Search results for: Quality Management

Authors: G.S. Abdiraiymova, D.K. Burkhanova, G.A. Kenzhakimova

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Education in the modern world provides the socioeconomic progress of society. In today's society, where the presence of large middle class ensures its stability and is a symbol of resolution of hidden economic problems, education is an integral part of formation and reproduction of the middle class. This article presents part of results of the sociological study conducted under the project "Kazakhstan model of education: international experience and national traditions" supported by the Foundation of the First President of Republic of Kazakhstan - Leader of the Nation to determine the ratio of students to the transformations of the educational system. The authors conclude that the Kazakhstani system of education, passing through the transformation processes, improving the quality of educational programs and trying to correspond to the international standards, not yet in full range, but begins to perform important functions in the formation of the middle class.

Keywords: Higher education, middle class, reforms, students, transformation processes.

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Authors: Bahi brahim, El hassane Ibn Elhaj, Driss Aboutajdine

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In this paper we propose a Multiple Description Image Coding(MDIC) scheme to generate two compressed and balanced rates descriptions in the wavelet domain (Daubechies biorthogonal (9, 7) wavelet) using pairwise correlating transform optimal and application method for Generalized Multiple Description Coding (GMDC) to image coding in the wavelet domain. The GMDC produces statistically correlated streams such that lost streams can be estimated from the received data. Our performance test shown that the proposed method gives more improvement and good quality of the reconstructed image when the wavelet coefficients are normalized by Gaussian Scale Mixture (GSM) model then the Gaussian one ,.

Keywords: Multiple description coding (MDC), gaussian scale mixture (GSM) model, joint source-channel coding, pairwise correlating transform, GMDCT.

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Authors: P. Sawitri, S. Cdr. Sittha, T. Kritsana

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Flow forming is widely used in many industries, especially in defence technology industries. Pressure vessels requirements are high precision, light weight, seamless and optimum strength. For large pressure vessels, flow forming by 3 rollers machine were used. In case of long range rocket motor case flow forming and welding of pressure vessels have been used for manufacturing. Due to complication of welding process, researchers had developed 4 meters length pressure vessels without weldment by 4 rollers flow forming machine. Design and preparation of preform work pieces are performed. The optimization of flow forming parameter such as feed rate, spindle speed and depth of cut will be discussed. The experimental result shown relation of flow forming parameters to quality of flow formed tube and prototype pressure vessels have been made.

Keywords: Flow forming, Pressure vessel, four rollers, feed rate, spindle speed, cold work.

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Authors: Abdelkrim Zitouni, Mounir Zid, Sami Badrouchi, Rached Tourki

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The Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous Network on Chip (GALS NoC) is the most efficient solution that provides low latency transfers and power efficient System on Chip (SoC) interconnect. This study presents a GALS and generic NoC architecture based on a configurable router. This router integrates a sophisticated dynamic arbiter, the wormhole routing technique and can be configured in a manner that allows it to be used in many possible NoC topologies such as Mesh 2-D, Tree and Polygon architectures. This makes it possible to improve the quality of service (QoS) required by the proposed NoC. A comparative performances study of the proposed NoC architecture, Tore architecture and of the most used Mesh 2D architecture is performed. This study shows that Spidergon architecture is characterised by the lower latency and the later saturation. It is also shown that no matter what the number of used links is raised; the Links×Diameter product permitted by the Spidergon architecture remains always the lower. The only limitation of this architecture comes from it-s over cost in term of silicon area.

Keywords: Dynamic arbiter, Generic router, Spidergon NoC, SoC.

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Authors: Federica Cornali

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Does education matter to the quality of our life? The results of extensive studies offer an affirmative answer to this question: high education levels are positively associated with higher income, with more highly qualified professions, with lower risk of unemployment, with better physical health and also, it is said, with more happiness. However, exploring these relationships is far from straightforward. Aside from educational credentials, what properties distinguish functionally literate individuals? How can their personal level of satisfaction be measured? What are the social mechanisms whereby education affects well-being?Using a literacy index and several measures for well-being developed by secondary analysis of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey database, this investigation examined the relationship between literacy skills and subjective wellbeing in several OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Special attention was been addressed to Italy, and in particular to two regions representing territorial differences in this country: Piedmont and Campania.

