Search results for: global warming

Authors: Fatima Akhmedova, Simon Liao

Abstract:

One of the most critical decision points in the design of a face recognition system is the choice of an appropriate face representation. Effective feature descriptors are expected to convey sufficient, invariant and non-redundant facial information. In this work we propose a set of Hahn moments as a new approach for feature description. Hahn moments have been widely used in image analysis due to their invariance, nonredundancy and the ability to extract features either globally and locally. To assess the applicability of Hahn moments to Face Recognition we conduct two experiments on the Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) database and University of Notre-Dame (UND) X1 biometric collection. Fusion of the global features along with the features from local facial regions are used as an input for the conventional k-NN classifier. The method reaches an accuracy of 93% of correctly recognized subjects for the ORL database and 94% for the UND database.

Keywords: Face Recognition, Hahn moments, Recognition-by-parts, Time-lapse.

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Authors: Clio G. Vossou, Ioannis N. Koukoulis, Christopher G. Provatidis

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The present work encounters the solution of the defect identification problem with the use of an evolutionary algorithm combined with a simplex method. In more details, a Matlab implementation of Genetic Algorithms is combined with a Simplex method in order to lead to the successful identification of the defect. The influence of the location and the orientation of the depressed ellipsoidal flaw was investigated as well as the use of different amount of static data in the cost function. The results were evaluated according to the ability of the simplex method to locate the global optimum in each test case. In this way, a clear impression regarding the performance of the novel combination of the optimization algorithms, and the influence of the geometrical parameters of the flaw in defect identification problems was obtained.

Keywords: Defect identification, genetic algorithms, optimization.

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Authors: S. Chuenchooklin, S. Taweepong, U. Pangnakorn

Abstract:

This research was conducted in the Mae Sot Watershed where located in the Moei River Basin at the Upper Salween River Basin in Tak Province, Thailand. The Mae Sot Municipality is the largest urban area in Tak Province and situated in the midstream of the Mae Sot Watershed. It usually faces flash flood problem after heavy rain due to poor flood management has been reported since economic rapidly bloom up in recent years. Its catchment can be classified as ungauged basin with lack of rainfall data and no any stream gaging station was reported. It was attached by most severely flood events in 2013 as the worst studied case for all those communities in this municipality. Moreover, other problems are also faced in this watershed, such shortage water supply for domestic consumption and agriculture utilizations including a deterioration of water quality and landslide as well. The research aimed to increase capability building and strengthening the participation of those local community leaders and related agencies to conduct better water management in urban area was started by mean of the data collection and illustration of the appropriated application of some short period rainfall forecasting model as they aim for better flood relief plan and management through the hydrologic model system and river analysis system programs. The authors intended to apply the global rainfall data via the integrated data viewer (IDV) program from the Unidata with the aim for rainfall forecasting in a short period of 7-10 days in advance during rainy season instead of real time record. The IDV product can be present in an advance period of rainfall with time step of 3-6 hours was introduced to the communities. The result can be used as input data to the hydrologic modeling system model (HEC-HMS) for synthesizing flood hydrographs and use for flood forecasting as well. The authors applied the river analysis system model (HEC-RAS) to present flood flow behaviors in the reach of the Mae Sot stream via the downtown of the Mae Sot City as flood extents as the water surface level at every cross-sectional profiles of the stream. Both models of HMS and RAS were tested in 2013 with observed rainfall and inflow-outflow data from the Mae Sot Dam. The result of HMS showed fit to the observed data at the dam and applied at upstream boundary discharge to RAS in order to simulate flood extents and tested in the field, and the result found satisfying. The product of rainfall from IDV was fair while compared with observed data. However, it is an appropriate tool to use in the ungauged catchment to use with flood hydrograph and river analysis models for future efficient flood relief plan and management.

Keywords: Global rainfall, flood forecasting, hydrologic modeling system, river analysis system.

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Authors: Sonia Rebai, Mohamed Naceur Azaiez, Dhafer Saidane

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In this study, we develop a performance evaluation model based on a multi-attribute utility approach aiming at reaching the sustainable banking (SB) status. This model is built accounting for various banks’ stakeholders in a win-win paradigm. In addition, it offers the opportunity for adopting a global measure of performance as an indication of a bank’s sustainability degree. This measure is referred to as banking sustainability performance index (BSPI). This index may constitute a basis for ranking banks. Moreover, it may constitute a bridge between the assessment types of financial and extra-financial rating agencies. A real application is performed on three French banks.

