Search results for: programming languages

Authors: Beverly Black

Abstract:

Background: Adolescent dating abuse (ADA) is widespread throughout the world and negatively impacts many adolescents. ADA is associated with lower self-esteem, poorer school performance, lower employment opportunities, higher rates of depression, absenteeism from school, substance abuse, bullying, smoking, suicide, pregnancy, eating disorders, and risky sexual behaviors, and experiencing domestic violence later in life. ADA prevention is sometimes addressed through school programming; yet, parental responses to ADA can also be an important vehicle for its prevention. In this exploratory study, the author examined how mothers, including abused mothers, responded to scenarios of ADA involving their children. Methods: Six focus groups were conducted between December, 2013 and June, 2014 with mothers (n=31) in the southern part of the United States. Three of the focus groups were comprised of mothers (n=17) who had been abused by their partners. Mothers were recruited from local community family agencies. Participants were provided a series of four scenarios about ADA and they were asked to explain how they would respond. Focus groups lasted approximately 45 minutes. All participants were given a gift card to a major retailer as a ‘thank you’. Using QSR-N10, two researchers’ analyzed the focus group data first using open and axial coding techniques to find overarching themes. Researchers triangulated the coded data to ensure accurate interpretations of the participants’ messages and used the scenario questions to structure the coded results. Results: Almost 30% of 699 comments coded as mothers’ recommendations for responding to ADA focused on the importance of providing advice to their children. Advice included breaking up, going to police, ignoring or avoiding the abusive partner, and setting boundaries in relationships. About 22% of comments focused on the need for educating teens about healthy and unhealthy relationships and seeking additional information. About 13% of the comments reflected the view that parents should confront abuser and/or abusers’ parents, and less than 2% noted the need to take their child to counseling. Mothers who had been abused offered similar responses as parents who had not experienced abuse. However, their responses were more likely to focus on sharing their own experience exercising caution in their responses, as they knew from their own experiences that authoritarian responses were ineffective. Over half of the comments indicated that parents would react stronger, quicker, and angrier if a girl was being abused by a boy than vice versa; parents expressed greater fear for their daughters than their sons involved in ADA. Conclusions. Results suggest that mothers have ideas about how to respond to ADA. Mothers who have been abused draw from their experiences and are aware that responding in an authoritarian manner may not be helpful. Because parental influence on teens is critical in their development, it is important for all parents to respond to ADA in a helpful manner to break the cycle of violence. Understanding responses to ADA can inform prevention programming to work with parents in responding to ADA.

Keywords: abused mothers' responses to dating abuse, adolescent dating abuse, mothers' responses to dating abuse, teen dating violence

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Authors: Ivana Lolic, Petar Soric, Mirjana Cizmesija

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Based on Business and Consumer Survey (BCS) data, the European Commission (EC) regularly publishes the monthly Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) for each EU member state. ESI is conceptualized as a leading indicator, aimed ad tracking the overall economic activity. In calculating ESI, the EC employs arbitrarily chosen weights on 15 BCS response balances. This paper raises the predictive quality of ESI by applying nonlinear programming to find such weights that maximize the correlation coefficient of ESI and year-on-year GDP growth. The obtained results show that the highest weights are assigned to the response balances of industrial sector questions, followed by questions from the retail trade sector. This comes as no surprise since the existing literature shows that the industrial production is a plausible proxy for the overall Croatian economic activity and since Croatian GDP is largely influenced by the aggregate personal consumption.

Keywords: business and consumer survey, economic sentiment indicator, leading indicator, nonlinear optimization with constraints

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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: Y. Bablu Singh, B. S. Purkayashtha, Chungkham Yashawanta Singh

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Morphological analysis forms the basic foundation in NLP applications including syntax parsing Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR) and automatic indexing in all languages. It is the field of the linguistics; it can provide valuable information for computer based linguistics task such as lemmatization and studies of internal structure of the words. Computational Morphology is the application of morphological rules in the field of computational linguistics, and it is the emerging area in AI, which studies the structure of words, which are formed by combining smaller units of linguistics information, called morphemes: the building blocks of words. Morphological analysis provides about semantic and syntactic role in a sentence. It analyzes the Manipuri word forms and produces several grammatical information associated with the words. The Morphological Analyzer for Manipuri has been tested on 3500 Manipuri words in Shakti Standard format (SSF) using Meitei Mayek as source; thereby an accuracy of 80% has been obtained on a manual check.

