Search results for: e-Science User Services

Authors: Mohamed Abdalla Khalil Mahmoud, Omnia Haidar Suliman

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Information and Communication technologies have revolutionized the way services are developed and offered to customers and have achieved evident success in a variety of vital sectors and widely contributed to the growth and resilience of the economy worldwide. Consequently, governments, especially of developing countries, have turned their attention to examine possible ways to utilize contemporary technology advances to offer essential governmental services to citizens, especially in areas where government agencies are not present. This paper investigates the challenges that impede governments of developing countries to provide basic services to its constituents nationwide. Sudan, as a case study, has taken major steps to provide essential governmental services via electronic channels. However, these services are still not widely used by the citizens, resulting in waste of financial and human resources and efforts that could have been invested more appropriately. This paper examines the challenges that hinder the Sudan’s government in their pursuit of availing its services via electronic channels. Different categories of e-government challenges, such as organizational, technological, social and, demographic, and financial and economic, have been explored in order to pinpoint the major challenges. A structured questionnaire is used to survey the target population of e-government professionals and executives who have direct involvement in the implementation of this nationwide endeavor in Sudan. The survey has successfully identified the main challenges that have high impact on the government’s effort to offer its services via electronic channels, such as Lack of coordination between public and private sectors and Lack of the benefits recognition of the e-government program. The findings of this paper can be used as a solid foundation for improving the way governmental services are offered to citizens in Sudan, resulting in a successful investment of financial and human resources and benefiting the targeted customers of all types.

Keywords: citizen, digital, e-channels, public sector, Sudan, technology

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Authors: Erika Takidah, Salina Kassim

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Digital transformation has accelerated in the new millennium. It is reshaping the financial services industry from a traditional system to financial technology. Moreover, the number of financial inclusion rates in Indonesia is less than 60%. An innovative model needed to elucidate this national problem. On the other hand, the Islamic financial service industry and financial technology grow fast as a new aspire in economic development. An Islamic bank, takaful, Islamic microfinance, Islamic financial technology and Islamic social finance institution could collaborate to intensify the financial inclusion number in Indonesia. The primary motive of this paper is to examine the strategy of collaboration-based Islamic financial services to enhance financial inclusion in Indonesia, particularly facing the digital era. The fundamental findings for the main problems are the foundations and key ecosystems aspect involved in the development of collaboration-based Islamic financial services. By using the Interpretive Structural Model (ISM) approach, the core problems faced in the development of the models have lacked policy instruments guarding the collaboration-based Islamic financial services with fintech work process and availability of human resources for fintech. The core strategies or foundations that are needed in the framework of collaboration-based Islamic financial services are the ability to manage and analyze data in the big data era. For the aspects of the Ecosystem or actors involved in the development of this model, the important actor is government or regulator, educational institutions, and also existing industries (Islamic financial services). The outcome of the study designates that strategy collaboration of Islamic financial services institution supported by robust technology, a legal and regulatory commitment of the regulators and policymakers of the Islamic financial institutions, extensive public awareness of financial inclusion in Indonesia. The study limited itself to realize financial inclusion, particularly in Islamic finance development in Indonesia. The study will have an inference for the concerned professional bodies, regulators, policymakers, stakeholders, and practitioners of Islamic financial service institutions.

Keywords: collaboration, financial inclusion, Islamic financial services, Islamic fintech

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Authors: Wong Seng Yue

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Game dynamics and game mechanics are the two main components that used in gamification to engage and encourage students to learn. The advantages of gamified classroom are engaging students, increasing students interest, preserving students focus and remain a positive behaviour. However, the empirical studies on gamification are still at early stage, especially the effectiveness of various gamification components have not been evaluated. Thus, this study is aimed to conduct a user experience (UX) evaluation on gamified classroom through Prezi, which focused on learning experience, gaming experience, adaptivity, and gameplay experience. This study is a further study extended from the previous exploratory study to explore more on UX of gamified classroom via Prezi by interview. A focus group study, which involves 22 students from a foundation course has been conducted for the study. Besides the empirical data from the previous study, this focus group study has significantly found that 90.9% respondents show their positive perceptions on gaming experience via Prezi. They are interested, feel fresh, good, and highly motivated of the contents of Prezi. 95.5% participants have had a positive learning experience from the gamified classroom via Prezi, which can engage them, made them concentrate on learning and easy to remember what they have learned if compared to the traditional classroom slides. The adaptivity of the gamified classroom also high due to its zooming user interface, narrative, rewards and engagement features. This study has uncovered on how far the impact of gamification components in the classroom, especially UX that implemented in gamified classroom.

