Search results for: learning and teaching

Authors: Natalie Delia

Abstract:

This academic paper investigates the transformative potential of incorporating alternative ways of knowing within the framework of Critical Studies departments. Traditional academic paradigms often prioritize empirical evidence and established methodologies, potentially limiting the scope of critical inquiry. In response to this, our research seeks to illuminate the benefits and challenges associated with integrating alternative epistemologies, such as indigenous knowledge systems, artistic expressions, and experiential narratives. Drawing upon a comprehensive review of literature and case studies, we examine how alternative ways of knowing can enrich and diversify the intellectual landscape of Critical Studies departments. By embracing perspectives that extend beyond conventional boundaries, departments may foster a more inclusive and holistic understanding of critical issues. Additionally, we explore the potential impact on pedagogical approaches, suggesting that alternative ways of knowing can stimulate alternative way of teaching methods and enhance student engagement. Our investigation also delves into the institutional and cultural shifts necessary to support the integration of alternative epistemologies within academic settings. We address concerns related to validation, legitimacy, and the potential clash with established norms, offering insights into fostering an environment that encourages intellectual pluralism. Furthermore, the paper considers the implications for interdisciplinary collaboration and the potential for cultivating a more responsive and socially engaged scholarship. By encouraging a synthesis of diverse perspectives, Critical Studies departments may be better equipped to address the complexities of contemporary issues, encouraging a dynamic and evolving field of study. In conclusion, this paper advocates for a paradigm shift within Critical Studies departments towards a more inclusive and expansive approach to knowledge production. By embracing alternative ways of knowing, departments have the opportunity to not only diversify their intellectual landscape but also to contribute meaningfully to broader societal dialogues, addressing pressing issues with renewed depth and insight.

Keywords: critical studies, alternative ways of knowing, academic department, Wallerstein

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Authors: Sakapas Saengchai, Vilasinee Jintalikhitdee, Mathinee Khongsatid, Nattapol Pourprasert

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This paper studied the participation of people of the five villages of Bang Nang Li Community in Ampawa District, Samut Songkram Province, in designing community planning. The population was 2,755 villagers from the 5 villages with 349 people sampled. The level of involvement was measured by using Likert Five Scale for: preparing readiness of local people in the community, providing information for community and self analysis and learning, designing goals and directions for community development, designing strategic plans for community projects, and operating according to the plans. All process items reported a medium level of involvement except the item of preparing readiness for local people that presented the highest mean score. A test of a correlation between personal factors and level of involvement in designing the community planning unveiled no correlation between gender, age and career. Contrarily, the findings revealed that the villagers’ educational level and community membership status had a correlation with their level of involvement in designing the community planning.

Keywords: community development, community planning, people participation, educational level

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Authors: L. R. Valencia Pérez, J. M. Peña Aguilar, A. Lamadrid Álvarez, A. Pastrana Palma, H. F. Valencia Pérez, M. Vivanco Vargas

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This work proposes a Cooperation-Competitive (Coopetitive) approach that allows coordinated work among the Secretary of Public Education (SEP), the Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ) and government funds from National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) or some other international organizations. To work on an overall knowledge transfer strategy with e-learning over the Cloud, where experts in junior high and high school education, working in multidisciplinary teams, perform analysis, evaluation, design, production, validation and knowledge transfer at large scale using a Cloud Computing platform. Allowing teachers and students to have all the information required to ensure a homologated nationally knowledge of topics such as mathematics, statistics, chemistry, history, ethics, civism, etc. This work will start with a pilot test in Spanish and initially in two regional dialects Otomí and Náhuatl. Otomí has more than 285,000 speaking indigenes in Queretaro and Mexico´s central region. Náhuatl is number one indigenous dialect spoken in Mexico with more than 1,550,000 indigenes. The phase one of the project takes into account negotiations with indigenous tribes from different regions, and the Information and Communication technologies to deliver the knowledge to the indigenous schools in their native dialect. The methodology includes the following main milestones: Identification of the indigenous areas where Otomí and Náhuatl are the spoken dialects, research with the SEP the location of actual indigenous schools, analysis and inventory or current schools conditions, negotiation with tribe chiefs, analysis of the technological communication requirements to reach the indigenous communities, identification and inventory of local teachers technology knowledge, selection of a pilot topic, analysis of actual student competence with traditional education system, identification of local translators, design of the e-learning platform, design of the multimedia resources and storage strategy for “Cloud Computing”, translation of the topic to both dialects, Indigenous teachers training, pilot test, course release, project follow up, analysis of student requirements for the new technological platform, definition of a new and improved proposal with greater reach in topics and regions. Importance of phase one of the project is multiple, it includes the proposal of a working technological scheme, focusing in the cultural impact in Mexico so that indigenous tribes can improve their knowledge about new forms of crop improvement, home storage technologies, proven home remedies for common diseases, ways of preparing foods containing major nutrients, disclose strengths and weaknesses of each region, communicating through cloud computing platforms offering regional products and opening communication spaces for inter-indigenous cultural exchange.

