Search results for: ISO/IEC 25010 quality model

Authors: Oulad Naoui Noureddine, Cherif ELAmine, Djehiche Abdelkader

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Water resources management includes several disciplines; the modeling of rainfall-runoff relationship is the most important discipline to prevent natural risks. There are several models to study rainfall-runoff relationship in watersheds. However, the majority of these models are not applicable in all basins of the world.  In this study, a new stochastic method called The Only Corresponding Competitor method (OCC) was used for the hydrological modeling of M’ZAB   Watershed (South East of Algeria) to adapt a few empirical models for any hydrological regime.  The results obtained allow to authorize a certain number of visions, in which it would be interesting to experiment with hydrological models that improve collectively or separately the data of a catchment by the OCC method.

Keywords: Empirical model, modeling, OCC, rainfall-runoff relationship.

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Authors: Chandan Deep Singh

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In present days, companies are facing the rapid competition in terms of customer requirements to be satisfied, new technologies to be integrated into future products, new safety regulations to be followed, new computer-based tools to be introduced into design activities that becomes more scientific. In today’s highly competitive market, survival focuses on various factors such as quality, innovation, adherence to standards, and rapid response as the basis for competitive advantage. For competitive advantage, companies have to produce various competencies: for improving the capability of suppliers and for strengthening the process of integrating technology. For more competitiveness, organizations should operate in a strategy driven way and have a strategic architecture for developing core competencies. Traditional ways to take such experience and develop competencies tend to take a lot of time and they are expensive. A new learning environment, which is built around a gaming engine, supports the development of competences in specific subject areas. Technology competencies have a significant role in firm innovation and competitiveness; they interact with the competitive environment. Technological competencies vary according to the type of competitive environment, thus enhancing firm innovativeness. Technological competency is gained through extensive experimentation and learning in its research, development and employment in manufacturing. This is a review paper based on competency and strategic success of automobile industry. The aim here is to study strategy formulation and competency tools in the industry. This work is a review of literature related to competency and strategy in automobile industry. This study involves review of 34 papers related to competency and strategy.

Keywords: Competency, competitiveness, manufacturing competency, strategic formulation.

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Authors: Shima Rajabi, Leila Vafajoo

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Compost manufacturing plants are one of units where wastewater is produced in significantly large amounts. Wastewater produced in these plants contains high amounts of substrate (organic loads) and is classified as stringent waste which creates significant pollution when discharged into the environment without treatment. A compost production plant in the one of the Iran-s province treating 200 tons/day of waste is one of the most important environmental pollutant operations in this zone. The main objectives of this paper are to investigate the compost wastewater treatability in hybrid anaerobic reactors with an upflow-downflow arrangement, to determine the kinetic constants, and eventually to obtain an appropriate mathematical model. After starting the hybrid anaerobic reactor of the compost production plant, the average COD removal rate efficiency was 95%.

Keywords: Leachate treatment, anaerobic hybrid reactor

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Authors: Pascal Mwenge, Jefrey Pilusa, Tumisang Seodigeng

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The current study investigated the effect of catalyst ratio and methanol to oil ratio on biodiesel production by using central composite design. Biodiesel was produced by transesterification using sodium hydroxide as a homogeneous catalyst, a laboratory scale reactor consisting of flat bottom flask mounts with a reflux condenser and a heating plate was used to produce biodiesel. Key parameters, including, time, temperature and mixing rate were kept constant at 60 minutes, 60 ^oC and 600 RPM, respectively. From the results obtained, it was observed that the biodiesel yield depends on catalyst ratio and methanol to oil ratio. The highest yield of 50.65% was obtained at catalyst ratio of 0.5 wt.% and methanol to oil mole ratio 10.5. The analysis of variances of biodiesel yield showed the R Squared value of 0.8387. A quadratic mathematical model was developed to predict the biodiesel yield in the specified parameters ranges.

Keywords: ANOVA, biodiesel, catalyst, CCD, transesterification.

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Authors: S. Y. Ahmadi-Brooghani, H. Hassanzadeh, P. Kahhal

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This work presents a study on the abrasive water jet (AWJ) machining. An explicit finite element analysis (FEA) of single abrasive particle impact on stainless steel 1.4304 (AISI 304) is conducted. The abrasive water jet machining is modeled by FEA software ABAQUS/CAE. Shapes of craters in FEM simulation results were used and compared with the previous experimental and FEM works by means of crater sphericity. The influence of impact angle and particle velocity was observed. Adaptive mesh domain is used to model the impact zone. Results are in good agreement with those obtained from the experimental and FEM simulation. The crater-s depth is also obtained for different impact angle and abrasive particle velocities.

