Search results for: Ethical decision making

Authors: Aryanejad Mir Bahador Goli, Zahra Honarmand Shah Zileh

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In most study fields, a phenomenon may not be studied directly but it will be examined indirectly by phenomenon model. Making an accurate model of system, there is attained new information from modeled phenomenon without any charge, danger, etc... there have been developed more solutions for describing and analyzing the recent complicated systems but few of them have analyzed the performance in the range of system description. Petri nets are of limited solutions which may make such union. Petri nets are being applied in problems related to modeling and designing the systems. Theory of Petri nets allow a system to model mathematically by a Petri net and analyzing the Petri net can then determine main information of modeled system-s structure and dynamic. This information can be used for assessing the performance of systems and suggesting corrections in the system. In this paper, beside the introduction of Petri nets, a real case study will be studied in order to show the application of generalized stochastic Petri nets in modeling a resource sharing production system and evaluating the efficiency of its machines and robots. The modeling tool used here is SHARP software which calculates specific indicators helping to make decision.

Keywords: Flexible manufacturing system, generalizedstochastic Petri nets, Markov chain, performance evaluation.

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Authors: Lamia Hammadi, Abdellah Ait Ouhman, Aomar Ibourk

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It is widely assumed that the case of Customs Supply Chain is classified as a complex system, due to not only the variety and large number of actors, but also their complex structural links, and the interactions between these actors, that’s why this system is subject to various types of Risks. The economic, political and social impacts of those risks are highly detrimental to countries, businesses and the public, for this reason, Risk management in the customs supply chain is becoming a crucial issue to ensure the sustainability, security and safety. The main characteristic of customs risk management approach is determining which goods and means of transport should be examined? To what extend? And where future compliance resources should be directed? The purposes of this article are, firstly to deal with the concept of customs supply chain, secondly present our risk management approach based on Cross Activity Based Costing (ABC) Method as an interactive tool to support decision making in customs risk management. Finally, analysis of case study of Moroccan customs to putting theory into practice and will thus draw together the various elements of a structured and efficient risk management approach.

Keywords: Cross ABC Method, Customs Supply Chain, Risk, Risk Management.

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Authors: Murat Koklu, Yavuz Unal

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Data mining can be called as a technique to extract information from data. It is the process of obtaining hidden information and then turning it into qualified knowledge by statistical and artificial intelligence technique. One of its application areas is medical area to form decision support systems for diagnosis just by inventing meaningful information from given medical data. In this study a decision support system for diagnosis of illness that make use of data mining and three different artificial intelligence classifier algorithms namely Multilayer Perceptron, Naive Bayes Classifier and J.48. Pima Indian dataset of UCI Machine Learning Repository was used. This dataset includes urinary and blood test results of 768 patients. These test results consist of 8 different feature vectors. Obtained classifying results were compared with the previous studies. The suggestions for future studies were presented.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Classifiers, Data Mining, Diabetic Patients.

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Authors: Rhoann Kerh, Chen-Fu Chien, Kuo-Yi Lin

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In the era of rapidly increasing notebook market, consumer electronics manufacturers are facing a highly dynamic and competitive environment. In particular, the product appearance is the first part for user to distinguish the product from the product of other brands. Notebook product should differ in its appearance to engage users and contribute to the user experience (UX). The UX evaluates various product concepts to find the design for user needs; in addition, help the designer to further understand the product appearance preference of different market segment. However, few studies have been done for exploring the relationship between consumer background and the reaction of product appearance. This study aims to propose a data mining framework to capture the user’s information and the important relation between product appearance factors. The proposed framework consists of problem definition and structuring, data preparation, rules generation, and results evaluation and interpretation. An empirical study has been done in Taiwan that recruited 168 subjects from different background to experience the appearance performance of 11 different portable computers. The results assist the designers to develop product strategies based on the characteristics of consumers and the product concept that related to the UX, which help to launch the products to the right customers and increase the market shares. The results have shown the practical feasibility of the proposed framework.