Keywords: Cultural Divide, Literacy Index, Life Satisfaction, Subjective Well-being Index

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Authors: Haythem Yahyaoui, Samir Moalla, Mounir Bouden, Skander Ghorbel

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Nowadays, cloud environments are becoming a need for companies, this new technology gives the opportunities to access to the data anywhere and anytime. It also provides an optimized and secured access to the resources and gives more security for the data which is stored in the platform. However, some companies do not trust Cloud providers, they think that providers can access and modify some confidential data such as bank accounts. Many works have been done in this context, they conclude that encryption methods realized by providers ensure the confidentiality, but, they forgot that Cloud providers can decrypt the confidential resources. The best solution here is to apply some operations on the data before sending them to the provider Cloud in the objective to make them unreadable. The principal idea is to allow user how it can protect his data with his own methods. In this paper, we are going to demonstrate our approach and prove that is more efficient in term of execution time than some existing methods. This work aims at enhancing the quality of service of providers and ensuring the trust of the customers. 

Keywords: Confidentiality, cryptography, security issues, trust issues.

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Authors: Azlina Abu Bakar, Abdul Fatah Wan Sidek

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Well-being has been given special emphasis in quality of life. It involves living a meaningful, life satisfaction, stability and happiness in life. Well-being also concerns the satisfaction of physical, psychological, social needs and demands of an individual. The purpose of this study was to validate three-factor measurement model of well-being using structural equation modeling (SEM). The conceptions of well-being measured such dimensions as physical, psychological and social well-being. This study was done based on a total sample of 650 adolescents from east-coast of peninsular Malaysia. The Well-Being Scales which was adapted from [1] was used in this study. The items were hypothesized a priori to have nonzero loadings on all dimensions in the model. The findings of the SEM demonstrated that it is a good fitting model which the proposed model fits the driving theory; (x2df = 1.268; GFI = .994; CFI = .998; TLI= .996; p = .255; RMSEA = .021). Composite reliability (CR) was .93 and average variance extracted (AVE) was 58%. The model in this study fits with the sample of data and well-being is important to bring sustainable development to the mainstream.

Keywords: Adolescence, Structural Equation Modeling, Sustainable Development, Well-Being.

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Authors: Hossein Pazhoumand-Dar, Amir Mohsen Toliyat Abolhassani, Ehsan Saeedi

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Speed estimation is one of the important and practical tasks in machine vision, Robotic and Mechatronic. the availability of high quality and inexpensive video cameras, and the increasing need for automated video analysis has generated a great deal of interest in machine vision algorithms. Numerous approaches for speed estimation have been proposed. So classification and survey of the proposed methods can be very useful. The goal of this paper is first to review and verify these methods. Then we will propose a novel algorithm to estimate the speed of moving object by using fuzzy concept. There is a direct relation between motion blur parameters and object speed. In our new approach we will use Radon transform to find direction of blurred image, and Fuzzy sets to estimate motion blur length. The most benefit of this algorithm is its robustness and precision in noisy images. Our method was tested on many images with different range of SNR and is satisfiable.

Keywords: Blur Analysis, Fuzzy sets, Speed estimation.

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Authors: Yassine Meraihi, Dalila Acheli, Rabah Meraihi

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Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a special case of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) used to establish communications and exchange information among nearby vehicles and between vehicles and nearby fixed infrastructure. VANET is seen as a promising technology used to provide safety, efficiency, assistance and comfort to the road users. Routing is an important issue in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network to find and maintain communication between vehicles due to the highly dynamic topology, frequently disconnected network and mobility constraints.

This paper evaluates the performance of two most popular proactive routing protocols OLSR and DSDV in real city traffic scenario on the basis of three metrics namely Packet delivery ratio, throughput and average end to end delay by varying vehicles density and transmission range.

Keywords: DSDV, OLSR, Quality of service, Routing protocols, VANET.