Keywords: user experience (UX), gamification, gamified classroom, Prezi

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Authors: Ananda Perera

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Computer-Assisted Medical Evaluation of Symptoms (CAMEOS) is a medical expert system designed to help General Practices (GPs) make an accurate diagnosis. CAMEOS comprises a knowledge base, user input, inference engine, reasoning module, and output statement. The knowledge base was developed by the author. User input is an Html file. The physician user collects data in the consultation. Data is sent to the inference engine at servers. CAMEOS uses set theory to simulate diagnostic reasoning. The program output is a list of differential diagnoses, the most probable diagnosis, and the diagnostic reasoning.

Keywords: CDSS, computerized decision support systems, expert systems, general practice, diagnosis, diagnostic systems, primary care diagnostic system, artificial intelligence in medicine

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Authors: Mohammad Ibrahim

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The study was conducted at Albasar international foundation ophthalmic hospitals in Sudan to study the burden and patterns of ophthalmic disorder in the sector. Review of the hospitals records revealed that the total number of patient examined in the hospitals and outreached camps conducted by the hospitals is 10,513,874, the total number of surgeries is 694,015 and the total number of pupils at school program is 230,382. The organization working with the highest management system and standards and quality result based planning. The study yielded that the ophthalmic problem in Sudan are of great percentage and the temporal blindness disorder are high since major cases and surgeries were Cataract (57.8%). Retinal problem (2.9%), Glaucoma (2.4%), Orbit and Occulo-plastic disorders (2.2%) other disorders are refractive errors, squint and strabismus, Corneal, Pediatrics and minor ophthalmic disorders.

Keywords: hospitals and outreach ophthalmic services, largest coverage of ophthalmic services, nonprofitable ophthalmic services, strong management system and standards

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Authors: Nicole Merkle, Stefan Zander

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Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) describes a technological and methodological stack of (e.g. formal model-theoretic semantics, rule-based reasoning and machine learning), different aspects regarding the behavior, activities and characteristics of humans. Hence, a semantic representation of the user environment and its relevant elements are required in order to allow assistive agents to recognize situations and deduce appropriate actions. Furthermore, the user and his/her characteristics (e.g. physical, cognitive, preferences) need to be represented with a high degree of expressiveness in order to allow software agents a precise evaluation of the users’ context models. The correct interpretation of these context models highly depends on temporal, spatial circumstances as well as individual user preferences. In most AAL approaches, model representations of real world situations represent the current state of a universe of discourse at a given point in time by neglecting transitions between a set of states. However, the AAL domain currently lacks sufficient approaches that contemplate on the dynamic adaptions of context-related representations. Semantic representations of relevant real-world excerpts (e.g. user activities) help cognitive, rule-based agents to reason and make decisions in order to help users in appropriate tasks and situations. Furthermore, rules and reasoning on semantic models are not sufficient for handling uncertainty and fuzzy situations. A certain situation can require different (re-)actions in order to achieve the best results with respect to the user and his/her needs. But what is the best result? To answer this question, we need to consider that every smart agent requires to achieve an objective, but this objective is mostly defined by domain experts who can also fail in their estimation of what is desired by the user and what not. Hence, a smart agent has to be able to learn from context history data and estimate or predict what is most likely in certain contexts. Furthermore, different agents with contrary objectives can cause collisions as their actions influence the user’s context and constituting conditions in unintended or uncontrolled ways. We present an approach for dynamically updating a semantic model with respect to the current user context that allows flexibility of the software agents and enhances their conformance in order to improve the user experience. The presented approach adapts rules by learning sensor evidence and user actions using probabilistic reasoning approaches, based on given expert knowledge. The semantic domain model consists basically of device-, service- and user profile representations. In this paper, we present how this semantic domain model can be used in order to compute the probability of matching rules and actions. We apply this probability estimation to compare the current domain model representation with the computed one in order to adapt the formal semantic representation. Our approach aims at minimizing the likelihood of unintended interferences in order to eliminate conflicts and unpredictable side-effects by updating pre-defined expert knowledge according to the most probable context representation. This enables agents to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment which enhances the provision of adequate assistance and affects positively the user satisfaction.

Keywords: ambient intelligence, machine learning, semantic web, software agents

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Authors: Adekunle K. O, Adeniyi A. E, Kolawole E

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One of the most dramatic trends in the communications market in recent years has been the growth of prepaid services. Today, prepaid no longer constitutes the low-revenue, basic-service segment. It is driven by a high margin, value-add service customers who view it as a convenient way of retaining control over their usage and communication spending while expecting high service levels. To service providers, prepaid services offer the advantage of reducing bad accounts while allowing them to predict usage and plan network resources. Yet, the real-time demands of prepaid services require a scalable, real-time platform to manage customers through their entire life cycle. It delivers integrated real-time rating, voucher management, recharge management, customer care and service provisioning for the generation of new prepaid services. It carries high scalability that can handle millions of prepaid customers in real-time through their entire life cycle.

