Search results for: health monitoring services.

Authors: Scott N. Gerard, Aliza Heching, Susann M. Keohane, Samuel S. Adams

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The world-wide population of people over 60 years of age is growing rapidly. The explosion is placing increasingly onerous demands on individual families, multiple industries and entire countries. Current, human-intensive approaches to eldercare are not sustainable, but IoT and AI technologies can help. The Knowledge Reactor (KR) is a contextual, data fusion engine built to address this and other similar problems. It fuses and centralizes IoT and System of Record/Engagement data into a reactive knowledge graph. Cognitive applications and services are constructed with its multiagent architecture. The KR can scale-up and scaledown, because it exploits container-based, horizontally scalable services for graph store (JanusGraph) and pub-sub (Kafka) technologies. While the KR can be applied to many domains that require IoT and AI technologies, this paper describes how the KR specifically supports the challenging domain of cognitive eldercare. Rule- and machine learning-based analytics infer activities of daily living from IoT sensor readings. KR scalability, adaptability, flexibility and usability are demonstrated.

Keywords: Ambient sensing, AI, artificial intelligence, eldercare, IoT, internet of things, knowledge graph.

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Authors: M. Cuevas-González, O. Monserrat, A. Barra, C. Reyes-Carmona, R. M. Mateos, J. P. Galve, R. Sarro, M. Cantalejo, E. Peña, M. Martínez-Corbella, J. A. Luque, J. M. Azañón, A. Millares, M. Béjar, J. A. Navarro, L. Solari

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Geohazard prone areas require continuous monitoring to detect risks, understand the phenomena occurring in those regions and prevent disasters. Satellite interferometry (InSAR) has come to be a trustworthy technique for ground movement detection and monitoring in the last few years. InSAR based techniques allow to process large areas providing high number of displacement measurements at low cost. However, the results provided by such techniques are usually not easy to interpret by non-experienced users hampering its use for decision makers. This work presents a set of tools developed in the framework of different projects (Momit, Safety, U-Geohaz, Riskcoast) and an example of their use in the Granada Coastal area (Spain) is shown. The ADA (Active Displacement Areas) tool has been developed with the aim of easing the management, use and interpretation of InSAR based results. It provides a semi-automatic extraction of the most significant ADAs through the application ADAFinder tool. This tool aims to support the exploitation of the European Ground Motion Service (EU-GMS), which will offer reliable and systematic information on natural and anthropogenic ground motion phenomena across Europe.

Keywords: Ground displacements, InSAR, natural hazards, satellite imagery.

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Authors: Esmeralda Hysenbelliu

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The aim of this paper is to present the QoE (Quality of Experience) IPTV SDN-based media streaming server enhanced architecture for configuring, controlling, management and provisioning the improved delivery of IPTV service application with low cost, low bandwidth, and high security. Furthermore, it is given a virtual QoE IPTV SDN-based topology to provide an improved IPTV service based on QoE Control and Management of multimedia services functionalities. Inside OpenFlow SDN Controller there are enabled in high flexibility and efficiency Service Load-Balancing Systems; based on the Loading-Balance module and based on GeoIP Service. This two Load-balancing system improve IPTV end-users Quality of Experience (QoE) with optimal management of resources greatly. Through the key functionalities of OpenFlow SDN controller, this approach produced several important features, opportunities for overcoming the critical QoE metrics for IPTV Service like achieving incredible Fast Zapping time (Channel Switching time) < 0.1 seconds. This approach enabled Easy and Powerful Transcoding system via FFMPEG encoder. It has the ability to customize streaming dimensions bitrates, latency management and maximum transfer rates ensuring delivering of IPTV streaming services (Audio and Video) in high flexibility, low bandwidth and required performance. This QoE IPTV SDN-based media streaming architecture unlike other architectures provides the possibility of Channel Exchanging between several IPTV service providers all over the word. This new functionality brings many benefits as increasing the number of TV channels received by end –users with low cost, decreasing stream failure time (Channel Failure time < 0.1 seconds) and improving the quality of streaming services.

Keywords: Improved QoE, OpenFlow SDN controller, IPTV service application, softwarization.

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Authors: Smita S. D. Goorah, Melisha Panchoo

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In Mauritius, much emphasis is put on measures to combat the high prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Health promotion campaigns for the adoption of healthy behaviors and screening programs are done regularly by local authorities and NCD surveys are carried out at intervals. However, the health behaviors of the poor have not been investigated so far. This study aims to give an insight on the perceptions of health status and lifestyle health behaviors of poor people in Mauritius. A crosssectional study among 83 persons benefiting from social aid in a selected urban district was carried out. Results showed that 51.8% of respondents perceived that they had good health status. 57.8% had no known NCD whilst 25.3% had hypertension, followed by diabetes (16.9%), asthma (9.6%) and heart disease (7.2%).They had low smoking (10.8%) and alcohol consumption (6.0%) as well as high physical activity prevalence (54.2%). These results were significantly different from the NCD survey carried out in the general population. Consumption of vegetables in the study was high. Overweight and obesity trends were however similar to the NCD survey report 2009. These findings contrast with other international studies showing poor people having poor perceptions of health status and unhealthy behavioral choices. Whether these positive health behaviors of poor people in Mauritius arise out of choice or whether it is because the alternative behavior is too costly remains to be investigated further.