Keywords: morphological analysis, machine translation, computational morphology, information retrieval, SSF

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Authors: Ruben Lopez-Rodriguez

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In a microgrid, diverse energy sources (both renewable and non-renewable) are combined with energy storage units to form a localized power system. Microgrids function as independent entities, capable of meeting the energy needs of specific areas or communities. This paper introduces a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach tailored for grid-connected microgrids, aiming to optimize their operation. The formulation employs Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) to find optimal trajectories. This entails the fulfillment of continuous and binary constraints, all while accounting for commutations between various operating conditions such as storage unit charge/discharge, import/export from/towards the main grid, as well as asset connection/disconnection. To validate the proposed approach, a microgrid case study is conducted, and the simulation results are compared with those obtained using a rule-based strategy.

Keywords: microgrids, mixed logical dynamical systems, mixed-integer optimization, model predictive control

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Authors: Ali Nadi, Ali Edrissi

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Relief demand and transportation links availability is the essential information that is needed for every natural disaster operation. This information is not in hand once a disaster strikes. Relief demand and network condition has been evaluated based on prediction method in related works. Nevertheless, prediction seems to be over or under estimated due to uncertainties and may lead to a failure operation. Therefore, in this paper a stochastic programming model is proposed to evaluate real-time relief demand and network condition at the onset of a natural disaster. To address the time sensitivity of the emergency response, the proposed model uses reinforcement learning for optimization of the total relief assessment time. The proposed model is tested on a real size network problem. The simulation results indicate that the proposed model performs well in the case of collecting real-time information.

Keywords: disaster management, real-time demand, reinforcement learning, relief demand

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Authors: Shyam Parhi

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Airports GIS program collects Airports data, validate and verify it, and stores it in specific database. Airports GIS allows authorized users to submit changes to airport data. The verified data is used to develop several engineering applications. One of these applications is electronic Airport Layout Plan (eALP) whose primary aim is to move from paper to digital form of ALP. The first phase of development of eALP was completed recently and it was tested for a few pilot program airports across different regions. We conducted gap analysis and noticed that a lot of development work is needed to fine tune at least six mandatory sheets of eALP. It is important to note that significant amount of programming is needed to move from out-of-box ArcGIS to a much customized ArcGIS which will be discussed. The ArcGIS viewer capability to display essential features like runway or taxiway or the perpendicular distance between them will be discussed. An enterprise level workflow which incorporates coordination process among different lines of business will be highlighted.

Keywords: geospatial data, geology, geographic information systems, aviation

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Authors: Nga Yui Tong

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Mandarin, the official language of China, is based on the Beijing dialect and is spoken by more than one billion people from all over the world. To investigate the trends of Mandarin acquisition, 192 preschoolers are recruited by stratified random sampling. They are from 4 different districts in Beijing, 2 schools in each district, with 4 age groups, both genders, and 3 children in each stratum. The children are paired up to conduct semi-structured free play for 30 minutes. Their language output is videotaped, transcribed, and coded for the calculation of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). Two-way ANOVA showed that the variation of MLU is significantly contributed by age, which is coherent to previous findings of other languages. This first large-scale study to investigate the developmental trend of Mandarin in young children in Beijing provides empirical evidence to the development of standards and curriculum planning for early Mandarin education. Interestingly, the gender effect in the study is insignificant, with boys showing a slightly higher MLU than girls across all age groups and settings, except the 4.5 years same-gender dyads. The societal factors in the Chinese context on parenting and gender bias are worth looking into.