Keywords: prepaid billing, voucher management, customers, automated, security

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Authors: Martina Marinelli, Samanta Vellante, Francesco Pilotti, Daniele Di Valerio, Gaetanino Paolone

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Any development in web marketing technology requires changes in information engineering to identify instruments and techniques suitable for the production of software applications for informative marketing. Moreover, for large web solutions, designing an interface that enables human interactions is a complex process that must bridge between informative marketing requirements and the developed solution. A user-friendly interface in web marketing applications is crucial for a successful business. The paper introduces mkInfo - a software platform that implements informative marketing. Informative marketing is a new interpretation of marketing which places the information at the center of every marketing action. The creative team includes software engineering researchers who have recently authored an article on automatic code generation. The authors have created the mkInfo software platform to generate informative marketing web applications. For each web application, it is possible to automatically implement an opt in page, a landing page, a sales page, and a thank you page: one only needs to insert the content. mkInfo implements an autoresponder to send mail according to a predetermined schedule. The mkInfo platform also includes e-commerce for a product or service. The stakeholder can access any opt-in page and get basic information about a product or service. If he wants to know more, he will need to provide an e-mail address to access a landing page that will generate an e-mail sequence. It will provide him with complete information about the product or the service. From this point on, the stakeholder becomes a user and is now able to purchase the product or related services through the mkInfo platform. This paper suggests a possible definition for Informative Marketing, illustrates its basic principles, and finally details the mkInfo platform that implements it. This paper also offers some Informative Marketing models, which are implemented in the mkInfo platform. Informative marketing can be applied to products or services. It is necessary to realize a web application for each product or service. The mkInfo platform enables the product or the service producer to send information concerning a specific product or service to all stakeholders. In conclusion, the technical contributions of this paper are: a different interpretation of marketing based on information; a modular architecture for web applications, particularly for one with standard features such as information storage, exchange, and delivery; multiple models to implement informative marketing; a software platform enabling the implementation of such models in a web application. Future research aims to enable stakeholders to provide information about a product or a service so that the information gathered about a product or a service includes both the producer’s and the stakeholders' point of view. The purpose is to create an all-inclusive management system of the knowledge regarding a specific product or service: a system that includes everything about the product or service and is able to address even unexpected questions.

Keywords: informative marketing, opt in page, software platform, web application

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Authors: Divyans Mahansaria

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User authentication is an important security measure for protecting confidential data and systems. However, the vulnerability while authenticating into a system has significantly increased. Thus, necessary mechanisms must be deployed during the process of authenticating a user to safeguard him/her from the vulnerable attacks. The proposed solution implements a novel authentication mechanism to counter various forms of security breach attacks including phishing, Trojan horse, replay, key logging, Asterisk logging, shoulder surfing, brute force search and others. QR code (Quick Response Code) is a type of matrix barcode or two-dimensional barcode that can be used for storing URLs, text, images and other information. In the proposed solution, during each new authentication request, a QR code is dynamically generated and presented to the user. A piece of generic information is mapped to plurality of elements and stored within the QR code. The mapping of generic information with plurality of elements, randomizes in each new login, and thus the QR code generated for each new authentication request is for one-time use only. In order to authenticate into the system, the user needs to decode the QR code using any QR code decoding software. The QR code decoding software needs to be installed on handheld mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistant (PDA), etc. On decoding the QR code, the user will be presented a mapping between the generic piece of information and plurality of elements using which the user needs to derive cipher secret information corresponding to his/her actual password. Now, in place of the actual password, the user will use this cipher secret information to authenticate into the system. The authentication terminal will receive the cipher secret information and use a validation engine that will decipher the cipher secret information. If the entered secret information is correct, the user will be provided access to the system. Usability study has been carried out on the proposed solution, and the new authentication mechanism was found to be easy to learn and adapt. Mathematical analysis of the time taken to carry out brute force attack on the proposed solution has been carried out. The result of mathematical analysis showed that the solution is almost completely resistant to brute force attack. Today’s standard methods for authentication are subject to a wide variety of software, hardware, and human attacks. The proposed scheme can be very useful in controlling the various types of authentication related attacks especially in a networked computer environment where the use of username and password for authentication is common.

Keywords: authentication, QR code, cipher / decipher text, one time password, secret information

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Authors: Jae-Neung Lee, Myung-Won Lee, Jung-Su Han, Keun-Chang Kwak

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The paper established DB on the basis of five sailing essentials in the real yachting environment. It obtained the yacht condition (tilt, speed and course), surrounding circumstances (wind direction and speed) and user motion. Gopro camera for image processing was used to recognize the user motion and tilt sensor was employed to see the yacht balance. In addition, GPS for course, wind speed and direction sensor and marked suit were employed.