Keywords: Health behavior, non-communicable diseases, poor people.

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Authors: Qatawneh H., Yousef S., Shirvani H.

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The purpose of this article is to propose a model designed to achieve Total Knowledge Transfer in the public health sector. The Total Knowledge Transfer Model integrated four essential organizational factors which have been under examined in totality in the literature. The research design was inductive in nature and used a case study for accomplishing the research objectives. The researcher investigated the factors that created a base to design a framework for total knowledge transfer in the public health sector. The results of this study are drawn from a fairly large sample in only two hospitals. A further research can be conducted to cover more responses from a wider health sector. The Total Knowledge Transfer Model is essential to improve the transfer and application of total common health knowledge.

Keywords: Health Care, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Transfer.

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Authors: Satoshi Komorita, Tsunehiko Chiba, Hidetoshi Yokota, Ashutosh Dutta, Christian Makaya, Subir Das, Dana Chee, F. Joe Lin, Henning Schulzrinne

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The NGN (Next Generation Network), which can provide advanced multimedia services over an all-IP based network, has been the subject of much attention for years. While there have been tremendous efforts to develop its architecture and protocols, especially for IMS, which is a key technology of the NGN, it is far from being widely deployed. However, efforts to create an advanced signaling infrastructure realizing many requirements have resulted in a large number of functional components and interactions between those components. Thus, the carriers are trying to explore effective ways to deploy IMS while offering value-added services. As one such approach, we have proposed a self-organizing IMS. A self-organizing IMS enables IMS functional components and corresponding physical nodes to adapt dynamically and automatically based on situation such as network load and available system resources while continuing IMS operation. To realize this, service continuity for users is an important requirement when a reconfiguration occurs during operation. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that will provide service continuity to users and focus on the implementation and describe performance evaluation in terms of number of control signaling and processing time during reconfiguration

Keywords: IMS, SIP, Service Continuity, Self-organizing, and Performance.

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Authors: Sadovska V.

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The progress of concentrations of particular heavy metals was assessed in chosen localities in region Moravia, the Czech Republic, from 2007 to 2009. Particular metals were observed in localities with various types and characterization of zone. Pb, Ni, As and Cd were emphasized as a result of their toxicity and potential adverse health effect to the exposed population. The progress of metal concentrations and their health effects in the most polluted localities were examined. According to the results, the air pollution limit values were not exceeded. Based on the health risk assessment, the probability of developing tumorous diseases is acceptable, except for the increased probability of cancer risk from long-term exposure to As.

Keywords: Air pollution, heavy metals, health risk assessment, individual lifetime cancer risk

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Authors: Karolína Vozková, Matěj Kuc

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Net fee and commission income is one of the key elements of a bank’s core income. In the current low-interest rate environment, this type of income is gaining importance relative to net interest income. This paper analyses the effects of bank and country specific determinants of net fee and commission income on a set of cooperative banks from European countries in the 2007-2014 period. In order to do that, dynamic panel data methods (system Generalized Methods of Moments) were employed. Subsequently, alternative panel data methods were run as robustness checks of the analysis. Strong positive impact of bank concentration on the share of net fee and commission income was found, which proves that cooperative banks tend to display a higher share of fee income in less competitive markets. This is probably connected with the fact that they stick with their traditional deposit-taking and loan-providing model and fees on these services are driven down by the competitors. Moreover, compared to commercial banks, cooperatives do not expand heavily into non-traditional fee bearing services under competition and their overall fee income share is therefore decreasing with the increased competitiveness of the sector.

Keywords: Cooperative banking, dynamic panel data models, net fee, commission income, system GMM.

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Authors: Pradyumna Kumar Sahoo, Prasanta Kumar Satpathy

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This paper aims at finding a suitable neural network for monitoring congestion level in electrical power systems. In this paper, the input data has been framed properly to meet the target objective through supervised learning mechanism by defining normal and abnormal operating conditions for the system under study. The congestion level, expressed as line congestion index (LCI), is evaluated for each operating condition and is presented to the NN along with the bus voltages to represent the input and target data. Once, the training goes successful, the NN learns how to deal with a set of newly presented data through validation and testing mechanism. The crux of the results presented in this paper rests on performance comparison of a multi-layered feed forward neural network with eleven types of back propagation techniques so as to evolve the best training criteria. The proposed methodology has been tested on the standard IEEE-14 bus test system with the support of MATLAB based NN toolbox. The results presented in this paper signify that the Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation algorithm gives best training performance of all the eleven cases considered in this paper, thus validating the proposed methodology.