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Authors: Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Christian Toonen, Jan Topi Tervo, Dennis Lappe

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Time series analysis often requires data that represents the evolution of an observed variable in equidistant time steps. In order to collect this data sampling is applied. While continuous signals may be sampled, analyzed and reconstructed applying Shannon-s sampling theorem, time-discrete signals have to be dealt with differently. In this article we consider the discrete-event simulation (DES) of job-shop-systems and study the effects of different sampling rates on data quality regarding completeness and accuracy of reconstructed inventory evolutions. At this we discuss deterministic as well as non-deterministic behavior of system variables. Error curves are deployed to illustrate and discuss the sampling rate-s impact and to derive recommendations for its wellfounded choice.

Keywords: discrete-event simulation, job-shop-system, sampling rate.

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Authors: Essam Abdel-Salam Gouda

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This paper analysis the tourism development on the Red Sea in Egypt (west bank) and the needed ongoing action toward a sustainable approach. It addresses, at the first, the development's evolution occurred in the coastal area, the environmental effects it left, and how to minimize those impacts in the future. The second main point is dealing with the most important issues that hinder the achievement of sustainable tourism development on the Red Sea coast and how we can overcome them in the future.

Keywords: Coastal management, Environment, Red Sea, Sustainable tourism.

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Authors: Mohammad Ali Hosseinpour, Hossein Ghoreishi, Saeid Gitipour, Mona Jafarnejad

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REY area has been located in Tehran Province and several archaeological ruins of this area indicate that the settlement in this area has been started since several thousand years ago. In this paper, the main investigation items consist of analysis of oil components and groundwater quality inside the wells. By finding the contents of oil in the well, it is possible to find out the pollution source by comparing the oil contents of well with other oil products that are used inside and outside of the oil farm. Investigation items consist of analysis of BTEX (Benzene, Toluene, Ethyl-benzene, Xylene), Gas chromatographic distillation characteristics, Water content, Density, Sulfur content, Lead content, Atmospheric distillation, MTBE(Methyl tertiary butyl ether). Analysis of polluting oil components showed that except MW(Monitoring Well)10 and MW 15 that oil with slightly heavy components was detected in them; with a high possibility the polluting oil is light oil.

Keywords: BTEX, Oil Component, REY Area, Tehran Oil Refining Company (T.O.R.C) .

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Authors: Kawpong Polyorat

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Since the outbreak of mad cow disease and bird flu, consumers have become more concerned with meat quality and safety. As a result, meat traceability is adopted as one approach to handle consumers’ concern in this issue. Nevertheless, in Thailand, meat traceability is rarely used as a marketing tool to persuade consumers. As a consequence, the present study attempts to understand consumer trust in the meat traceability system by conducting a study in this country to examine the impact of three types of consumer knowledge on this trust. The study results reveal that out of three types of consumer knowledge, marketplace knowledge was the sole predictor of consumer trust in meat traceability and it has a positive influence. General product class knowledge and knowledge in meat products with traceability, however, did not significantly influence consumer trust. The research results provide several implications and directions for future study.

Keywords: Consumer knowledge, marketing, product knowledge, traceability.

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Authors: Kelaiaia Mounia Samira, Labar Hocine, Bounaya Kamel, Kelaiaia Samia

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With the rapid advanced of technology, the industrial processes become increasingly demanding, from the point of view, power quality and controllability. The advent of multi levels inverters responds partially to these requirements. But actually, the new generation of multi-cells inverters permits to reach more performances, since, it offers more voltage levels. The disadvantage in the increase of voltage levels by the number of cells in cascades is on account of series igbts synchronisation loss, from where, a limitation of cells in cascade to 4. Regarding to these constraints, a new topology is proposed in this paper, which increases the voltage levels of the three-cell inverter from 4 to 8; with the same number of igbts, and using less stored energy in the flaying capacitors. The details of operation and modelling of this new inverter structure are also presented, then tested thanks to a three phase induction motor. KeywordsFlaying capacitors, Multi-cells inverter, pwm, switchers, modelling.

