Search results for: personal learning environment (PLE)

Authors: Sally A. Brown

Abstract:

Over the last 30 years, researchers have developed models or frameworks to provide a more structured understanding of the reading comprehension process. Cognitive information processing models and social cognitive theories both provide frameworks to inform reading comprehension instruction. The purpose of this paper is to (a) provide an overview of the historical development of reading comprehension theory, (b) review the literature framed by cognitive information processing, social cognitive, and integrated reading comprehension theories, and (c) demonstrate how these frameworks inform instruction. As integrated models of reading can guide the interpretation of various factors related to student learning, an integrated framework designed by the researcher will be presented. Results indicated that features of cognitive processing and social cognitivism theory—represented in the integrated framework—highlight the importance of the role of the teacher. This model can aide teachers in not only improving reading comprehension instruction but in identifying areas of challenge for students.

Keywords: Explicit instruction, integrated models of reading comprehension, reading comprehension, teacher’s role.

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Authors: Kolay P. K., Singh H.

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The coal utilization in thermal power plants in Malaysia has increased significantly which produces an enormous amount of coal combustion by-product (CCBP) or coal ash and poses severe disposal problem. As each coal ash is distinct, this study presents the geochemistry of the coal ash, in particular fly ash, produced from the combustion of local coal from Kuching Sarawak, Malaysia. The geochemical composition of the ash showed a high amount of silica, alumina, iron oxides and alkalies which was found to be a convenient starting material for the hydrothermal synthesis of zeolites with the higher Na₂O percentage being a positive factor for its alkaline activation; while the mineral phases are mainly quartz, mullite, calcium oxide, silica, and iron oxide hydrate. The geochemical changes upon alkali activation that can be predicted in a similar type of ash have been described in this paper. The result shows that this particular ash has a good potential for a high value industrial product like zeolites upon alkali activation.

Keywords: Coal ash, chemical composition, mineralogical composition, alkali activation, SEM.

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Authors: Ivana Tadić, Željana Aljinović Barać, Nikolina Plazonić

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Living today in turbulent business environment forces companies to distinguish from each other, securing sustainable competitive growth and competitive advantage. The best possible solution is to invest (effort and financial resources) within companies’ different practices of human resource management (HRM), more specifically in employees’ knowledge, skills and abilities. Applying this approach companies will create enviable level of human capital securing its economic growth. Employees become human capital for their employers at the moment when they contribute with their own knowledge and abilities in creating material and non-material value of the company. The main aim of this research is to explore the relations between human capital investments and business excellence of Croatian companies. Furthermore, the differences in the level of human capital investments with regard to several companies’ characteristics (e.g. size of the company, ownership and type of the industry) are investigated.

Keywords:

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Authors: Md. Mahmudul Hasan

Abstract:

Wavelet analysis has some strong advantages over Fourier analysis, as it allows a time-frequency domain analysis, allowing optimal resolution and flexibility. As a result, they have been satisfactorily applied in almost all the fields of communication systems including OFDM which is a strong candidate for next generation of wireless technology. In this paper, the performances of wavelet based Multiuser Multiple Input and Multiple Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MU-MIMO OFDM) systems are analyzed in terms of BER. It has been shown that the wavelet based systems outperform the classical FFT based systems. This analysis also unfolds an interesting result, where wavelet based OFDM system will have a constant error performance using Regularized Channel Inversion (RCI) beamforming for any number of users, and outperforms in all possible scenario in a multiuser environment. An extensive computer simulations show that a PAPR reduction of up to 6.8dB can be obtained with M=64.

Keywords: Wavelet Based OFDM, Optimal Beam-forming, Multiuser MIMO OFDM, Signal to Leakage Ratio.

