Search results for: prior information

Authors: Mohamed Ali KAMMOUN, Ahmed Ben HAMIDA

Abstract:

In this paper, we present a novel statistical approach to corpus-based speech synthesis. Classically, phonetic information is defined and considered as acoustic reference to be respected. In this way, many studies were elaborated for acoustical unit classification. This type of classification allows separating units according to their symbolic characteristics. Indeed, target cost and concatenation cost were classically defined for unit selection. In Corpus-Based Speech Synthesis System, when using large text corpora, cost functions were limited to a juxtaposition of symbolic criteria and the acoustic information of units is not exploited in the definition of the target cost. In this manuscript, we token in our consideration the unit phonetic information corresponding to acoustic information. This would be realized by defining a probabilistic linguistic Bi-grams model basically used for unit selection. The selected units would be extracted from the English TIMIT corpora.

Keywords: Unit selection, Corpus-based Speech Synthesis, Bigram model

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Authors: Pablo Cardozo Herrera

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In a dynamic market of Information Technology (IT) Service and with high quality demands and high performance requirements in decreasing costs, it is imperative that IT companies invest organizational effort in order to increase the effectiveness of their Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) processes through the improvement of ITSM project management and through solid support to the strategic decision-making process of IT directors. In this article, the author presents an analysis of common issues of IT companies around the world, with strategic needs of information unmet that provoke their ITSM processes and projects management that do not achieve the effectiveness and efficiency expected of their results. In response to the issues raised, the author proposes a framework consisting of an innovative theoretical framework model of ITSM management and a technological solution aligned to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) good practices guidance and ISO/IEC 20000-1 requirements. The article describes a research that proves the proposed framework is able to integrate, manage and coordinate in a holistic way, measurable and auditable, all ITSM processes and projects of IT organization and utilize the effectiveness assessment achieved for their strategic decision-making process increasing the process maturity level and improving the capacity of an efficient management.

Keywords: Innovation in IT services, ITSM processes, ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000-1, IT service management, IT service excellence.

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Authors: G. Gürsel, K. H. Gülkesen, N. Zayim, A. Arifoğlu, O. Saka

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User satisfaction is one of the most used success indicators in the research of information system (IS). Literature shows user expectations have great influence on user satisfaction. Both expectation and satisfaction of users are important for Hospital Information Systems (HIS). Education, IS experience, age, attitude towards change, business title, sex and working unit of the hospital, are examined as the potential determinant of the medical users’ expectations. Data about medical user expectations are collected by the “Expectation Questionnaire” developed for this study. Expectation data are used for calculating the Expectation Meeting Ratio (EMR) with the evaluation framework also developed for this study. The internal consistencies of the answers to the questionnaire are measured by Cronbach´s Alpha coefficient. The multivariate analysis of medical user’s EMRs of HIS is performed by forward stepwise binary logistic regression analysis. Education and business title is appeared to be the determinants of expectations from HIS.

Keywords: Evaluation, Fuzzy Logic, Hospital Information System, User Expectation.

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Authors: Elena Ezhova, Vadim Mottl, Olga Krasotkina

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The problem of estimating time-varying regression is inevitably concerned with the necessity to choose the appropriate level of model volatility - ranging from the full stationarity of instant regression models to their absolute independence of each other. In the stationary case the number of regression coefficients to be estimated equals that of regressors, whereas the absence of any smoothness assumptions augments the dimension of the unknown vector by the factor of the time-series length. The Akaike Information Criterion is a commonly adopted means of adjusting a model to the given data set within a succession of nested parametric model classes, but its crucial restriction is that the classes are rigidly defined by the growing integer-valued dimension of the unknown vector. To make the Kullback information maximization principle underlying the classical AIC applicable to the problem of time-varying regression estimation, we extend it onto a wider class of data models in which the dimension of the parameter is fixed, but the freedom of its values is softly constrained by a family of continuously nested a priori probability distributions.

Keywords: Time varying regression, time-volatility of regression coefficients, Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), Kullback information maximization principle.