Keywords: Line congestion index, critical bus, contingency, neural network.

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Authors: I. Derek Kaka’an, P. Smolianov, D. Koh Choon Lian, S. Dion, C. Schoen, J. Norberg

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This study was designed to examine mass participation and elite football performance in Nigeria with reference to advance international football management practices. Over 200 sources of literature on sport delivery systems were analyzed to construct a globally applicable model of elite football integrated with mass participation, comprising of the following three levels: macro- (socio-economic, cultural, legislative, and organizational), meso- (infrastructures, personnel, and services enabling sport programs) and micro-level (operations, processes, and methodologies for development of individual athletes). The model has received scholarly validation and showed to be a framework for program analysis that is not culturally bound. The Smolianov and Zakus model has been employed for further understanding of sport systems such as US soccer, US Rugby, swimming, tennis, and volleyball as well as Russian and Dutch swimming. A questionnaire was developed using the above-mentioned model. Survey questions were validated by 12 experts including academicians, executives from sport governing bodies, football coaches, and administrators. To identify best practices and determine areas for improvement of football in Nigeria, 120 coaches completed the questionnaire. Useful exemplars and possible improvements were further identified through semi-structured discussions with 10 Nigerian football administrators and experts. Finally, content analysis of Nigeria Football Federation’s website and organizational documentation was conducted. This paper focuses on the meso-level of Nigerian football delivery, particularly infrastructures, personnel, and services enabling sport programs. This includes training centers, competition systems, and intellectual services. Results identified remarkable achievements coupled with great potential to further develop football in different types of public and private organizations in Nigeria. These include: assimilating football competitions with other cultural and educational activities, providing favorable conditions for employees of all possible organizations to partake and help in managing football programs and events, providing football coaching integrated with counseling for prevention of antisocial conduct, and improving cooperation between football programs and organizations for peace-making and advancement of international relations, tourism, and socio-economic development. Accurate reporting of the sports programs from the media should be encouraged through staff training for better awareness of various events. The systematic integration of these meso-level practices into the balanced development of mass and high-performance football will contribute to international sport success as well as national health, education, and social harmony.

Keywords: Football, high performance, mass participation, Nigeria, sport development.

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Authors: E. Tskitishvili, L. Jgenti, I. Eliava, T. Tskitishvili, N. Bagathuria, M. Gigolashvili

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There has been studied the distribution character of potato stem nematode (Ditylenchus destructor Thorne, 1945) on the potato fields in four municipalities (Tsalka, Bolnisi, Marneuli, Gardabani) of Kvemo Kartli (Eastern Georgia).

As a result of scientific research there is stated the extensiveness of pathogens invasion, accompanying composition of fauna species, environmental groups of populations and quantity.

During the research process in the studied ecosystems there were registered 160 forms of free-living and Phyto-parasitic nematodes, from which 118 forms are determined as species and 42 as genus.

It was found that in almost the entire studied ecosystem there is dominated pathogenic nematodes Ditylenchus destructor. The large number of exemplars (almost uncountable) was found in tubers material of Bolnisi and Gardabani. 

Keywords: Nematoda, potato, steam, bioecological, monitoring.

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Authors: Mohammad Syuhaimi Ab-Rahman, Boonchuan Ng, Kasmiran Jumari

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This paper presented a MATLAB-based system named Smart Access Network Testing, Analyzing and Database (SANTAD), purposely for in-service transmission surveillance and self restoration against fiber fault in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) access network. The developed program will be installed with optical line terminal (OLT) at central office (CO) to monitor the status and detect any fiber fault that occurs in FTTH downwardly from CO towards residential customer locations. SANTAD is interfaced with optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) to accumulate every network testing result to be displayed on a single computer screen for further analysis. This program will identify and present the parameters of each optical fiber line such as the line's status either in working or nonworking condition, magnitude of decreasing at each point, failure location, and other details as shown in the OTDR's screen. The failure status will be delivered to field engineers for promptly actions, meanwhile the failure line will be diverted to protection line to ensure the traffic flow continuously. This approach has a bright prospect to improve the survivability and reliability as well as increase the efficiency and monitoring capabilities in FTTH.