Keywords: Mexicans indigenous tribes, education, knowledge transfer, cloud computing, otomi, Náhuatl, language

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Authors: B. Alajmi, L. Marouf, A. S. Chaudhry

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In recent years, increasing emphasis has been placed upon issues concerning the evaluation of health care. In this regard, knowledge management has also been considered an important component of the evaluation process. KM facilitates the transfer of existing knowledge or the development of new knowledge among healthcare staff and patients. This research aimed to examine how hospitals in Kuwait employ knowledge management practices, including capturing, sharing, and generating, and the perceived impact of KM practices on performance of hospitals in Kuwait. Through adopting a quantitative survey method with 277 sample of doctors, the study found that in terms of the three major knowledge management practices – knowledge capturing, sharing, and generating – the adoption of KM practices were rated very low in the sampled hospitals in Kuwait. Hospitals paid little attention to the main activities that support the transfer of expertise among doctors in hospitals. However, as predicted by previous studies, knowledge management practices were perceived to have an impact on hospitals’ performance. Through knowledge capturing, sharing, and generating, hospitals could improve the services they provide through documenting best practices, transforming their hospitals into learning organizations in which lessons learned are captured, stored, and made available for others to learn from.

Keywords: knowledge management, hospitals, knowledge management practices, knowledge management tools, performance

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Authors: Hamad Aldosari

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the status of sexism, or gender discrepancies, in current pedagogical and curricular practices in EFL learning higher education settings. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of both course contents and pedagogies in Saudi higher education institutions are to be discussed with reference to female/male topic presentation in dialogs and reading passages, sex-based activity types, stereotyped sex roles and the masculine generic conceptions of male superiority subliminally related in EFL curriculum and pedagogical practices, as well as the causes and effects of segregated language education practices in Saudi Arabia from a holistic vantage point of analysis. Analysis findings show that language educational practices including educational settings and segregation are gender-biased in attitude, but with regard to curriculum, sexism has not been traced. Findings also show that sexism is rampant due to socio-cultural aspects of language education rather than to religious reasons: a finding that seems to mirror the institutionalized unfair sex discrimination to the disadvantage of women in the Arabian societies at large.

Keywords: genderism, sex segregation, Saudi Arabia, EFL

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Authors: Poom Thiparapkul, Tanat Jiravansirikul, Pakpoom Thongsari

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This study explores the design of electric vehicle (EV) dashboards with a focus on user interaction. Findings from a Thai sample reveal a preference for physical buttons over touch interfaces due to their immediate feedback. Touchscreens lack this assurance, leading to potential uncertainty. Users' smartphone experiences create a learning curve that doesn't translate well to in-car touch systems. Gender-wise, females exhibit slightly longer decision times. Designing EV dashboards should consider these factors, prioritizing user experience while avoiding overreliance on smartphone principles. A successful example is Subaru XV's design, which calculates screen angles and button positions for targeted users. In summary, EV dashboards should be intuitive, minimize touch dependency, and accommodate user habits. Balancing modernity with functionality can enhance driving experiences while ensuring safety. A user-centered approach, acknowledging gender differences, will yield efficient and safe driving environments.

Keywords: user experience design, user experience, electric vehicle, dashboard design, Thailand driver.

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Authors: Khaled M. Alhawiti

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Reading capability is a major segment of language competency. On the other hand, discovering topical writings at a fitting level for outside and second language learners is a test for educators. We address this issue utilizing natural language preparing innovation to survey reading level and streamline content. In the connection of outside and second-language learning, existing measures of reading level are not appropriate to this errand. Related work has demonstrated the profit of utilizing measurable language preparing procedures; we expand these thoughts and incorporate other potential peculiarities to measure intelligibility. In the first piece of this examination, we join characteristics from measurable language models, customary reading level measures and other language preparing apparatuses to deliver a finer technique for recognizing reading level. We examine the execution of human annotators and assess results for our finders concerning human appraisals. A key commitment is that our identifiers are trainable; with preparing and test information from the same space, our finders beat more general reading level instruments (Flesch-Kincaid and Lexile). Trainability will permit execution to be tuned to address the needs of specific gatherings or understudies.

Keywords: natural language processing, trainability, syntactic simplification tools, education

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Authors: Promise Ekpo Osaine, Daniel Melesse

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Image captioning is an active area of research in the multi-modal artificial intelligence (AI) community as it connects vision and language understanding, especially in settings where it is required that a model understands the content shown in an image and generates semantically and grammatically correct descriptions. In this project, we followed a standard approach to a deep learning-based image captioning model, injecting architecture for the encoder-decoder setup, where the encoder extracts image features, and the decoder generates a sequence of words that represents the image content. As such, we investigated image encoders, which are ResNet101, InceptionResNetV2, EfficientNetB7, EfficientNetV2M, and CLIP. As a caption generation structure, we explored long short-term memory (LSTM). The CLIP-LSTM model demonstrated superior performance compared to the encoder-decoder models, achieving a BLEU-1 score of 0.904 and a BLEU-4 score of 0.640. Additionally, among the CNN-LSTM models, EfficientNetV2M-LSTM exhibited the highest performance with a BLEU-1 score of 0.896 and a BLEU-4 score of 0.586 while using a single-layer LSTM.

