Search results for: Human resources management practices

Authors: N. Mpofu, M. Sears

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In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for delineating the endocardial wall from a human heart ultrasound scan. We assume that the gray levels in the ultrasound images are independent and identically distributed random variables with different Rician Inverse Gaussian (RiIG) distributions. Both synthetic and real clinical data will be used for testing the algorithm. Algorithm performance will be evaluated using the expert radiologist evaluation of a soft copy of an ultrasound scan during the scanning process and secondly, doctor’s conclusion after going through a printed copy of the same scan. Successful implementation of this algorithm should make it possible to differentiate normal from abnormal soft tissue and help disease identification, what stage the disease is in and how best to treat the patient. We hope that an automated system that uses this algorithm will be useful in public hospitals especially in Third World countries where problems such as shortage of skilled radiologists and shortage of ultrasound machines are common. These public hospitals are usually the first and last stop for most patients in these countries.

Keywords: Endorcardial Wall, Rician Inverse Distributions, Segmentation, Ultrasound Images.

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Authors: I. Yakubu, Y. Y. Ziggah, C. Yeboah

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In the mining environment, tailings dam embankment is among the hazards and risk areas. The tailings dam embankment could fail and result to damages to facilities, human injuries or even fatalities. Periodic monitoring of the dam embankment is needed to help assess the safety of the tailings dam embankment. Artificial intelligence techniques such as fractals can be used to analyse the stability of the monitored dataset from survey measurement techniques. In this paper, the fractal dimension (D) was determined using D = 2-H. The Hurst parameters (H) of each monitored prism were determined by using a time domain of rescaled range programming in MATLAB software. The fractal dimensions of each monitored prism were determined based on the values of H. The results reveal that the values of the determined H were all within the threshold of 0 ≤ H ≤ 1 m. The smaller the H, the bigger the fractal dimension is. Fractal dimension values ranging from 1.359 x 10^-4 m to 1.8843 x 10^-3 m were obtained from the monitored prisms on the based on the tailing dam embankment dataset used. The ranges of values obtained indicate that the tailings dam embankment is stable.

Keywords: Hurst parameter, fractal dimension, tailings dam embankment, surveyed dataset.

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Authors: N. Chetty, K. Singh

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In this work, the relationship between the melanin content in a tissue and subsequent absorption of light through that tissue was determined using a digital camera. This technique proved to be simple, cost effective, efficient and reliable. Tissue phantom samples were created using milk and soy sauce to simulate the optical properties of melanin content in human tissue. Increasing the concentration of soy sauce in the milk correlated to an increase in melanin content of an individual. Two methods were employed to measure the light transmitted through the sample. The first was direct measurement of the transmitted intensity using a conventional lux meter. The second method involved correctly calibrating an ordinary digital camera and using image analysis software to calculate the transmitted intensity through the phantom. The results from these methods were then graphically compared to the theoretical relationship between the intensity of transmitted light and the concentration of absorbers in the sample. Conclusions were then drawn about the effectiveness and efficiency of these low cost methods.

Keywords: Tissue phantoms, scattering coefficient, albedo, low-cost method.

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Authors: Rhoda M. Darkwah, Patrick B. Cobbinah

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Urban greenery remains the bastion of urban landscape and a key to sustainable development due to its integral connections to the general health and wellbeing of urban residents. However, in an era of rapid urbanisation, recent studies indicate that urban greenery, especially ecologically sensitive areas, in many African cities is becoming increasingly depleted. Given the scale and rate of natural and anthropogenic change, effective management of urban greenery as the ultimate goal of restoring depleting urban landscapes is urgent. This review advocates for an urban resilience model to managing urban greenery.

Keywords: Green spaces, resilience, urbanisation, urban greenery.

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Authors: B. Prashantha, S. Anish

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The aim of the present study is to computationally evaluate the hemodynamic factors which affect the formation of atherosclerosis and plaque rupture in the human artery. An increase of atherosclerosis disease in the artery causes geometry changes, which results in hemodynamic changes such as flow separation, reattachment, and adhesion of new cells (chemotactic) in the artery. Hence, geometry plays an important role in the determining the nature of hemodynamic patterns. Influence of stenosis in the non-bifurcating artery, under pulsatile flow condition, has been studied on an idealized geometry. Analysis of flow through symmetric and asymmetric stenosis in the artery revealed the significance of oscillating shear index (OSI), flow separation, low WSS zones and secondary flow patterns on plaque formation. The observed characteristic of flow in the post-stenotic region highlight the importance of plaque eccentricity on the formation of secondary stenosis on the arterial wall.