Keywords: Consumers Decision Making, Product Design, Rough Set Theory, User Experience.

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Authors: Francisco José Plácido da Cunha, Tassio Ferenzini Martins Sirqueira, Marx Leles Viana, Carlos José Pereira de Lucena

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Open Multiagent Systems (MASs) are societies in which heterogeneous and independently designed entities (agents) work towards similar, or different ends. Software agents are autonomous and the diversity of interests among different members living in the same society is a fact. In order to deal with this autonomy, these open systems use mechanisms of social control (norms) to ensure a desirable social order. This paper considers the following types of norms: (i) obligation — agents must accomplish a specific outcome; (ii) permission — agents may act in a particular way, and (iii) prohibition — agents must not act in a specific way. All of these characteristics mean to encourage the fulfillment of norms through rewards and to discourage norm violation by pointing out the punishments. Once the software agent decides that its priority is the satisfaction of its own desires and goals, each agent must evaluate the effects associated to the fulfillment of one or more norms before choosing which one should be fulfilled. The same applies when agents decide to violate a norm. This paper also introduces a framework for the development of MASs that provide support mechanisms to the agent’s decision-making, using norm-based reasoning. The applicability and validation of this approach is demonstrated applying a traffic intersection scenario.

Keywords: BDI aAgent, BDI4JADE framework, multiagent system, normative agents.

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Authors: Mingwei Yi, Liujie Guo, Zongjun Pan, Xiang Lin, Xiaoming Yi

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With the rapid expansion of road construction mileage in China, the scale of road maintenance needs has concurrently escalated. As the service life of roads extends, the design of pavement repair and maintenance emerges as a crucial component in preserving the excellent performance of the pavement. The remaining service life of asphalt pavement structure is a vital parameter in the lifecycle maintenance design of asphalt pavements. Based on an analysis of pavement structural integrity, this study presents a characterization and assessment of the remaining life of existing asphalt pavement structures. It proposes indicators such as the transverse crack spacing and the length of longitudinal cracks. The transverse crack spacing decreases with an increase in maintenance intervals and with the extended use of semi-rigid base layer structures, although this trend becomes less pronounced after maintenance intervals exceed 4 years. The length of longitudinal cracks increases with longer maintenance intervals, but this trend weakens after five years. This system can support the enhancement of standardization and scientific design in highway maintenance decision-making processes.

Keywords: Structural integrity, highways, pavement evaluation, asphalt concrete pavement.

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Authors: Luís Pina

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The conservation of marine biodiversity keeps ecosystems in balance and ensures the sustainable use of resources. In this context, technological resources have been used for monitoring marine species to allow biologists to obtain data in real-time. There are different mobile applications developed for data collection for monitoring purposes, but these systems are designed to be utilized only on third-generation (3G) phones or smartphones with Internet access and in rural parts of the developing countries, Internet services and smartphones are scarce. Thus, the objective of this work is to develop a system to monitor marine turtles using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), which users can access through basic mobile phones. The system aims to improve the data collection mechanism and enhance the effectiveness of current systems in monitoring sea turtles using any type of mobile device without Internet access. The system will be able to report information related to the biological activities of marine turtles. Also, it will be used as a platform to assist marine conservation entities to receive reports of illegal sales of sea turtles. The system can also be utilized as an educational tool for communities, providing knowledge and allowing the inclusion of communities in the process of monitoring marine turtles. Therefore, this work may contribute with information to decision-making and implementation of contingency plans for marine conservation programs.

Keywords: GSM, marine biology, marine turtles, USSD.