Keywords: multi-modal AI systems, image captioning, encoder, decoder, BLUE score

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Authors: Li Qingjian, Li Ke, He Chun, Huang Yong

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In this paper, the method of combining the Pohl Seidman's deep belief network with the self-organizing neural network is proposed to classify the target. This method is mainly aimed at the high nonlinearity of the hyperspectral image, the high sample dimension and the difficulty in designing the classifier. The main feature of original data is extracted by deep belief network. In the process of extracting features, adding known labels samples to fine tune the network, enriching the main characteristics. Then, the extracted feature vectors are classified into the self-organizing neural network. This method can effectively reduce the dimensions of data in the spectrum dimension in the preservation of large amounts of raw data information, to solve the traditional clustering and the long training time when labeled samples less deep learning algorithm for training problems, improve the classification accuracy and robustness. Through the data simulation, the results show that the proposed network structure can get a higher classification precision in the case of a small number of known label samples.

Keywords: DBN, SOM, pattern classification, hyperspectral, data compression

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Authors: Annie Devault

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Mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) can be beneficial for the well-being of children. MBIs offered for children in contexts of vulnerability (poverty, neglect) report positive results in terms of emotion regulation and cognitive flexibility. Anxiety is a common issue for children living in a vulnerable context. It has a negative impact on children’s attention span, emotional regulation and self-esteem. The MBI (12 weeks) associated with this research has been developed for a total of 30 children suffering from anxiety (7 to 9 years old) and receiving services from a community center over the last seven years. The first objective is to describe in details the content of the mindfulness-based intervention. The second purpose is to document what helps and what hinders the practice of mindfulness for children living in a context of vulnerability. A special attention will be given to the importance of the way that the intervention is offered and the principles that are followed by the practitioners. Perceived effects of the intervention on children were collected through an individual semi-structured interview with each child at the end of the program. Parents were also interviewed to have their point of view on the effect of their children’s participation in the group. Anxiety was measure with the Beck youth pre-post and at follow up (2 months). Qualitative analysis of the interviews with children showed that most of them mentioned that the program helped them become calmer, more confident, less scared and more able to deal with difficult emotions. Almost all of them reported having used the material provided to them to practice at home. This result has been confirmed by parents. They reported that their child had gained confidence and were better at verbalizing emotions. Children also grew calmer, even though all anxiety was not gone. They would have liked more material to practice at home. The quantitative instrument used to measure anxiety did not corroborate the qualitative interviews about anxiety. Discussion will question the use of this questionnaire for children who have important cognitive limitations. Discussion will also report the importance of the personalized contact with children, along with other consideration, to enhance the adherence of children and parents. The MBI seems to have benefited children in different ways, which is corroborated by most parents. Since the sample was limited, we will need to continue documenting its effects with more children and parents. The major strength of this research is to have reported the subjective perspectives of children on their experience of mindfulness.

Keywords: anxiety, mindfulness, children, best practices

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Authors: Iván García-Magariño, Javier Bravo-Agapito, Marta López-Fernández

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Online judges have proven their utility in partial auto-evaluation of programming short exercises in the last decades. UnitJudge online judge has the advantage of facilitating the evaluation of separate units to provide more segregate and meaningful feedback to students in complex exercises and practices. This paper discusses the use of UnitUdge in advanced Java object-oriented programming exercises and web development practices. This later usage has been proposed by means of the Selenium Java library and classes to provide the web address. Consequently, UnitJudge is an online judge system that can be applied in several subjects, and therefore, many other students would take advantage of self-testing their exercises. This paper presents the experiments with a Java programming exercise for learning Java object-oriented classes with a generic type. Considering 10 students who voluntarily used UnitJudge, 80% successfully learned this concept, passing the judge exercise with correct results.

Keywords: online judges, programming skills, computer science education, auto-evaluation

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Authors: P. S. Jagadeesh Kumar, Tracy Lin Huan, Rebecca K. Rossi, Yanmin Yuan, Xianpei Li

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The fiscal growth of any country hinges on the prudent administration of water resources. The river Yamuna and Ganga are measured as the life line of India as it affords the needs for life to endure. Earth observation over remote sensing images permits the precise description and identification of ingredients on the superficial from space and airborne platforms. Multiple and heterogeneous image sources are accessible for the same geographical section; multispectral, hyperspectral, radar, multitemporal, and multiangular images. In this paper, a taxonomical learning of the fluvial geomorphological features of river Yamuna and Ganga over doon valley using color fusion of multispectral remote sensing images was performed. Experimental results exhibited that the segmentation based colorization technique stranded on pattern recognition, and color mapping fashioned more colorful and truthful colorized images for geomorphological feature extraction.