Keywords: Multi-attribute utility theory, Performance, Sustainable banking.

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Authors: S. H. Mirhossaini, H. Godini, A. Jafari

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Biological Ammonia removal (nitrification), the oxidation of ammonia to nitrate catalyzed by bacteria, is a key part of global nitrogen cycling. In the first step of nitrification, chemolithoautotrophic ammonia oxidizer transform ammonia to nitrite, this subsequently oxidized to nitrate by nitrite oxidizing bacteria. This process can be affected by several factors. In this study the effect of influent COD on biological ammonia removal in a bench-scale biological reactor was investigated. Experiments were carried out using synthetic wastewater. The initial ammonium concentration was 25mgNH4 +-N L-1. The effect of COD between 247.55±1.8 and 601.08±3.24mgL-1 on biological ammonia removal was investigated by varying the COD loading supplied to reactor. From the results obtained in this study it could be concluded in the range of 247.55±1.8 to 351.35±2.05mgL-1, there is a direct relationship between amount of COD and ammonia removal. However more than 351.35±2.05 up to 601.08±3.24mgL-1 were found an indirect relationship between them.

Keywords: Ammonia biological removal, Nitrification, InfluentCOD.

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Authors: Shanshan Qi, Rob Law, Dimitrios Buhalis

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The fast technology and economic growth in China has attracted global attention in its tourism development. This study makes an effort on investigating China-s online tourism market and the Chinese online travelers- perceptions of hotel websites. The findings are expected to better understand Chinese customers- online preference and identified the differences among online travelers from different regions in the country. Empirical findings showed online reservation information is the most important factor to Chinese customers, and tourists from different regions of China have perception difference on user-friendly factor. The findings benefit hoteliers from understanding their websites development and formulating more appropriate online strategies to meet the requirements of Chinese travelers.

Keywords: Chinese online travelers, Hotel websites, Regions of China, Website usefulness

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Authors: Muthatakul Metasit, Setthasakko Watchaneeporn

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At present, increased concerns about global environmental problems have magnified the importance of sustainability management. To move towards sustainability, companies need to look at everything from a holistic perspective in order to understand the interconnections between economic growth and environmental and social sustainability. This paper aims to gain an understanding of key determinants that drive sustainability management and barriers that hinder its development. It employs semi-structured interviews with key informants, site observation and documentation. The informants are production, marketing and environmental managers of the leading wine producer, which aims to become an Asia-s leader in wine & wine based products. It is found that corporate image and top management leadership are the primary factors influencing the adoption of sustainability management. Lack of environmental knowledge and inefficient communication are identified as barriers.

Keywords: Environmental, knowledge; Sustainability management; Top management leadership; Wine industry

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Authors: Roberto Sabatini, Celia Bartel, Anish Kaharkar, Tesheen Shaid, Subramanian Ramasamy

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Two multisensor system architectures for navigation and guidance of small Unmanned Aircraft (UA) are presented and compared. The main objective of our research is to design a compact, light and relatively inexpensive system capable of providing the required navigation performance in all phases of flight of small UA, with a special focus on precision approach and landing, where Vision Based Navigation (VBN) techniques can be fully exploited in a multisensor integrated architecture. Various existing techniques for VBN are compared and the Appearance-Based Navigation (ABN) approach is selected for implementation. Feature extraction and optical flow techniques are employed to estimate flight parameters such as roll angle, pitch angle, deviation from the runway centreline and body rates. Additionally, we address the possible synergies of VBN, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and MEMS-IMU (Micro-Electromechanical System Inertial Measurement Unit) sensors, and the use of Aircraft Dynamics Model (ADM) to provide additional information suitable to compensate for the shortcomings of VBN and MEMS-IMU sensors in high-dynamics attitude determination tasks. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is developed to fuse the information provided by the different sensors and to provide estimates of position, velocity and attitude of the UA platform in real-time. The key mathematical models describing the two architectures i.e., VBN-IMU-GNSS (VIG) system and VIGADM (VIGA) system are introduced. The first architecture uses VBN and GNSS to augment the MEMS-IMU. The second mode also includes the ADM to provide augmentation of the attitude channel. Simulation of these two modes is carried out and the performances of the two schemes are compared in a small UA integration scheme (i.e., AEROSONDE UA platform) exploring a representative cross-section of this UA operational flight envelope, including high dynamics manoeuvres and CAT-I to CAT-III precision approach tasks. Simulation of the first system architecture (i.e., VIG system) shows that the integrated system can reach position, velocity and attitude accuracies compatible with the Required Navigation Performance (RNP) requirements. Simulation of the VIGA system also shows promising results since the achieved attitude accuracy is higher using the VBN-IMU-ADM than using VBN-IMU only. A comparison of VIG and VIGA system is also performed and it shows that the position and attitude accuracy of the proposed VIG and VIGA systems are both compatible with the RNP specified in the various UA flight phases, including precision approach down to CAT-II.