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Authors: Tristan O'Neill, Trina Myers, Jarrod Trevathan

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The Tropical Data Hub (TDH) is a virtual research environment that provides researchers with an e-research infrastructure to congregate significant tropical data sets for data reuse, integration, searching, and correlation. However, researchers often require data and metadata synthesis across disciplines for crossdomain analyses and knowledge discovery. A triplestore offers a semantic layer to achieve a more intelligent method of search to support the synthesis requirements by automating latent linkages in the data and metadata. Presently, the benchmarks to aid the decision of which triplestore is best suited for use in an application environment like the TDH are limited to performance. This paper describes a new evaluation tool developed to analyze both features and performance. The tool comprises a weighted decision matrix to evaluate the interoperability, functionality, performance, and support availability of a range of integrated and native triplestores to rank them according to requirements of the TDH.

Keywords: Virtual research environment, Semantic Web, performance analysis, tropical data hub.

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Authors: Edward Pol

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All companies are confronted with the need to innovate in order to meet market demands. In so doing they are challenged with the dilemma of whether to aim to be first into the market with a new innovative product, or to deliberately wait and learn from a pioneers’ mistakes; potentially avoiding higher risks. It is therefore important to critically understand from a first mover advantage and disadvantage perspective the decision-making implications of defence industry transformation onset by an innovative paradigm shift. This paper will argue that the type of industry characteristics matter, especially when considering what role the clients play in the innovation process and what their level of influence is. Through investigation of qualitative case study research, this inquiry will focus on first mover advantages and first mover disadvantages with a view to establish practical and value-added academic findings by focusing on specific industries where the clients play an active role in cooperation with the supplier innovation. The resulting findings will help managers to mitigate risk in innovative technology introduction. A selection from several defence industry innovations is specifically chosen because of the client–supplier relationship that typically differs from traditional first mover research. In this instance, case studies will be used referencing vertical-take-off-and-landing defence equipment innovations. 

Keywords: innovation, pioneer, first mover advantage, first mover disadvantage, risk

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Authors: Mohd Nuri Al-Amin Endut, Wan Suhaimi Wan Abdullah, Zulqarnain Abu Bakar

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The element of justice or al-‘adl in the context of Islamic critical thinking deals with the notion of justice in a thinking process which critically rationalizes the truth in a fair and objective manner with no irrelevant interference that can jeopardize a sound judgment. This Islamic axiological element is vital in technological decision making as it addresses the issues of religious values and ethics that are primarily set to fulfill the purpose of human life on earth. The main objective of this study was to examine and analyze the perception of Muslim engineering students in Malaysian higher education institutions towards the concept of al-‘adl as an essential element of Islamic critical thinking. The study employed mixed methods approach that comprises data collection from the questionnaire survey and the interview responses. A total of 557 Muslim engineering undergraduates from six Malaysian universities participated in the study. The study generally indicated that Muslim engineering undergraduates in the higher institutions have rather good comprehension and consciousness for al-‘adl with a slight awareness on the importance of objective thinking. Nonetheless there were a few items on the concept that have implied a comparatively low perception on the rational justice in Islam as the means to grasp the ultimate truth.

Keywords: Engineering education, Islamic critical thinking, rational justice, perception, tertiary education.

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Authors: Klio Monokrousou, Maria Giannopoulou

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Urban areas, as they have been developed and operate today, are areas of accumulation of a significant amount of people and a large number of activities that generate desires and reasons for traveling. The territorial expansion of the cities as well as the need to preserve the importance of the central city areas lead to the continuous increase of transportation needs which in the limited urban space results in creating serious traffic and operational problems. The modern perception of urban planning is directed towards more holistic approaches and integrated policies that make it economically competitive, socially just and more environmentally friendly. Over the last 25 years, the goal of sustainable transport development has been central to the agenda of any plan or policy for the city. The modern planning of urban space takes into account the economic and social aspects of the city and the importance of the environment to sustainable urban development. In this context, the European Union promotes direct or indirect related interventions according to the cohesion and environmental policies; many countries even had the chance to actually test them. This paper explores the methods and processes that have been developed towards this direction and presents a review and systematic presentation of this work. The ultimate purpose of this research is to effectively use this review to create a decision making methodological framework which can be the basis of a useful operational tool for sustainable urban planning.

Keywords: Sustainable urban development, urban mobility, urban regeneration methods.