Keywords: MATLAB, SANTAD, in-service transmission surveillance, self restoration, fiber fault, FTTH

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Authors: Glenda Wrenn, Juliet Muzere, Meldra Hall, Allyson Belton, Kisha Holden, Chanita Hughes-Halbert, Martha Kent, Bekh Bradley

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Understanding the help seeking decision making process and experiences of health disparity populations with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is central to development of trauma-informed, culturally centered, and patient focused services. Yet, little is known about the decision making process among adult Black women who are non-treatment seekers as they are, by definition, not engaged in services. Methods: Audiotaped interviews were conducted with 30 African American adult women with clinically significant PTSD symptoms who were engaged in primary care, but not in treatment for PTSD despite symptom burden. A qualitative interview guide was used to elucidate key themes. Independent coding of themes mapped to theory and identification of emergent themes were conducted using qualitative methods. An existing quantitative dataset was analyzed to contextualize responses and provide a descriptive summary of the sample. Results: Emergent themes revealed that active mental avoidance, the intermittent nature of distress, ambivalence, and self-identified resilience as undermining to help seeking decisions. Participants were stuck within the help-seeking phase of ‘recognition’ of illness and retained a sense of “it is my decision” despite endorsing significant social and environmental negative influencers. Participants distinguished ‘help acceptance’ from ‘help seeking’ with greater willingness to accept help and importance placed on being of help to others. Conclusions: Elucidation of the decision-making process from the perspective of non-treatment seekers has implications for outreach and treatment within models of integrated and specialty systems care. The salience of responses to trauma symptoms and stagnation in the help seeking recognition phase are findings relevant to integrated care service design and community engagement.

Keywords: Culture, help-seeking, integrated care, PTSD.

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Authors: Mohammad K. Abedin, Mohammad Shahjahan, Zeenat Sultana, Tawfique Jahan, Jesmin Akter

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To strengthen social and behavior change communication (SBCC) capacity of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) of the Government of Bangladesh, BCCP/BKMI developed two eLearning courses providing opportunities for professional development of SBCC Program Managers who have no access to training or refreshers training. The two eLearning courses – Message and Material Development (MMD) and Monitoring and Evaluation (MandE) of SBCC programs – went online in September 2015, where all users could register their participation so results could be monitored. Methodology: To assess the uses of these courses a randomly selected sample was collected to run a pre and post-test analyses and a phone survey were conducted. Systematic random sampling was used to select a sample of 75 MandE and 25 MMD course participants from a sampling frame of 179 and 51 respectively. Results: As of September 2016, more than 179 learners have completed the MandE course, and 49 learners have completed the MMD course. The users of these courses are program managers, university faculty members, and students. Encouraging results were revealed from the analysis of pre and post-test scores and a phone survey three months after course completion. Test scores suggested a substantial increase in knowledge. The pre-test scores findings suggested that about 19% learners scored high on the MandE. The post-test scores finding indicated a high score (92%) of the sample across 4 modules of MandE. For MMD course in pre-test scoring, 30% of the learners scored high, and 100% scored high at the post-test. It was found that all the learners in the phone survey have discussed the courses. Most of the sharing occurred with colleagues and friends, usually through face to face (70%) interaction. The learners reported that they did recommend the two courses to concerned people. About 67% MandE and 76% MMD learners stated that the concepts that they had to learn during the course were put into practice in their work settings. The respondents for both MandE and MMD courses have provided a valuable set of suggestions that would further strengthen the courses. Conclusions: The study showed that the initiative offered ample opportunities to build capacity in various ways in which the eLearning courses were used. It also highlighted the importance of scaling up these efforts to further strengthen the outcomes.

Keywords: E-learning course, message and material development, monitoring and evaluation, social and behavior change communication.

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Authors: Sitalakshmi Venkataraman

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Recent scientific investigations indicate that multimodal biometrics overcome the technical limitations of unimodal biometrics, making them ideally suited for everyday life applications that require a reliable authentication system. However, for a successful adoption of multimodal biometrics, such systems would require large heterogeneous datasets with complex multimodal fusion and privacy schemes spanning various distributed environments. From experimental investigations of current multimodal systems, this paper reports the various issues related to speed, error-recovery and privacy that impede the diffusion of such systems in real-life. This calls for a robust mechanism that caters to the desired real-time performance, robust fusion schemes, interoperability and adaptable privacy policies. The main objective of this paper is to present a framework that addresses the abovementioned issues by leveraging on the heterogeneous resource sharing capacities of Grid services and the efficient machine learning capabilities of artificial neural networks (ANN). Hence, this paper proposes a Grid-based neural network framework for adopting multimodal biometrics with the view of overcoming the barriers of performance, privacy and risk issues that are associated with shared heterogeneous multimodal data centres. The framework combines the concept of Grid services for reliable brokering and privacy policy management of shared biometric resources along with a momentum back propagation ANN (MBPANN) model of machine learning for efficient multimodal fusion and authentication schemes. Real-life applications would be able to adopt the proposed framework to cater to the varying business requirements and user privacies for a successful diffusion of multimodal biometrics in various day-to-day transactions.