Keywords: Beijing, language development, Mandarin, preschoolers

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Authors: Kelsey Fortin, Susan Harvey

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The intersection between hunger and health outcomes is beginning to gain traction among the research community. With new interventions focusing on collaborations between the medical and social service sectors, this study aimed to understand the acceptability and approach of a health coaching intervention within a county-wide Midwest food pantry. Through formative research, the study used mixed methods to review secondary data and conduct surveys and semi-structured interviews with food pantry clients (n=30), staff (n=7), and volunteers (n=10). Supplemental secondary data collected and provided by pantry staff were reviewed to understand the broader pantry context of clientele health and health behaviors, annual food donations, and current pantry programming. Results from secondary data showed that the broader pantry client population reported high rates of chronic disease, low consumption of fruits and vegetables, and poor self-reported health, while annual donation data showed increases in produce availability on pantry shelves. This disconnect between produce availability, client health status, and behaviors was supported in the current study, with pantry staff and volunteers reporting lack of knowledge in produce selection and preparation being amongst the most common client inquiries and barriers to healthy food selection. Additional supports to secondary data came from pantry clients in the current study through self-reported high rates of both individual (60%, n=18) and household (43%, n=13 ) disease diagnosis, low consumption of fruits and vegetables averaging zero to one servings of vegetables (67%, n=20) and fruits (47%, n=14) per day, and low levels of physical activity averaging zero to 120 minutes per week (67%, n=20). Further, pantry clients provided health coaching programmatic recommendations through interviews with feedback such as non-judgmental coaching, accountability measures, and providing participant incentives as considerations for future program design and approach. Volunteers and staff reported the need for client education in food preparation, basic nutrition and physical activity, and the need for additional health expertise to educate and respond to diet related nutrition recommendations. All three stakeholder groups supported hosting a health coach within the pantry to focused on nutrition, physical activity, and health programming, with one client stating, 'I am hoping it really works out [the health coaching program]. I think it would be great for something like this to be offered for someone that isn’t knowledgeable like me.' In conclusion, high rates of chronic disease, partnered with low food, nutrition, and physical activity literacy among pantry clients, demonstrates the need to address health behaviors. With all three stakeholder groups showing acceptability of a health coaching program, partnered with existing literature showing health coaching success as a behavior change intervention, further research should be conducted to pilot the design and implementation of such a program in the pantry setting.

Keywords: food insecurity, formative research, food pantries, health coaching, hunger and health

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Authors: Birome Holo Ba, Christian Prins, Caroline Prodhon

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Optimization is an important aspect of logistics management. It can reduce significantly logistics costs and also be a good tool for decision support. In this paper, we address a planning problem specific to biomass supply chain. We propose a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model dealing with different feed stock production operations such as harvesting, packing, storage, pre-processing and transportation, with the objective of minimizing the total logistic cost of the system on a regional basis. It determines the optimal number of harvesting machine, the fleet size of trucks for transportation and the amount of each type of biomass harvested, stored and pre-processed in each period to satisfy demands of refineries in each period. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposal model with a numerical example, a case study in Aube (France department), which gives preliminary and interesting, results on a small test case.

Keywords: biomass logistics, supply chain, modelling, optimization, bioenergy, biofuels

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Authors: Grace Omowunmi Soyebi

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A computerized medical record system is a collection of medical information about a person that is stored on a computer. One principal problem of most hospitals in rural areas is using the file management system for keeping records. A lot of time is wasted when a patient visits the hospital, probably in an emergency, and the nurse or attendant has to search through voluminous files before the patient's file can be retrieved; this may cause an unexpected to happen to the patient. This data mining application is to be designed using a structured system analysis and design method which will help in a well-articulated analysis of the existing file management system, feasibility study, and proper documentation of the design and implementation of a computerized medical record system. This computerized system will replace the file management system and help to quickly retrieve a patient's record with increased data security, access clinical records for decision-making, and reduce the time range at which a patient gets attended to.

Keywords: programming, data, software development, innovation

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Authors: Gül Fatma Türker, Hatice Akman

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Portable muscle stimulators for real-time applications has first introduced by Liberson in 1961. Now these systems has been advanced. In this study, FES (Functional Electrical Stimulator) and NMES (Neuromuscular Electrostimulator) systems are analyzed through their hardware and their quality of life improvements for foot drop patients. FES and NMES systems are used for people whose leg muscles and leg neural connections are healty but not able to walk properly because of their injured central nervous system like spinal cord injuries. These systems are used to stimulate neurons or muscles by getting information from other movements and programming these stimulations to get natural walk and it is accepted as a rehabilitation method for the correction of drop foot. This systems support person to approach natural form of walking. Foot drop is characterized by steppage gait. It is a gait abnormality. This systems helps to person for plantar and dorse reflection movements which are hard to done for foot drop patients.