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Authors: Keisham Ingocha Singh, Mayanglambam Mani Babu, Lorho Mary Maheo

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Background: The tradition of the development of pottery through the handling of clay is one of the earliest skills known to the Chakpas of Manipur. Nongpok Sekmai, a Chakpa village in Thoubal district of Manipur, India, is strictly associated with making pots of red ochre colour called uyan. In the past, pottery was in great demand, each family needed them in rituals, festive occasions and also for day to day use. The whole village was engaged in the occupation of pot making. However the tradition of pottery making is fast declining. People have switched over to other economic activities which can provide them a better socioeconomic life leaving behind the age-old tradition of pottery occupation. The present study was carried out to find out the social life of the potters of Nongpok Sekmai. Materials and Method: In-depth interviews, household survey and observation were conducted to collect information on the pottery trend in the village. Results: The total population of the surveyed village is 1194 persons out of which 582 are male and 612 are female, distributed through 252 households. At present 4.94 % of the total population are still engaged in this profession. The study recorded 19 occupations other than pottery among women indicating decline of the traditional occupation. Conclusion: The study has revealed the changing life of the potters due to technological development, globalization and social network.

Keywords: Chakpas, Nongpok Sekmai, pottery, uyan.

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Authors: Arash Habibi Lashkari, Azizah Abdul Manaf, Maslin Masrom

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In today's day and age, one of the important topics in information security is authentication. There are several alternatives to text-based authentication of which includes Graphical Password (GP) or Graphical User Authentication (GUA). These methods stems from the fact that humans recognized and remembers images better than alphanumerical text characters. This paper will focus on the security aspect of GP algorithms and what most researchers have been working on trying to define these security features and attributes. The goal of this study is to develop a fuzzy decision model that allows automatic selection of available GP algorithms by taking into considerations the subjective judgments of the decision makers who are more than 50 postgraduate students of computer science. The approach that is being proposed is based on the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) which determines the criteria weight as a linear formula.

Keywords: Graphical Password, Authentication Security, Attack Patterns, Brute force attack, Dictionary attack, Guessing Attack, Spyware attack, Shoulder surfing attack, Social engineering Attack, Password Entropy, Password Space.

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Authors: B. T. Sayed, Nafaâ Jabeur, M. Aref

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Creation and maintenance of knowledge management systems has been recognized as an important research area. Consecutively lack of accurate results from knowledge management systems limits the organization to apply their knowledge management processes. This leads to a failure in getting the right information to the right people at the right time thus followed by a deficiency in decision making processes. An Intranet offers a powerful tool for communication and collaboration, presenting data and information, and the means that creates and shares knowledge, all in one easily accessible place. This paper proposes an archetype describing how a knowledge management system, with the support of intranet capabilities, could very much increase the accuracy of capturing, storing and retrieving knowledge based processes thereby increasing the efficiency of the system. This system will expect a critical mass of usage, by the users, for intranet to function as knowledge management systems. This prototype would lead to a design of an application that would impose creation and maintenance of an effective knowledge management system through intranet. The aim of this paper is to introduce an effective system to handle capture, store and distribute knowledge management in a form that may not lead to any failure which exists in most of the systems. The methodology used in the system would require all the employees, in the organization, to contribute the maximum to deliver the system to a successful arena. The system is still in its initial mode and thereby the authors are under the process to practically implement the ideas, as mentioned in the system, to produce satisfactory results.

Keywords: Knowledge Management Systems, Intranet, Methodology.