Keywords: Back Propagation, Grid Services, MultimodalBiometrics, Neural Networks.

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Authors: Zhankun Wang, Timothy Makubuya

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The efficiency of public sports service of prefecture-level cities in Zhejiang from 2008 to 2012 was evaluated by applying the DEA method, then its influencing factors were also analyzed through Tobit model. Upon analysis, the results revealed the following; (i) the change in average efficiency of public sports service in Zhejiang present a smooth uptrend and at a relatively high level from 2008 to 2012 (ii) generally, the productivity of public sports service in Zhejiang improved from 2008 to 2012, the productivity efficiency varied greatly in different years, and the regional difference of production efficiency increased. (iii) The correlations for urbanization rate, aging rate, per capita GDP and the population density were significantly positive with the public sports service efficiency in Zhejiang, of which the most significant was the aging rate. However, the population density and per capita GDP had less impact on the efficiency of public sports service in Zhejiang. In addition, whether the efficiency of public sports services in different areas in Zhejiang reciprocates to overall benefits in public wellbeing in both rural and urban settings is still arguable.

Keywords: DEA Model, public sports service, efficiency, Tobit model, Malmquist productivity index, Zhejiang.

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Authors: Amri Yusoff, Shahrizuan Shafiril, Ashardi Abas, Norma Che Yusoff

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Nowadays, illegal logging has been causing many effects including flash flood, avalanche, global warming, and etc. The purpose of this study was to maintain the earth ecosystem by keeping and regulate Malaysia’s treasurable rainforest by utilizing a new technology that will assist in real-time alert and give faster response to the authority to act on these illegal activities. The methodology of this research consisted of design stages that have been conducted as well as the system model and system architecture of the prototype in addition to the proposed hardware and software that have been mainly used such as microcontroller, sensor with the implementation of GSM, and GPS integrated system. This prototype was deployed at Royal Belum forest in December 2014 for phase 1 and April 2015 for phase 2 at 21 pinpoint locations. The findings of this research were the capture of data in real-time such as temperature, humidity, gaseous, fire, and rain detection which indicate the current natural state and habitat in the forest. Besides, this device location can be detected via GPS of its current location and then transmitted by SMS via GSM system. All of its readings were sent in real-time for further analysis. The data that were compared to meteorological department showed that the precision of this device was about 95% and these findings proved that the system is acceptable and suitable to be used in the field.

Keywords: Remote monitoring system, forest data, GSM, GPS, wireless sensor.

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Authors: John Lamb, Robert Epstein, Vasundhara L. Bhupathi, Sanjeev Kumar Marimekala

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As we enter the new era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, we mostly rely on the machine and natural language processing capabilities of AI, and energy efficient hardware and software devices in almost every industry sector. In these industry sectors, much emphasis is on developing new and innovative methods for producing and conserving energy and to sustain the depletion of natural resources. The core pillars of sustainability are Economic, Environmental, and Social, which are also informally referred to as 3 P's (People, Planet and Profits). The 3 P's play a vital role in creating a core sustainability model in the enterprise. Natural resources are continually being depleted, so there is more focus and growing demand for renewable energy. With this growing demand there is also a growing concern in many industries on how to reduce carbon emission and conserve natural resources while adopting sustainability in the corporate business models and policies. In our paper, we would like to discuss the driving forces such as climate changes, natural disasters, pandemic, disruptive technologies, corporate policies, scaled business models and emerging social media and AI platforms that influence the 3 main pillars of sustainability (3P’s). Through this paper, we would like to bring an overall perspective on enterprise strategies and the primary focus on bringing cultural shifts in adapting energy efficient operational models. Overall, many industries across the globe are incorporating core sustainability principles such as reducing energy costs, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reducing waste and increase recycling, adopting advanced monitoring and metering infrastructure, reducing server footprint and compute resources (shared IT services, cloud computing and application modernization) with the vision for a sustainable environment.

Keywords: AI, cloud computing, machine learning, social media platform.

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Authors: M. Derayatifar, M. Packirisamy, R.B. Bhat

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Role of piezoelectric energy harvesters has gained interest in supplying power for micro devices such as health monitoring sensors. In this study, in order to enhance the piezoelectric energy harvesting in capturing energy from broader range of excitation and to improve the mechanical and electrical responses, bimorph piezoelectric energy harvester beam with magnetic mass attached at the end is presented. In view of overcoming the brittleness of piezo-ceramics, functionally graded piezoelectric layers comprising of both piezo-ceramic and piezo-polymer is employed. The nonlinear equations of motions are derived using energy method and then solved analytically using perturbation scheme. The frequency responses of the forced vibration case are obtained for the near resonance case. The nonlinear dynamic responses of the MEMS scaled functionally graded piezoelectric energy harvester in this paper may be utilized in different design scenarios to increase the efficiency of the harvester.