Keywords: Flaying capacitors, Multi-cells inverter, pwm, switchers, modelling.

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Authors: Swetha Priya Darshini Thammadi, Sateesh Kumar Pisini, Sanjay Kumar Shukla

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Source apportionment using Dispersion model depends primarily on the quality of Emission Inventory. In the present study, a CMB receptor model has been used to identify the sources of PM_2.5, while the AERMOD dispersion model has been used to account for missing sources of PM_2.5 in the Emission Inventory. A statistical approach has been developed to quantify the missing sources not considered in the Emission Inventory. The inventory of each grid was improved by adjusting emissions based on road lengths and deficit in measured and modelled concentrations. The results showed that in CMB analyses, fugitive sources - soil and road dust - contribute significantly to ambient PM_2.5 pollution. As a result, AERMOD significantly underestimated the ambient air concentration at most locations. The revised Emission Inventory showed a significant improvement in AERMOD performance which is evident through statistical tests.

Keywords: CMB, GIS, AERMOD, PM2.5, fugitive, emission inventory.

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Authors: Aeslina Binti Abdul Kadir, Ahmad Shayuti Bin Abdul Rahim

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Brick is one of the most common masonry units used as building material. Due to the demand, different types of waste have been investigated to be incorporated into the bricks. Many types of sludge have been incorporated in fired clay brick for example marble sludge, stone sludge, water sludge, sewage sludge, and ceramic sludge. The utilization of these waste materials in fired clay bricks usually has positive effects on the properties such as lightweight bricks with improved shrinkage, porosity, and strength. This paper reviews on utilization of different types of sludge wastes into fired clay bricks. Previous investigations have demonstrated positive effects on the physical and mechanical properties as well as less impact towards the environment. Thus, the utilizations of sludge waste could produce a good quality of brick and could be one of alternative disposal methods for the sludge wastes.

Keywords: Fired Clay Brick, Sludge waste, Compressive strength, Shrinkage, Water absorption.

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Authors: D. N. Kambrekar, S. B. Jagginavar, J. Aruna

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Grape stem borer, Celosterna scrabrator is an important production constraint in grapes in India. Hitherto this pest was a severe menace only on the aged and unmanaged fields but during the recent past it has also started damaging the newly established fields. In India, since Karnataka, Andra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra are the major grape production states, the incidence of stem borer is also restricted and severe in these states. The grubs of the beetle bore in to the main stem and even the branches, which affect the translocation of nutrients to the areal parts of the plant. Since, the grubs bore inside the stem, the chewed material along with its excreta is discharged outside the holes and the frass is found on the ground just below the bored holes. The portion of vines above the damaged part has a sticky appearance. The leaves become pale yellow which looks like a deficiency of micronutrients. The leaves ultimately dry and drop down. The status of the incidence of the grape stem borer in different grape growing districts of Northern Karnataka was carried out during three years. In each taluka five locations were surveyed for the incidence of grape stem borer. Further, the experiment on management of stem borer was carried out in the grape gardens of Vijayapur districts under farmers field during three years. Stem borer infested plants that show live holes were selected per treatments and it was replicated three times. Live and dead holes observed during pre-treatment were closely monitored and only plants with live holes were selected and tagged. Different doses of chlorantraniliprole 0.4% GR were incorporated into the soil around the vine basins near root zone surrounded to trunk region by removing soils up to 5-10 cm with a peripheral distance of 1 to 1.5 feet from the main trunk where feeder roots are present. Irrigation was followed after application of insecticide for proper incorporation of the test chemical. The results indicated that there was sever to moderate incidence of the stem borer in all the grape growing districts of northern Karnataka. Maximum incidence was recorded in Belagavi (11 holes per vine) and minimum was in Gadag district (8.5 holes per vine). The investigations carried out to study the efficacy of chlorantraniliprole on grape stem borer for successive three years under farmers field indicated that chlorantraniliprole @ 15g/vine applied just near the active root zone of the plant followed by irrigation has successfully managed the pest. The insecticide has translocated to all the parts of the plants and thereby stopped the activity of the pest which has resulted in to better growth of the plant and higher berry yield compared to other treatments under investigation. Thus, chlorantraniliprole 0.4 GR @ 15g/vine can be effective means in managing the stem borer.