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Authors: Salama Meghriche, Amer Draa, Mohammed Boulemden

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Heart failure is the most common reason of death nowadays, but if the medical help is given directly, the patient-s life may be saved in many cases. Numerous heart diseases can be detected by means of analyzing electrocardiograms (ECG). Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are computer-based expert systems that have proved to be useful in pattern recognition tasks. ANN can be used in different phases of the decision-making process, from classification to diagnostic procedures. This work concentrates on a review followed by a novel method. The purpose of the review is to assess the evidence of healthcare benefits involving the application of artificial neural networks to the clinical functions of diagnosis, prognosis and survival analysis, in ECG signals. The developed method is based on a compound neural network (CNN), to classify ECGs as normal or carrying an AtrioVentricular heart Block (AVB). This method uses three different feed forward multilayer neural networks. A single output unit encodes the probability of AVB occurrences. A value between 0 and 0.1 is the desired output for a normal ECG; a value between 0.1 and 1 would infer an occurrence of an AVB. The results show that this compound network has a good performance in detecting AVBs, with a sensitivity of 90.7% and a specificity of 86.05%. The accuracy value is 87.9%.

Keywords: Artificial neural networks, Electrocardiogram(ECG), Feed forward multilayer neural network, Medical diagnosis, Pattern recognitionm, Signal processing.

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Authors: Vasiliki Vlachou, Christos Kontzinos, Ourania Markaki, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, Vagelis Karakolis, John Psarras

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Higher Education is resisting the pull of technology, especially as this concerns the issuance and verification of degrees and certificates. It is widely known that education certificates are largely produced in paper form making them vulnerable to damage while holders of such certificates are dependent on the universities and other issuing organisations. QualiChain is an EU Horizon 2020 (H2020) research project aiming to transform and revolutionise the domain of public education and its ties with the job market by leveraging blockchain, analytics and decision support to develop a platform for the verification and sharing of education certificates. Blockchain plays an integral part in the QualiChain solution in providing a trustworthy environment to store, share and manage such accreditations. Under the context of this paper, three prominent blockchain platforms (Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha) were considered as a means of experimentation for creating a system with the basic functionalities that will be needed for trustworthy degree verification. The methodology and respective system developed and presented in this paper used Hyperledger Iroha and proved that this specific platform can be used to easily develop decentralize applications. Future papers will attempt to further experiment with other blockchain platforms and assess which has the best potential.

Keywords: Blockchain, degree verification, higher education certificates, Hyperledger Iroha.

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Authors: Julio Molleda, Daniel F. García, Juan C. Granda, Francisco J. Suárez

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One of the main trouble in a steel strip manufacturing line is the breakage of whatever weld carried out between steel coils, that are used to produce the continuous strip to be processed. A weld breakage results in a several hours stop of the manufacturing line. In this process the damages caused by the breakage must be repaired. After the reparation and in order to go on with the production it will be necessary a restarting process of the line. For minimizing this problem, a human operator must inspect visually and manually each weld in order to avoid its breakage during the manufacturing process. The work presented in this paper is based on the Bayesian decision theory and it presents an approach to detect, on real-time, steel strip defective welds. This approach is based on quantifying the tradeoffs between various classification decisions using probability and the costs that accompany such decisions.

Keywords: Classification, Pattern Recognition, ProbabilisticReasoning, Statistical Data Analysis.

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Authors: M. Othman, N. Bhuiyan, G. J. Gouw

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In today-s global and competitive market, manufacturing companies are working hard towards improving their production system performance. Most companies develop production systems that can help in cost reduction. Manufacturing systems consist of different elements including production methods, machines, processes, control and information systems. Human issues are an important part of manufacturing systems, yet most companies do not pay sufficient attention to them. In this paper, a workforce planning (WP) model is presented. A non-linear programming model is developed in order to minimize the hiring, firing, training and overtime costs. The purpose is to determine the number of workers for each worker type, the number of workers trained, and the number of overtime hours. Moreover, a decision support system (DSS) based on the proposed model is introduced using the Excel-Lingo software interfacing feature. This model will help to improve the interaction between the workers, managers and the technical systems in manufacturing.

Keywords: Decision Support System, Human Factors, Manufacturing System, Workforce Planning.