Keywords: Abrasive water jet machining, Adaptive meshcontrol, Explicit finite elements analysis, Single-particle impact.

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Authors: Bernd Kiefer, Abraham Gebru Tesfay, Dietrich Klakow

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The motivation of our work is to detect different terrain types traversed by a robot based on acoustic data from the robot-terrain interaction. Different acoustic features and classifiers were investigated, such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient and Gamma-tone frequency cepstral coefficient for the feature extraction, and Gaussian mixture model and Feed forward neural network for the classification. We analyze the system’s performance by comparing our proposed techniques with some other features surveyed from distinct related works. We achieve precision and recall values between 87% and 100% per class, and an average accuracy at 95.2%. We also study the effect of varying audio chunk size in the application phase of the models and find only a mild impact on performance.

Keywords: Terrain classification, acoustic features, autonomous robots, feature extraction.

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Authors: Abiodun M. Aibinu, Momoh J. E. Salami, Amir A. Shafie, Athaur Rahman Najeeb

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Autoregressive Moving average (ARMA) is a parametric based method of signal representation. It is suitable for problems in which the signal can be modeled by explicit known source functions with a few adjustable parameters. Various methods have been suggested for the coefficients determination among which are Prony, Pade, Autocorrelation, Covariance and most recently, the use of Artificial Neural Network technique. In this paper, the method of using Artificial Neural network (ANN) technique is compared with some known and widely acceptable techniques. The comparisons is entirely based on the value of the coefficients obtained. Result obtained shows that the use of ANN also gives accurate in computing the coefficients of an ARMA system.

Keywords: Autoregressive moving average, coefficients, back propagation, model parameters, neural network, weight.

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Authors: Viriyavudh Sim, WooYoung Jung

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Damage due to high wind is not limited to load resistance components such as beam and column. The majority of damage is due to breach in the building envelope such as broken roof, window, and door. In this paper, wind fragility of window glass in residential apartment was determined to compare the difference between two window configuration models. Monte Carlo Simulation method had been used to derive damage data and analytical fragilities were constructed. Fragility of window system showed that window located in leeward wall had higher probability of failure, especially those close to the edge of structure. Between the two window models, Model 2 had higher probability of failure, this was due to the number of panel in this configuration.

Keywords: Wind fragility, glass window, high rise apartment, Monte Carlo Simulation method.

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Authors: Joabe Silva, Ginalber Serra

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This paper proposes the analysis and design of robust fuzzy control to Stochastic Parametrics Uncertaint Linear systems. This system type to be controlled is partitioned into several linear sub-models, in terms of transfer function, forming a convex polytope, similar to LPV (Linear Parameters Varying) system. Once defined the linear sub-models of the plant, these are organized into fuzzy Takagi- Sugeno (TS) structure. From the Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) strategy, a mathematical formulation is defined in the frequency domain, based on the gain and phase margins specifications, to obtain robust PI sub-controllers in accordance to the Takagi- Sugeno fuzzy model of the plant. The main results of the paper are based on the robust stability conditions with the proposal of one Axiom and two Theorems.

Keywords: Fuzzy Systems; Robust Stability, Stochastic Control, Stochastic Process

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Authors: S. Rao Rayapudi

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Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) is a method of determining the most efficient, low-cost and reliable operation of a power system by dispatching available electricity generation resources to supply load on the system. The primary objective of economic dispatch is to minimize total cost of generation while honoring operational constraints of available generation resources. In this paper an intelligent water drop (IWD) algorithm has been proposed to solve ELD problem with an objective of minimizing the total cost of generation. Intelligent water drop algorithm is a swarm-based natureinspired optimization algorithm, which has been inspired from natural rivers. A natural river often finds good paths among lots of possible paths in its ways from source to destination and finally find almost optimal path to their destination. These ideas are embedded into the proposed algorithm for solving economic load dispatch problem. The main advantage of the proposed technique is easy is implement and capable of finding feasible near global optimal solution with less computational effort. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, it has been tested on 6-unit and 20-unit test systems with incremental fuel cost functions taking into account the valve point-point loading effects. Numerical results shows that the proposed method has good convergence property and better in quality of solution than other algorithms reported in recent literature.

Keywords: Economic load dispatch, Transmission loss, Optimization, Valve point loading, Intelligent Water Drop Algorithm.