Keywords: DB consturuction, yacht, five essentials of sailing, marker, Gps

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Authors: Liwen Wang, Yuting Chen, Tong Wu, Shaolei Hu

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In order to enhance the security of critical financial infrastructure, this study carries out a transformation of the architecture of a financial trading terminal to a zero trust architecture (ZTA), constructs an active defense system for cybersecurity, improves the security level of trading services in the Internet environment, enhances the ability to prevent network attacks and unknown risks, and reduces the industry and security risks brought about by cybersecurity risks. This study introduces the SDP technology of ZTA, adapts and applies it to a financial trading terminal to achieve security optimization and fine-grained business grading control. The upgraded architecture of the trading terminal moves security protection forward to the user access layer, replaces VPN to optimize remote access, and significantly improves the security protection capability of Internet transactions. The study achieves 1. deep integration with the access control architecture of the transaction system; 2. no impact on the performance of terminals and gateways, and no perception of application system upgrades; 3. customized checklist and policy configuration; 4. introduction of industry-leading security technology such as single-packet authorization (SPA) and secondary authentication. This study carries out a successful application of ZTA in the field of financial trading and provides transformation ideas for other similar systems while improving the security level of financial transaction services in the Internet environment.

Keywords: zero trust, trading terminal, architecture, network security, cybersecurity

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Authors: Delphine Vendryes, Dushyanth Sekhar, Baojia Tong, Matthew Theisen, Chester Curme

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Much of the data that inform the decisions of governments, corporations and individuals are harvested from unstructured documents. Data extraction is defined here as a process that turns non-machine-readable information into a machine-readable format that can be stored, for instance, in a database. In financial services, introducing more automation in data extraction pipelines is a major challenge. Information sought by financial data consumers is often buried within vast bodies of unstructured documents, which have historically required thorough manual extraction. Automated solutions provide faster access to non-machine-readable datasets, in a context where untimely information quickly becomes irrelevant. Data quality standards cannot be compromised, so automation requires high data integrity. This multifaceted task is broken down into smaller steps: ingestion, table parsing (detection and structure recognition), text analysis (entity detection and disambiguation), schema-based record extraction, user feedback incorporation. Selected intermediary steps are phrased as machine learning problems. Solutions leveraging cutting-edge approaches from the fields of computer vision (e.g. table detection) and natural language processing (e.g. entity detection and disambiguation) are proposed.

Keywords: computer vision, entity recognition, finance, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing

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Authors: F. Amin, S. Feizi

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Big data has the potential to improve the quality of services; enable infrastructure that businesses depend on to adapt continually and efficiently; improve the performance of employees; help organizations better understand customers; and reduce liability risks. Analytics and marketing models of fixed and mobile operators are falling short in combating churn and declining revenue per user. Big Data presents new method to reverse the way and improve profitability. The benefits of Big Data and next-generation network, however, are more exorbitant than improved customer relationship management. Next generation of networks are in a prime position to monetize rich supplies of customer information—while being mindful of legal and privacy issues. As data assets are transformed into new revenue streams will become integral to high performance.

Keywords: big data, next generation networks, network transformation, strategy

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Authors: Alexander Suuk Laar, Emmanuel Bekyieriya, Sylvester Isang, Benjamin Baguune

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Introduction: In Ghana, despite the implementation of strategies and initiatives to ensure universal access to reproductive health and family planning (FP) services for the past two decades, interventions have not adequately addressed the access and utilization needs of women of reproductive age, especially in rural Ghana. To improve access and use of reproductive and maternal health services in Ghana, a free maternal care exemption policy under the universal health coverage of the National Health Insurance Scheme was implemented in 2005. Despite the importance of FP, this service was left out of the benefit package of the policy. Low or no use of FP services is often associated with poor health among women. However, to date, there has been limited research on perspectives of women for not making FP services as part of the benefit package of the free maternal health services. This qualitative study explored perceptions of women on the comprehensiveness of the free maternal health benefit package and the effects on utilisation of services in the rural Upper West region of Ghana to improve services. Methods: This exploratory qualitative study used focus group discussions with pregnant and lactating women in three rural districts in the Upper West region of Ghana. Six focus groups were held with both pregnant women and lactating mothers at the time of the interview. Three focus group discussions were organised with the same category of women in each district. We used a purposive sampling procedure to select the participants from the districts. The interviews with the written consent of the participants lasted between 60 minutes and 120 minutes. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke thematic framework guidelines. Results: This research presents an in-depth account of women's perceptions on the effects associated with the uptake of FP services and its exclusion from the benefit package of the free maternal health policy. Our study found that participants did not support the exclusion of FP services in the benefit package. Participants mentioned factors hampering their access to and use of FP and contraceptive services to include the cost of services, distance and cost of transport to health facilities, lack of knowledge about FP services, socio-cultural norms and negative attitude of healthcare professionals. Participants are of the view that making FP services part of the benefit package could have addressed the cost aspect of services which act as the main barrier to improve the use of services by poor rural women. Conclusion: Women of reproductive age face cost barriers that limit their access to and use of FP and contraception services in the rural Upper West region of Ghana and need health policymakers to revise the free maternal health package to include FP services. It is essential for policymakers to begin considering revising the free maternal health policy benefit package to include FP services to help address the cost barrier for rural poor women to use services.