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Authors: Rocío Abascal-Mena, Erick López-Ornelas

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We present the results of a case study aiming to assess the reflection of the tourism community in the Web and its usability to propose new ways to communicate visually. The wealth of information contained in the Web and the clear facilities to communicate personals points of view makes of the social web a new space of exploration. In this way, social web allow the sharing of information between communities with similar interests. However, the tourism community remains unexplored as is the case of the information covered in travel stories. Along the Web, we find multiples sites allowing the users to communicate their experiences and personal points of view of a particular place of the world. This cultural heritage is found in multiple documents, usually very little supplemented with photos, so they are difficult to explore due to the lack of visual information. This paper explores the possibility of analyzing travel stories to display them visually on maps and generate new knowledge such as patterns of travel routes. This way, travel narratives published in electronic formats can be very important especially to the tourism community because of the great amount of knowledge that can be extracted. Our approach is based on the use of a Geoparsing Web Service to extract geographic coordinates from travel narratives in order to draw the geo-positions and link the documents into a map image.

Keywords: Social web, tourism community, visual communication, travel stories, geo references.

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Authors: James D. Gadze, Niki Pissinou, Kia Makki

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In this paper we propose an intelligent agent approach to control the electric power grid at a smaller granularity in order to give it self-healing capabilities. We develop a method using the influence model to transform transmission substations into information processing, analyzing and decision making (intelligent behavior) units. We also develop a wireless communication method to deliver real-time uncorrupted information to an intelligent controller in a power system environment. A combined networking and information theoretic approach is adopted in meeting both the delay and error probability requirements. We use a mobile agent approach in optimizing the achievable information rate vector and in the distribution of rates to users (sensors). We developed the concept and the quantitative tools require in the creation of cooperating semiautonomous subsystems which puts the electric grid on the path towards intelligent and self-healing system.

Keywords: Mobile agent, power system operation and control, real time, wireless communication.

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Authors: Aravind Mohan Krishnan

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This paper identifies a research gap in the literature on tourism entrepreneurship in Malawi, Africa, and investigates how entrepreneurs from the Malawian tourism sector discover and exploit business opportunities. In particular, the importance of prior experience and business networks in the opportunity development process is debated. Another area of empirical research examined here is the opportunity recognition-venture creation sequence. While Malawi presents fruitful business opportunities, exploiting these opportunities into fully realized business ideas is a real challenge due to the country’s difficult business environment and poor promotional and marketing efforts. The study concludes by calling for further research in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to develop our understanding of entrepreneurship in this (African) context.

Keywords: Tourism, entrepreneurship, Malawi, business opportunities.

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Authors: Juan P. Novoa, Mario A. Rios

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This paper presents a transmission planning methodology that considers the conversion of HVAC transmission lines to HVDC as an alternative of expansion of power systems, as a consequence of restrictions for the construction of new lines. The transmission expansion planning problem formulates an optimization problem that minimizes the total cost that includes the investment cost to convert lines from HVAC to HVDC and possible required reinforcements of the power system prior to the conversion. The costs analysis assesses the impact of the conversion on the reliability because transmission lines are out of service during the conversion work. The presented methodology is applied to a test system considering a planning a horizon of 10 years.

Keywords: Cost optimization, energy non supplied, HVAC, HVDC, transmission expansion planning.

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Authors: Cheng-Che Tsai, Huang-Ming Chuang

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of cognitive decision effort in recommendation system, combined with indicators "information quality" and "service quality" from IS success model to exam the awareness of the user for the "recommended system performance". A total of 411 internet user answered a questionnaire assessing their attention of use and satisfaction of recommendation system in internet book store. Quantitative result indicates following research results. First, information quality of recommended system has obvious influence in consumer shopping decision-making process, and the attitude to use the system. Second, in the process of consumer's shopping decision-making, the recommendation system has no significant influence for consumers to pay lower cognitive decision-making effort. Third, e-commerce platform provides recommendations and information is necessary, but the quality of information on user needs must be considered, or they will be other competitors offer homogeneous services replaced.

Keywords: Recommender system, Cognitive decision-making efforts, IS success model, Internet bookstore.

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Authors: Laimona Sliburyte

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Today advertising is actively penetrating into many spheres of our lives. We cannot imagine the existence of a lot of economic activities without advertising. That mostly concerns trade and services. Everyone of us should look better into the everyday communication and carefully consider the amount and the quality of the information we receive as well as its influence on our behaviour. Special attention should be paid to the young generation. Theoretical and practical research has proved the ever growing influence of information (especially the one contained in advertising) on a society; on its economics, culture, religion, politics and even people-s private lives and behaviour. Children have plenty of free time and, therefore, see a lot of different advertising. Though education of children is in the hands of parents and schools, advertising makers and customers should think with responsibility about the selection of time and transmission channels of child targeted advertising. The purpose of the present paper is to investigate the influence of advertising upon consumer views and behaviour of children in different age groups. The present investigation has clarified the influence of advertising as a means of information on a certain group of society, which in the modern information society is the most vulnerable – children. In this paper we assess children-s perception and their understanding of advertising.