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Authors: S. Selvaperumal, M. S. Sivagamasundari

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In this paper, selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation technique is employed to eliminate lower order harmonics like third by determination of solving non-linear equations. The cascaded H-bridge five level inverter is driven by the Peripheral Interface Controlled (PIC) Microcontroller 16F877A. The performance of single phase cascaded H-bridge five level inverter with relevant to harmonics and a variety of switches with solar cell as its input source is simulated by employing MATLAB/Simulink. A hardware model is developed to verify the performance of the developed system.

Keywords: Multilevel inverter, cascaded H-Bridge multilevel inverter, total harmonic distortion, selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation, MATLAB.

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Authors: A. Medjnoun, R. Bahar

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The disorders caused by the shrinking-swelling phenomenon are prevalent in arid and semi-arid in the presence of swelling clay. This soil has the characteristic of changing state under the effect of water solicitation (wetting and drying). A set of geotechnical parameters is necessary for the characterization of this soil type, such as state parameters, physical and chemical parameters and mechanical parameters. Some of these tests are very long and some are very expensive, hence the use or methods of predictions. The complexity of this phenomenon and the difficulty of its characterization have prompted researchers to use several identification parameters in the prediction of swelling potential. This document is an analytical and statistical study of geotechnical parameters affecting the potential of swelling clays. This work is performing on a database obtained from investigations swelling Algerian soil. The obtained observations have helped us to understand the soil swelling structure and its behavior.

Keywords: Analysis, estimated model, parameter identification, Swelling of clay.

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Authors: R. Faiez, M. Mashhoudi, F. Najafi

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Implicit in most large-scale numerical analyses of the crystal growth from the melt is the assumption that the shape and position of the phase boundary are determined by the transport phenomena coupled strongly to the melt hydrodynamics. In the present numerical study, the interface shape-effect on the convective interactions in a Czochralski oxide melt is described. It was demonstrated that thermocapillary flow affects inversely the phase boundaries of distinct shapes. The inhomogenity of heat flux and the location of the stagnation point at the crystallization front were investigated. The forced convection effect on the point displacement at the boundary found to be much stronger for the flat plate interface compared to the cone-shaped one with and without the Marangoni flow.

Keywords: Computer simulation, fluid flow, interface shape, thermocapillary effect.

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Authors: S. Botman, D. Borchevkin, V. Petrov, E. Bogdanov, M. Patrushev, N. Shusharina

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In this paper, we report the development of the device for diagnostics of cardiovascular system state and associated automated workstation for large-scale medical measurement data collection and analysis. It was shown that optimal design for the monitoring device is wristband as it represents engineering trade-off between accuracy and usability. Monitoring device is based on the infrared reflective photoplethysmographic sensor, which allows collecting multiple physiological parameters, such as heart rate and pulsing wave characteristics. Developed device uses BLE interface for medical and supplementary data transmission to the coupled mobile phone, which processes it and send it to the doctor's automated workstation. Results of this experimental model approbation confirmed the applicability of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Cardiovascular diseases, health monitoring systems, photoplethysmography, pulse wave, remote diagnostics.

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Authors: Gouri Prakash

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One of the common problems encountered in software engineering is addressing and responding to the changing nature of requirements. While several approaches have been devised to address this issue, ranging from instilling resistance to changing requirements in order to mitigate impact to project schedules, to developing an agile mindset towards requirements, the approach discussed in this paper is one of conceptualizing the delta in requirement and modeling it, in order to plan a response to it. To provide some context here, change is first formally identified and categorized as either formal change or informal change. While agile methodology facilitates informal change, the approach discussed in this paper seeks to develop the idea of facilitating formal change. To collect, document meta-requirements that represent the phenomena of change would be a pro-active measure towards building a realistic cognition of the requirements entity that can further be harnessed in the software engineering process.

Keywords: Change Management, Agile methodology, Metarequirements

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Authors: Fu Jiayan, Wang Zhu, Sun Jiaojiao

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Mixed-use development is one of the most important trends in new island house transformation along southeast coastal area in China. Unique island geographical environment and profound fishing village culture coexist for a long time in this. With artistic creation for the purpose of the "live-work" houses are in a large number of emergence, however, still lack of systematic strategy. Based on space effect from marine resources to regional human settlements, this article teases out the evolution regularity of island settlement context and architectural form, then, puts forward the formation mechanism and construction model of art island houses. Thereby, to further explore space design method and site creation strategy of mixed-use development.