Keywords: Atherosclerotic plaque, Oscillatory Shear Index, Stenosis nature, Wall Shear Stress.

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Authors: Andrea Gelmini

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This paper considers the advent of 5G and the use of it in a Based Control System (BCS), posing as a basic concept the question of what the real differences and practical improvements are compared to 4G. To this purpose, a testbed hardware simulator has been designed and built where identical machines with the same sensors and management systems will communicate with different radio access network connections. This allows an objective statistical comparison of performance on the real functioning and improvement of the infrastructure with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connected to it.

Keywords: 4G, 5G, BCS, eSIM, IIoT, SCADA, Testbed.

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Authors: Towfeeq Fairooz, Salim Istyaq

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The passive electrical properties of a tissue depends on the intrinsic constituents and its structure, therefore by measuring the complex electrical impedance of the tissue it might be possible to obtain indicators of the tissue state or physiological activity [1]. Complete bio-impedance information relative to physiology and pathology of a human body and functional states of the body tissue or organs can be extracted by using a technique containing a fourelectrode measurement setup. This work presents the estimation measurement setup based on the four-electrode technique. First, the complex impedance is estimated by three different estimation techniques: Fourier, Sine Correlation and Digital De-convolution and then estimation errors for the magnitude, phase, reactance and resistance are calculated and analyzed for different levels of disturbances in the observations. The absolute values of relative errors are plotted and the graphical performance of each technique is compared.

Keywords: Electrical Impedance, Fast Fourier Transform, Additive White Gaussian Noise, Total Least Square, Digital De-Convolution, Sine-Correlation.

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Authors: Chee Siong Teh, Chee Peng Lim

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This paper proposes a novel architecture for developing decision support systems. Unlike conventional decision support systems, the proposed architecture endeavors to reveal the decision-making process such that humans' subjectivity can be incorporated into a computerized system and, at the same time, to preserve the capability of the computerized system in processing information objectively. A number of techniques used in developing the decision support system are elaborated to make the decisionmarking process transparent. These include procedures for high dimensional data visualization, pattern classification, prediction, and evolutionary computational search. An artificial data set is first employed to compare the proposed approach with other methods. A simulated handwritten data set and a real data set on liver disease diagnosis are then employed to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The results are analyzed and discussed. The potentials of the proposed architecture as a useful decision support system are demonstrated.

Keywords: Interactive evolutionary computation, multivariate data projection, pattern classification, topographic map.

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Authors: Mostafa Ahmed Shokshok

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Libyan industrial companies face many challenges in today's competitive market. Quality management culture approaches is one of these challenges which may furnish the road to the Libyan industrial companies to effectively empower their employees and improve their ability to respond to the international competition. The primary objective of this paper is to design a practical approach to guide Libyan industrial companies toward successful quality culture implementation.

Keywords: Libyan manufacturing industries, TQM, Quality culture, Quality framework.

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Authors: Peng-Hui Maffee Wan, Klarissa Ting Ting Chang, Rax Suen Chun Lung

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Icons, or pictorial and graphical objects, are commonly used in human-computer interaction (HCI) fields as the mediator in order to communicate information to users. Yet there has been little studies focusing on a majority of the world’s population – semi-literate communities – in terms of the fundamental knowhow for designing icons for such population. In this study, two sets of icons belonging in different icon taxonomy – abstract and concrete – are designed for a mobile application for semi-literate agricultural communities. In this paper, we propose a triadic relationship of an icon, namely meaning, task and mental image, which inherits the triadic relationship of a sign. User testing with the application and a post-pilot questionnaire are conducted as the experimental approach in two rural villages in India. Icons belonging to concrete taxonomy perform better than abstract icons on the premise that the design of the icon fulfills the underlying rules of the proposed triadic relationship.

Keywords: Icon, GUI, mobile app, semi-literate.