Keywords: Advertising, children, children targeted advertising, consumer socialization process.

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Authors: Hassan Haleh, Zohreh Nasiri, Parisa Farahpour

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During recent years, the traditional learning approaches have undergone fundamental changes due to the emergence of new technologies such as multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunication. E-learning is a modern world phenomenon that has come into existence in the information age and in a knowledgebased society. E-learning has developed significantly within a short period of time. Thus it is of a great significant to secure information, allow a confident access and prevent unauthorized accesses. Making use of individuals- physiologic or behavioral (biometric) properties is a confident method to make the information secure. Among the biometrics, fingerprint is more acceptable and most countries use it as an efficient methods of identification. This article provides a new method to compare the fingerprint comparison by pattern recognition and image processing techniques. To verify fingerprint, the shortest distance method is used together with perceptronic multilayer neural network functioning based on minutiae. This method is highly accurate in the extraction of minutiae and it accelerates comparisons due to elimination of false minutiae and is more reliable compared with methods that merely use directional images.

Keywords: Fingerprint, minutiae, extraction of properties, multilayer neural network

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Authors: N. Rezaee, M Nayeripour, A. Roosta, T. Niknam

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With the prevalence of computer and development of information technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have long used for a variety of applications in electrical engineering. GIS are designed to support the analysis, management, manipulation and mapping of spatial data. This paper presents several usages of GIS in power utilities such as automated route selection for the construction of new power lines which uses a dynamic programming model for route optimization, load forecasting and optimizing planning of substation-s location and capacity with comprehensive algorithm which involves an accurate small-area electric load forecasting procedure and simulates the different cost functions of substations.

Keywords: Geographic information systems (GIS), optimallocation and capacity, power distribution planning, route selection, spatial load forecasting.

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Authors: Md. Athar Imtiaz, Abduljalil S. Al-Mudhary, Md. Taha Mirhashemi, Roslina Ibrahim

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Information Technology (IT) is being used by almost all organizations throughout the world. However its success at supporting and improving business is debatable. There is always the risk of IT project failure and studies have proven that a large number of IT projects indeed do fail. There are many components that further the success of IT projects; these have been studied in previous studies. Studies have found the most necessary components for success in software development projects, executive information systems etc. In this study previous literatures that have looked into these success promoting factors have been critically reviewed and analyzed. 15 Critical Success Factors (CSF) of IT projects were enlisted and examined. These factors can be applied to all IT projects and is not specific to a particular type of IT/IS project. A hypothesis was also generated after the evaluation of the factors.

Keywords: Critical Success Factors, CSF, IT Projects, IS Projects, Software Development Projects.

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Authors: Michael T. Ajayi, Oluwakemi E. Fapojuwo

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Farmers are in need of regular and relevant information relating to new technologies. Production of extension materials has been found to be useful in facilitating the process. Extension materials help to provide information to reach large numbers of farmers quickly and economically. However, as good as extension materials are, previous materials produced are not used by farmers. The reasons for this include lack of involvement of farmers in the production of the extension materials, most of the extension materials are not relevant to the farmers’ environments, the agricultural extension agents lack capacity to prepare the materials, and many extension agents lack commitment. These problems led to this innovative capacity building of extension agents. This innovative approach involves five stages. The first stage is the diagnostic survey of farmers’ environment to collect useful information. The second stage is the development and production of draft extension materials. The third stage is the field testing and evaluation of draft materials by the same famers that were involved at the diagnostic stage. The fourth stage is the revision of the draft extension materials by incorporating suggestions from farmers. The fifth stage is the action plans. This process improves the capacity of agricultural extension agents in the preparation of extension materials and also promotes engagement of farmers and beneficiaries in the process. The process also makes farmers assume some level of ownership of the exercise and the extension materials.

Keywords: Capacity building, dissemination, extension agents, information/technologies.