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Authors: Soe Winn, May Thwe Oo

Abstract:

Business process automation is an important task in an enterprise business environment software development. The requirements of processing acceleration and automation level of enterprises are inherently different from one organization to another. We present a methodology and system for automation of business process management system architecture by multi-agent collaboration based on SOA. Design layer processes are modeled in semantic markup language for web services application. At the core of our system is considering certain types of human tasks to their further automation across over multiple platform environments. An improved abnormality processing with model for automation of BPMS architecture by multi-agent collaboration based on SOA is introduced. Validating system for efficiency of process automation, an application for educational knowledge base instance would also be described.

Keywords: Business process management system, businessprocess automation, multi-agent collaboration, Service OrientedArchitecture, extensible service application

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Authors: Silvia Tamayo-Moreno, Diana Pérez-Marín

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In this paper, the possibility of children studying by using an interactive learning technology called Pedagogic Conversational Agent is presented. The main benefit is that the agent is able to adapt the dialogue to each student and to provide automatic feedback. Moreover, according to Math teachers, in many cases students are unable to solve the problems even knowing the procedure to solve them, because they do not understand what they have to do. The hypothesis is that if students are helped to understand what they have to solve, they will be able to do it. Taken that into account, we have started the development of Dr. Roland, an agent to help students understand Math problems following a User-Centered Design methodology. The use of this methodology is proposed, for the first time, to design pedagogic agents to teach any subject from Secondary down to Pre-Primary education. The reason behind proposing a methodology is that while working on this project, we noticed the lack of literature to design and evaluate agents. To cover this gap, we describe how User-Centered Design can be applied, and which usability techniques can be applied to evaluate the agent.

Keywords: Pedagogic conversational agent, human-computer interaction, user-centered design, natural language interface.

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Authors: Poramate Manoonpong, Frank Pasemann, Florentin Wörgötter

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This paper describes reactive neural control used to generate phototaxis and obstacle avoidance behavior of walking machines. It utilizes discrete-time neurodynamics and consists of two main neural modules: neural preprocessing and modular neural control. The neural preprocessing network acts as a sensory fusion unit. It filters sensory noise and shapes sensory data to drive the corresponding reactive behavior. On the other hand, modular neural control based on a central pattern generator is applied for locomotion of walking machines. It coordinates leg movements and can generate omnidirectional walking. As a result, through a sensorimotor loop this reactive neural controller enables the machines to explore a dynamic environment by avoiding obstacles, turn toward a light source, and then stop near to it.

Keywords: Recurrent neural networks, Walking robots, Modular neural control, Phototaxis, Obstacle avoidance behavior.

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Authors: Brice Nya, Detlef Schulz

Abstract:

Any use of energy in industrial productive activities is combined with various environment impacts. Withintransportation, this fact was not only found among land transport, railways and maritime transport, but also in the air transport industry. An effective climate protection requires strategies and measures for reducing all greenhouses gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide, and must take into account the economic, ecologic and social aspects. It seem simperative now to develop and manufacture environmentally friendly products and systems, to reduce consumption and use less resource, and to save energy and power. Today-sproducts could better serve these requirements taking into account the integration of a power management system into the electrical power system.This paper gives an overview of an approach ofpower management with load prioritization in modernaircraft. Load dimensioning and load management strategies on current civil aircraft will be presented and used as a basis for the proposed approach.

Keywords: Load management, power management, electrical load analysis, flight mission, power load profile.

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Authors: S. Madhavi, K. Baala Srinivas, G. Bharath, R. K. Indhuja, M. Kowser Chandini

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Game theory is the study of how people interact and make decisions to handle competitive situations. It has mainly been developed to study decision making in complex situations. Humans routinely alter their behaviour in response to changes in their social and physical environment. As a consequence, the outcomes of decisions that depend on the behaviour of multiple decision makers are difficult to predict and require highly adaptive decision-making strategies. In addition to the decision makers may have preferences regarding consequences to other individuals and choose their actions to improve or reduce the well-being of others. Nash equilibrium is a fundamental concept in the theory of games and the most widely used method of predicting the outcome of a strategic interaction in the social sciences. A Nash Equilibrium exists when there is no unilateral profitable deviation from any of the players involved. On the other hand, no player in the game would take a different action as long as every other player remains the same.