Keywords: Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Lowcost Navigation Sensors, MEMS Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Vision Based Navigation.

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Authors: F. Javier Benitez, Carolina Garcia, Juan Luis Acero, Francisco J. Real

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Four phenylurea herbicides (isoproturon, chlortoluron, diuron and linuron) were dissolved in different water matrices in order to study their chemical degradation by using UV radiation, ozone and some advanced oxidation processes (UV/H2O2, O3/H2O2, Fenton reagent and the photo- Fenton system). The waters used were: ultra-pure water, a commercial mineral water, a groundwater and a surface water taken from a reservoir. Elimination levels were established for each herbicide and for several global quality parameters, and a kinetic study was performed in order to determine basic kinetic parameters of each reaction between the target phenylureas and these oxidizing systems.

Keywords: Phenylurea herbicides, UV radiation; Ozone, Fenton reagent, Hydroxyl radicals, Rate constants, Quantum yields

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Authors: Changhwan Choi, Yongwan Park

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In this paper, we propose a method that allows faster and more accurate detection of traffic lights by a vision sensor during driving, DGPS is used to obtain physical location of a traffic light, extract from the image information of the vision sensor only the traffic light area at this location and ascertain if the sign is in operation and determine its form. This method can solve the problem in existing research where low visibility at night or reflection under bright light makes it difficult to recognize the form of traffic light, thus making driving unstable. We compared our success rate of traffic light recognition in day and night road environments. Compared to previous researches, it showed similar performance during the day but 50% improvement at night.

Keywords: Traffic light, Intelligent vehicle, Night, Detection, DGPS (Differential Global Positioning System).

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Authors: Vladimir I. Byshev, Victor G. Neiman, Yuri A. Romanov, Ilya V. Serykh

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Since atmosphere pressure field is an actual envoy of climatic signal the atmospheric Highs and Lows should be attributed to the key active focal points within the ocean-atmosphere interplay system. Here we were set a task to determine how the dynamics of those centres of action relates to the climate change both on regional and global scales. For this target the near-surface temperature and atmospheric pressure differences between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High were considered. The secular term of phase states of the system under consideration was found divided into three nonintersecting subsets. Each of that was put in consequence with one of three climatic scenarios related to the periods of 1905-1935 (relatively warm phase), 1940-1970 (cold phase) and 1980-2000 (warm phase).

Keywords: Climate change, climatic scenario, fields of environmental characteristics, North Atlantic region.

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Authors: Shweta Shah, Upena Dalal

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The development of wireless communication technologies has changed our living style in global level. After the international success of mobile telephony standards, the location and time independent voice connection has become a default method in daily telecommunications. As for today, highly advanced multimedia messaging plays a key role in value added service handling. Along with evolving data services, the need for more complex applications can be seen, including the mobile usage of broadcast technologies. Here performance of a system design for terrestrial multimedia content is examined with emphasis on mobile reception. This review paper has accommodated the understanding of physical layer role and the flavour of terrestrial channel effects on the terrestrial multimedia transmission using OFDM keeping DVB-H as benchmark standard.

Keywords: Digital Video Broadcast-Handhelds, Multimedia, OFDM, Physical Layer

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Authors: Samson Davoyan, Tatevik Sahakyan

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The purpose of this report is to suggest a new methodology for the assessment of the comparative efficiency of the reforms made in different countries by an integral index. We have highlighted the reforms made in post-crisis period in 21 former socialist countries. The integral index describes the social-economic development level. The integral index contains of six indexes: The Global Competitiveness Index, Doing Business, The Corruption Perception, The Index of Economic Freedom, The Human Development, and The Democracy Index, which are reported by different international organizations. With the help of our methodology we first summarized the above-mentioned 6 indexes and attained 1 general index, besides, our new method enables us to assess the comparative efficiency of the reforms made in different countries by analyzing them. The purpose is to reveal the opportunities and threats of socialeconomic reforms in different directions.