Keywords: Energy harvesting, functionally graded piezoelectric material, magnetic force, MEMS piezoelectric, perturbation method.

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Authors: Shuen-Tai Wang, Hsi-Ya Chang

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Cloud computing is becoming more and more matured over the last few years and consequently the demands for better cloud services is increasing rapidly. One of the research topics to improve cloud services is the desktop computing in virtualized environment. This paper aims at the development of an adaptive virtual desktop service in cloud computing platform based on our previous research on the virtualization technology. We implement cloud virtual desktop and application software streaming technology that make it possible for providing Virtual Desktop as a Service (VDaaS). Given the development of remote desktop virtualization, it allows shifting the user’s desktop from the traditional PC environment to the cloud-enabled environment, which is stored on a remote virtual machine rather than locally. This proposed effort has the potential to positively provide an efficient, resilience and elastic environment for online cloud service. Users no longer need to burden the platform maintenances and drastically reduces the overall cost of hardware and software licenses. Moreover, this flexible remote desktop service represents the next significant step to the mobile workplace, and it lets users access their desktop environments from virtually anywhere.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Desktop, VDaaS.

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Authors: Armando Cartenì, Ilaria Henke

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The perceived public transport quality is an important driver that influences both customer satisfaction and mobility choices. The competition among transport operators needs to improve the quality of the services and identify which attributes are perceived as relevant by passengers. Among the “traditional” public transport quality attributes there are, for example: travel and waiting time, regularity of the services, and ticket price. By contrast, there are some “non-conventional” attributes that could significantly influence customer satisfaction jointly with the “traditional” ones. Among these, the beauty/aesthetics of the transport terminals (e.g. rail station and bus terminal) is probably one of the most impacting on user perception. Starting from these considerations, the point stressed in this paper was if (and how munch) the travel experience of the overall travel (e.g. how long is the travel, how many transport modes must be used) influences the perception of the public transport quality. The aim of this paper was to investigate the weight of the terminal quality (e.g. aesthetic, comfort and service offered) within the overall travel experience. The case study was the extra-urban Italian bus network. The passengers of the major Italian terminal bus were interviewed and the analysis of the results shows that about the 75% of the travelers, are available to pay up to 30% more for the ticket price for having a high quality terminal. A travel experience effect was observed: the average perceived transport quality varies with the characteristic of the overall trip. The passengers that have a “long trip” (travel time greater than 2 hours) perceived as “low” the overall quality of the trip even if they pass through a high quality terminal. The opposite occurs for the “short trip” passengers. This means that if a traveler passes through a high quality station, the overall perception of that terminal could be significantly reduced if he is tired from a long trip. This result is important and if confirmed through other case studies, will allow to conclude that the “travel experience impact" must be considered as an explicit design variable for public transport services and planning.

Keywords: Transportation planning, sustainable mobility, decision support system, discrete choice model, design problem.

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Authors: P. Vijaya Laxmi, V. Goswami, V. Suchitra

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This paper presents a finite buffer renewal input single working vacation and vacation interruption queue with state dependent services and state dependent vacations, which has a wide range of applications in several areas including manufacturing, wireless communication systems. Service times during busy period, vacation period and vacation times are exponentially distributed and are state dependent. As a result of the finite waiting space, state dependent services and state dependent vacation policies, the analysis of these queueing models needs special attention. We provide a recursive method using the supplementary variable technique to compute the stationary queue length distributions at pre-arrival and arbitrary epochs. An efficient computational algorithm of the model is presented which is fast and accurate and easy to implement. Various performance measures have been discussed. Finally, some special cases and numerical results have been depicted in the form of tables and graphs. 

Keywords: State Dependent Service, Vacation Interruption, Supplementary Variable, Single Working Vacation, Blocking Probability.

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Authors: Shun Hattori

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In recent years, many researches to mine the exploding Web world, especially User Generated Content (UGC) such as weblogs, for knowledge about various phenomena and events in the physical world have been done actively, and also Web services with the Web-mined knowledge have begun to be developed for the public. However, there are few detailed investigations on how accurately Web-mined data reflect physical-world data. It must be problematic to idolatrously utilize the Web-mined data in public Web services without ensuring their accuracy sufficiently. Therefore, this paper introduces the simplest Web Sensor and spatiotemporallynormalized Web Sensor to extract spatiotemporal data about a target phenomenon from weblogs searched by keyword(s) representing the target phenomenon, and tries to validate the potential and reliability of the Web-sensed spatiotemporal data by four kinds of granularity analyses of coefficient correlation with temperature, rainfall, snowfall, and earthquake statistics per day by region of Japan Meteorological Agency as physical-world data: spatial granularity (region-s population density), temporal granularity (time period, e.g., per day vs. per week), representation granularity (e.g., “rain" vs. “heavy rain"), and media granularity (weblogs vs. microblogs such as Tweets).