Keywords: color fusion, geomorphology, fluvial processes, multispectral images, pattern recognition

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Authors: Wei-Jong Yang, Wei-Hau Du, Pau-Choo Chang, Jar-Ferr Yang, Pi-Hsia Hung

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The demands of smart visual thing recognition in various devices have been increased rapidly for daily smart production, living and learning systems in recent years. This paper proposed a visual thing recognition system, which combines binary scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), bag of words model (BoW), and support vector machine (SVM) by using color information. Since the traditional SIFT features and SVM classifiers only use the gray information, color information is still an important feature for visual thing recognition. With color-based SIFT features and SVM, we can discard unreliable matching pairs and increase the robustness of matching tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed object recognition system with color-assistant SIFT SVM classifier achieves higher recognition rate than that with the traditional gray SIFT and SVM classification in various situations.

Keywords: color moments, visual thing recognition system, SIFT, color SIFT

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Authors: Amanda Burrell, Tonia Gary, David Wright, Kumara Ward

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This paper explores the concept of academic identity as it relates to the lecture, in particular, the digitized lecture delivered to a camera, in the absence of a student audience. Many academics have the performance aspect of the role thrust upon them with little or no training. For the purpose of this study, we look at the performance of the academic identity and examine tailored film presence coaching for its contributions toward academic identity, specifically in relation to feelings of self-confidence and diminishment of discomfort or stage fright. The case is articulated through the lens of scholar-practitioners, using expert facilitated participatory action research. It demonstrates in our sample of experienced academics, all reported some feelings of uncertainty about presenting lectures to camera prior to coaching. We share how power poses and reframing fear, produced improvements in the ease and competency of all participants. We share exactly how this insight could be adapted for self-coaching by any academic when called to present to a camera and consider the relationship between this and academic identity.

Keywords: academic identity, digitized lecture, embodied learning, performance coaching

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Authors: Anita Chhatwal

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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and investigate the scope of usage of Academic Social Networking Websites (ASNs) by the Science faculty members across universities of North India, viz. Panjab University, Punjabi University and University of Delhi, Delhi. Design/Methodology/Approach: The present study is based upon the primary data collected from 81 science faculty participants from three universities of North India. Questionnaire method was used as an instrument for survey. The study is descriptive and research-based to investigate the popular ASNs amongst the participants from three sample universities and the purpose for which they use them along with the problems they encounter while using ASNs. Findings: The findings of the study revealed that majority of the participants were using ASNs for their academic needs. It was observed that majority of the participants (78%) used ASNs to access scientific papers, while 73.8% of the participants used them to share their research publications. ResearchGate (60.5%) and Google Scholar (59.7%) were the top two most preferred and widely used ASNs by the participants. The critical analysis of the data shows that laptops (86.3%) emerged as major tools for accessing ASNs. Shortage of computers was found to be the chief obstacle in accessing ASNs by the participants. Results of the study demonstrate that 56.3% of participants suggested conduct of seminars and training as the most effective method to increase the awareness of ASNs. Research Limitations/Implications: The study in hand absorbed the 81 faculty (Assistant Professors) members from 15 Science teaching departments across three sample universities of North India. The findings of this study will help the Government of India to regulate and simultaneously make effort to develop and enhance ASNs usage among faculty, researchers, and students. The present study will add to the existing library and information science literature and will be advantageous for all the information professionals as well. Originality/Value: This study is original survey based on primary data investigate the usage of ASNs by the academia. This study will be useful for research scholars, academicians and students all over the world.

Keywords: academic social networks, awareness and usage, North India, scholarly communication, web 2.0

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Authors: Madhu Babu Cherukuri, Tamoghna Ghosh

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Factory supply chain management spends billions of dollars every year to procure and manage equipment spare parts. Due to technology -and processes changes some of these spares become obsolete/dead inventory. Factories have huge dead inventory worth millions of dollars accumulating over time. This is due to lack of a scientific methodology to identify them and send the inventory back to the suppliers on a timely basis. The standard approach followed across industries to deal with this is: if a part is not used for a set pre-defined period of time it is declared dead. This leads to accumulation of dead parts over time and these parts cannot be sold back to the suppliers as it is too late as per contract agreement. Our main idea is the time period for identifying a part as dead cannot be a fixed pre-defined duration across all parts. Rather, it should depend on various properties of the part like historical consumption pattern, type of part, how many machines it is being used in, whether it- is a preventive maintenance part etc. We have designed a predictive algorithm which predicts part obsolescence well in advance with reasonable accuracy and which can help save millions.