Keywords: Mixed-use, Island House, Art Creation, Southeast Coastal Area of Chinese.

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Authors: B. Muhammadani

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Health workforce is a fundamental component of health system and plays a significant role in delivering effective health care services. However, there is a crucial shortage of skilled personnel which make them prone to work in stressful conditions. In spite of excessively high workload and burnout among the staff, little attention is given to their job satisfaction level which has serious implications on the productivity and effective performance of staff to achieve organizational goals. Therefore, this study aims to explore the job satisfaction of midwives working in the labor ward of the Lady Dufferin Hospital, Karachi. A cross-sectional survey was conducted. The short version of Minnesota Job Satisfaction Questionnaire was administered on a convenient sample group of 22 midwives to gather information on their job satisfaction. The results demonstrated that midwives were overall satisfied with their job. The level of job satisfaction was however found different in various positions within midwifery cadre. The head of midwives was highly satisfied as compared to midwifery staff who works under the supervision of head. The level of satisfaction of team leaders fall between the head and staff of midwifery. Similar trends were observed for both intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction. Such evidences on these issues are essential and useful as it helps explore the attitudes of individuals towards work which has direct implications on access to quality care services. Strategic interventions are required at organizational level to provide motivators and satisfiers to health workers for their work related satisfaction and enhanced motivation.

Keywords: Health workforce, job satisfaction, motivation, workload, burnout, midwives, health system.

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Authors: Sunhyoung Lee, Askar Akshabayev, Beisenbek Baisakov, Youngjoon Han, Hernsoo Hahn

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It is important to give input information without other device in AR system. One solution is using hand for augmented reality application. Many researchers have proposed different solutions for hand interface in augmented reality. Analyze Histogram and connecting factor is can be example for that. Various Direction searching is one of robust way to recognition hand but it takes too much calculating time. And background should be distinguished with skin color. This paper proposes a hand tracking method to control the 3D object in augmented reality using depth device and skin color. Also in this work discussed relationship between several markers, which is based on relationship between camera and marker. One marker used for displaying virtual object and three markers for detecting hand gesture and manipulating the virtual object.

Keywords: Augmented Reality, depth map, hand recognition, kinect, marker, YCbCr color model.

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Authors: Elena Krelja Kurelović, Jasminka Tomljanović, Vlatka Davidović

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The development of web technologies and mobile devices makes creating, accessing, using and sharing information or communicating with each other simpler every day. However, while the amount of information constantly increasing it is becoming harder to effectively organize and find quality information despite the availability of web search engines, filtering and indexing tools. Although digital technologies have overall positive impact on students’ lives, frequent use of these technologies and digital media enriched with dynamic hypertext and hypermedia content, as well as multitasking, distractions caused by notifications, calls or messages; can decrease the attention span, make thinking, memorizing and learning more difficult, which can lead to stress and mental exhaustion. This is referred to as “information overload”, “information glut” or “information anxiety”. Objective of this study is to determine whether students show signs of information overload and to identify the possible predictors. Research was conducted using a questionnaire developed for the purpose of this study. The results show that students frequently use technology (computers, gadgets and digital media), while they show moderate level of information literacy. They have sometimes experienced symptoms of information overload. According to the statistical analysis, higher frequency of technology use and lower level of information literacy are correlated with larger information overload. The multiple regression analysis has confirmed that the combination of these two independent variables has statistically significant predictive capacity for information overload. Therefore, the information science teachers should pay attention to improving the level of students’ information literacy and educate them about the risks of excessive technology use.

Keywords: Information overload, technology use, digital media, information literacy, students.

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Authors: Ponsy R.K. Sathia Bhama, Thamarai Selvi Soma Sundaram, R. Sivakama Sundari, R. Bakiyalakshmi, K. Thamizharasi

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Grid scheduling is the process of mapping grid jobs to resources over multiple administrative domains. Traditionally, application-level schedulers have been tightly integrated with the application itself and were not easily applied to other applications. This design is generic that decouples the scheduler core (the search procedure) from the application-specific (e.g. application performance models) and platform-specific (e.g. collection of resource information) components used by the search procedure. In this decoupled approach the application details are not revealed completely to broker, but customer will give the application to resource provider for execution. In a decoupled approach, apart from scheduling, the resource selection can be performed independently in order to achieve scalability.

Keywords: Meta, grid scheduling, application-level scheduler, decouple, scheduler core and performance model.