Keywords: FES, foot drop, NMES, stimulator

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Authors: Elifcan Oztekin

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Compliment response strategies in cross-linguistic contexts have received a considerable amount of interest in sociolinguistic research in various language settings. In this respect, a common finding of these studies indicates that speakers of different languages employ different patterns in strategies to respond to compliments. This has triggered varying theoretical approaches to compliment responses within theories of politeness and the universality of speech acts. In the light of previous studies, the present study investigates compliment response strategies that Turkish-English bilingual university students use in English and Turkish response conditions through a cross-linguistic discourse completion task and interviews. Data were analyzed using Holmes’ (1988) taxonomy and the results indicate a similar pattern to what has been observed in Turkish compliments responses in previous research. Turkish-English comparisons also display noticeable similarities in macro-level strategies, while subtle differences in micro-level strategies were also observed.

Keywords: compliment response strategies, cross-cultural differences, bilingualism, sociolinguistics

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Authors: Oluwatosin S. Adeoye

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The power quality issues in the world today are critical to the development of different nations. Prosperity of each nation depends on availability of constant power supply. Constant power supply is a major challenge in Africa particularly in Nigeria where the generated power is than thirty percent of the required power. The metrics of power quality are voltage dip, flickers, spikes, harmonics and interruptions. The level of interruptions in Ekiti State was examined through the investigation of the causes of power interruptions in the State. The method used was the collection of data from the Distribution Company, assessment through simple programming as a command for plotting the graphs through the use of MATLAB 2015 depicting the behavioural pattern of the interruption for a period of six months in 2016. The result shows that the interrelationship between the interruptions and development. Recommendations were suggested with the objective of solving the problems being set up by interruptions in the State and these include installation of reactors, automatic voltage regulators and effective tap changing system on the lines, busses and transformer substation respectively.

Keywords: development, frequency, interruption, power, quality

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Authors: Zihan Geng, L. Quentin Dixon

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It has been proposed that early bilingual experience confers a number of advantages in the development of executive control mechanisms. Although the literature provides empirical evidence for bilingual benefits, some studies also reported null or mixed results. To make sense of these contradictory findings, the current review synthesize recent empirical studies investigating bilingual effects on children’s executive function and attention control. The publication time of the studies included in the review ranges from 2010 to 2017. The key searching terms are bilingual, bilingualism, children, executive control, executive function, and attention. The key terms were combined within each of the following databases: ERIC (EBSCO), Education Source, PsycINFO, and Social Science Citation Index. Studies involving both children and adults were also included but the analysis was based on the data generated only by the children group. The initial search yielded 137 distinct articles. Twenty-eight studies from 27 articles with a total of 3367 participants were finally included based on the selection criteria. The selective studies were then coded in terms of (a) the setting (i.e., the country where the data was collected), (b) the participants (i.e., age and languages), (c) sample size (i.e., the number of children in each group), (d) cognitive outcomes measured, (e) data collection instruments (i.e., cognitive tasks and tests), and (f) statistic analysis models (e.g., t-test, ANOVA). The results show that the majority of the studies were undertaken in western countries, mainly in the U.S., Canada, and the UK. A variety of languages such as Arabic, French, Dutch, Welsh, German, Spanish, Korean, and Cantonese were involved. In relation to cognitive outcomes, the studies examined children’s overall planning and problem-solving abilities, inhibition, cognitive complexity, working memory (WM), and sustained and selective attention. The results indicate that though bilingualism is associated with several cognitive benefits, the advantages seem to be weak, at least, for children. Additionally, the nature of the cognitive measures was found to greatly moderate the results. No significant differences are observed between bilinguals and monolinguals in overall planning and problem-solving ability, indicating that there is no bilingual benefit in the cooperation of executive function components at an early age. In terms of inhibition, the mixed results suggest that bilingual children, especially young children, may have better conceptual inhibition measured in conflict tasks, but not better response inhibition measured by delay tasks. Further, bilingual children showed better inhibitory control to bivalent displays, which resembles the process of maintaining two language systems. The null results were obtained for both cognitive complexity and WM, suggesting no bilingual advantage in these two cognitive components. Finally, findings on children’s attention system associate bilingualism with heightened attention control. Together, these findings support the hypothesis of cognitive benefits for bilingual children. Nevertheless, whether these advantages are observable appears to highly depend on the cognitive assessments. Therefore, future research should be more specific about the cognitive outcomes (e.g., the type of inhibition) and should report the validity of the cognitive measures consistently.