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Authors: Subramaniam Chandran

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This paper explores the social and political imperatives in the sphere of public policy relating to social justice. In India, the colonial legacy and post-colonial social and political pressures sustained the appropriation of 'caste' category in allocating public resources to the backward class of citizens. For several reasons, 'economic' category could not be placed in allocating resources. This paper examines the reasons behind the deliberative exercises and formulating policies and seeks an alternative framework in realizing social justice in terms of a unified category. This attempt can be viewed as a reconciliation of traditional and modern values for a viable alternative in public policy making.

Keywords: Social justice, caste, public policy, communal quota

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Authors: M. I. Abdelhamid, A. O. Ghallab, R. S. Ettouney, M. A. El-Rifai

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An optimization scheme based on COM server is suggested for communication between Genetic Algorithm (GA) toolbox of MATLAB and Aspen HYSYS. The structure and details of the proposed framework are discussed. The power of the developed scheme is illustrated by its application to the optimization of a recently developed natural gas liquefaction process in which Aspen HYSYS was used for minimization of the power consumption by optimizing the values of five operating variables. In this work, optimization by coupling between the GA in MATLAB and Aspen HYSYS model of the same process using the same five decision variables enabled improvements in power consumption by 3.3%, when 77% of the natural gas feed is liquefied. Also on inclusion of the flow rates of both nitrogen and carbon dioxide refrigerants as two additional decision variables, the power consumption decreased by 6.5% for a 78% liquefaction of the natural gas feed.

Keywords: Stranded gas liquefaction, genetic algorithm, COM server, single nitrogen expansion, carbon dioxide pre-cooling.

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Authors: Nieto Bernal Wilson, Carmona Suarez Edgar

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The organizations have structured and unstructured information in different formats, sources, and systems. Part of these come from ERP under OLTP processing that support the information system, however these organizations in OLAP processing level, presented some deficiencies, part of this problematic lies in that does not exist interesting into extract knowledge from their data sources, as also the absence of operational capabilities to tackle with these kind of projects.  Data Warehouse and its applications are considered as non-proprietary tools, which are of great interest to business intelligence, since they are repositories basis for creating models or patterns (behavior of customers, suppliers, products, social networks and genomics) and facilitate corporate decision making and research. The following paper present a structured methodology, simple, inspired from the agile development models as Scrum, XP and AUP. Also the models object relational, spatial data models, and the base line of data modeling under UML and Big data, from this way sought to deliver an agile methodology for the developing of data warehouses, simple and of easy application. The methodology naturally take into account the application of process for the respectively information analysis, visualization and data mining, particularly for patterns generation and derived models from the objects facts structured.

Keywords: Data warehouse, model data, big data, object fact, object relational fact, process developed data warehouse.

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Authors: Zheng Miao, Dennis Fernandez

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CRISPR research has the potential to completely transform life science, agriculture, live-stock and the health care industry. The Intellectual Property derived from its research has raised significant attention in the academic as well as the biopharmaceutical industry culminating an urgent need for strategic IP protection. We review the rudimentary concepts and key competitors of CRISPR technologies as well as the paramount strategies for intellectual property protection. Further, we elaborate on prosecution issues related to CRISPR patents as well as possible solutions to various patent laws, interferences and litigation. Finally, we address how the bioinformatics of the CRISPR technology begs an inquiry into issues of privacy and a host of ethical concerns.

Keywords: Bioinformatics, CRISPR, biotechnology, intellectual property.

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Authors: Ching-Sheng Wang, Lun-Ping Hung, Sheng-Yu Peng, Li-Chieh Cheng

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The computer has become an essential tool in modern life, and the combined use of a computer with a projector is very common in teaching and presentations. However, as typical computer operating devices involve a mouse or keyboard, when making presentations, users often need to stay near the computer to execute functions such as changing pages, writing, and drawing, thus, making the operation time-consuming, and reducing interactions with the audience. This paper proposes a laser pointer interaction system able to simulate mouse functions in order that users need not remain near the computer, but can directly use laser pointer operations from at a distance. It can effectively reduce the users- time spent by the computer, allowing for greater interactions with the audience.