Keywords: Chlorantraniliprole, grape stem borer, Celosterna scrabrator, management.

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Authors: M. Sankari, C. Meena

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Enhancing the quality of two dimensional signals is one of the most important factors in the fields of video surveillance and computer vision. Usually in real-life video surveillance, false detection occurs due to the presence of random noise, illumination and shadow artifacts. The detection methods based on background subtraction faces several problems in accurately detecting objects in realistic environments: In this paper, we propose a noise removal algorithm using neighborhood comparison method with thresholding. The illumination variations correction is done in the detected foreground objects by using an amalgamation of techniques like homomorphic decomposition, curvelet transformation and gamma adjustment operator. Shadow is removed using chromaticity estimator with local relation estimator. Results are compared with the existing methods and prove as high robustness in the video surveillance.

Keywords: Chromaticity Estimator, Curvelet Transformation, Denoising, Gamma correction, Homomorphic, Neighborhood Assessment.

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Authors: Mehdi Nafar, Mohammad Reza Mansouri

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The present research presents a direct active and reactive power control (DPC) of a wind energy conversion system (WECS) for the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) based on a doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) connected to electric power grid. The control strategy of the Rotor Side Converter (RSC) is targeted in extracting a maximum of power under fluctuating wind speed. A fuzzy logic speed controller (FLC) has been used to ensure the MPPT. The Grid Side Converter is directed in a way to ensure sinusoidal current in the grid side and a smooth DC voltage. To reduce fluctuations, rotor torque and voltage use of multilevel inverters is a good way to remove the rotor harmony.

Keywords: DFIG, power quality improvement, wind energy conversion system, WECS, fuzzy logic, RSC, GSC, inverter.

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Authors: Gyoutae Park, Woosuk Kim, Sangguk Ahn, Seungmo Kim, Minjun Kim, Jinhan Lee, Youngdo Jo, Jongsam Moon, Hiesik Kim

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In this research, we designed a remote system to test parameters of gas detectors such as gas concentration and initial response time. This testing system is available to measure two gas instruments simultaneously. First of all, we assembled an experimental jig with a square structure. Those parts are included with a glass flask, two high-quality cameras, and two Ethernet modems for transmitting data. This remote gas detector testing system extracts numerals from videos with continually various gas concentrations while LCDs show photographs from cameras. Extracted numeral data are received to a laptop computer through Ethernet modem. And then, the numerical data with gas concentrations and the measured initial response speeds are recorded and graphed. Our remote testing system will be diversely applied on gas detector’s test and will be certificated in domestic and international countries.

Keywords: Gas leakage detector, inspection instrument, extracting numerals, concentration.

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Authors: Vijay Kapse, Arun Pofale, Mayank Mathur

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Developing countries are facing a problem of slums and there appears to be no fool proof solution to eradicate them. For improving the quality of life there are three approaches of slum development and In-situ up-gradation approach is found to be the best one, while the relocation approach has proved to be failure. Factors responsible for failure of relocation projects are needed to be assessed, which is the basic aim of the paper. Factors responsible for failure of relocation projects are loss of livelihood, security of tenure and inefficiency of the Government. These factors are traced out & mapped from the examples of Western & Indian cities. National habitat, Resettlement policy emphasized relationship between shelter and work place. SRA has identified 55 slums for relocation due reservation of land uses, security of tenure and non- notified status of slums. The policy guidelines have been suggested for successful relocation projects. KeywordsLivelihood, Relocation, Slums, Urban poor.

Keywords: Livelihood, Relocation, Slums, Urban poor.