Keywords: Granularity analysis, knowledge extraction, spatiotemporal data mining, Web credibility, Web mining, Web sensor.

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Authors: A. E. Mukhametov, M. T. Yerbulekova, D. R. Dautkanova, G. A. Tuyakova, G. Aitkhozhayeva

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The accumulation of heavy metals in food is a constant problem in many parts of the world. Vegetable oils are widely used, both for cooking and for processing in the food industry, meeting the main dietary requirements. One of the main chemical pollutants, heavy metals, is usually found in vegetable oils. These chemical pollutants are carcinogenic, teratogenic and immunotoxic, harmful to consumption and have a negative effect on human health even in trace amounts. Residues of these substances can easily accumulate in vegetable oil during cultivation, processing and storage. In this article, the content of the concentration of heavy metal ions in vegetable oils of Kazakhstan production is studied: sunflower, rapeseed, safflower and linseed oil. Heavy metals: arsenic, cadmium, lead and nickel, were determined in three repetitions by the method of flame atomic absorption. Analysis of vegetable oil samples revealed that the largest lead contamination (Pb) was determined to be 0.065 mg/kg in linseed oil. The content of cadmium (Cd) in the largest amount of 0.009 mg/kg was found in safflower oil. Arsenic (As) content was determined in rapeseed and safflower oils at 0.003 mg/kg, and arsenic (As) was not detected in linseed and sunflower oil. The nickel (Ni) content in the largest amount of 0.433 mg/kg was in linseed oil. The heavy metal contents in the test samples complied with the requirements of regulatory documents for vegetable oils. An assessment of the health risk of vegetable oils with a daily consumption of 36 g per day shows that all samples of vegetable oils produced in Kazakhstan are safe for consumption. But further monitoring is needed, since all these metals are toxic and their harmful effects become apparent only after several years of exposure.

Keywords: Kazakhstan, oil, safety, toxic metals.

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Authors: Ammar S. M. Moohialdin, Bambang T. Suhariadi, Mohsin Siddiqui

Abstract:

This paper addresses the application of physiological status monitoring (PSM) for assessing the impact of harsh weather conditions on sports activities in universities in Saudi Arabia. Real sports measurement was conducted during sports activities such that the physiological status (HR and BR) of five students were continuously monitored by using Zephyr BioHarness^TM 3.0 sensors in order to identify the physiological bonds and zones. These bonds and zones were employed as indicators of the associated physiological risks of the performed sports activities. Furthermore, a short yes/no questionnaire was applied to collect information on participants’ health conditions and opinions of the applied PSM sensors. The results show the absence of a warning system as a protective aid for the hazardous levels of extremely hot and humid weather conditions that may cause dangerous and fatal circumstances. The applied formulas for estimating maximum HR provides accurate estimations for Maximum Heart Rate (HR_max). The physiological results reveal that the performed activities by the participants are considered the highest category (90–100%) in terms of activity intensity. This category is associated with higher HR, BR and physiological risks including losing the ability to control human body behaviors. Therefore, there is a need for immediate intervention actions to reduce the intensity of the performed activities to safer zones. The outcomes of this study assist the safety improvement of sports activities inside universities and athletes performing their sports activities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to represent a special case of the application of PSM technology for assessing sports activities in universities considering the impacts of harsh weather conditions on students’ health and safety.

Keywords: PSM, heart rate, HR, breathing rate, BR.

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Authors: Venerando E. Amaro, Francisco Gabriel F. de Lima, Marcelo S.T. Santos

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The morphological short-term evolution of Ponta do Tubarão Island (PTI) was investigated through high accurate surveys based on post-processed kinematic (PPK) relative positioning on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). PTI is part of a barrier island system on a high energy northeast Brazilian coastal environment and also an area of high environmental sensitivity. Surveys were carried out quarterly over a two years period from May 2010 to May 2012. This paper assesses statically the performance of digital elevation models (DEM) derived from different interpolation methods to represent morphologic features and to quantify volumetric changes and TIN models shown the best results to that purposes. The MDE allowed quantifying surfaces and volumes in detail as well as identifying the most vulnerable segments of the PTI to erosion and/or accumulation of sediments and relate the alterations to climate conditions. The coastal setting and geometry of PTI protects a significant mangrove ecosystem and some oil and gas facilities installed in the vicinities from damaging effects of strong oceanwaves and currents. Thus, the maintenance of PTI is extremely required but the prediction of its longevity is uncertain because results indicate an irregularity of sedimentary balance and a substantial decline in sediment supply to this coastal area.

Keywords: DEM, GNSS, short-term monitoring, Brazil.