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Authors: P. Luangpaiboon

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Various intelligences and inspirations have been adopted into the iterative searching process called as meta-heuristics. They intelligently perform the exploration and exploitation in the solution domain space aiming to efficiently seek near optimal solutions. In this work, the bee algorithm, inspired by the natural foraging behaviour of honey bees, was adapted to find the near optimal solutions of the transportation management system, dynamic multi-zone dispatching. This problem prepares for an uncertainty and changing customers- demand. In striving to remain competitive, transportation system should therefore be flexible in order to cope with the changes of customers- demand in terms of in-bound and outbound goods and technological innovations. To remain higher service level but lower cost management via the minimal imbalance scenario, the rearrangement penalty of the area, in each zone, including time periods are also included. However, the performance of the algorithm depends on the appropriate parameters- setting and need to be determined and analysed before its implementation. BEE parameters are determined through the linear constrained response surface optimisation or LCRSOM and weighted centroid modified simplex methods or WCMSM. Experimental results were analysed in terms of best solutions found so far, mean and standard deviation on the imbalance values including the convergence of the solutions obtained. It was found that the results obtained from the LCRSOM were better than those using the WCMSM. However, the average execution time of experimental run using the LCRSOM was longer than those using the WCMSM. Finally a recommendation of proper level settings of BEE parameters for some selected problem sizes is given as a guideline for future applications.

Keywords: Meta-heuristic, Bee Algorithm, Dynamic Multi-Zone Dispatching, Linear Constrained Response SurfaceOptimisation Method, Weighted Centroid Modified Simplex Method

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Authors: Zahra Banakar, Farzad Tahriri

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It has often been said that the strength of any country resides in the strength of its industrial sector, and Progress in industrial society has been accomplished by the creation of new technologies. Developments have been facilitated by the increasing availability of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT), in addition the implementation of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) requires careful planning at all levels of the organization to ensure that the implementation will achieve the intended goals. Justification and implementation of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) involves decisions that are crucial for the practitioners regarding the survival of business in the present days of uncertain manufacturing world. This paper assists the industrial managers to consider all the important criteria for success AMT implementation, when purchasing new technology. Concurrently, this paper classifies the tangible benefits of a technology that are evaluated by addressing both cost and time dimensions, and the intangible benefits are evaluated by addressing technological, strategic, social and human issues to identify and create awareness of the essential elements in the AMT implementation process and identify the necessary actions before implementing AMT.

Keywords: Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT), Justification and Classification.

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Authors: Mawahib Gafare Abdalrahman Ahmed, Abdallah Belal Adam, John Ojur Dennis

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Air bubbles have been detected in human circulation of end-stage renal disease patients who are treated by hemodialysis. The consequence of air embolism, air bubbles, is under recognized and usually overlooked in daily practice. This paper shows results of a capacitor based detection method that capable of detecting the presence of air bubbles in the blood stream in different frequencies. The method is based on a parallel plates capacitor made of platinum with an area of 1.5 cm2 and a distance between the two plates is 1cm. The dielectric material used in this capacitor is Dextran70 solution which mimics blood rheology. Simulations were carried out using RC circuit at two frequencies 30Hz and 3 kHz and results compared with experiments and theory. It is observed that by injecting air bubbles of different diameters into the device, there were significant changes in the capacitance of the capacitor. Furthermore, it is observed that the output voltage from the circuit increased with increasing air bubble diameter. These results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in improving air bubble detection in Hemodialysis.

Keywords: Air bubbles, Hemodialysis, Capacitor, Dextran70, Air bubbles diameters.

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Authors: Solehuddin Shuib, Koay Boon Aik, Zainul Ahmad Rajion

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There are many types of mechanical failure on the dental implant. In this project, the failure that needs to take into consideration is the bone resorption on the dental implant. Human bone has its ability to remodel after the implantation. As the dental implant is installed into the bone, the bone will detect and change the bone structure to achieve new biomechanical environment. This phenomenon is known as bone remodeling. The objective of the project is to improve the performance of dental implant by using different types of design. These designs are used to analyze and predict the failure of the dental implant by using finite element analysis (FEA) namely ANSYS. The bone is assumed to be fully attached to the implant or cement. Hence, results are then compared with other researchers. The results were presented in the form of Von Mises stress, normal stress, shear stress analysis, and displacement. The selected design will be analyzed further based on a theoretical calculation of bone remodeling on the dental implant. The results have shown that the design constructed passed the failure analysis. Therefore, the selected design is proven to have a stable performance at the recovery stage.

Keywords: Dental implant, FEA, bone remodeling, osseointegration.