Keywords: attention, bilingual advantage, children, executive function

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Authors: Ariane Plaisance, Holly O. Witteman, Patrick Michel Archambault

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Upon admission to an intensive care unit (ICU), all patients should discuss their wishes concerning life-sustaining interventions (e.g., cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)). Without such discussions, interventions that prolong life at the cost of decreasing its quality may be used without appropriate guidance from patients. We employed user-centered design to adapt an existing decision aid (DA) about CPR to create a novel wiki-based DA adapted to the context of a single ICU and tailored to individual patient’s risk factors. During Phase 1, we conducted three weeks of ethnography of the decision-making context in our ICU to identify clinician and patient needs for a decision aid. During this time, we observed five dyads of intensivists and patients discussing their wishes concerning life-sustaining interventions. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with the attending intensivists in this ICU. During Phase 2, we conducted three rounds of rapid prototyping involving 15 patients and 11 other allied health professionals. We recorded discussions between intensivists and patients and used a standardized observation grid to collect patients’ comments and sociodemographic data. We applied content analysis to field notes, verbatim transcripts and the completed observation grids. Each round of observations and rapid prototyping iteratively informed the design of the next prototype. We also used the programming architecture of a wiki platform to embed the GO-FAR prediction rule programming code that we linked to a risk graphics software to better illustrate outcome risks calculated. During Phase I, we identified the need to add a section in our DA concerning invasive mechanical ventilation in addition to CPR because both life-sustaining interventions were often discussed together by physicians. During Phase II, we produced a context-adapted decision aid about CPR and mechanical ventilation that includes a values clarification section, questions about the patient’s functional autonomy prior to admission to the ICU and the functional decline that they would judge acceptable upon hospital discharge, risks and benefits of CPR and invasive mechanical ventilation, population-level statistics about CPR, a synthesis section to help patients come to a final decision and an online calculator based on the GO-FAR prediction rule. Even though the three rounds of rapid prototyping led to simplifying the information in our DA, 60% (n= 3/5) of the patients involved in the last cycle still did not understand the purpose of the DA. We also identified gaps in the discussion and documentation of patients’ preferences concerning life-sustaining interventions (e.g.,. CPR, invasive mechanical ventilation). The final version of our DA and our online wiki-based GO-FAR risk calculator using the IconArray.com risk graphics software are available online at www.wikidecision.org and are ready to be adapted to other contexts. Our results inform producers of decision aids on the use of wikis and user-centered design to develop DAs that are better adapted to users’ needs. Further work is needed on the creation of a video version of our DA. Physicians will also need the training to use our DA and to develop shared decision-making skills about goals of care.

Keywords: ethnography, intensive care units, life-sustaining therapies, user-centered design

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Authors: Yuhong Zhang, Dan Lu, Chenyang Bu, Peipei Li, Kui Yu, Xindong Wu

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The Cross-Lingual Entity Alignment (CLEA) task aims to find the aligned entities that refer to the same identity from two knowledge graphs (KGs) in different languages. It is an effective way to enhance the performance of data mining for KGs with scarce resources. In real-world applications, the neighborhood structures of the same entities in different KGs tend to be non-isomorphic, which makes the representation of entities contain diverse semantic information and then poses a great challenge for CLEA. In this paper, we try to address this challenge from two perspectives. On the one hand, the cross-KG relation completion rules are designed with the alignment constraint of entities and relations to improve the topology isomorphism of two KGs. On the other hand, a representation method combining isomorphic weights is designed to include more isomorphic semantics for counterpart entities, which will benefit the CLEA. Experiments show that our model can improve the isomorphism of two KGs and the alignment performance, especially for two non-isomorphic KGs.