Keywords: obsolete inventory, machine learning, big data, supply chain analytics, dead inventory

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Authors: Shuaili Ji

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The correct use of verbs is an important element of high-quality research articles, and thus for Chinese EFL learners, it is significant to master characteristics of verbs and to precisely use verbs. However, some researches have shown that there are differences in using verbs between learners and native speakers and learners have difficulty in using English verbs. This corpus-based quantitative research can enhance learners’ knowledge of English verbs and promote the quality of research article abstracts even of the whole academic writing. The aim of this study is to find the differences between learners’ and native speakers’ use of verbs and to study the factors that contribute to those differences. To this end, the research question is as follows: What are the differences between most frequently used verbs by learners and those by native speakers? The research question is answered through a study that uses corpus-based data-driven approach to analyze the verbs used by learners in their abstract writings in terms of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody. The results show that: (1) EFL learners obviously overused ‘be, can, find, make’ and underused ‘investigate, examine, may’. As to modal verbs, learners obviously overused ‘can’ while underused ‘may’. (2) Learners obviously overused ‘we find + object clauses’ while underused ‘nouns (results, findings, data) + suggest/indicate/reveal + object clauses’ when expressing research results. (3) Learners tended to transfer the collocation, colligation and semantic prosody of shǐ and zuò to make. (4) Learners obviously overused ‘BE+V-ed’ and used BE as the main verb. They also obviously overused the basic forms of BE such as be, is, are, while obviously underused its inflections (was, were). These results manifested learners’ lack of accuracy and idiomatic property in verb usage. Due to the influence of the concept transfer of Chinese, the verbs in learners’ abstracts showed obvious transfer of mother language. In addition, learners have not fully mastered the use of verbs, avoiding using complex colligations to prevent errors. Based on these findings, the present study has implications for English teaching, seeking to have implications for English academic abstract writing in China. Further research could be undertaken to study the use of verbs in the whole dissertation to find out whether the characteristic of the verbs in abstracts can apply in the whole dissertation or not.

Keywords: academic writing abstracts, Chinese EFL learners, corpus-based, data-driven, verbs

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Authors: Sadeeq Launi

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NGOs, the world over, have been recognized as part of the institutions that complement government activities in providing services to the people, particularly in respect of human development. This study examined the role played by the NGOs in human development in Bauchi State, Nigeria, between 2004 and 2013. The emphasis was on reproductive health and access to education role of the selected NGOs. All the research questions, objectives and hypotheses were stated in line with these variables. The theoretical framework that guided the study was the participatory development approach. Being a survey research, data were generated from both primary and secondary sources with questionnaires and interviews as the instruments for generating the primary data. The population of the study was made up of the staff of the selected NGOs, beneficiaries, health staff and school teachers in Bauchi State. The sample drawn from these categories were 90, 107 and 148 units respectively. Stratified random and simple random sampling techniques were adopted for NGOs staff, and Health staff and school teachers data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively and hypotheses were tested using Pearson Chi-square test through SPSS computer statistical package. The study revealed that despite the challenges facing NGOs operations in the study area, NGOs rendered services in the areas of health and education This research recommends among others that, both government and people should be more cooperative to NGOs to enable them provide more efficient and effective services. Governments at all levels should be more dedicated to increasing accessibility and affordability of basic education and reproductive health care facilities and services in Bauchi state through committing more resources to the Health and Education sectors, this would support and facilitate the complementary role of NGOs in providing teaching facilities, drugs, and other reproductive health services in the States. More enlightenment campaigns should be carried out by governments to sensitize the public, particularly women on the need to embrace immunization programmes for their children and antenatal care services being provided by both the government and NGOs.

Keywords: access to education, human development, NGOs, reproductive health

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Authors: Atuhurra Jesse, N'guessan Yves-Roland Douha, Pabitra Lenka

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The detection of diseases within plants has attracted a lot of attention from computer vision enthusiasts. Despite the progress made to detect diseases in many plants, there remains a research gap to train image classifiers to detect the cacao swollen shoot virus disease or CSSVD for short, pertinent to cacao plants. This gap has mainly been due to the unavailability of high quality labeled training data. Moreover, institutions have been hesitant to share their data related to CSSVD. To fill these gaps, image classifiers to detect CSSVD-infected cacao plants are presented in this study. The classifiers are based on VGG16, ResNet50 and Vision Transformer (ViT). The image classifiers are evaluated on a recently released and publicly accessible KaraAgroAI Cocoa dataset. The best performing image classifier, based on ResNet50, achieves 95.39\% precision, 93.75\% recall, 94.34\% F1-score and 94\% accuracy on only 20 epochs. There is a +9.75\% improvement in recall when compared to previous works. These results indicate that the image classifiers learn to identify cacao plants infected with CSSVD.

Keywords: CSSVD, image classification, ResNet50, vision transformer, KaraAgroAI cocoa dataset

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Authors: Sajeeha Ansar, Asad Ali Safi, Sheikh Ziauddin, Ahmad R. Shahid, Faraz Ahsan

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The most aggressive form of brain tumor is called glioma. Glioma is kind of tumor that arises from glial tissue of the brain and occurs quite often. A fully automatic 2D-CNN model for brain tumor segmentation is presented in this paper. We performed pre-processing steps to remove noise and intensity variances using N4ITK and standard intensity correction, respectively. We used Keras open-source library with Theano as backend for fast implementation of CNN model. In addition, we used BRATS 2015 MRI dataset to evaluate our proposed model. Furthermore, we have used SimpleITK open-source library in our proposed model to analyze images. Moreover, we have extracted random 2D patches for proposed 2D-CNN model for efficient brain segmentation. Extracting 2D patched instead of 3D due to less dimensional information present in 2D which helps us in reducing computational time. Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) is used as performance measure for the evaluation of the proposed method. Our method achieved DSC score of 0.77 for complete, 0.76 for core, 0.77 for enhanced tumor regions. However, these results are comparable with methods already implemented 2D CNN architecture.