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Authors: J. Kala, V. Salajka, P. Hradil

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Many footbridges have natural frequencies that coincide with the dominant frequencies of the pedestrian-induced load and therefore they have a potential to suffer excessive vibrations under dynamic loads induced by pedestrians. Some of the design standards introduce load models for pedestrian loads applicable for simple structures. Load modeling for more complex structures, on the other hand, is most often left to the designer. The main focus of this paper is on the human induced forces transmitted to a footbridge and on the ways these loads can be modeled to be used in the dynamic design of footbridges. Also design criteria and load models proposed by widely used standards were introduced and a comparison was made. The dynamic analysis of the suspension bridge in Kolin in the Czech Republic was performed on detailed FEM model using the ANSYS program system. An attempt to model the load imposed by a single person and a crowd of pedestrians resulted in displacements and accelerations that are compared with serviceability criteria.

Keywords: Footbridge, Serviceability, Pedestrian action, Numerical analysis.

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Authors: Rupali, Anil Kumar Jaiswal

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Cloud computing can be defined as one of the prominent technologies that lets a user change, configure and access the services online. it can be said that this is a prototype of computing that helps in saving cost and time of a user practically the use of cloud computing can be found in various fields like education, health, banking etc.  Cloud computing is an internet dependent technology thus it is the major responsibility of Cloud Service Providers(CSPs) to care of data stored by user at data centers. Scheduling in cloud computing environment plays a vital role as to achieve maximum utilization and user satisfaction cloud providers need to schedule resources effectively.  Job scheduling for cloud computing is analyzed in the following work. To complete, recreate the task calculation, and conveyed scheduling methods CloudSim3.0.3 is utilized. This research work discusses the job scheduling for circulated processing condition also by exploring on this issue we find it works with minimum time and less cost. In this work two load balancing techniques have been employed: ‘Throttled stack adjustment policy’ and ‘Active VM load balancing policy’ with two brokerage services ‘Advanced Response Time’ and ‘Reconfigure Dynamically’ to evaluate the VM_Cost, DC_Cost, Response Time, and Data Processing Time. The proposed techniques are compared with Round Robin scheduling policy.

Keywords: Physical machines, virtual machines, support for repetition, self-healing, highly scalable programming model.

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Authors: Bhekisipho Twala, Mantepu Masetshaba, Ramapulana Nkoana

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Multiple classifier systems combine several individual classifiers to deliver a final classification decision. However, an increasingly controversial question is whether such systems can outperform the single best classifier, and if so, what form of multiple classifiers system yields the most significant benefit. Also, multi-target tracking detection using multiple sensors is an important research field in mobile techniques and military applications. In this paper, several multiple classifiers systems are evaluated in terms of their ability to predict a system’s failure or success for multi-sensor target tracking tasks. The Bristol Eden project dataset is utilised for this task. Experimental and simulation results show that the human activity identification system can fulfil requirements of target tracking due to improved sensors classification performances with multiple classifier systems constructed using boosting achieving higher accuracy rates.

Keywords: Single classifier, machine learning, ensemble learning, multi-sensor target tracking.

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Authors: D. Dannehl, Z. Taylor, J. Suhl, L. Miranda, R., Ulrichs, C., Salazar, E. Fitz-Rodriguez, I. Lopez-Cruz, A. Rojano-Aguilar, G. Navas-Gomez, U. Schmidt

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Growing environmental and sustainability concerns have driven continual modernization of horticultural practices, especially for urban farming. Controlled environment and soilless production methods are increasing in popularity because of their efficient resource use and intensive cropping capabilities. However, some popular substrates used for hydroponic cultivation, particularly rock wool, represent a large environmental burden in regard to their manufacture and disposal. Substrate-less hydroponic systems are effective in producing short cropping cycle plants such as lettuce or herbs, but less information is available for the production of plants with larger root-systems and longer cropping times. Here, we investigated the viability of a hybrid aeroponic/nutrient film technique (AP/NFT) system for the cultivation of greenhouse tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum ‘Panovy’). The plants grown in the AP/NFT system had a more compact phenotype, accumulated more Na⁺ and less P and S than the rock wool grown counterparts. Due to forced irrigation interruptions, we propose that the differences observed were cofounded by the differing severity of water-stress for plants with and without substrate. They may also be caused by a higher root zone temperature predominant in plants exposed to AP/NFT. However, leaf area, stem diameter, and number of trusses did not differ significantly. The same was found for leaf pigments and plant photosynthetic efficiency. Overall, the AP/NFT system appears to be viable for the production of greenhouse tomato, enabling the environment to be relieved by way of lessening rock wool usage.