Keywords: Game Theory, Nash Equilibrium, Rules of Dominance.

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Authors: Asim Kumar Pal, Debabrata Nath, Sumit Chakraborty

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This paper presents an economic game for sybil detection in a distributed computing environment. Cost parameters reflecting impacts of different sybil attacks are introduced in the sybil detection game. The optimal strategies for this game in which both sybil and non-sybil identities are expected to participate are devised. A cost sharing economic mechanism called Discriminatory Rewarding Mechanism for Sybil Detection is proposed based on this game. A detective accepts a security deposit from each active agent, negotiates with the agents and offers rewards to the sybils if the latter disclose their identity. The basic objective of the detective is to determine the optimum reward amount for each sybil which will encourage the maximum possible number of sybils to reveal themselves. Maintaining privacy is an important issue for the mechanism since the participants involved in the negotiation are generally reluctant to share their private information. The mechanism has been applied to Tor by introducing a reputation scoring function.

Keywords: Game theory, Incentive mechanism, Reputation, Sybil Attack

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Authors: Mária Stachová, Lukáš Sobíšek

Abstract:

Data mining incorporates a group of statistical methods used to analyze a set of information, or a data set. It operates with models and algorithms, which are powerful tools with the great potential. They can help people to understand the patterns in certain chunk of information so it is obvious that the data mining tools have a wide area of applications. For example in the theoretical chemistry data mining tools can be used to predict moleculeproperties or improve computer-assisted drug design. Classification analysis is one of the major data mining methodologies. The aim of thecontribution is to create a classification model, which would be able to deal with a huge data set with high accuracy. For this purpose logistic regression, Bayesian logistic regression and random forest models were built using R software. TheBayesian logistic regression in Latent GOLD software was created as well. These classification methods belong to supervised learning methods. It was necessary to reduce data matrix dimension before construct models and thus the factor analysis (FA) was used. Those models were applied to predict the biological activity of molecules, potential new drug candidates.

Keywords: data mining, classification, drug design, QSAR

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Authors: Amna Javed, Hisashi Masuda, Youji Kohda

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This study examines the value analysis in Islamic and conventional banking services in Pakistan. Many scholars have focused on co-creation of values in services but mainly economic values not non-economic. As Islamic banking is based on Islamic principles that are more concerned with non-economic values (well-being, partnership, fairness, trust worthy, and justice) than economic values as money in terms of interest.  This study is important to know the providers point of view about the co-created values, because, it may be more sustainable and appropriate for today’s unpredictable socio-economic environment. Data were collected from 4 banks (2 Islamic and 2 conventional banks). Text mining technique is applied for data analysis, and values with 100% occurrences in Islamic banking are chosen. The results reflect that Islamic banking is more centric towards non-economic values than economic values and it promotes team work and partnership concept by applying Islamic spirit and trust worthiness concept.

Keywords: Economic values, Islamic banking, Non-economic values, Value system.

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Authors: F. O. Aron, T. O. Olwal, A. Kurien, M. O. Odhiambo

Abstract:

A considerable amount of energy is consumed during transmission and reception of messages in a wireless mesh network (WMN). Reducing per-node transmission power would greatly increase the network lifetime via power conservation in addition to increasing the network capacity via better spatial bandwidth reuse. In this work, the problem of topology control in a hybrid WMN of heterogeneous wireless devices with varying maximum transmission ranges is considered. A localized distributed topology control algorithm is presented which calculates the optimal transmission power so that (1) network connectivity is maintained (2) node transmission power is reduced to cover only the nearest neighbours (3) networks lifetime is extended. Simulations and analysis of results are carried out in the NS-2 environment to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Topology Control, Wireless Mesh Networks, Backbone, Energy Efficiency, Localized Algorithm.