Keywords: Assessment, comparative, effectiveness, reforms

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Authors: Kyria Rebeca Finardi

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The study discusses the role of foreign languages in general and of English in particular in the process of internationalization of higher education (IHE), defined as the intentional integration of an international, intercultural or global dimension in the purpose, function or offer of higher education. The study is bibliographical and offers a brief outline of the current political, economic and educational scenarios in Brazil, before discussing some possibilities and challenges for the development of multilingualism and IHE there. The theoretical background includes a review of Brazilian language and internationalization policies. The review and discussion concludes that the use of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach and the Intercomprehension approach to foreign language teaching/learning are relevant alternatives to foster multilingualism in that context.

Keywords: Brazil, higher education, internationalization, multilingualism.

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Authors: M. Raciti Castelli, E. Benini

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This paper presents a numerical investigation of the unsteady flow around an American 19th century vertical-axis windmill: the Stevens & Jolly rotor, patented on April 16, 1895. The computational approach used is based on solving the complete transient Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (t-RANS) equations: a full campaign of numerical simulation has been performed using the k-ω SST turbulence model. Flow field characteristics have been investigated for several values of tip speed ratio and for a constant unperturbed free-stream wind velocity of 6 m/s, enabling the study of some unsteady flow phenomena in the rotor wake. Finally, the global power generated from the windmill has been determined for each simulated angular velocity, allowing the calculation of the rotor power-curve.

Keywords: CFD, vertical-axis rotor, windmill.

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Authors: F. Lievens, M. Jordanova

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Telemedicine is brought to life by contemporary changes of our world and summarizes the entire range of services that are at the crossroad of traditional healthcare and information technology. It is believed that eHealth can help in solving critical issues of rising costs, care for ageing and housebound population, staff shortage. It is a feasible tool to provide routine as well as specialized health service as it has the potential to improve both the access to and the standard of care. eHealth is no more an optional choice. It has already made quite a way but it still remains a fantastic challenge for the future requiring cooperation and coordination at all possible levels. The strategic objectives of this paper are: 1. To start with an attempt to clarify the mass of terms used nowadays; 2. To answer the question “Who needs eHealth"; 3. To focus on the necessity of bridging telemedicine and medical (health) informatics as well as on the dual relationship between them; as well as 4. To underline the need of networking in understanding, developing and implementing eHealth.

Keywords: E-Health/telemedicine, networking, medical informatics.

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Authors: Ashkan Ebadi, Andrea Schiffauerova

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In spite of the global efforts toward gender equality, female researchers are still underrepresented in professional scientific activities. The gender gap is more seen in engineering and math-intensive technological scientific fields thus calling for a specific attention. This paper focuses on the Canadian funded researchers who are active in natural sciences and engineering, and analyses the gender aspects of researchers’ performance, their scientific collaboration patterns as well as their share of the federal funding within the period of 2000 to 2010. Our results confirm the existence of gender disparity among the examined Canadian researchers. Although it was observed that male researchers have been performing better in terms of number of publications, the impact of the research was almost the same for both genders. In addition, it was observed that research funding is more biased towards male researchers and they have more control over their scientific community as well.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, collaboration, funding, gender differences, research output.

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Authors: Li Wu

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Plant ecological stoichiometry, which is one of the most important tools to connect the components among different levels of ecosystem, has obtained increasingly extensive concern, especially on its responses to the environmental gradients. Based on the published literatures and datasets, this article focused on reviewing the variable responses of plant foliar ecological stoichiometry to the climatic factors, such as temperature, water, elevated CO₂, and found that foliar ecological stoichiometry responded dynamically to climatic variations among different regions and different growth forms. Then, research status and deficiency were summarized and the expectation on studying the relationships between plant C, N and P ecological stoichiometry and environmental variations which can provide a reference to understand how plants will respond to global change in the future was pointed out.

Keywords: Climatic variations, terrestrial plant, foliar ecological stoichiometry, temperature, precipitation, drought, elevated CO2.

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Authors: Azhar E. Serikkaliyeva, Nurzhamal A. Aldabek

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The purpose of this article is to analyze economic and political tendencies of development of integration processes with different developing level and speed on the Eurasian space, by considering two organizations at the region – Eurasian Economic Community and Shanghai Cooperation Organization, by considering the interests of participations in organizations of Russia and China as a global powers and Kazakhstan as a leader among the Central Asian countries. This article investigates what certain goals Eurasian countries (especially Russia, Kazakhstan and China) are waiting from integration within the SCO and the EurAsEC, linking the process with the theories of regional integration. After European debt crisis it is more topically to research the integration within the specific region's conditions.