Keywords: benefit package, free maternal policy, women, Ghana, rural Upper West Region, Universal Health Coverage.

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Authors: Nadia Diyana Mohd Muhaiyuddin, Dayang Rohaya Awang Rambli

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The aim of our work is to identify whether user’s calmness can be a factor to elicit user’s spatial presence experience. Hence, a systematic mental model technique called repertory grid was selected to collect data because users can freely give their opinions in this approach. Three image-based virtual reality (IBVR) environments were created to satisfy the requirement of the repertory grid. Different virtual environments were necessary to allow users to compare and give feedback. Result was analyzed by using descriptive analysis through the SPSS software. The result revealed that ‘users feel calm’ is accepted as one of the factors that can elicit spatial presence. Users also highlighted five IBVR characteristics that could elicit spatial presence, namely, calm sound, calm content, calm color, calm story line, and the calm feeling of the user.

Keywords: spatial presence, presence, virtual reality, image-based virtual reality, human-computer interaction

Procedia PDF Downloads 286

Authors: Rachel Tambyah, Katarzyna Olcoń, Julaine Allan, Pete Destry, Thomas Astell-Burt

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The rising social and financial burden of mental illness indicates an urgent need to explore interventions that can be used as well as or instead of traditional treatments. Although there is growing evidence of the positive mental health outcomes of spending time in nature, the implementation of nature-based interventions (NBIs) within mental health services remains minimal. Based on interviews with mental health clinicians in Australia, this study demonstrated that clinicians supported the use of NBIs and would promote them to their clients.

Keywords: nature, nature-based interventions, mental health, mental health services, mental health clinicians

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Authors: Rania Khadim, Mohammed Erritali, Abdelhakim Maaden

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Nowadays Wireless Sensor Networks have attracted worldwide research and industrial interest, because they can be applied in various areas. Geographic routing protocols are very suitable to those networks because they use location information when they need to route packets. Obviously, location information is maintained by Location-Based Services provided by network nodes in a distributed way. In this paper we choose to evaluate the performance of two hierarchical rendezvous location based-services, GLS (Grid Location Service) and HLS (Hierarchical Location Service) coupled to the GPSR routing protocol (Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing) for Wireless Sensor Network. The simulations were performed using NS2 simulator to evaluate the performance and power of the two services in term of location overhead, the request travel time (RTT) and the query Success ratio (QSR). This work presents also a new scalability performance study of both GLS and HLS, specifically, what happens if the number of nodes N increases. The study will focus on three qualitative metrics: The location maintenance cost, the location query cost and the storage cost.

Keywords: location based-services, routing protocols, scalability, wireless sensor networks

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Authors: Gemma García López

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The goal of this study is to analyze if search queries carried out in search engines such as Google, can offer emotional information about the user that performs them. Knowing the emotional state in which the Internet user is located can be a key to achieve the maximum personalization of content and the detection of worrying behaviors. For this, two studies were carried out using tools with advanced natural language processing techniques. The first study determines if a query can be classified as positive, negative or neutral, while the second study extracts emotional content from words and applies the categorical and dimensional models for the representation of emotions. In addition, we use search queries in Spanish and English to establish similarities and differences between two languages. The results revealed that text search queries performed by users on the Internet can be classified emotionally. This allows us to better understand the emotional state of the user at the time of the search, which could involve adapting the technology and personalizing the responses to different emotional states.

Keywords: emotion classification, text search queries, emotional analysis, sentiment analysis in text, natural language processing

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Authors: R. Kanthavel, R. Yogesh Kumar, T. Narendrakumar, B. Santhosh, S. Surya Prakash

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This paper primarily focuses on developing an affordable personal assistant and the implementation of it in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a virtual assistant/friend. The problem in existing home automation techniques is that it requires the usage of exact command words present in the database to execute the corresponding task. Our proposed work is ATOM a.k.a ‘Artificial intelligence Talking Omnipresent Machine’. Our inspiration came from an unlikely source- the movie ‘Iron Man’ in which a character called J.A.R.V.I.S has omnipresence, and device controlling capability. This device can control household devices in real time and send the live information to the user. This device does not require the user to utter the exact commands specified in the database as it can capture the keywords from the uttered commands, correlates the obtained keywords and perform the specified task. This ability to compare and correlate the keywords gives the user the liberty to give commands which are not necessarily the exact words provided in the database. The proposed work has a higher flexibility (due to its keyword extracting ability from the user input) comparing to the existing work Intelligent Home automation System (IHAS), is more accurate, and is much more affordable as it makes use of WI-FI module and raspberry pi 2 instead of ZigBee and a computer respectively.