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Authors: H. Iranmanesh, S. Nazari Shirkouhi, M. R. Skandari

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Information Technology (IT) projects are always accompanied by various risks and because of high rate of failure in such projects, managing risks in order to neutralize or at least decrease their effects on the success of the project is strongly essential. In this paper, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) is exploited as a means of risk evaluation methodology to prioritize and organize risk factors faced in IT projects. A real case of IT projects, a project of design and implementation of an integrated information system in a vehicle producing company in Iran is studied. Related risk factors are identified and then expert qualitative judgments about these factors are acquired. Translating these judgments to fuzzy numbers and using them as an input to FAHP, risk factors are then ranked and prioritized by FAHP in order to make project managers aware of more important risks and enable them to adopt suitable measures to deal with these highly devastative risks.

Keywords: Information technology projects, Risk evaluation, Analytic hierarchal process, fuzzy logic.

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Authors: H. Al-Baghli

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In this investigation, rubberized HMA technology was examined to address the most critical forms of pavement distresses in the State of Kuwait, namely, high temperature rutting, and moisture induced raveling. PelletPAVE™ additive was selected as the preferred technology, since it offered a convenient method of directly modifying the exiting local HMA recipe without having to polymer modify the bitumen. Experimental work, using various Pelletpave contents was carried out at Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) to design an optimum rubberized HMA formulation prior to conducting a pilot-scale road trial. With the aid of a gyratory compactor, the compaction and volumetric properties of HMAs containing 2.5% and 3.0% Pelletpave additive were investigated at a range of bitumen contents, all by mass of total mix.

Keywords: Modified bitumen, rubberized hot mix asphalt, gyratory compaction, volumetric properties.

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Authors: M. Winkens, M. Goerke, P. Nyhuis

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This technical contribution treats of a novel approach to condition-oriented maintenance as elaborated by Collaborative Research Centre 653 at the Leibniz University in Hanover. The objective resides in the targeted analysis of information about a component's lifecycle for maintenance purposes. The information in question is collected by means of the Collaborative Research Centre's innovative technologies. This enables preventive maintenance of components on the basis of their condition. This contribution initially explains condition-oriented maintenance, before introducing the Collaborative Research Centre and finally presenting the methodology for analyzing the information. The current state of development is described and an outlook provided for expanding the methodology.

Keywords: Gentelligent Components, Preventive Maintenance, life cycle data.

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Authors: Garima Gupta, Daya Gupta

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Virtually all existing networked system management tools use a Manager/Agent paradigm. That is, distributed agents are deployed on managed devices to collect local information and report it back to some management unit. Even those that use standard protocols such as SNMP fall into this model. Using standard protocol has the advantage of interoperability among devices from different vendors. However, it may not be able to provide customized information that is of interest to satisfy specific management needs. In this dissertation work, different approaches are used to collect information regarding the devices attached to a Local Area Network. An SNMP aware application is being developed that will manage the discovery procedure and will be used as data collector.

Keywords: ICMP Scanner, Network Discovery, NetworkManagement, SNMP Scanner.

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Authors: H. J. Yang, R. Z. Jin, I. J. Park, C. T. Hyun

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There has been gradual progress of late in construction projects, particularly in big-scale megaprojects. Due to the long-term construction period, however, with large-scale budget investment, lack of construction management technologies, and increase in the incomplete elements of project schedule management, a plan to conduct efficient operations and to ensure business safety is required. In particular, as the project management information system (PMIS) is meant for managing a single project centering on the construction phase, there is a limitation in the management of program-scale businesses like megaprojects. Thus, a program management information system (PgMIS) that includes program-level management technologies is needed to manage multiple projects. In this study, a support tool was developed for managing the cost and schedule information occurring in the construction phase, at the program level. In addition, a case study on the developed support tool was conducted to verify the usability of the system. With the use of the developed support tool program, construction managers can monitor the progress of the entire project and of the individual subprojects in real time.

Keywords: Cost∙Schedule integration management, Supporting Tool, UI, WBS, CBS, introduce PgMIS (Program Management Information System), PMIS (Project Management Information System)

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Authors: Philip T. Roundy

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Prior research has examined the relationship between religiosity, religious involvement, and involvement in secular, civic organizations. However, research has not examined the influence of religious involvement on secular, non-civic organizations (i.e. work organizations). This study examines the link between religiosity, religious involvement, and the three-component model of organizational commitment. More specifically, the author hypothesizes that individuals high in religiosity (and religious involvement) will have lower affective, continuance, and normative commitment than less religious (or non-religious) individuals. In addition, it is hypothesized that this relationship is moderated by a third factor: organizational spirituality. Further, the author hypothesizes that for organizations that are spiritual the negative relationship between religiosity and job commitment will be weakened or even negated.

Keywords: Job Commitment, Organizational Spirituality, Religiosity.