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Authors: Luísa P. Cruz-Lopes, Liliana Rodrigues, Idalina Domingos, José Ferreira, Luís Teixeira de Lemos, Bruno Esteves

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Currently, the polyurethanes industry is dependent on fossil resources to obtain their basic raw materials (polyols and isocyanate), as these are obtained from petroleum products. The aim of this work was to use biopolyols from liquefied Pseudotsuga (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and Turkey oak (Quercus cerris) barks for the production of polyurethane foams and optimize the process. Liquefaction was done with glycerol catalyzed by KOH. Foams were produced following different formulations and using biopolyols from both barks. Subsequently, the foams were characterized according to their mechanical properties and the reaction of the foam formation was monitored by FTIR-ATR. The results show that it is possible to produce polyurethane foams using bio-based polyols and the liquefaction conditions are very important because they influence the characteristics of biopolyols and, consequently the characteristics of the foams. However, the process has to be further optimized so that it can obtain better quality foams.

Keywords: Bio-based polyol, mechanical tests, polyurethane foam, Pseudotsuga bark, renewable resources, Turkey oak bark.

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Authors: Rameshwar Kawitkar

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With the exponentially increasing demand for wireless communications the capacity of current cellular systems will soon become incapable of handling the growing traffic. Since radio frequencies are diminishing natural resources, there seems to be a fundamental barrier to further capacity increase. The solution can be found in smart antenna systems. Smart or adaptive antenna arrays consist of an array of antenna elements with signal processing capability, that optimize the radiation and reception of a desired signal, dynamically. Smart antennas can place nulls in the direction of interferers via adaptive updating of weights linked to each antenna element. They thus cancel out most of the co-channel interference resulting in better quality of reception and lower dropped calls. Smart antennas can also track the user within a cell via direction of arrival algorithms. This implies that they are more advantageous than other antenna systems. This paper focuses on few issues about the smart antennas in mobile radio networks.

Keywords: Smart/Adaptive Antenna, Multipath fading, Beamforming, Radio propagation.

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Authors: A. Szabó Nagy, J. Szabó, Zs. Csanádi, J. Erdős

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The main objective of this study was to assess the seasonal variation of atmospheric polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) concentrations associated with PM10 in an urban site of Győr, Hungary. A total of 112 PM10 aerosol samples were collected in the years of 2012 and 2013 and analyzed for PAHs by gas chromatography method. The total PAH concentrations (sum of the concentrations of 19 individual PAH compounds) ranged from 0.19 to 70.16 ng/m3 with the mean value of 12.29 ng/m3. Higher concentrations of both total PAHs and benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) were detected in samples collected in the heating seasons. Using BaPequivalent potency index on the carcinogenic PAH concentration data, the local population appears to be exposed to significantly higher cancer risk in the heating seasons. However, the comparison of the BaP and total PAH concentrations observed for Győr with other cities it was found that the PAH levels in Győr generally corresponded to the EU average.

Keywords: Air quality, benzo[a]pyrene, PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

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Authors: Walid M. Saad

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techniques are examined to overcome the performance degradation caused by the channel dispersion using slow frequency hopping (SFH) with dynamic frequency hopping (DFH) pattern adaptation. In DFH systems, the frequency slots are selected by continuous quality monitoring of all frequencies available in a system and modification of hopping patterns for each individual link based on replacing slots which its signal to interference ratio (SIR) measurement is below a required threshold. Simulation results will show the improvements in BER obtained by DFH in comparison with matched frequency hopping (MFH), random frequency hopping (RFH) and multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) in multipath slowly fading dispersive channels using a generalized bandpass two-path transfer function model, and will show the improvement obtained according to the threshold selection.

Keywords: code division multiple access (CDMA), dynamic channel allocation (DCA), dynamic channel assignment, frequency hopping, matched frequency hopping (MFH).

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Authors: Nikolaos Vassilas, Theocharis Tsenoglou, Djamchid Ghazanfarpour

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In this work, we explore the capability of the mean shift algorithm as a powerful preprocessing tool for improving the quality of spatial data, acquired from airborne scanners, from densely built urban areas. On one hand, high resolution image data corrupted by noise caused by lossy compression techniques are appropriately smoothed while at the same time preserving the optical edges and, on the other, low resolution LiDAR data in the form of normalized Digital Surface Map (nDSM) is upsampled through the joint mean shift algorithm. Experiments on both the edge-preserving smoothing and upsampling capabilities using synthetic RGB-z data show that the mean shift algorithm is superior to bilateral filtering as well as to other classical smoothing and upsampling algorithms. Application of the proposed methodology for 3D reconstruction of buildings of a pilot region of Athens, Greece results in a significant visual improvement of the 3D building block model.