Keywords: home automation, speech recognition, voice control, personal assistant, artificial intelligence

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Authors: Yakubu Nkom Bityong, A. I. Kabido, K. Venkateswarlu

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The influence of branding and consultancy services on sports development and marketing mix has been a matter of interest among coaches athletes and sports managers in Nigeria. Marketers use sports as a promotional vehicle towards attracting customers to their products and services. The use of images, names, and photographs of sports personalities to advertise beverages, cars, and a whole range of other products and services as it is clearly noticed all over the television, radio and print media has generated a lot of argument among consumers who have vested interest and are more drawn to their favorite teams and sports personalities than they are to many company products This paper examines the influence of branding and consultancy services on sports Performance of coaches, athletes and sports managers in Nigeria. From a population of 7,441 made up of coaches, athletes and sports managers, 372 respondents were sampled for the study. A self developed and standardized questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. One-tailed t-test was used to test the hypothesis. Results revealed that branding and consultancy services influence the performances of coaches, athletes and sports managers in Nigeria. It was concluded that the establishment of the National Institute of Sports (NIS) in Lagos with affiliated sports training programmes in Nigerian Universities is responsible for boosting the performance of sports personalities in Nigeria. It was recommended that National Policy on Sports should be reviewed in order to inculcate new methods and strategies towards enhancing sports development initiatives in the country while stakeholders should intensify regular training and retraining programmes for coaches, athletes and sports managers to update their knowledge and skills.

Keywords: branding, consultancy, sports performance, sports development

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Authors: Wann-Yun Shieh, Chin-Man Wang, Ya-Cheng Shieh

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This study aims to develop an objective scoring system to evaluate hand-eye coordination and hand dexterity for Parkinson’s disease. This system contains three boards, and each of them is implemented with the sensors to sense a user’s finger operations. The operations include the peg test, the block test, and the blind block test. A user has to use the vision, hearing, and tactile abilities to finish these operations, and the board will record the results automatically. These results can help the physicians to evaluate a user’s reaction, coordination, dexterity function. The results will be collected to a cloud database for further analysis and statistics. A researcher can use this system to obtain systematic, graphic reports for an individual or a group of users. Particularly, a deep learning model is developed to learn the features of the data from different users. This model will help the physicians to assess the Parkinson’s disease symptoms by a more intellective algorithm.

Keywords: deep learning, hand-eye coordination, reaction, hand dexterity

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Authors: Natalia Khvorostianov, Nelly Elias

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The present study seeks to analyze representation of social work in immigrant media, focusing on the case of online newspapers established by immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel. This immigrant population is particularly interesting because social work did not exist as a profession practiced in the USSR and hence most FSU immigrants arrive in Israel without a basic knowledge of the essence of social work, the services it provides and the logic behind its treatment methods. The sample of 37 items was built through a Google search of the Russian online newspapers and portals originated in Israel by using keywords such as “social worker,” “social work services” and the like. All items were analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. Principal analytical categories used for the analysis were: Assessment of social work services (negative, positive, neutral); social workers’ professionalism and effectiveness; goals and motives underlying their activity; cross-cultural contact with immigrants and methods used in working with immigrants. On this basis, four dominant images used to portray Israeli social work services and social workers were identified: Lack of professionalism, cultural gaps between FSU immigrants and Israeli social workers, repressive character of social work services and social workers’ involvement in corruption and crime.

Keywords: FSU immigrants, immigrant media, media images, social workers

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Authors: Aarnav Singh, Jatin Moolchandani

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The proposed research work aims to build a query-based AI chatbot that can answer any question related to any topic. A chatbot is software that converses with users via text messages. In the proposed system, we aim to build a chatbot that generates a response based on the user’s query. For this, we use natural language processing to analyze the query and some set of texts to form a concise answer. The texts are obtained through web-scrapping and filtering all the credible sources from a web search. The objective of this project is to provide a chatbot that is able to provide simple and accurate answers without the user having to read through a large number of articles and websites. Creating an AI chatbot that can answer a variety of user questions on a variety of topics is the goal of the proposed research project. This chatbot uses natural language processing to comprehend user inquiries and provides succinct responses by examining a collection of writings that were scraped from the internet. The texts are carefully selected from reliable websites that are found via internet searches. This project aims to provide users with a chatbot that provides clear and precise responses, removing the need to go through several articles and web pages in great detail. In addition to exploring the reasons for their broad acceptance and their usefulness across many industries, this article offers an overview of the interest in chatbots throughout the world.