Keywords: knowledge graphs, cross-lingual entity alignment, non-isomorphic, relation completion

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Authors: Shah Muhammad Butt, Ahmed Masaud Ansair

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Present financial crisis in Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs) is causing lots of problems such as considerable budget cuts, which makes it difficult to meet the ever growing IT based research and learning needs. Institutions are rapidly planning and promoting cloud based approaches for their academic and research needs. A cost-effective hybrid cloud framework for HEIs will provide educational services for campus or intercampus communication. Hybrid cloud framework comprises private and public cloud approaches. This paper will propose the framework based on the Open Source Cloud (OpenNebula for Virtualization, Eucalyptus for Infrastructure and Aneka for programming development environment) combined with CSPs services which are delivered to the end-user via the internet from public clouds such as Google, Microsoft, Zoho, and Salesforce.

Keywords: educational services, hybrid campus cloud, open source, higher educational institutes

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Authors: Trapti Sharma, Devesh Kumar Srivastava

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This paper is basically a analysis study of above MapReduce implementation and also to verify and validate the MapReduce solution model for Parallel K-Mediod algorithm on Hadoop Cluster. MapReduce is a programming model which authorize the managing of huge amounts of data in parallel, on a large number of devices. It is specially well suited to constant or moderate changing set of data since the implementation point of a position is usually high. MapReduce has slowly become the framework of choice for “big data”. The MapReduce model authorizes for systematic and instant organizing of large scale data with a cluster of evaluate nodes. One of the primary affect in Hadoop is how to minimize the completion length (i.e. makespan) of a set of MapReduce duty. In this paper, we have verified and validated various MapReduce applications like wordcount, grep, terasort and parallel K-Mediod clustering algorithm. We have found that as the amount of nodes increases the completion time decreases.

Keywords: hadoop, mapreduce, k-mediod, validation, verification

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Authors: Boudersa Said Sami

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This paper aims at revealing the new role of the African translator as a progressive traveler in the thoughts and minds of both Africans and others via his/her multidimensional translations, and a particular focus will be here on literary translation. The African translator, in this respect, is a great actor in Africa’s literary, intellectual and philosophical movement through his exploration of great literary books and highly-echoed intellectual masterpieces via translation. The paper’s hypothesis revolves around the importance of the African translator in moving from one thought to another as shifting from one language to another (French to English or English to French and Arabic). Unless the African translator is alert-minded, lively and animated, the African thoughts are stagnant and Africa is a big mire of rotten ideas. African thoughts are alive, providing that translation is vivid. The findings of the paper reveal the significance of the African translator’s multidimensional roles in keeping Africa in movement. As a pertinent recommendation, translation in Africa should be fostered and its tools should be enhanced as well to keep Africa’s thoughts in continuous mobility between geographic areas as languages are in a progressive move through translation.

Keywords: African, translator, literary, globetrotter, movement

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Authors: Asmaa Shehata

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Prior research indicates that second language (L2) learners encounter difficulty in the distinguishing novel L2 contrasting sounds that are not contrastive in their native languages. L2 orthographic information, however, is found to play a positive role in the acquisition of non-native phoneme contrasts. While most studies have mainly involved a familiar written script (i.e., the Roman script), the influence of a foreign, unfamiliar script is still unknown. Therefore, the present study asks: Does unfamiliar L2 script play a role in creating distinct phonological representations of novel contrasting phonemes? It is predicted that subjects’ performance in the unfamiliar orthography group will outperform their counterparts’ performance in the control group. Thus, training that entails orthographic inputs can yield a significant improvement in L2 adult learners’ identification and lexical encoding of novel L2 consonant contrasts. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the type of input introduced to L2 learners to improve their language learning.

