Abstract: Summarizing skills have been introduced to English
syllabus in secondary school in Malaysia to evaluate student-s comprehension for a given text where it requires students to employ several strategies to produce the summary. This paper reports on our effort to develop a computer-based summarization assessment system
that detects the strategies used by the students in producing their
summaries. Sentence decomposition of expert-written summaries is
used to analyze how experts produce their summary sentences. From
the analysis, we identified seven summarizing strategies and their
rules which are then transformed into a set of heuristic rules on how
to determine the summarizing strategies. We developed an algorithm
based on the heuristic rules and performed some experiments to
evaluate and support the technique proposed.
Abstract: Nanowire arrays of copper with uniform diameters have
been synthesized by potentiostatic electrochemical metal deposition
(EMD) of copper sulphate and potassium chloride solution within
the nano-channels of porous Indium-Tin Oxide (ITO), also known as
Tin doped Indium Oxide templates. The nanowires developed were
fairly continuous with diameters ranging from 110-140 nm along
the entire length. Single as well as poly-crystalline copper wires
have been prepared by application of appropriate potential during the
EMD process. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high resolution
transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), small angle electron
diffraction (SAED) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were used
to characterize the synthesized nano wires at room temperature. The
electrochemical response of synthesized products was evaluated by
cyclic voltammetry while surface energy analysis was carried out
using a Goniometer.
Abstract: Nowadays, efficiency, effectiveness and economy are regarded as the main objectives of managers and the secret of the continuity of an organization in competing economy. In such competing settings, it is essential that the management of an organization has not been neglected and been obliged to identify quickly the opportunities for improving the operation of organization and remove the shortcomings of their managed system in order to use the opportunities for development. Operational auditing is a useful tool for system adjustment and leading an organization toward its objectives. Operational auditing is indeed a viewpoint which identifies the causes of insufficiencies, weaknesses and deficiencies of system and plans to eliminate them. Operational auditing is useful in the effectiveness and optimization of executive managers- decisions and increasing the efficiency and economy of their performance in the future and prevents the waste and incorrect use of resources. Evidence shows that operational auditing is used at a limited level in Iran. This matter raises some questions like the following ones in the minds. Why do a limited number of corporations use operational auditing? Which factors can guarantee its full implementation? What obstacles are there in its implementation? The purpose of this article is to determine executive objectives, the operation domain of operational auditing, the components of operational auditing and the executive obstacles to operational auditing in Iran.
Abstract: We present a subband adaptive infinite-impulse response (IIR) filtering method, which is based on a polyphase decomposition of IIR filter. Motivated by the fact that the polyphase structure has benefits in terms of convergence rate and stability, we introduce the polyphase decomposition to subband IIR filtering, i.e., in each subband high order IIR filter is decomposed into polyphase IIR filters with lower order. Computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed method has improved convergence rate over conventional IIR filters.
Abstract: Service discovery is a very important component of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). This paper presents two alternative approaches to customise the query results of private service registry such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). The customisation is performed based on some pre-defined and/or real-time changing parameters. This work identifies the requirements, designs and additional mechanisms that must be applied to UDDI in order to support this customisation capability. We also detail the implements of the approaches and examine its performance and scalability. Based on our experimental results, we conclude that both approaches can be used to customise registry query results, but by storing personalization parameters in external resource will yield better performance and but less scalable when size of query results increases. We believe these approaches when combined with semantics enabled service registry will enhance the service discovery methods within a private UDDI registry environment.
Abstract: An Advance Driver Assistance System (ADAS) is a computer system on board a vehicle which is used to reduce the risk of vehicular accidents by monitoring factors relating to the driver, vehicle and environment and taking some action when a risk is identified. Much work has been done on assessing vehicle and environmental state but there is still comparatively little published work that tackles the problem of driver state. Visual attention is one such driver state. In fact, some researchers claim that lack of attention is the main cause of accidents as factors such as fatigue, alcohol or drug use, distraction and speeding all impair the driver-s capacity to pay attention to the vehicle and road conditions [1]. This seems to imply that the main cause of accidents is inappropriate driver behaviour in cases where the driver is not giving full attention while driving. The work presented in this paper proposes an ADAS system which uses an image based template matching algorithm to detect if a driver is failing to observe particular windscreen cells. This is achieved by dividing the windscreen into 24 uniform cells (4 rows of 6 columns) and matching video images of the driver-s left eye with eye-gesture templates drawn from images of the driver looking at the centre of each windscreen cell. The main contribution of this paper is to assess the accuracy of this approach using Receiver Operating Characteristic analysis. The results of our evaluation give a sensitivity value of 84.3% and a specificity value of 85.0% for the eye-gesture template approach indicating that it may be useful for driver point of regard determinations.
Abstract: The plant world is the source of many medicines.
Recently, researchers have estimated that there are approximately
400,000 plant species worldwide, of which about a quarter or a third
have been used by societies for medicinal purposes. The human uses
of plants for thousands of years to treat various ailments, in many
developing countries, much of the population trust in traditional
doctors and their collections of medicinal plants to treat them.
