Abstract: The aeration process via injectors is used to combat
the lack of oxygen in lakes due to eutrophication. A 3D numerical
simulation of the resulting flow using a simplified model is presented.
In order to generate the best dynamic in the fluid with respect to
the aeration purpose, the optimization of the injectors location is
considered. We propose to adapt to this problem the topological
sensitivity analysis method which gives the variation of a criterion
with respect to the creation of a small hole in the domain. The main
idea is to derive the topological sensitivity analysis of the physical
model with respect to the insertion of an injector in the fluid flow
domain. We propose in this work a topological optimization algorithm
based on the studied asymptotic expansion. Finally we present some
numerical results, showing the efficiency of our approach
Abstract: The present study was conducted to investigate the
response of plants exposed to lignite-based thermal power plant
emission. For this purpose, five plant species were collected from 1.0
km distance (polluted site) and control plants were collected from
20.0 km distance (control site) to thermal power plant. The common
tree species Cassia siamea Lamk., Polyalthia longifolia. Sonn,
Acacia longifolia (Andrews) Wild., Azadirachta indica A.Juss, Ficus
religiosa L. were selected as test plants. Photosynthetic pigments
changes (chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and carotenoids) and rubisco
enzyme modifications were studied. Reduction was observed in the
photosynthetic pigments of plants growing in polluted site and also
large sub unit of the rubisco enzyme was degraded in Azadirachta
indica A. Juss collected from polluted site.
Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to research on the
methodologies of BYD to implement the opportune innovation. BYD
is a Chinese company which has the IT component manufacture, the
rechargeable battery and the automobile businesses. The paper deals
with the innovation methodology as the same as the IPR management
BYD implements in order to obtain the rapid growth of technology
development with the reasonable cost of money and time.