Keywords: Arabic, consonant contrasts, foreign script, lexical encoding, orthography, word learning

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Authors: Arindam Chaudhuri

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The research presents epsilon- hierarchical fuzzy twin support vector regression (epsilon-HFTSVR) based on epsilon-fuzzy twin support vector regression (epsilon-FTSVR) and epsilon-twin support vector regression (epsilon-TSVR). Epsilon-FTSVR is achieved by incorporating trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to epsilon-TSVR which takes care of uncertainty existing in forecasting problems. Epsilon-FTSVR determines a pair of epsilon-insensitive proximal functions by solving two related quadratic programming problems. The structural risk minimization principle is implemented by introducing regularization term in primal problems of epsilon-FTSVR. This yields dual stable positive definite problems which improves regression performance. Epsilon-FTSVR is then reformulated as epsilon-HFTSVR consisting of a set of hierarchical layers each containing epsilon-FTSVR. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets reveal that epsilon-HFTSVR has remarkable generalization performance with minimum training time.

Keywords: regression, epsilon-TSVR, epsilon-FTSVR, epsilon-HFTSVR

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Authors: Arbolino R., Boffardi R., L. De Simone

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The success of a development policy requires the definition of a proper investment planning on behalf of policymakers. Such planning should consider both tangible and intangible features characterizing a territory and, moreover, evaluate both state of place and an ideal situation to be achieved, that represents the final goal of the policy. The aim of this research is to propose a methodological approach to implement this ideal solution or the best solution appliable to the Italian regions. It consists of two steps: the first one is a measure of regional inequality through building a composite indicator for analyzing the level of development and compare the differences among the regions. It is constructed by means of a principal component analysis. Ranking regions according to the scores achieved is useful as benchmark, to identify a best solution towards which other regions should strive. Thus, this distance is measured through a revised Sen index that allows to assign a weight on which calculate the financing resource programming. The results show that this approach is a good instrument to fairly and efficiently allocate public funds, in order to reduce regional inequalities.

Keywords: public economics, inequalities, growth, development

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Authors: Abdulaziz Alageel, Martino Luis, Shuya Zhong

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The main focus of this research study is on the challenges faced in decision-making in a supply chain network regarding the facility location while considering carbon emissions. The study aims (i) to locate facilities (i.e., distribution centeres) in a continuous space considering limitations of capacity and the costs associated with opening and (ii) to reduce the cost of carbon emissions by selecting the mode of transportation. The problem is formulated as mixed-integer linear programming. This study hybridised a greedy randomised adaptive search (GRASP) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) to deal with the problem. Well-known datasets from the literature (Brimberg et al. 2001) are used and adapted in order to assess the performance of the proposed method. The proposed hybrid method produces encouraging results based on computational analysis. The study also highlights some research avenues for future recommendations.

Keywords: supply chain, facility location, weber problem, sustainability

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Authors: Farrukh Shahzad

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The rich Islamic resources related to religious text, Islamic sciences, and history are widely available in print and in electronic format online. However, most of these works are only available in Arabic language. In this research, an attempt is made to utilize these resources to create interactive web applications in Arabic, English and other languages. The system utilizes the Pattern Recognition, Knowledge Management, Data Mining, Information Retrieval and Management, Indexing, storage and data-analysis techniques to parse, store, convert and manage the information from authentic Arabic resources. These interactive web Apps provide smart multi-lingual search, tree based search, on-demand information matching and linking. In this paper, we provide details of application architecture, design, implementation and technologies employed. We also presented the summary of web applications already developed. We have also included some screen shots from the corresponding web sites. These web applications provide an Innovative On-line Learning Systems (eLearning and computer based education).

Keywords: Islamic resources, Muslim scholars, hadith, narrators, history, fiqh

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Authors: Banazzouz Halima

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Throughout the ages, language has been viewed not only as a simple code of communicating information but rather as the most powerful and versatile medium of maintaining relationships with other people. While,by the end of the 18th century, such matters of scientific investigation concerning the study of human language began to occur under the scope of “Linguistics” generally defined as the scientific study of language. Linguistics, thus, provides a growing body of scientific knowledge about language which can guide the activity of the language teacher and student as well. Moreover,as times passed, the linguistic development engaged language in a broadly practiced academic discipline having relationship with other sciences such as: psychology, sociology, anthropology etc. Therefore, “Sociolinguistics” was given birth during the 1960’s. In fact, the given abstract is mainly linguistic, inserted under the scope of “Sociolinguistics” and by far it highlights on the process of linguistic variation and language change to show that all languages change through time and linguistic systems may vary from one speech community to another providing there is a sense of vitality where people of different parts of the globe may mutually and intelligibly communicate and comprehend each other.