Essential oils have many therapeutic properties. In herbal medicine,
they are used for their antiseptic properties against infectious
diseases of fungal origin, against dermatophytes, those of bacterial
origin. The aim of our study is to determine the antimicrobial effect
of essential oils of the plant Trigonella focnum greacum on some
pathogenic bacteria, it is a medicinal plant used in traditional
therapy. The test adopted is based on the diffusion method on solid
medium (Antibiogram), this method determines the sensitivity or
resistance of a microorganism vis-à-vis the extract studied. Our study
reveals that the essential oil of the plant Trigonella focnum greacum
has a different effect on the resistance of germs. For staphiloccocus
Pseudomonnas aeroginosa and Krebsilla, are moderately sensitive
strains, also Escherichia coli and Candida albicans represents a high
sensitivity. By against Proteus is a strain that represents a weak
sensitivity.
Abstract: power-line networks are promise infrastructure for
broadband services provision to end users. However, the network
performance is affected by stochastic channel changing which is due
to load impedances, number of branches and branched line lengths. It
has been proposed that multi-carrier modulations techniques such as
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), Multi-Carrier
Spread Spectrum (MC-SS), wavelet OFDM can be used in such
environment. This paper investigates the performance of different
indoor topologies of power-line networks that uses MC-SS
modulation scheme.It is observed that when a branch is added in the
link between sending and receiving end of an indoor channel an
average of 2.5dB power loss is found. In additional, when the branch
is added at a node an average of 1dB power loss is found.
Additionally when the terminal impedances of the branch change
from line characteristic impedance to impedance either higher or
lower values the channel performances were tremendously improved.
For example changing terminal load from characteristic impedance
(85 .) to 5 . the signal to noise ratio (SNR) required to attain the
same performances were decreased from 37dB to 24dB respectively.
Also, changing the terminal load from channel characteristic
impedance (85 .) to very higher impedance (1600 .) the SNR
required to maintain the same performances were decreased from
37dB to 23dB. The result concludes that MC-SS performs better
compared with OFDM techniques in all aspects and especially when
the channel is terminated in either higher or lower impedances.
Abstract: With the resource exhaustion, bad affections of human
activities and the awakening of the human rights, the corporate social
responsibility became popular corporate strategy achieving
sustainable development of both corporation and society. The issue of
Guideline of Chinese Corporate Social Responsibility Report
promotes greatly corporation to take social responsibility. This paper
built the index system according to this guideline and takes the textile
industry as an example, uses the analytical hierarchy process to
identify the weightings of different responsibilities of corporation to
guide the corporate social responsibility performance assessment.
Abstract: This paper explores an application of an adaptive learning mechanism for robots based on the natural immune system. Most of the research carried out so far are based either on the innate or adaptive characteristics of the immune system, we present a combination of these to achieve behavior arbitration wherein a robot learns to detect vulnerable areas of a track and adapts to the required speed over such portions. The test bed comprises of two Lego robots deployed simultaneously on two predefined near concentric tracks with the outer robot capable of helping the inner one when it misaligns. The helper robot works in a damage-control mode by realigning itself to guide the other robot back onto its track. The panic-stricken robot records the conditions under which it was misaligned and learns to detect and adapt under similar conditions thereby making the overall system immune to such failures.
Abstract: The gel-supported precipitation (GSP) process can be
used to make spherical particles (spherules) of nuclear fuel,
particularly for very high temperature reactors (VHTR) and even for
implementing the process called SPHEREPAC. In these different
cases, the main characteristics are the sphericity of the particles to be
manufactured and the control over their grain size. Nonetheless,
depending on the specifications defined for these spherical particles,
the GSP process has intrinsic limits, particularly when fabricating
very small particles. This paper describes the use of secondary
fragmentation (water, water/PVA and uranyl nitrate) on solid
surfaces under varying temperature and vibration conditions to assess
the relevance of using this new technique to manufacture very small
spherical particles by means of a modified GSP process. The
fragmentation mechanisms are monitored and analysed, before the
trends for its subsequent optimised application are described.
Abstract: Most of the biclustering/projected clustering algorithms are based either on the Euclidean distance or correlation coefficient which capture only linear relationships. However, in many applications, like gene expression data and word-document data, non linear relationships may exist between the objects. Mutual Information between two variables provides a more general criterion to investigate dependencies amongst variables. In this paper, we improve upon our previous algorithm that uses mutual information for biclustering in terms of computation time and also the type of clusters identified. The algorithm is able to find biclusters with mixed relationships and is faster than the previous one. To the best of our knowledge, none of the other existing algorithms for biclustering have used mutual information as a similarity measure. We present the experimental results on synthetic data as well as on the yeast expression data. Biclusters on the yeast data were found to be biologically and statistically significant using GO Tool Box and FuncAssociate.
Abstract: This study focused on arsenate removal by nano
zero-valent iron (NZVI) in the gas-bubbled aqueous solution. It
appears that solution acidified by H2SO4 is far more favorable than by
CO2-bubbled acidification. In addition, as dissolved oxygen was
stripped out of solution by N2 gas bubbling, the arsenate removal
dropped significantly. To take advantages of common practice of
carbonation and oxic condition, pretreatment of CO2 and air bubbling
in sequence are recommended for a better removal of arsenate.