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Authors: Kisik Song, Sungjoo Lee

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Recent years have seen an increasing number of patent disputes due to excessive competition in the global market and a reduced technology life-cycle; this has increased the risk of investment in technology development. While many global companies have started developing a methodology to identify promising technologies and assess for decisions, the existing methodology still has some limitations. Post hoc assessments of the new technology are not being performed, especially to determine whether the suggested technologies turned out to be promising. For example, in existing quantitative patent analysis, a patent’s citation information has served as an important metric for quality assessment, but this analysis cannot be applied to recently registered patents because such information accumulates over time. Therefore, we propose a new technology assessment model that can replace citation information and positively affect technological development based on post hoc analysis of the patents for promising technologies. Additionally, we collect customer reviews on a target technology to extract keywords that show the customers’ needs, and we determine how many keywords are covered in the new technology. Finally, we construct a portfolio (based on a technology assessment from patent information) and a customer-based marketability assessment (based on review data), and we use them to visualize the characteristics of the new technologies.

Keywords: Technology assessment, patents, citation information, opinion mining.

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Authors: M. Shafighi, Z. Emami, M. Shahsanaei, E. Khaliliyan

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The aim of this study was to assess the effect of LAB isolated from Iranian native olives on the opportunistic skin pathogens, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus. Lactic Acid Bacteria were isolated from the brine of each sample in the prior of time. The samples were spread on MRS agar for isolation of lactobacillus and for lactococcus. 28 strains of labs were isolated. The labs were centrifuged, the supernatant was strewed and pellet was used to inoculation in wells or at blank disks. 20μl of each pellet was inoculated to blank disks and 40μl of each pellet was inoculated to each well. The result of disk and well diffusion agar against these pathogens were confirmed each other. The size of inhibition zone was different according to the type of bacteria, the method and the concentrations of labs.

Keywords: Olive, Probiotic, Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB), P.aeroginosa and S.aureus

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Authors: H. Ali, K. Hameed, N. Khan

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In DMVC, we have more than one options of sources available for construction of side information. The newer techniques make use of both the techniques simultaneously by constructing a bitmask that determines the source of every block or pixel of the side information. A lot of computation is done to determine each bit in the bitmask. In this paper, we have tried to define areas that can only be well predicted by temporal interpolation and not by multiview interpolation or synthesis. We predict that all such areas that are not covered by two cameras cannot be appropriately predicted by multiview synthesis and if we can identify such areas in the first place, we don-t need to go through the script of computations for all the pixels that lie in those areas. Moreover, this paper also defines a technique based on KLT to mark the above mentioned areas before any other processing is done on the side view.

Keywords: Side Information, Distributed Multiview Video Coding, Fusion, Early Decision.

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Authors: Thiago M. R. Dias, Gray F. Moita, Paulo E. M. Almeida

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Although the World Wide Web is considered the largest source of information there exists nowadays, due to its inherent dynamic characteristics, the task of finding useful and qualified information can become a very frustrating experience. This study presents a research on the information mining systems in the Web; and proposes an implementation of these systems by means of components that can be built using the technology of Web services. This implies that they can encompass features offered by a services oriented architecture (SOA) and specific components may be used by other tools, independent of platforms or programming languages. Hence, the main objective of this work is to provide an architecture to Web mining systems, divided into stages, where each step is a component that will incorporate the characteristics of SOA. The separation of these steps was designed based upon the existing literature. Interesting results were obtained and are shown here.

Keywords: Web Mining, Service Oriented Architecture, WebServices.

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Authors: Sungkuk Chun, Kwangjin Hong, Keechul Jung

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In this paper, we propose an improved 3D star skeleton technique, which is a suitable skeletonization for human posture representation and reflects the 3D information of human posture. Moreover, the proposed technique is simple and then can be performed in real-time. The existing skeleton construction techniques, such as distance transformation, Voronoi diagram, and thinning, focus on the precision of skeleton information. Therefore, those techniques are not applicable to real-time posture recognition since they are computationally expensive and highly susceptible to noise of boundary. Although a 2D star skeleton was proposed to complement these problems, it also has some limitations to describe the 3D information of the posture. To represent human posture effectively, the constructed skeleton should consider the 3D information of posture. The proposed 3D star skeleton contains 3D data of human, and focuses on human action and posture recognition. Our 3D star skeleton uses the 8 projection maps which have 2D silhouette information and depth data of human surface. And the extremal points can be extracted as the features of 3D star skeleton, without searching whole boundary of object. Therefore, on execution time, our 3D star skeleton is faster than the “greedy" 3D star skeleton using the whole boundary points on the surface. Moreover, our method can offer more accurate skeleton of posture than the existing star skeleton since the 3D data for the object is concerned. Additionally, we make a codebook, a collection of representative 3D star skeletons about 7 postures, to recognize what posture of constructed skeleton is.