Keywords: Aeroponic/nutrient film technique, greenhouse, nutrient dynamic, soilless culture, urban farming, waste reduction.

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Authors: D. Bhaskar, N. R. Wadehra, M. Gulati, A. Narula, R. Vishnu, G. Katyal

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With drug resistance becoming widespread in Plasmodium falciparum infections, the development of the alternative drugs is the desired strategy for prevention and cure of malaria. Three drug targets were selected to screen promising drug molecules from the GSK library of 13469 molecules. Using an in silico structure-based drug designing approach, the differences in binding energies of the substrate and inhibitor were exploited between target sites of parasite and human to design a drug molecule against Plasmodium. The docking studies have shown several promising molecules from GSK library with more effective binding as compared to the already known inhibitors for the drug targets. Though stronger interaction has been shown by several molecules as compared to the reference, few molecules have shown the potential as drug candidates though in vitro studies are required to validate the results. In case of thymidylate synthase-dihydrofolatereductase (TS-DHFR), three compounds have shown promise for future studies as potential drugs.

Keywords: Drug resistance, Drug targets, In silico studies, Plasmodium falciparum.

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Authors: Atisthan Wuttimanop, Suchada Rianmora, Mahint Mahattanakorn

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Feet and ankles are parts of human body that receive high-pressure in every day. Feet disorders such as ankle sprain, achilles tendonitis, heel pain, and plantar fasciitis are very common. There are many causes for these feet disorders such as wearing high heels, obesity, sports activity, and standing for a long time. There are many reliefs for feet disorders such as heel insert. However, they come in various shapes and use different materials. There are no specifications in which type is suitable for specific user. This has led to the proposed research to provide guidelines for selecting the appropriate heel insert for ladies who face with long-standing carriers. This research uses contact-measuring techniques to test forces, contact area, and pressure acting on a person’s feet in various standing positions with different insert materials and shapes. The proper material for making insert will be presented and discussed.

Keywords: Heel inserts, Long-standing person, Contact-data acquisition, Finite element analysis, Ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA).

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Authors: Mohammed Sani Abdulai

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Public sector budgeting, all over the world, is underpinned by some universally accepted principles of sound budget management such as budget unity, universality, annuality, and a balanced budget. These traditional principles, though fundamental, had, in recent years, been augmented by the more modern principles of budgeting within fiscal objective, alignment with medium-term strategic plans as well as the observance of such related concepts as transparency, openness and accessibility. In this paper, we have endeavored to shed light, from literature and practice, on the meaning and purposes of such fundamental budgeting principles. We have also assessed the extent to which the Government of Ghana’s budget complies with the four traditional principles of budget unity, universality, annuality, and a balanced budget and the three out of the ten modern principles of budgetary governance of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We did so by using a qualitative method of review and analysis of existing documents and the performance assessment reports on Ghana’s Public Financial Management (PFM) measured using such frameworks as the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA), the Open Budget Survey (OBS) and its Index (OBI), the reports and action plans of Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT). Other performance assessment reports that were relied on included, but not limited to, the Joint Evaluation Report of PFM in Ghana, 2001-2010, and the Joint Evaluation of Budget Support to Ghana, 2005-2015. We have, through this paper, brought to the fore the lessons that could be learned on how those budgetary principles undergird the Government of Ghana’s budget formulation, execution, accounting, control, and oversight. These lessons include, but are not limited to, the need for both scholars and practitioners in the PFM space to be aware of the impact of those principles on public sector budgeting.

Keywords: Annulaity, Balanced Budget, Budget Unity, Budgetary Principles, OECD’s Principles on Budgetary Governance, Open Budget Index, Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability, Universality.

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Authors: Sean Paulsen, Michael Casey

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In this work, we present a self-supervised pretraining framework for transformers on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. First, we pretrain our architecture on two self-supervised tasks simultaneously to teach the model a general understanding of the temporal and spatial dynamics of human auditory cortex during music listening. Our pretraining results are the first to suggest a synergistic effect of multitask training on fMRI data. Second, we finetune the pretrained models and train additional fresh models on a supervised fMRI classification task. We observe significantly improved accuracy on held-out runs with the finetuned models, which demonstrates the ability of our pretraining tasks to facilitate transfer learning. This work contributes to the growing body of literature on transformer architectures for pretraining and transfer learning with fMRI data, and serves as a proof of concept for our pretraining tasks and multitask pretraining on fMRI data.