Abstract: The survival of publicly listed companies largely
depends on their stocks being liquidly traded. This goal can be
achieved when new investors are attracted to invest on companies-
stocks. Among different groups of investors, individual investors are
generally less able to objectively evaluate companies- risks and
returns, and tend to be emotionally biased in their investing
decisions. Therefore their decisions may be formed as a result of
perceived risks and returns, and influenced by companies- images.
This study finds that perceived risk, perceived returns and trust
directly affect individual investors- trading decisions while attitude
towards brand partially mediates the relationships. This finding
suggests that, in courting individual investors, companies still need to
perform financially while building a good image can result in their
stocks being accepted quicker than the stocks of good performing
companies with hidden images.
Abstract: We propose an integral tracking control method for a piezoelectric actuator system. The proposed method achieves the output tracking without requiring any hysteresis observer or schemes to compensate the hysteresis effect. With the proposed control law, the system is converted into the standard singularly perturbed model. Using Tikhonov-s theorem, we guarantee that the tracking error can be reduced to arbitrarily small bound. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Abstract: This paper reports on a survey of state-of-the-art
application scenarios for smart office environments. Based on an
analysis of ongoing research activities and industry projects,
functionalities and services of future office systems are extracted. In
a second step, these results are used to identify the key characteristics
of emerging products.
Abstract: The whole-cell protein-profiling technique was
evaluated for studying differences in banding pattern of three
different species of Cyanobacteria i.e. Anabaena fertilissima,
Aulosira fertilissima and Westiellopsis prolifica under the influence
of four different pesticides-2,4-D (Ethyl Ester of 2,4-Dichloro
Phenoxy Acetic Acid), Pencycuron (N-[(4-chlorophenyl)methyl]-Ncyclopentyl-
N'–phenylurea), Endosulfan (6,7,8,9,10,10hexachloro-
1,5,5a,6,9,9a-hexahydro-6,9-methano-2,4,3-benzodioxathiepine-3-
oxide) and Tebuconazole (1-(4-Chlorophenyl)-4,4-dimethyl-3-(1,2,4-
triazol-1-ylmethyl)pentan-3-ol). Whole-cell extracts were obtained by
sonication treatment (Sonifier cell disruptor -Branson Digital Sonifier
S-450D, USA) and were analyzed by sodium dodecyl sulfate
polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). SDS-PAGE
analyses of the total protein profile of Anabaena fertilissima,
Aulosira fertilissima and Westiellopsis prolifica showed a linear
decrease in the protein content with increasing pesticide stress when
administered to different concentrations of 2, 4-D, Pencycuron,
Endosulfan and Tebuconazole. The results indicate that different
stressors exert specific effects on cyanobacterial protein synthesis.
Abstract: Representation and description of object shapes by the
slopes of their contours or borders are proposed. The idea is to capture
the essence of the features that make it easier for a shape to be
stored, transmitted, compared and recognized. These features must
be independent of translation, rotation and scaling of the shape. A
approach is proposed to obtain high performance, efficiency and to
merge the boundaries into sequence of straight line segments with
the fewest possible segments. Evaluation on the performance of the
proposed method is based on its comparison with established method
of object shape description.
Abstract: Protection of slope and embankment from erosion has
become an important issue in Bangladesh. The constructions of
strong structures require large capital, integrated designing, high
maintenance cost. Strong structure methods have negative impact on
the environment and sometimes not function for the design period.
Plantation of vetiver system along the slopes is an alternative
solution. Vetiver not only serves the purpose of slope protection but
also adds green environment reducing pollution. Vetiver is available
in almost all the districts of Bangladesh. This paper presents the
application of vetiver system with geo-jute, for slope protection and
erosion control of embankments and slopes. In-situ shear tests have
been conducted on vetiver rooted soil system to find the shear
strength. The shear strength and effective soil cohesion of vetiver
rooted soil matrix are respectively 2.0 times and 2.1 times higher than
that of the bared soil. Similar trends have been found in direct shear
tests conducted on laboratory reconstituted samples. Field trials have
been conducted in road embankment and slope protection with
vetiver at different sites. During the time of vetiver root growth the
soil protection has been accomplished by geo-jute. As the geo-jute
degrades with time, vetiver roots grow and take over the function of
geo-jutes. Slope stability analyses showed that vegetation increase
the factor of safety significantly.
Abstract: The theory of Groebner Bases, which has recently been
honored with the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award,
has become a crucial building block to computer algebra, and is
widely used in science, engineering, and computer science. It is wellknown
that Groebner bases computation is EXP-SPACE in a general
polynomial ring setting.
However, for many important applications in computer science
such as satisfiability and automated verification of hardware and
software, computations are performed in a Boolean ring. In this paper,
we give an algorithm to show that Groebner bases computation is PSPACE
in Boolean rings. We also show that with this discovery,
the Groebner bases method can theoretically be as efficient as
other methods for automated verification of hardware and software.
Additionally, many useful and interesting properties of Groebner
bases including the ability to efficiently convert the bases for different
orders of variables making Groebner bases a promising method in
automated verification.