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Authors: Vesile Evrim, Aliyu Awwal

Abstract:

By the evolvement in technology, the way of expressing opinions switched direction to the digital world. The domain of politics, as one of the hottest topics of opinion mining research, merged together with the behavior analysis for affiliation determination in texts, which constitutes the subject of this paper. This study aims to classify the text in news/blogs either as Republican or Democrat with the minimum number of features. As an initial set, 68 features which 64 were constituted by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) features were tested against 14 benchmark classification algorithms. In the later experiments, the dimensions of the feature vector reduced based on the 7 feature selection algorithms. The results show that the “Decision Tree”, “Rule Induction” and “M5 Rule” classifiers when used with “SVM” and “IGR” feature selection algorithms performed the best up to 82.5% accuracy on a given dataset. Further tests on a single feature and the linguistic based feature sets showed the similar results. The feature “Function”, as an aggregate feature of the linguistic category, was found as the most differentiating feature among the 68 features with the accuracy of 81% in classifying articles either as Republican or Democrat.

Keywords: Politics, machine learning, feature selection, LIWC.

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Authors: Daniel Pereiro, Felix Martinez, Iker Urresti, Ana Gomez Gonzalez

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Today modern simulations solutions in the wind turbine industry have achieved a high degree of complexity and detail in result. Limitations exist when it is time to validate model results against measurements. Regarding Model validation it is of special interest to identify mode frequencies and to differentiate them from the different excitations. A wind turbine is a complex device and measurements regarding any part of the assembly show a lot of noise. Input excitations are difficult or even impossible to measure due to the stochastic nature of the environment. Traditional techniques for frequency analysis or features extraction are widely used to analyze wind turbine sensor signals, but have several limitations specially attending to non stationary signals (Events). A new technique based on autoregresive analysis techniques is introduced here for a specific application, a comparison and examples related to different events in the wind turbine operations are presented.

Keywords: Wind turbine, signal processing, mode extraction.

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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: Moohyun Lee, Soojung Hur, Yongwan Park

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We propose obstacle classification method based on 2D LIDAR Database. The existing obstacle classification method based on 2D LIDAR, has an advantage in terms of accuracy and shorter calculation time. However, it was difficult to classifier the type of obstacle and therefore accurate path planning was not possible. In order to overcome this problem, a method of classifying obstacle type based on width data of obstacle was proposed. However, width data was not sufficient to improve accuracy. In this paper, database was established by width and intensity data; the first classification was processed by the width data; the second classification was processed by the intensity data; classification was processed by comparing to database; result of obstacle classification was determined by finding the one with highest similarity values. An experiment using an actual autonomous vehicle under real environment shows that calculation time declined in comparison to 3D LIDAR and it was possible to classify obstacle using single 2D LIDAR.

Keywords: Obstacle, Classification, LIDAR, Segmentation, Width, Intensity, Database.

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Authors: Vivian Guo, Yan Qu

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Online marketplaces are not only digital places where consumers buy and sell merchandise, and they are also destinations for brands to connect with real consumers at the moment when customers are in the shopping mindset. For many marketplaces, brands have been important partners through advertising. There can be, however, a risk of advertising impacting a consumer’s shopping journey if it hurts the use experience or takes the user away from the site. Both could lead to the loss of transaction revenue for the marketplace. In this paper, we present user-based methods for cannibalization control by selectively turning off ads to users who are likely to be cannibalized by ads subject to business objectives. We present ways of measuring cannibalization of advertising in the context of an online marketplace and propose novel ways of measuring cannibalization through purchase propensity and uplift modeling. A/B testing has shown that our methods can significantly improve user purchase and engagement metrics while operating within business objectives. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that addresses cannibalization mitigation at the user-level in the context of advertising.

Keywords: Cannibalization, machine learning, online marketplace, revenue optimization, yield optimization.