Keywords: 3D buildings reconstruction, data fusion, data upsampling, mean shift.

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Authors: Sushil Sarwa, Rajeev Kumar

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The wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging technology in wireless networking as they can serve large scale high speed internet access. Due to its wireless multi-hop feature, wireless mesh network is prone to suffer from many attacks, such as denial of service attack (DoS). We consider a special case of DoS attack which is selective forwarding attack (a.k.a. gray hole attack). In such attack, a misbehaving mesh router selectively drops the packets it receives rom its predecessor mesh router. It is very hard to detect that packet loss is due to medium access collision, bad channel quality or because of selective forwarding attack. In this paper, we present a review of detection algorithms of selective forwarding attack and discuss their advantage & disadvantage. Finally we conclude this paper with open research issues and challenges.

Keywords: CAD algorithm, CHEMAS, selective forwarding attack, watchdog & pathrater, wireless mesh network.

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Authors: Houshang Taghizadeh, Gholamreza Soltani Fesghandis

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Nowadays, without the awareness of consumer behavior and correct understanding of it, it is not possible for organizations to take appropriate measures to meet the consumer needs and demands. The aim of this paper is the identification and prioritization of the factors affecting the consumer behavior based on the product value. The population of the study includes all the consumers of furniture producing firms in East Azarbaijan province, Iran. The research sample includes 93 people selected by the sampling formula in unlimited population. The data collection instrument was a questionnaire, the validity of which was confirmed through face validity and the reliability of which was determined, using Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The Kolmogorov-Smironov test was used to test data normality, the t-test for identification of factors affecting the product value, and Friedman test for prioritizing the factors. The results show that quality, satisfaction, styling, price, finishing operation, performance, safety, worth, shape, use, and excellence are placed from 1 to 11 priorities, respectively.

Keywords: Consumer Behavior, Consumer Satisfaction, Product, Value

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Authors: Ashkan Ebadi, Andrea Schiffauerova

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Every year, a considerable amount of money is being invested on research, mainly in the form of funding allocated to universities and research institutes. To better distribute the available funds and to set the most proper R&D investment strategies for the future, evaluation of the productivity of the funded researchers and the impact of such funding is crucial. In this paper, using the data on 15 years of journal publications of the NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering research Council of Canada) funded researchers and by means of bibliometric analysis, the scientific development of the funded researchers and their scientific collaboration patterns will be investigated in the period of 1996-2010. According to the results it seems that there is a positive relation between the average level of funding and quantity and quality of the scientific output. In addition, whenever funding allocated to the researchers has increased, the number of co-authors per paper has also augmented. Hence, the increase in the level of funding may enable researchers to get involved in larger projects and/or scientific teams and increase their scientific output respectively.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, Collaboration, Funding, Productivity.

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Authors: William Anderson, Kyle Kobold, Oleg Yakimenko

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Green microgrids using mostly renewable energy (RE) for generation, are complex systems with inherent nonlinear dynamics. Among a variety of different optimization tools there are only a few ones that adequately consider this complexity. This paper evaluates applicability of two somewhat similar optimization tools tailored for standalone RE microgrids and also assesses a machine learning tool for performance prediction that can enhance the reliability of any chosen optimization tool. It shows that one of these microgrid optimization tools has certain advantages over another and presents a detailed routine of preparing input data to simulate RE microgrid behavior. The paper also shows how neural-network-based predictive modeling can be used to validate and forecast solar power generation based on weather time series data, which improves the overall quality of standalone RE microgrid analysis.

Keywords: Microgrid, renewable energy, complex systems, optimization, predictive modeling, neural networks.

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