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Authors: Lijia Wang, Xuexi Huo

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This study analyzes characteristics determining member’s willingness to invest in cooperatives using ordered logit model. The data were collected in a field survey among 122 cooperative members in north-central China. The descriptive analysis of survey evidence suggests that cooperatives in China generally having poor ability to deliver the processing services related to product package, grading, and storage, performing worse in profitability, inability of providing returns to capital and obtaining agricultural loan. The regression results demonstrate that members’ farm size, their satisfaction with cooperative price preferential services, attitudes toward cooperative operational scale and development potential have statistically significant impact on willingness to invest.

Keywords: Cooperatives, investment willingness, member, ordered logit.

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Authors: Amal Kr Sarma, H Zeen Devi, N Nimai Singh

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The Constraints imposed by non-thermal leptogenesis on the survival of the neutrino mass models describing the presently available neutrino mass patterns, are studied numerically. We consider the Majorana CP violating phases coming from right-handed Majorana mass matrices to estimate the baryon asymmetry of the universe, for different neutrino mass models namely quasi-degenerate, inverted hierarchical and normal hierarchical models, with tribimaximal mixings. Considering two possible diagonal forms of Dirac neutrino mass matrix as either charged lepton or up-quark mass matrix, the heavy right-handed mass matrices are constructed from the light neutrino mass matrix. Only the normal hierarchical model leads to the best predictions of baryon asymmetry of the universe, consistent with observations in non-thermal leptogenesis scenario.

Keywords: Thermal leptogenesis, Non-thermal leptogenesis.

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Authors: Yin-Yann Chen

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As the gradual increase of the enterprise scale, the firms may possess many manufacturing plants located in different places geographically. This change will result in the multi-site production planning problems under the environment of multiple plants or production resources. Our research proposes the structural framework to analyze the multi-site planning problems. The analytical framework is composed of six elements: multi-site conceptual model, product structure (bill of manufacturing), production strategy, manufacturing capability and characteristics, production planning constraints, and key performance indicators. As well as the discussion of these six ingredients, we also review related literatures in this paper to match our analytical framework. Finally we take a real-world practical example of a TFT-LCD manufacturer in Taiwan to explain our proposed analytical framework for the multi-site production planning problems.

Keywords: Multi-Site, Production Planning, Supply Chain, TFT-LCD.

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Authors: Pavel Vazan, Pavol Tanuska, Michal Kebisek

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The paper gives the pilot results of the project that is oriented on the use of data mining techniques and knowledge discoveries from production systems through them. They have been used in the management of these systems. The simulation models of manufacturing systems have been developed to obtain the necessary data about production. The authors have developed the way of storing data obtained from the simulation models in the data warehouse. Data mining model has been created by using specific methods and selected techniques for defined problems of production system management. The new knowledge has been applied to production management system. Gained knowledge has been tested on simulation models of the production system. An important benefit of the project has been proposal of the new methodology. This methodology is focused on data mining from the databases that store operational data about the production process.

Keywords: data mining, data warehousing, management of production system, simulation

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Authors: Jin-Woong Park, Sun-Kyung Kang, Sung-Tae Jung

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In this study, we propose a tongue diagnosis method which detects the tongue from face image and divides the tongue area into six areas, and finally generates tongue coating ratio of each area. To detect the tongue area from face image, we use ASM as one of the active shape models. Detected tongue area is divided into six areas widely used in the Korean traditional medicine and the distribution of tongue coating of the six areas is examined by SVM(Support Vector Machine). For SVM, we use a 3-dimensional vector calculated by PCA(Principal Component Analysis) from a 12-dimentional vector consisting of RGB, HIS, Lab, and Luv. As a result, we detected the tongue area stably using ASM and found that PCA and SVM helped raise the ratio of tongue coating detection.

Keywords: Active Shape Model, Principal Component Analysis, Support Vector Machine, Tongue diagnosis

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Authors: Vladyslav Povoroznyuk, Larysa Martynyuk, Iryna Syzonenko, Liliya Martynyuk