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Authors: Siva Prasad Darla, C. D. Naiju, K. Annamalai, Y. Upendra Sravan

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In recent years, environment regulation forcing manufactures to consider recovery activity of end-of- life products and/or return products for refurbishing, recycling, remanufacturing/repair and disposal in supply chain management. In this paper, a mathematical model is formulated for single product production-inventory system considering remanufacturing/reuse of return products and rate of return products follows a demand like function, dependent on purchasing price and acceptance quality level. It is useful in decision making to determine whether to go for remanufacturing or disposal of returned products along with newly produced products to satisfy a stationary demand. In addition, a modified genetic algorithm approach is proposed, inspired by particle swarm optimization method. Numerical analysis of the case study is carried out to validate the model.

Keywords: Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Production, Remanufacturing.

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Authors: Djarot B. Darmadi

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The wider growing Finite Element Method (FEM) application is caused by its benefits of cost saving and environment friendly. Also, by using FEM a deep understanding of certain phenomenon can be achieved. This paper observed the role of material properties and volumetric change when Solid State Phase Transformation (SSPT) takes place in residual stress formation due to a welding process of ferritic steels through coupled Thermo- Metallurgy-Mechanical (TMM) analysis. The correctness of FEM residual stress prediction was validated by experiment. From parametric study of the FEM model, it can be concluded that the material properties change tend to over-predicts residual stress in the weld center whilst volumetric change tend to underestimates it. The best final result is the compromise of both by incorporates them in the model which has a better result compared to a model without SSPT.

Keywords: Residual stress, ferritic steels, SSPT, coupled-TMM.

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Authors: Kyung Hyun, Choi, Minh Ngoc, Nong, M. Asif Ali, Rehmani

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This present paper proposes the modified Elastic Strip method for mobile robot to avoid obstacles with a real time system in an uncertain environment. The method deals with the problem of robot in driving from an initial position to a target position based on elastic force and potential field force. To avoid the obstacles, the robot has to modify the trajectory based on signal received from the sensor system in the sampling times. It was evident that with the combination of Modification Elastic strip and Pseudomedian filter to process the nonlinear data from sensor uncertainties in the data received from the sensor system can be reduced. The simulations and experiments of these methods were carried out.

Keywords: Collision avoidance, Avoidance obstacle, Elastic Strip, Real time collision avoidance.

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Authors: Roshayani Arshad, Suaini Othman, Rohana Othman

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This study examines the effect of Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility disclosure and on corporate reputation as well as performance. These relationships are examined based on content analysis of of annual reports of 17 Islamic banks in Malaysia for 2008, 2009 and 2010. Results of this study provide evidence that CSR activities communicated in corporate annual reports are significantly positively related with corporate reputation as well as firm performance. These results indicate that CSR activities and disclosure from Islamic perspectives are equally important business strategies in creating continuous superior performance for organisations. In addition, it also highlights that organisations need to develop a stakeholder orientation particularly in an environment of increasing pressure from jurisdictions dominated by Islamic stakeholders on organisations engaging in Islamic products to increase their social responsibilities from the Islamic perspectives.

Keywords: Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Reputation, Firm Performance, Islamic Banks

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Authors: Nikolina Ribarić

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This paper compares the readiness of chemistry teachers to use information and communication technologies in chemistry in 2018 and 2021. A survey conducted in 2018 on a sample of teachers showed that most teachers occasionally use visualization and digitization tools in chemistry teaching (65%), but feel that they are not educated enough to use them (56%). Also, most teachers do not have adequate equipment in their schools and are not able to use ICT in teaching or digital tools for visualization and digitization of content (44%). None of the teachers find the use of digitization and visualization tools useless. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2021 shows that most teachers occasionally use visualization and digitization tools in chemistry teaching (83%). Also, the research shows that some teachers still do not have adequate equipment in their schools and are not able to use ICT in chemistry teaching or digital tools for visualization and digitization of content (14%). Advances in the use of ICT in chemistry teaching are linked to pandemic conditions and the obligation to conduct online teaching. The share of 14% of teachers who still do not have adequate equipment to use digital tools in teaching is worrying.

Keywords: Chemistry, digital content, e-learning, ICT, visualization.