Keywords: brain tumor segmentation, convolutional neural networks, deep learning, LGG

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Authors: Duygu Dere, Mert Ergeneci, Kaan Gokcesu

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Google Trends data has gained increasing popularity in the applications of behavioral finance, decision science and risk management. Because of Google’s wide range of use, the Trends statistics provide significant information about the investor sentiment and intention, which can be used as decisive factors for corporate and risk management fields. However, an anomaly, a significant increase or decrease, in a certain query cannot be detected by the state of the art applications of computation due to the random baseline noise of the Trends data, which is modelled as an Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Since through time, the baseline noise power shows a gradual change an adaptive thresholding method is required to track and learn the baseline noise for a correct classification. To this end, we introduce an online method to classify meaningful deviations in Google Trends data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method can successfully classify various anomalies for plenty of different data.

Keywords: adaptive data processing, behavioral finance , convex optimization, online learning, soft minimum thresholding

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Authors: Junqi Zou

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As one of the world’s most tech-ready countries, Singapore has initiated the Smart Nation plan to harness the full power and potential of digital technologies to transform the way people live and work, through the more efficient government and business processes, to make the economy more productive. The key evolutions of digital technology transformation in healthcare and the increasing deployment of Internet of Things (IoTs), Big Data, AI/cognitive, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Electronic Health Record Systems (EHR), Electronic Medical Record Systems (EMR), Warehouse Management System (WMS in the most recent decade have significantly stepped up the move towards an information-driven healthcare ecosystem. The advances in information technology not only bring benefits to patients but also act as a key force in changing management accounting in healthcare sector. The aim of this study is to investigate the impacts of digital technology transformation on Singapore’s healthcare sector from a management accounting perspective. Adopting a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) analysis approach, this paper conducted an exploratory case study of a newly launched Singapore public hospital, which has been recognized as amongst the most digitally advanced healthcare facilities in Asia-Pacific region. Specifically, this study gains insights on how the new technology is changing healthcare organizations’ management accounting from four perspectives under the Balanced Scorecard approach, 1) Financial Perspective, 2) Customer (Patient) Perspective, 3) Internal Processes Perspective, and 4) Learning and Growth Perspective. Based on a thorough review of archival records from the government and public, and the interview reports with the hospital’s CIO, this study finds the improvements from all the four perspectives under the Balanced Scorecard framework as follows: 1) Learning and Growth Perspective: The Government (Ministry of Health) works with the hospital to open up multiple training pathways to health professionals that upgrade and develops new IT skills among the healthcare workforce to support the transformation of healthcare services. 2) Internal Process Perspective: The hospital achieved digital transformation through Project OneCare to integrate clinical, operational, and administrative information systems (e.g., EHR, EMR, WMS, EPIB, RTLS) that enable the seamless flow of data and the implementation of JIT system to help the hospital operate more effectively and efficiently. 3) Customer Perspective: The fully integrated EMR suite enhances the patient’s experiences by achieving the 5 Rights (Right Patient, Right Data, Right Device, Right Entry and Right Time). 4) Financial Perspective: Cost savings are achieved from improved inventory management and effective supply chain management. The use of process automation also results in a reduction of manpower costs and logistics cost. To summarize, these improvements identified under the Balanced Scorecard framework confirm the success of utilizing the integration of advanced ICT to enhance healthcare organization’s customer service, productivity efficiency, and cost savings. Moreover, the Big Data generated from this integrated EMR system can be particularly useful in aiding management control system to optimize decision making and strategic planning. To conclude, the new digital technology transformation has moved the usefulness of management accounting to both financial and non-financial dimensions with new heights in the area of healthcare management.

Keywords: balanced scorecard, digital technology transformation, healthcare ecosystem, integrated information system

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Authors: Hyunbin Choi, Jihyeon Noh, Changwon Lim

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In this paper, we propose SiamMask++, an architecture that performs layer-wise aggregation and depth-wise cross-correlation and introduce multi-RPN module and multi-MASK module to improve EAO (Expected Average Overlap), a representative performance evaluation metric for Visual Object Tracking (VOT) challenge. The proposed architecture, SiamMask++, has two versions, namely, bi_SiamMask++, which satisfies the real time (56fps) on systems equipped with GPUs (Titan XP), and rf_SiamMask++, which combines mask refinement modules for EAO improvements. Tests are performed on VOT2016, VOT2018 and VOT2019, the representative datasets of Visual Object Tracking tasks labeled as rotated bounding boxes. SiamMask++ perform better than SiamMask on all the three datasets tested. SiamMask++ is achieved performance of 62.6% accuracy, 26.2% robustness and 39.8% EAO, especially on the VOT2018 dataset. Compared to SiamMask, this is an improvement of 4.18%, 37.17%, 23.99%, respectively. In addition, we do an experimental in-depth analysis of how much the introduction of features and multi modules extracted from the backbone affects the performance of our model in the VOT task.