Keywords: Eurasian Economic Community, China, Kazakhstan, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Regional integration, Russia.

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Authors: Z. Liu, K. Cao

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Strategic spatial planning, which is taken as an effective and competitive way for the governors of the city to improve the development and management level of a city, has been blooming in recent years all over the world. In the context of globalization and informatization, strategic spatial planning must transfer its focus on three different levels: global, regional and urban. Internal and external changes in environmental conditions lead to new advances in strategic planning both theoretically and practically. However, such advances or changes respond differently to cities on account of different dynamic mechanisms. This article aims at two cities of Tianjin in China and Melbourne in Australia, through a comparative study on strategic planning, to explore the differentiation of mechanisms in urban planning making. By comparison and exploration, the purpose of this article is to exhibit two different planning worlds between western and Chinese in a new way nowadays.

Keywords: Differentiation, Tianjin China, Melbourne Australia, strategic planning.

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Authors: Ahcene Habbi, Yassine Boudouaoui

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This paper deals with the problem of automatic rule generation for fuzzy systems design. The proposed approach is based on hybrid artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization and weighted least squares (LS) method and aims to find the structure and parameters of fuzzy systems simultaneously. More precisely, two ABC based fuzzy modeling strategies are presented and compared. The first strategy uses global optimization to learn fuzzy models, the second one hybridizes ABC and weighted least squares estimate method. The performances of the proposed ABC and ABC-LS fuzzy modeling strategies are evaluated on complex modeling problems and compared to other advanced modeling methods.

Keywords: Automatic design, learning, fuzzy rules, hybrid, swarm optimization.

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Authors: Gabriel Chavira, Jorge Orozco, Salvador Nava, Eduardo Álvarez, Julio Rolón, Roberto Pichardo

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Ambient Intelligence promotes a shift in computing which involves fitting-out the environments with devices to support context-aware applications. One of main objectives is the reduction to a minimum of the user’s interactive effort, the diversity and quantity of devices with which people are surrounded with, in existing environments; increase the level of difficulty to achieve this goal. The mobile phones and their amazing global penetration, makes it an excellent device for delivering new services to the user, without requiring a learning effort. The environment will have to be able to perceive all of the interaction techniques. In this paper, we present the PICTAC model (Perceiving touch Interaction through TAgging Context), which similarly delivers service to members of a research group.

Keywords: Ambient Intelligence, Tagging Context, Touch Interaction, Touching Services.

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Authors: S. K. Fasogbon, A. A. Asere

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Depletion and hazardous gas emissions associated with fossil fuels have caused scientists and global attention to focus on the use of “alternative, eco-friendly substitutes for use in Compression Ignition Engines. In this work, biodiesel was produced by trans-esterification of soybean obtained from a Nigerian market using Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) as a catalyst.” After the production, the physical properties (specific gravity to kinematic viscosity and net calorific value) of the Soybean-biodiesel produced and petrol diesel obtained from a filling station in Nigeria were determined, and these properties conform to conventional standards (ASTM). A cummins-6V-92TA DDEC diesel (Compression ignition, CI) engine was run on various biodiesel-petrol diesel blends (0/100, 10/90, 20/80, 30/70 and 40/60), the B20 (blend 20/80) was found to be the most satisfactory.

Keywords: Effects, Soybean, Methyl Ester, Performance, compression Ignition Engine.

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Authors: A. Borji, M. Hamidi

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In this paper we examine the use of global texture analysis based approaches for the purpose of Persian font recognition in machine-printed document images. Most existing methods for font recognition make use of local typographical features and connected component analysis. However derivation of such features is not an easy task. Gabor filters are appropriate tools for texture analysis and are motivated by human visual system. Here we consider document images as textures and use Gabor filter responses for identifying the fonts. The method is content independent and involves no local feature analysis. Two different classifiers Weighted Euclidean Distance and SVM are used for the purpose of classification. Experiments on seven different type faces and four font styles show average accuracy of 85% with WED and 82% with SVM classifier over typefaces

Keywords: Persian font recognition, support vector machine, gabor filter.