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Authors: Kehinde K. Agbele, Kehinde Daniel Aruleba, Eniafe F. Ayetiran

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When using Information Retrieval Systems (IRS), users often present search queries made of ad-hoc keywords. It is then up to the IRS to obtain a precise representation of the user’s information need and the context of the information. This paper investigates optimization of IRS to individual information needs in order of relevance. The study addressed development of algorithms that optimize the ranking of documents retrieved from IRS. This study discusses and describes a Document Ranking Optimization (DROPT) algorithm for information retrieval (IR) in an Internet-based or designated databases environment. Conversely, as the volume of information available online and in designated databases is growing continuously, ranking algorithms can play a major role in the context of search results. In this paper, a DROPT technique for documents retrieved from a corpus is developed with respect to document index keywords and the query vectors. This is based on calculating the weight (

Keywords: Internet ranking,

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Authors: Chang-Uk Kwak, Sun-Joong Kim, Seong-Bae Park, Sang-Jo Lee

Abstract:

This paper proposes a method of learning topics for broadcasting contents. There are two kinds of texts related to broadcasting contents. One is a broadcasting script, which is a series of texts including directions and dialogues. The other is blogposts, which possesses relatively abstracted contents, stories, and diverse information of broadcasting contents. Although two texts range over similar broadcasting contents, words in blogposts and broadcasting script are different. When unseen words appear, it needs a method to reflect to existing topic. In this paper, we introduce a semantic vocabulary expansion method to reflect unseen words. We expand topics of the broadcasting script by incorporating the words in blogposts. Each word in blogposts is added to the most semantically correlated topics. We use word2vec to get the semantic correlation between words in blogposts and topics of scripts. The vocabularies of topics are updated and then posterior inference is performed to rearrange the topics. In experiments, we verified that the proposed method can discover more salient topics for broadcasting contents.

Keywords: Broadcasting script analysis, topic expansion, semantic correlation analysis, word2vec.

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Authors: Antonis Skouloudis, Georgios Deligiannakis, Panagiotis Vouros, Konstantinos Evangelinos, Ioannis Nikolaou

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On November 15th, 2017, a catastrophic flash flood devastated the city of Mandra in Central Greece, resulting in 24 fatalities and extensive damages to the built environment and infrastructure. It was Greece’s deadliest and most destructive flood event for the past 40 years. In this paper, we examine the consequences of this event to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in Mandra during the flood event, which were affected by the floodwaters to varying extents. In this context, we conducted semi-structured interviews with business owners-managers of 45 SMEs located in flood inundated areas and are still active nowadays, based on an interview guide that spanned 27 topics. The topics pertained to the disaster experience of the business and business owners-managers, knowledge and attitudes towards climate change and extreme weather, aspects of disaster preparedness and related assistance needs. Our findings reveal that the vast majority of the affected businesses experienced heavy damages in equipment and infrastructure or total destruction, which resulted in business interruption from several weeks up to several months. Assistance from relatives or friends helped for the damage repairs and business recovery, while state compensations were deemed insufficient compared to the extent of the damages. Most interviewees pinpoint flooding as one of the most critical risks, and many connect it with the climate crisis. However, they are either not willing or unable to apply property-level prevention measures in their businesses due to cost considerations or complex and cumbersome bureaucratic processes. In all cases, the business owners are fully aware of the flood hazard implications, and since the recovery from the event, they have engaged in basic mitigation measures and contingency plans in case of future flood events. Such plans include insurance contracts whenever possible (as the vast majority of the affected SMEs were uninsured at the time of the 2017 event) as well as simple relocations of critical equipment within their property. The study offers fruitful insights on latent drivers and barriers of SMEs’ resilience capacity to flash flooding. In this respect, findings such as ours, highlighting tensions that underpin behavioural responses and experiences, can feed into: a) bottom-up approaches for devising actionable and practical guidelines, manuals and/or standards on business preparedness to flooding, and, ultimately, b) policy-making for an enabling environment towards a flood-resilient SME sector.