Keywords: Transfer learning, fMRI, self-supervised, brain decoding, transformer, multitask training.

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Authors: Tomasz Sapiński, Dorota Kamińska, Adam Pelikant, Egils Avots, Cagri Ozcinar, Gholamreza Anbarjafari

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People express emotions through different modalities. Integration of verbal and non-verbal communication channels creates a system in which the message is easier to understand. Expanding the focus to several expression forms can facilitate research on emotion recognition as well as human-machine interaction. In this article, the authors present a Polish emotional database composed of three modalities: facial expressions, body movement and gestures, and speech. The corpora contains recordings registered in studio conditions, acted out by 16 professional actors (8 male and 8 female). The data is labeled with six basic emotions categories, according to Ekman’s emotion categories. To check the quality of performance, all recordings are evaluated by experts and volunteers. The database is available to academic community and might be useful in the study on audio-visual emotion recognition.

Keywords: Body movement, emotion recognition, emotional corpus, facial expressions, gestures, multimodal database, speech.

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Authors: A. S. Mousa, R. I. Rajab, A. A. Pinto

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An envy behavioral game theoretical model with two types of homogeneous players is considered in this paper. The strategy space of each type of players is a discrete set with only two alternatives. The preferences of each type of players is given by a discrete utility function. All envy strategies that form Nash equilibria and the corresponding envy Nash domains for each type of players have been characterized. We use geometry to construct two dimensional envy tilings where the horizontal axis reflects the preference for players of type one, while the vertical axis reflects the preference for the players of type two. The influence of the envy behavior parameters on the Cartesian position of the equilibria has been studied, and in each envy tiling we determine the envy Nash equilibria. We observe that there are 1024 combinatorial classes of envy tilings generated from envy chromosomes: 256 of them are being structurally stable while 768 are with bifurcation. Finally, some conditions for the disparate envy Nash equilibria are stated.

Keywords: Game theory, Nash Equilibrium, envy Nash Equilibrium, geometric tilings, bifurcation thresholds.

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Authors: Toan Vu Duc, Son Ha Viet

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This research presents the first comprehensive survey of congener profiles (7 indicator congeners) of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in sediment samples covering ten sites in CauBay River, Vietnam. Chemical analyses were carried out in gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) for tri- to hepta- brominated congeners. Results pointed out a non-homogenous contamination of the sediment with ∑₇ PBDE values ranging from 8.93 to 25.64ng g⁻¹, reflecting moderate to low contamination closely in conformity to other Asian aquatic environments. The general order of decreasing congener contribution to the total load was: BDE 47 > 99 > 100 > 154, similar to the distribution pattern worldwide. PBDEs had rare risks in the sediment of studied area.  However, due to the propensity of PBDEs to accumulate in various compartments of wildlife and human food webs, evaluation of biological tissues should be undertaken as a high priority. 

Keywords: Residue, Risk assessment, PBDEs, Sediment.

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Authors: Zoaib Mirza

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Pakistan is an Islamic country that got its partition from India in 1947 so that the people could practice the religion of Islam. The political slogan to strive for independence was “What does Pakistan mean? There is no God but Allah”. The ideology of Pakistan was based on the notion that sovereignty only belonged to God Almighty (in Arabic, God means “Allah”), and Muslims will live in accordance with Islam principles. The Quran (Holy Book) and Sunnah (authentic practices of Prophet Mohammad, Peace Be Upon Him, that explains the application of the Quran) are foundations of the Islamic principles. It has been over 75 years, but unfortunately, Pakistan, due to its own political, social, and economic mistakes, is responsible for not being able to become a true Islamic nation to justify its partition from India. The rationale for writing this paper is to analyze the factors that led to changes in the democratic movements impacting the country's political, social, and economic growth. The methodology to examine the historical and political context of Pakistan’s history is by referencing the scholarly work of Israr Ahmed. He focused on Islamic theology, philosophy, and studies, offering insights into the historical and political context of the country. While from a Western perspective, Karl Marx, Mar Weber, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Paulo Freire, and Jacques Ranciere's philosophies specific to totalitarianism, politics, military rule, religion, capitalism, and superpower are used as the framework to analyze Pakistan’s democracy. The study's findings conclude that Pakistan's democracy is unstable and has been impacted by military and civilian governance, which led to political, social, and economic downfall. To improve the current situation, the citizens of Pakistan have to realize that the success of a nation is only dependent on the level of consciousness of the leader and not the political system. Therefore, it is the responsibility of every citizen to be conscious of how they select their leader and take responsibility for the current situation in Pakistan.