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Authors: Kankesu Jayanthakumaran, Shao-Wei Lee

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This paper proposes the hypothesis that multilateralism and regionalism are complementary, and that regional income convergence is likely with a like minded and committed regionalism that often has links geographically and culturally. The association between international trade, income per capita, and regional income convergence in founder members of ASEAN and SAARC, is explored by applying the Lumsdaine, and Papell approach. The causal relationships between the above variables are also studied in respective trade blocs by using Granger causality tests. The conclusion is that global reforms have had a greater impact on increasing trade for both trade blocs and induced convergence only in ASEAN-5 countries. The experience of ASEAN countries shows a two-way causal relationship between the flow from trade to regional income convergence, and vice versa. There is no evidence in SAARC countries for income convergence and causality.

Keywords: ASEAN-5, SAARC-5, trade liberalisation, incomeconvergence, structural breaks and causality.

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Authors: Chein-Shung Hwang, Ruei-Siang Fong

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User-based Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most prevailing and efficient recommendation techniques, provides personalized recommendations to users based on the opinions of other users. Although the CF technique has been successfully applied in various applications, it suffers from serious sparsity problems. The cloud-model approach addresses the sparsity problems by constructing the user-s global preference represented by a cloud eigenvector. The user-based CF approach works well with dense datasets while the cloud-model CF approach has a greater performance when the dataset is sparse. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach that integrates the predictions from both the user-based CF and the cloud-model CF approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach can ameliorate the sparsity problem and provide an improved prediction quality.

Keywords: Cloud model, Collaborative filtering, Hybridrecommender system

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Authors: J. Ruiz-Pinales, J. J. Acosta-Reyes, A. Salazar-Garibay, R. Jaime-Rivas

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In this paper, we present a new method for incorporating global shift invariance in support vector machines. Unlike other approaches which incorporate a feature extraction stage, we first scale the image and then classify it by using the modified support vector machines classifier. Shift invariance is achieved by replacing dot products between patterns used by the SVM classifier with the maximum cross-correlation value between them. Unlike the normal approach, in which the patterns are treated as vectors, in our approach the patterns are treated as matrices (or images). Crosscorrelation is computed by using computationally efficient techniques such as the fast Fourier transform. The method has been tested on the ORL face database. The tests indicate that this method can improve the recognition rate of an SVM classifier.

Keywords: Face recognition, support vector machines, shiftinvariance, image registration.

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Authors: Yin Jie, Qin Qiming, Yin Yong

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As a tool for human spatial cognition and thinking, the map has been playing an important role. Maps are perhaps as fundamental to society as language and the written word. Economic and social development requires extensive and in-depth understanding of their own living environment, from the scope of the overall global to urban housing. This has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges for traditional cartography . This paper first proposed the concept of scaleless-map and its basic characteristics, through the analysis of the existing multi-scale representation techniques. Then some strategies are presented for automated mapping compilation. Taking into account the demand of automated map compilation, detailed proposed the software - WJ workstation must have four technical features, which are generalization operators, symbol primitives, dynamically annotation and mapping process template. This paper provides a more systematic new idea and solution to improve the intelligence and automation of the scaleless cartography.

Keywords: scaleless-map, strategy, map generalization, automated compilation, WJ workstation.

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Authors: Valeri Arghutashvili, Mari Gogochuri

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Tourism industry development is one of the key priorities in Georgia, as it has positive influence on economic activities. Its contribution is very important for the different regions, as well as for the national economy. Benefits of the tourism industry include new jobs, service development, and increasing tax revenues, etc. The main aim of this research is to review and analyze the potential of the Georgian tourism industry with its long-term strategy and current challenges. To plan activities in a long-term development, it is required to evaluate several factors on the regional and on the national level. Factors include activities, transportation, services, lodging facilities, infrastructure and institutions. The major research contributions are practical estimates about regional tourism development which plays an important role in the integration process with global markets.

Keywords: Regional tourism, tourism industry, tourism in Georgia, tourism benefits.

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Authors: Ibrahim F. Jasim, Najah F. Jasim

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The problem of controlling a two link robotic manipulator, consisting of a rotating and a prismatic links, is addressed. The actuations of both links are assumed to have unknown dead zone nonlinearities and friction torques modeled by LuGre friction model. Because of the existence of the unknown dead zone and friction torque at the actuations, unknown parameters and unmeasured states would appear to be part of the overall system dynamics that need for estimation. Unmeasured states observer, unknown parameters estimators, and robust adaptive control laws have been derived such that closed loop global stability is achieved. Simulation results have been performed to show the efficacy of the suggested approach.

Keywords: Adaptive Robust Control, Dead Zone, Friction Torques, Robotic Manipulators.

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