Keywords: Flash flood, small and medium-sized enterprises, organisational resilience capacity, disaster preparedness, qualitative study.

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Authors: Phatthanan Chaiyabut

Abstract:

The aim for this research is to deliberately discuss how and why the contexts of culture are the main significant factors which need to be considered when conducting the international business oversea. As a consequence of understanding these various factors, the researcher would be able to infer some suggestions to the international organizations. With this in mind, the results of the understanding in a national culture environment can support the organizations to settle its international strategies which may be useful to develop the national export and import effectiveness. This data collecting methods will be concentrated upon 5-10 interviews from the senior members and business officers in the international company in Thailand by e-mail interview and analyses the individual manager’s viewpoint. As well as, focus on the questionnaires which the respondents were selected randomly around 100 samples from UK and Thailand, together with providing a functional sample size and comparable to data. The results of the study question the role of national culture, which contributed to in international business effectiveness and emphasize the positive and negative aspects, as well as suggestions to business investors are informed.

Keywords: Contexts of culture, International business effectiveness, International strategies, National Culture.

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Authors: Lenka Markovičová, Viera Zatkalíková, Tomasz Garbacz

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The development of composite materials and the related design and manufacturing technologies is one of the most important advances in the history of materials. Composites are multifunctional materials having unprecedented mechanical and physical properties that can be tailored to meet the requirements of a particular application. Some composites also exhibit great resistance to high-temperature corrosion, oxidation, and wear. Polymers are widely used indoors and outdoors, therefore they are exposed to a chemical environment which may include atmospheric oxygen, acidic fumes, acidic rain, moisture heat and thermal shock, ultra-violet light, high energy radiation, etc. Different polymers are affected differently by these factors even though the amorphous polymers are more sensitive. Ageing is also important and it is defined as the process of deterioration of engineering materials resulting from the combined effects of atmospheric radiation, heat, oxygen, water, microorganisms and other atmospheric factors.

Keywords: Composites with glass fibres, mechanical properties, polyamides, UV degradation.

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Authors: Shahrina Md Nordin, Zulhamri Abdullah, Yuhanis Abdul Aziz

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of corporate social responsibility statements on corporate websites of Malaysian and Singaporean corporations and analyze how the CSR statements contribute in building a unique corporate identity of corporations. Content analysis is employed to examine the websites of Malaysian and Singaporean consumer corporations. It is believed that generally most companies tend to publish and communicate their CSR statements visibly to general stakeholders. However, there is a significantly different outcome of the articulation of CSR on practices on websites between Malaysian and Singaporean consumer corporations. A number of Singaporean organizations were found less concerned with CSR practices as compared to Malaysian organizations. The findings indicate a need for corporations in Malaysia and Singapore to orchestrate their core competence of CSR activities in order to develop a unique corporate identity in a global business environment.

Keywords: Corporate identity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Asian country.

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Authors: M. Sivakumar, S. Saravanan

Abstract:

The main function of Medium Access Control (MAC) is to share the channel efficiently between all nodes. In the real-time scenario, there will be certain amount of wastage in bandwidth due to back-off periods. More bandwidth will be wasted in idle state if the back-off period is very high and collision may occur if the back-off period is small. So, an optimization is needed for this problem. The main objective of the work is to reduce delay due to back-off period thereby reducing collision and increasing throughput. Here a method, called the virtual back-off algorithm (VBA) is used to optimize the back-off period and thereby it increases throughput and reduces collisions. The main idea is to optimize the number of transmission for every node. A counter is introduced at each node to implement this idea. Here counter value represents the sequence number. VBA is classified into two types VBA with counter sharing (VBA-CS) and VBA with no counter sharing (VBA-NCS). These two classifications of VBA are compared for various parameters. Simulation is done in NS-2 environment. The results obtained are found to be promising. 

Keywords: VBA, sequence number, counter, back-off period.

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