Keywords: Chatbot, Artificial Intelligence, natural language processing, web scrapping

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Authors: Mona Solvoll, Ragnhild Kr. Olsen

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Background and significance of the study: Newspapers are going through radical changes with increased competition, eroding readerships and declining advertising resulting in plummeting overall revenues. This has lead to a quest for new business models, focusing on monetizing content. This research paper investigates both how local online newspapers have introduced user payment and how the audience has received these changes. Given the role of local media in keeping their communities informed and those in power accountable, their potential impact on civic engagement and cultural integration in local communities, the business model innovations of local media deserves far more research interest. Empirically, the findings are interesting for local journalists, local media managers as well as local advertisers. Basic methodologies: The study is based on interviews with commercial leaders in 20 Norwegian local newspapers in addition to a national survey data from 1600 respondents among local media users. The interviews were conducted in the second half of 2015, while the survey was conducted in September 2016. Theoretically, the study draws on the business model framework. Findings: The analysis indicates that paywalls aim more at reducing digital cannibalisation of print revenue than about creating new digital income. The newspapers are mostly concerned with retaining “old” print subscribers and transform them into digital subscribers. However, this strategy may come at a high price for newspapers if their defensive print strategy drives away younger digital readership and hamper their recruitment potential for new audiences as some previous studies have indicated. Analysis of young reader news habits indicates that attracting the younger audience to traditional local news providers is particularly challenging and that they are more prone to seek alternative news sources than the older audience is. Conclusion: The paywall strategy applied by the local newspapers may be well fitted to stabilise print subscription figures and facilitate more tailored and better services for already existing customers, but far less suited for attracting new ones. The paywall is a short-sighted strategy, which drives away younger readers and paves the road for substitute offerings, particularly Facebook.

Keywords: business model, newspapers, paywall, user payment

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Authors: Shivkumar Krishnamurti, Ruchi Agarwal

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The study examines the influence of marital status on consumers of products and services using blogs as a source of information. A pre-designed questionnaire was used to collect the primary data from the respondents (experiences). Data were collected from one hundred and eighty seven respondents residing in and around the Emirates of Sharjah and Dubai of the United Arab Emirates. The collected data was analyzed with the help of statistical tools such as averages, percentages, factor analysis, student’s t-test and structural equation modeling technique. Objectives of the study are to know the reasons how married and unmarried or single consumers of products and services are motivated to use blogs as a source of information, to know whether the consumers of products and services irrespective of their marital status share their views and experiences with other bloggers and to know the respondents’ future intentions towards blogging. The study revealed the following: Majority of the respondents have the motivation to blog because they are willing to receive comments on what they post about services, convenience of blogs to search for information about services and products, by blogging respondents share information on the symptoms of a disease/ disorder that may be experienced by someone, helps to share information about ready to cook mix products and are keen to spend more time blogging in the future.

Keywords: blog, consumer, information, marital status

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Authors: Dipendra Kumar Yadav, Rajani Ghimire, Saroj Yadav

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Background: The concern about adolescent on reproductive health has grown due to unprecedented increasing rates of early pregnancies and sexually transmitted Infections and they do not have adequate awareness and knowledge about it. Access to these services as well as information about them is, therefore, crucial for adolescents to utilize and benefit from sexual and reproductive health services. The objective of the study was to assess the reproductive health knowledge, attitude and health services utilization among adolescents in rural and urban areas of Kaski district. Materials and Methods: A community-based descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among adolescents (10-19 years of age) in rural and urban areas of Kaski district, Nepal. The period of data collection was October to November, 2014. Altogether 419 participants were taken for the study. Results: The mean age of the respondents was 15.86 and standard deviation was ±2.305. More than half (58.7 %) of the respondents were females and 41.3 % were males. Out of 419, majority (78.8%) of the respondents were known about family planning, among them only 70 % of respondents were aware about family planning methods. Fifty-one percentages of the respondents were aware about the sexually transmitted diseases. Before giving a birth there is need to consult with partner with this fact 68.7 % of the respondents were agree, 23.6 % of them were neutral and very few (7.6%) of them were disagree. Nearly twenty six percentage of the respondents were faced the reproductive health problems within one month. Out of 107 respondents, 57.9 % did not utilize reproductive health services because of different reasons. Conclusions: The overall level of knowledge towards reproductive health among adolescents was found low. However, levels of attitude towards different reproductive health components were found favorable. Only 42.1% of the respondents were utilized reproductive health services among those who was faced the reproductive health problems within one month which was low coverage of reproductive health services utilization.