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Osteoporosis is one of the important problems in postmenopausal women due to an increased risk of sudden and unexpected fractures. This study is aimed to determine the connection between bone mineral density (BMD) and trabecular bone score (TBS) in Ukrainian women suffering from metabolic syndrome. Participating in the study, 566 menopausal women aged 50-79 year-old were examined and divided into two groups: Group A included 336 women with no obesity (BMI ≤ 29.9 kg/m²), and Group B – 230 women with metabolic syndrome (diagnosis according to IDF criteria, 2005). Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry was used for measuring of lumbar spine (L1-L4), femoral neck, total body and forearm BMD and bone quality indexes (last according to Med-Imaps installation). Data were analyzed using Statistical Package 6.0. A significant increase of lumbar spine (L1-L4), femoral neck, total body and ultradistal radius BMD was found in women with metabolic syndrome compared to those without obesity (p < 0.001) both in their totality and in groups of 50-59 years, 60-69 years, and 70-79 years. TBS was significantly higher in non-obese women compared to metabolic syndrome patients of 50-59 years and in the general sample (p < 0.05). Analysis showed significant positive correlation between body mass index (BMI) and BMD at all levels. Significant negative correlation between BMI and TBS (L1-L4) was established. Despite the fact that BMD indexes were significantly higher in women with metabolic syndrome, the frequency of vertebral and non-vertebral fractures did not differ significantly in the groups of patients.

Keywords: Bone mineral density, trabecular bone score, metabolic syndrome, fracture.

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Authors: B. O. Diyaolu, E. A. Okebanjo

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Children in today’s world need attention and care even with their physique as obesity is also at the increased. Several factors can be responsible for obesity in children and adequate attention is paramount in other not to accommodate it into adolescent period. This study investigated perceived determinants of obesity among primary school pupils in Eti Osa Local Government area of Lagos State. Descriptive survey research design was used and population was all obese pupils in Eti Osa Local Government Area of Lagos State. 92 pupils were selected from randomly picked 12 primary schools while purposive sampling technique was used to pick primary 4-6 pupils. With the aid of body mass index (BMI) and age percentile chart the obese pupils were selected. The instrument for the study was a self-developed and structured questionnaire on perceived determinant of obesity. The questionnaire was divided into three sections. The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient of 0.74 was obtained. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 significant levels. The completed questionnaire was collated coded and analyzed using descriptive statistics of frequency counts and percentage and inferential statistics of chi-square (X²). Findings of this study revealed that physical activities and parental influences were determinant of obesity. Physical activity is essential in reducing the rate of obesity in Eti Osa Local Government Area both at home and within the school environment. Primary schools need to create more playing ground for pupils to exercise themselves. Parents need to cater for their children diet ensuring not just the quantity but the quality as well.

Keywords: Feeding pattern, obese pupils, parental influence, physical activities.

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Authors: J. Dutta, P. Pranith Kumar Reddy

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This research paper portrays a comparative analysis of thermomechanical behaviour of Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW) and Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) of low carbon steel of AISI 1020 grade butt joints. The thermal history has been obtained by experimental work. We have focused on temperature dependent cooling rate as depicted by Adam’s two-dimensional model. The effect of moving point heat source of SMAW and GTAW on mechanical properties has been judged by optical and scanning electron micrographs of different regions in weld joints. The microhardness study has been carried to visualize the joint strength due to formation of different phases.

Keywords: Shielded metal arc welding, gas tungsten arc welding, low carbon steel, microhardness study, thermal history, microscopic morphology.

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Authors: Roshan Sharma, Bjørn Glemmestad

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In gas lifted oil fields, the lift gas should be distributed optimally among the wells which share gas from a common source to maximize total oil production. One of the objectives of the paper is to show that a linear MPC consisting of a control objective and an economic objective can be used both as an optimizer and a controller for gas lifted systems. The MPC is based on linearized model of the oil field developed from first principles modeling. Simulation results show that the total oil production is increased by 3.4%. Difficulties in accurately measuring the bottom hole pressure using sensors in harsh operating conditions can be resolved by using an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) for estimation. In oil fields where input disturbance (total supply of gas) is not measured, UKF can also be used for disturbance estimation. Increased total oil production due to optimization leads to increased profit.

Keywords: gas lift, MPC, oil production, optimization, Unscented Kalman filter.

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Authors: Hossein Morshedlou, Ahmad Abdollahzade Barforoush

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Recent developments in storage technology and networking architectures have made it possible for broad areas of applications to rely on data streams for quick response and accurate decision making. Data streams are generated from events of real world so existence of associations, which are among the occurrence of these events in real world, among concepts of data streams is logical. Extraction of these hidden associations can be useful for prediction of subsequent concepts in concept shifting data streams. In this paper we present a new method for learning association among concepts of data stream and prediction of what the next concept will be. Knowing the next concept, an informed update of data model will be possible. The results of conducted experiments show that the proposed method is proper for classification of concept shifting data streams.

Keywords: Data Stream, Classification, Concept Shift, History.

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