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Authors: George N. Zaimes, Valasia Iakovoglou, Paschalis Koutalakis, Konstantinos Ioannou, Ioannis Kosmadakis, Panagiotis Tsardaklis, Theodoros Laopoulos

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The advancements in technology allow the development of a new system that can continuously measure surface soil erosion. Continuous soil erosion measurements are required in order to comprehend the erosional processes and propose effective and efficient conservation measures to mitigate surface erosion. Mitigating soil erosion, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Greece, is essential in order to maintain environmental and agricultural sustainability. In this paper, we present the Automated Soil Erosion Monitoring System (ASEMS) that measures surface soil erosion along with other factors that impact erosional process. Specifically, this system measures ground level changes (surface soil erosion), rainfall, air temperature, soil temperature, and soil moisture. Another important innovation is that the data will be collected by remote communication. In addition, stakeholder’s awareness is a key factor to help reduce any environmental problem. The different dissemination activities that were utilized are described. The overall outcomes were the development of a new innovative system that can measure erosion very accurately. These data from the system help study the process of erosion and find the best possible methods to reduce erosion. The dissemination activities enhance the stakeholders and public's awareness on surface soil erosion problems and will lead to the adoption of more effective soil erosion conservation practices in Greece.

Keywords: Soil management, climate change, new technologies, conservation practices.

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Authors: Rudy Bahouth, Farouk Benmeddour, Emmanuel Moulin, Jamal Assaad

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Guided ultrasonic waves are used in Non-Destructive Testing and Structural Health Monitoring for inspection and damage detection. Recently, wireless data transmission using ultrasonic waves in solid metallic channels has gained popularity in some industrial applications such as nuclear, aerospace and smart vehicles. The idea is to find a good substitute for electromagnetic waves since they are highly attenuated near metallic components due to Faraday shielding. The proposed solution is to use ultrasonic guided waves such as Lamb waves as an information carrier due to their capability of propagation for long distances. In addition to this, valuable information about the health of the structure could be extracted simultaneously. In this work, the reliable frequency bandwidth for communication is extracted experimentally from dispersion curves at first. Then, an experimental platform for wireless communication using Lamb waves is described and built. After this, coherent demodulation algorithm used in telecommunications is tested for Amplitude Shift Keying, On-Off Keying and Binary Phase Shift Keying modulation techniques. Signal processing parameters such as threshold choice, number of cycles per bit and Bit Rate are optimized. Experimental results are compared based on the average bit error percentage. Results has shown high sensitivity to threshold selection for Amplitude Shift Keying and On-Off Keying techniques resulting a Bit Rate decrease. Binary Phase Shift Keying technique shows the highest stability and data rate between all tested modulation techniques.

Keywords: Lamb Wave Communication, wireless communication, coherent demodulation, bit error percentage.

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Authors: Ari Lindeman, Melina Maunula, Jani Kiviranta, Ronja Pölkki

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The aim of this paper is to build a vision of the utilization of creative industry competences in industrial and services firms connected to Kymenlaakso region, Finland, smart specialization focus areas. Research indicates that creativity and the use of creative industry’s inputs can enhance innovation and competitiveness. Currently creative methods and services are underutilized in regional businesses and the added value they provide is not well grasped. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative exploratory approach. Data is collected in multiple ways including a survey, focus groups, and interviews. Theoretically, the paper contributes to the discussion about the use creative industry competences in regional development, and argues for building regional creative economy ecosystems in close co-operation with regional strategies and traditional industries rather than as treating regional creative industry ecosystem initiatives separate from them. The practical contribution of the paper is the creative vision for the use of regional authorities in updating smart specialization strategy as well as boosting industrial and creative & cultural sectors’ competitiveness. The paper also illustrates a research-based model of vision building.

Keywords: Business, cooperation, creative economy, regional development, vision.

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Authors: Supattra Kanchanopast

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The purpose of this research was to study the customers’ behavioral trend for online accommodation system at Bangkonthi District, Samutsongkhram province. The research collected data from 400 online users. A questionnaire was utilized as the tool in collecting information. Descriptive statistics included frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation. Independent- sample t- test, analysis of variance and Pearson Correlation were also used. The findings of this research revealed that the majority of the respondents were male, 25-32 years old, and graduated a bachelor degree. The respondents mostly worked in private sectors and had monthly income between 10,001-15,000 baht. The regular online users, visiting this system between 3-4 times/month, spending 1-2 hours/time, searched for online accommodation information. This result showed that the users had good and high attitude towards the system. According to the hypothesis testing, the number of online usage had positive related to the behavioral trends: accommodation purchasing intention and recommend the accommodation to others. Furthermore, both the number of online usage and overall attitude had a significant correlation to accommodation purchase intention and recommend the accommodation to others.

Keywords: Customer Behavior, Information System Management, Online Accommodation Services.

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