Keywords: Pakistan, Islam, democracy, totalitarianism, military, religion, capitalism.

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Authors: Navdeep Goel, Salvador Gabarda

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Digital images are widely used in computer applications. To store or transmit the uncompressed images requires considerable storage capacity and transmission bandwidth. Image compression is a means to perform transmission or storage of visual data in the most economical way. This paper explains about how images can be encoded to be transmitted in a multiplexing time-frequency domain channel. Multiplexing involves packing signals together whose representations are compact in the working domain. In order to optimize transmission resources each 4 × 4 pixel block of the image is transformed by a suitable polynomial approximation, into a minimal number of coefficients. Less than 4 × 4 coefficients in one block spares a significant amount of transmitted information, but some information is lost. Different approximations for image transformation have been evaluated as polynomial representation (Vandermonde matrix), least squares + gradient descent, 1-D Chebyshev polynomials, 2-D Chebyshev polynomials or singular value decomposition (SVD). Results have been compared in terms of nominal compression rate (NCR), compression ratio (CR) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) in order to minimize the error function defined as the difference between the original pixel gray levels and the approximated polynomial output. Polynomial coefficients have been later encoded and handled for generating chirps in a target rate of about two chirps per 4 × 4 pixel block and then submitted to a transmission multiplexing operation in the time-frequency domain.

Keywords: Chirp signals, Image multiplexing, Image transformation, Linear canonical transform, Polynomial approximation.

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Authors: Daniel Rivero, Julián Dorado, Juan R. Rabuñal, Alejandro Pazos, Javier Pereira

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The development of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is usually a slow process in which the human expert has to test several architectures until he finds the one that achieves best results to solve a certain problem. This work presents a new technique that uses Genetic Programming (GP) for automatically generating ANNs. To do this, the GP algorithm had to be changed in order to work with graph structures, so ANNs can be developed. This technique also allows the obtaining of simplified networks that solve the problem with a small group of neurons. In order to measure the performance of the system and to compare the results with other ANN development methods by means of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques, several tests were performed with problems based on some of the most used test databases. The results of those comparisons show that the system achieves good results comparable with the already existing techniques and, in most of the cases, they worked better than those techniques.

Keywords: Artificial Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computation, Genetic Programming.

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Authors: Cheuk Wing Lee, Kit Lun Yick, Sun Pui Ng, Joanne Yip

Abstract:

Daily activities and exercise may result in large displacements of the breasts, which lead to breast pain and discomfort. Therefore, a proper bra design and fit can help to control excessive breast motion to prevent the over-stretching of the connective tissues. Nevertheless, bra fit problems, such as excessively high tension of the shoulder straps and a tight underband could have substantially negative effects on the wear comfort and health of the wearer. The purpose of this study is to, therefore, examine the effects of bra band tension on breast displacement. Usually, human wear trials are carried out, but there are inconsistencies during testing. Therefore, a soft manikin torso is used to examine breast displacement at walking speeds of 2.30 km/h and 4.08 km/h. The breast displacement itself is determined by using a VICON motion capture system. The 3D geometric changes of the underwire bra band tension and the corresponding control of breast movement are also analyzed by using a 3D handheld scanner along with Rapidform software. The results indicate that an appropriate bra band tension can help to reduce breast displacement and provide a comfortable angle for the underwire. The findings can be used by designers and bra engineers as a reference source to advance bra design and development.

Keywords: Bra band, bra features, breast displacement, underwire angle.

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Authors: Feryal Aslani, Mohammad Mousakhani, Alireza Aslani

Abstract:

One of the most important areas of knowledge management studies is knowledge sharing. Measured in terms of number of scientific articles and organization-s applications, knowledge sharing stands as an example of success in the field. This paper reviews the related papers in the context of the underlying individual behavioral variables to providea direction framework for future research and writing.

Keywords: future research, individual variables, knowledge sharing, organizational behavior

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