Keywords: visual object tracking, video, deep learning, layer wise aggregation, Siamese network

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Authors: Lule Basha, Eralda Gjika

Abstract:

The exchange rate is one of the most important economic variables, especially for a small, open economy such as Albania. Its effect is noticeable in one country's competitiveness, trade and current account, inflation, wages, domestic economic activity, and bank stability. This study investigates the fluctuation of Albania’s exchange rates using monthly average foreign currency, Euro (Eur) to Albanian Lek (ALL) exchange rate with a time span from January 2008 to June 2021, and the macroeconomic factors that have a significant effect on the exchange rate. Initially, the Random Forest Regression algorithm is constructed to understand the impact of economic variables on the behavior of monthly average foreign currencies exchange rates. Then the forecast of macro-economic indicators for 12 months was performed using time series models. The predicted values received are placed in the random forest model in order to obtain the average monthly forecast of the Euro to Albanian Lek (ALL) exchange rate for the period July 2021 to June 2022.

Keywords: exchange rate, random forest, time series, machine learning, prediction

Procedia PDF Downloads 89

Authors: Botirjon Kosimov

Abstract:

This work sheds light on the reforms towards the independence of the judiciary in Uzbekistan, as well as issues of further ensuring judicial independence in the country based on international values, particularly the legal practice of the United States. In every democratic state infringed human rights are reinstated and violated laws are protected by the help of justice based on the strict principle of judicial independence. The realization of this principle in Uzbekistan has been paid much attention since the proclamation of its independence. In the country, a series of reforms have been implemented in the field of the judiciary in order to actualize the principle of judicial independence. Uzbekistan has been reforming the judiciary considering both international and national values and practice of foreign countries. While forming a democratic state based on civil society, Uzbekistan shares practice with the most developed countries in the world. The United States of America can be a clear example which is worth learning how to establish and ensure an independent judiciary. It seems that although Uzbekistan has reformed the judiciary efficiently, it should further reform considering the legal practice of the United States.

Keywords: dependent judges, independent judges, judicial independence, judicial reforms, judicial life tenure, obstacles to judicial independence

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Authors: Nadia Masood Khan, Muhammad Salman Khan, Gul Muhammad Khan

Abstract:

Cardiologists perform cardiac auscultation to detect abnormalities in heart sounds. Since accurate auscultation is a crucial first step in screening patients with heart diseases, there is a need to develop computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) systems to assist cardiologists in interpreting heart sounds and provide second opinions. In this paper different algorithms are implemented for automated heart sound classification using unsegmented phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. Support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN) and cartesian genetic programming evolved artificial neural network (CGPANN) without the application of any segmentation algorithm has been explored in this study. The signals are first pre-processed to remove any unwanted frequencies. Both time and frequency domain features are then extracted for training the different models. The different algorithms are tested in multiple scenarios and their strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Results indicate that SVM outperforms the rest with an accuracy of 73.64%.

Keywords: pattern recognition, machine learning, computer aided diagnosis, heart sound classification, and feature extraction

Procedia PDF Downloads 243

Authors: Jaspreet Singh, Gurvinder Singh, Prabhsimran Singh, Rajinder Singh, Prithvipal Singh, Karanjeet Singh Kahlon, Ravinder Singh Sawhney

Abstract:

Morphological evaluation of Indian languages is one of the burgeoning fields in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The evaluation of a language is an eminent task in the era of information retrieval and text mining. The extraction and classification of knowledge from text can be exploited for sentiment analysis and morphological evaluation. This study coalesce morphological evaluation and sentiment analysis for the task of classification of farmer suicide cases reported in Punjab state of India. The pre-processing of Punjabi text involves morphological evaluation and normalization of Punjabi word tokens followed by the training of proposed model using deep learning classification on Punjabi language text extracted from online Punjabi news reports. The class-wise accuracies of sentiment prediction for four negatively oriented classes of farmer suicide cases are 93.85%, 88.53%, 83.3%, and 95.45% respectively. The overall accuracy of sentiment classification obtained using proposed framework on 275 Punjabi text documents is found to be 90.29%.