Keywords: language change-sociolinguistics, social context-speech community, vitality of language, linguistic variation, urban dialectology, urban dialectology

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Authors: Ramanpreet Kaur, Upasana Sharma

Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenges facing the water supply for the Machine Learning Database (MLDB) system at the piston foundry plant. In the MLDB system, one main unit, i.e., robotic, is connected by two sub-units. The functioning of the system depends on the robotic and water supply. Lack of water supply causes system failure. The system operates at full capacity with the help of two sub-units. If one sub-unit fails, the system runs at a low capacity. Reliability modeling is performed using semi-Markov processes and regenerative point techniques. Several system effects such as mean time to system failure, availability at full capacity, availability at reduced capacity, busy period for repair and expected number of visits have been achieved. Benefits have been analyzed. The graphical study is designed for a specific case using programming in C++ and MS Excel.

Keywords: MLDB system, robotic, semi-Markov process, regenerative point technique

Procedia PDF Downloads 96

Authors: Dzhavidan Zeinalov, Bugra Sen, Firangiz Aslanova

Abstract:

Most text-to-speech models cannot operate well in low-resource languages and require a great amount of high-quality training data to be considered good enough. Yet, with the improvements made in ASR systems, it is now much easier than ever to collect data for the design of custom text-to-speech models. In this work, our work on using the ASR model to collect data to build a viable text-to-speech system for one of the leading financial institutions of Azerbaijan will be outlined. NVIDIA’s implementation of the Tacotron 2 model was utilized along with the HiFiGAN vocoder. As for the training, the model was first trained with high-quality audio data collected from the Internet, then fine-tuned on the bank’s single speaker call center data. The results were then evaluated by 50 different listeners and got a mean opinion score of 4.17, displaying that our method is indeed viable. With this, we have successfully designed the first text-to-speech model in Azerbaijani and publicly shared 12 hours of audiobook data for everyone to use.

Keywords: Azerbaijani language, HiFiGAN, Tacotron 2, text-to-speech, transfer learning, whisper

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Authors: B. Karmutoglu, E. Guzel, Y. Halefoglu

Abstract:

The aim of this study was to determine the basic trends of the students and instructors who participated in the courses of entrepreneurship certificate education in universities. In this study, it is tried to determine whether the level of education and occupational groups are meaningful in creating entrepreneurship, taking into consideration the legal regulations, supports, researches and development targets issued in this respect. For this reason, this project started 2015 and opened five courses in 2015, thirteen courses in 2016, and eleven courses in 2017. The total numbers of course and participants have been 30 and 510 respectively. Comparisons were made according to the faculties of 510 participants. In this comparison, it was observed that outward-oriented, self-confidence, breakthrough, risk-taking and entrepreneurship tendencies of engineering faculty students were very high. In the second place, entrepreneurial desires of the students of vocational high schools came to the forefront. This project supported by Cukurova University and The Scientific And Technological Research Council Of Turkey(TÜBİTAK) 1601 programming.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, training, certificate, project

Procedia PDF Downloads 161

Authors: Abdulatif Abdulsalam Mohamed Shaban

Abstract:

This paper states that the art of Procedure Entry Array (PEA) plan with a focus on control system applications. This paper begins with an impression of PEA technology development, followed by an arrangement of design technologies, and the use of programmable description languages and system-level design tools. They allow a practical approach based on a unique model for complete engineering electronics systems. There are three main design rules are implemented in the system. These are algorithm based fine-tuning, modularity, and the control act and the architectural constraints. An overview of contributions and limits of PEAs is also given, followed by a short survey of PEA-based gifted controllers for recent engineering systems. Finally, two complete and timely case studies are presented to illustrate the benefits of a PEA implementation when using the proposed system modelling and devise attitude. These consist of the direct control for training motor drives and the control of a diesel-driven stand-alone generator with the help of logical design.

Keywords: control (DC), engineering electronics systems, training motor drives, procedure entry array

Procedia PDF Downloads 506