Keywords: computer vision, gesture recognition, skeletonization, human posture representation.

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Authors: Piedad Garrido, Fernando Repulles, Andy Bloor, Julio A. Sanguesa, Jesus Gallardo, Vicente Torres, Jesus Tramullas

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With the emergence and development of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), Higher Education is experiencing rapid changes, not only in its teaching strategies but also in student’s learning skills. However, we have noticed that students often have difficulty when seeking innovative, useful, and interesting learning resources for their work. This is due to the lack of supervision in the selection of good query tools. This paper presents AINA, an Information Retrieval (IR) computer system aimed at providing motivating and stimulating content to both students and teachers working on different areas and at different educational levels. In particular, our proposal consists of an open virtual resource environment oriented to the vast universe of Disney comics and cartoons. Our test suite includes Disney’s long and shorts films, and we have performed some activities based on the Just In Time Teaching (JiTT) methodology. More specifically, it has been tested by groups of university and secondary school students.

Keywords: Information retrieval, animation, educational resources, JiTT.

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Authors: Rabindra Prasad Dhakal, Tatsuya Oshima, Yoshinari Baba

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The polyfunctional and highly reactive bio-polymer, the chitosan was first regioselectively converted into dialkylated chitosan using dimsyl anionic solution(NaH in DMSO) and bromodecane after protecting amino groups by phthalic anhydride. The dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether, on the other hand, was converted into its carbonyl derivatives via Duff reaction prior to incorporate into chitosan by Schiff base formation. Thus formed diformylated dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether was condensed with lipophilic chitosan to prepare the novel solvent extraction reagent. The products were characterized mainly by IR and 1H-NMR. Hence, the multidentate crown ether-embedded polyfunctional bio-material was tested for extraction of Pd(II) and Pt(IV) in aqueous solution.

Keywords: Lipophilic chitosan, Duff reaction, crown ether and precious metal ions extraction.

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Authors: Hei-Chia Wang, Wei-Pin Chiu

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As research performance in academia is treated as one of indices for national competency, many countries devote much attention and resources to increasing their research performance. Understand the research trend is the basic step to improve the research performance. The goal of this research is to design an analysis system to evaluate research trends from analyzing data from different countries. In this paper, information system researches in Taiwan and other countries, including Asian countries and prominent countries represented by the Group of Eight (G8) is used as example. Our research found the trends are varied in different countries. Our research suggested that Taiwan-s scholars can pay more attention to interdisciplinary applications and try to increase their collaboration with other countries, in order to increase Taiwan's competency in the area of information science.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis, research trend, scientometric analysis.

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Authors: Mohamed Tarek Khadir, Damien Fay, Ahmed Boughrira

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Short term electricity demand forecasts are required by power utilities for efficient operation of the power grid. In a competitive market environment, suppliers and large consumers also require short term forecasts in order to estimate their energy requirements in advance. Electricity demand is influenced (among other things) by the day of the week, the time of year and special periods and/or days such as Ramadhan, all of which must be identified prior to modelling. This identification, known as day-type identification, must be included in the modelling stage either by segmenting the data and modelling each day-type separately or by including the day-type as an input. Day-type identification is the main focus of this paper. A Kohonen map is employed to identify the separate day-types in Algerian data.

Keywords: Day type identification, electricity Load, Kohonenmaps, load forecasting.

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Authors: Blesson Varghese, Gerard T. McKee

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The work reported in this paper is motivated by the fact that there is a need to apply autonomic computing concepts to parallel computing systems. Advancing on prior work based on intelligent cores [36], a swarm-array computing approach, this paper focuses on 'Intelligent agents' another swarm-array computing approach in which the task to be executed on a parallel computing core is considered as a swarm of autonomous agents. A task is carried to a computing core by carrier agents and is seamlessly transferred between cores in the event of a predicted failure, thereby achieving self-ware objectives of autonomic computing. The feasibility of the proposed swarm-array computing approach is validated on a multi-agent simulator.

Keywords: Autonomic computing, intelligent agents, swarm-array computing.

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