Keywords: deep neural network, farmer suicides, morphological processing, punjabi text, sentiment analysis

Procedia PDF Downloads 305

Authors: Turuganti Venkateswarlu, Jagadeesh Anmala

Abstract:

Excessive runoffs from various non-point source land uses, and other point sources are rapidly contaminating the water quality of streams in the Upper Green River watershed, Kentucky, USA. It is essential to maintain the stream water quality as the river basin is one of the major freshwater sources in this province. It is also important to understand the water quality parameters (WQPs) quantitatively and qualitatively along with their important features as stream water is sensitive to climatic events and land-use practices. In this paper, a model was developed for predicting one of the significant WQPs, Fecal Coliform (FC) from precipitation, temperature, urban land use factor (ULUF), agricultural land use factor (ALUF), and forest land-use factor (FLUF) using Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The RF model, a novel ensemble learning algorithm, can even find out advanced feature importance characteristics from the given model inputs for different combinations. This model’s outcomes showed a good correlation between FC and climate events and land use factors (R2 = 0.94) and precipitation and temperature are the primary influencing factors for FC.

Keywords: water quality, land use factors, random forest, fecal coliform

Procedia PDF Downloads 185

Authors: V. Saccà, A. Sarica, F. Novellino, S. Barone, T. Tallarico, E. Filippelli, A. Granata, P. Valentino, A. Quattrone

Abstract:

The work aim was to evaluate how well Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms could support the early diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) from resting-state functional connectivity data. In particular, we wanted to explore the ability in distinguishing between controls and patients of mean signals extracted from ICA components corresponding to 15 well-known networks. Eighteen patients with early-MS (mean-age 37.42±8.11, 9 females) were recruited according to McDonald and Polman, and matched for demographic variables with 19 healthy controls (mean-age 37.55±14.76, 10 females). MRI was acquired by a 3T scanner with 8-channel head coil: (a)whole-brain T1-weighted; (b)conventional T2-weighted; (c)resting-state functional MRI (rsFMRI), 200 volumes. Estimated total lesion load (ml) and number of lesions were calculated using LST-toolbox from the corrected T1 and FLAIR. All rsFMRIs were pre-processed using tools from the FMRIB's Software Library as follows: (1) discarding of the first 5 volumes to remove T1 equilibrium effects, (2) skull-stripping of images, (3) motion and slice-time correction, (4) denoising with high-pass temporal filter (128s), (5) spatial smoothing with a Gaussian kernel of FWHM 8mm. No statistical significant differences (t-test, p < 0.05) were found between the two groups in the mean Euclidian distance and the mean Euler angle. WM and CSF signal together with 6 motion parameters were regressed out from the time series. We applied an independent component analysis (ICA) with the GIFT-toolbox using the Infomax approach with number of components=21. Fifteen mean components were visually identified by two experts. The resulting z-score maps were thresholded and binarized to extract the mean signal of the 15 networks for each subject. Statistical and machine learning analysis were then conducted on this dataset composed of 37 rows (subjects) and 15 features (mean signal in the network) with R language. The dataset was randomly splitted into training (75%) and test sets and two different classifiers were trained: RF and RBF-SVM. We used the intrinsic feature selection of RF, based on the Gini index, and recursive feature elimination (rfe) for the SVM, to obtain a rank of the most predictive variables. Thus, we built two new classifiers only on the most important features and we evaluated the accuracies (with and without feature selection) on test-set. The classifiers, trained on all the features, showed very poor accuracies on training (RF:58.62%, SVM:65.52%) and test sets (RF:62.5%, SVM:50%). Interestingly, when feature selection by RF and rfe-SVM were performed, the most important variable was the sensori-motor network I in both cases. Indeed, with only this network, RF and SVM classifiers reached an accuracy of 87.5% on test-set. More interestingly, the only misclassified patient resulted to have the lowest value of lesion volume. We showed that, with two different classification algorithms and feature selection approaches, the best discriminant network between controls and early MS, was the sensori-motor I. Similar importance values were obtained for the sensori-motor II, cerebellum and working memory networks. These findings, in according to the early manifestation of motor/sensorial deficits in MS, could represent an encouraging step toward the translation to the clinical diagnosis and prognosis.

Keywords: feature selection, machine learning, multiple sclerosis, random forest, support vector machine

Procedia PDF Downloads 227

Authors: Surendar Vaddepalli

Abstract:

Management education plays a crucial role to enable industry to cope with emerging challenges. It has spread in the last fifteen-twenty years in India and gained popularity as it was aimed at imbibing versatility and multi-tasking abilities in student community. Several management institutions started looking at upgrading their competencies in terms of faculty, research and industry interaction. The competitive business environment has been one of the drivers that paved the way for growing demand for management graduates in the employment market. Industry expects their executives to be engaged in a constant learning process. The ever-increasing demand for managers has led to establish more management institutions; however, the growth was not in line with the expectations from the industry. While top Business Schools are continuously changing the contents and delivery methodologies, academic standards of most of the other Business Schools are not up to the mark and quality of service provided by these institutes has opened various issues for discussion. On this back ground it is important to address the concerns of Indian management education experiencing with time and we have to rethink about the management education and efforts should be made to create a dynamic environment. This paper ties to study the current trends and tries to find out need for value based management education in India to rejuvenate it.

Keywords: management education, management, value based management education, business school, India

Procedia PDF Downloads 368