Keywords: reproductive health knowledge, reproductive health attitudes, adolescent, service utilization

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Authors: Anant Deogaonkar, Archana Nanoty

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The term civil service plays a vital role in functioning of any government. In today’s modern era of globalization civil services essentially contribute for the success of the good governance system. The civil service in India refers to the body of government officials employed in civil occupations that are neither political nor judicial. The Indian Civil Services were created to foster the idea of unity in diversity with the expectation of giving continuity and change in administration independent of the political scenario and turmoil affecting the country. The civil service is an integral part of administration and the structures of administration to determine the way civil service functions. The concept of good governance necessarily precludes the effective human resource management ensuring the root level reach of the good governance. The serious matter of concern is the element of change. The civil service in general has maintained status quo instead of sweeping changes in social and economic scenario. One may disagree for this but it is a fact on the street that the Indian civil service was not able to deliver up to the expectations of the people and was lacking on the service front. The effective management of human resources at civil service needs to be prioritized and will form a key factor in successful delivery of the desired results may be in minimum duration. This paper focuses on the various ways of effective management of human resources in civil services. It also highlights the importance of improvement in human resource management in civil services with the detailed discussion of positives and negatives if any of the human resource management in civil services.

Keywords: civil services, human resources management, India, governance

Procedia PDF Downloads 318

Authors: Thuy Hang Le

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Traditional agroforestry systems are land-use practices still widespread in tropical and subtropical countries, while in Europe have significantly decreased due to land-use intensification, land abandonment, and urbanization. Nevertheless, scientific evidence reveals that traditional agroforestry systems significantly support biodiversity and ecosystem services and may positively contribute to socioeconomic rural regional development. We worked out a review that follows the PRISMA approach and compiled comprehensive information on traditional agroforestry systems in Europe. Based on the differentiation of different land-use systems, also considering the agricultural as well as forestry components, we compiled information regarding current distribution, management (agrodiversity), biodiversity and agrobiodiversity, ecosystem and landscape services, threats, and restoration initiatives. From a total of 3,304 studies that dealt with agroforestry systems in Europe, both “modern” (e.g., buffer strip) and “traditional” (e.g., meadow orchards), we filtered out 158 studies from 35 European countries which represent the basis for in-depth investigation. We found, for example, that the traditional pastoral agroforestry system in the Mediterranean region, the so-called Dehesa, can harbor up to 300 plant species as well as 238 bird species, of which 134 are breeding birds. With regard to carbon storage, the traditional orchard agroforestry system in Germany stocks ranged between 6.5 and 9.8 Mg C ha−1, showing significantly higher values compared to an intensively used grassland with around 3.4 to 6.7 Mg C ha−1. With the remarkably high benefit for biodiversity and ecosystem services provided, the important role and multifunctionality of traditional agroforestry systems in Europe should be acknowledged and promoted.

Keywords: biodiversity, ecosystem services, landscape services, traditional agroforestry systems

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Authors: Aliyu Isah Agaie, Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad, Nurfadhlina Mohd Sharef, Aida Mustapha

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Natural Language Interfaces typically support a restricted language and also have scopes and limitations that naïve users are unaware of, resulting in errors when the users attempt to retrieve information from ontologies. To overcome this challenge, an auto-suggest feature is introduced into the querying process where users are guided through the querying process using interactive query construction system. Guiding users to formulate their queries, while providing them with an unconstrained (or almost unconstrained) way to query the ontology results in better interpretation of the query and ultimately lead to an effective search. The approach described in this paper is unobtrusive and subtly guides the users, so that they have a choice of either selecting from the suggestion list or typing in full. The user is not coerced into accepting system suggestions and can express himself using fragments or full sentences.

Keywords: auto-suggest, expressiveness, habitability, natural language interface, query interpretation, user guidance

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Authors: Kim Young-Jin, Kim Byung-Kon

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Although more efforts to expand the application of BIM (Building Information Modeling) technologies have be pursued in recent years than ever, it’s true that there have been various challenges in doing so, including a lack or absence of relevant institutions, lots of costs required to build BIM-related infrastructure, incompatible processes, etc. This, in turn, has led to a more prolonged delay in the expansion of their application than expected at an early stage. Especially, attempts to save costs for building BIM-related infrastructure and provide various BIM services compatible with domestic processes include studies to link between BIM and cloud computing technologies. Also in this study, the author attempted to develop a cloud BIM service operation model through analyzing the level of BIM applications for the construction sector and deriving relevant service areas, and find how to link BIM services to the cloud operation model, as through archiving BIM data and creating a revenue structure so that the BIM services may grow spontaneously, considering a demand for cloud resources.

Keywords: construction IT, BIM (building information modeling), cloud computing, BIM service based cloud computing

Procedia PDF Downloads 487