Keywords: laser pointer, presentation, interaction, mousefunction

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Authors: F. Farzin

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Research has shown that techno-entrepreneurship is economically significant. Therefore, it is suggested that teaching techno-entrepreneurship may be important because such programmes would prepare current and future generations of learners to recognise and act on high-technology opportunities. Education in technoentrepreneurship may increase the knowledge of how to start one’s own enterprise and recognise the technological opportunities for commercialisation to improve decision-making about starting a new venture; also it influence decisions about capturing the business opportunities and turning them into successful ventures. Universities can play a main role in connecting and networking technoentrepreneurship students towards a cooperative attitude with real business practice and industry knowledge. To investigate and answer whether education for techno-entrepreneurs really helps, this paper choses a comparison of literature reviews as its method of research. After reviewing literature related to the impact of technoentrepreneurship education on self-employment 6 studies which had similar aim and objective to this paper were. These particular papers were selected based on a keywords search and as their aim, objectives, and gaps were close to the current research. In addition, they were all based on the influence of techno-entrepreneurship education in self-employment and intention of students to start new ventures. The findings showed that teaching techno-entrepreneurship education may have an influence on students’ intention and their future self-employment, but which courses should be covered and the duration of programmes, needs further investigation.

Keywords: Techno-entrepreneurship education, training, higher education, intention, self-employment.

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Authors: B. Vahdani, R. Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, A. Baboli, S. M. Mousavi

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Focusing on the environmental issues, including the reduction of scrap and consumer residuals, along with the benefiting from the economic value during the life cycle of goods/products leads the companies to have an important competitive approach. The aim of this paper is to present a new mixed nonlinear facility locationallocation model in recycling collection networks by considering multi-echelon, multi-suppliers, multi-collection centers and multifacilities in the recycling network. To make an appropriate decision in reality, demands, returns, capacities, costs and distances, are regarded uncertain in our model. For this purpose, a fuzzy mathematical programming-based possibilistic approach is introduced as a solution methodology from the recent literature to solve the proposed mixed-nonlinear programming model (MNLP). The computational experiments are provided to illustrate the applicability of the designed model in a supply chain environment and to help the decision makers to facilitate their analysis.

Keywords: Location-allocation model, recycling collection networks, fuzzy mathematical programming.

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Authors: Sofia Elena Colesca, Dobrica Liliana

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The Romanian government has been making significant attempts to make its services and information available on the Internet. According to the UN e-government survey conducted in 2008, Romania comes under mid range countries by utilization of egovernment (percent of utilization 41%). Romania-s national portal www.e-guvernare.ro aims at progressively making all services and information accessible through the portal. However, the success of these efforts depends, to a great extent, on how well the targeted users for such services, citizens in general, make use of them. For this reason, the purpose of the presented study was to identify what factors could affect the citizens' adoption of e-government services. The study is an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model. The proposed model was validated using data collected from 481 citizens. The results provided substantial support for all proposed hypotheses and showed the significance of the extended constructs.

Keywords: e-government, citizen's adoption, TechnologyAcceptance model.

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Authors: J. K. Alhassan, S. A. Lawal

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This work is on decision tree-based classification for the disbursement of scholarship. Tree-based data mining classification technique is used in other to determine the generic rule to be used to disburse the scholarship. The system based on the defined rules from the tree is able to determine the class (status) to which an applicant shall belong whether Granted or Not Granted. The applicants that fall to the class of granted denote a successful acquirement of scholarship while those in not granted class are unsuccessful in the scheme. An algorithm that can be used to classify the applicants based on the rules from tree-based classification was also developed. The tree-based classification is adopted because of its efficiency, effectiveness, and easy to comprehend features. The system was tested with the data of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Abuja, a Parastatal of Federal Ministry of Communication Technology that is mandated to develop and regulate information technology in Nigeria. The system was found working according to the specification. It is therefore recommended for all scholarship disbursement organizations.

Keywords: Decision tree, classification, data mining, scholarship.

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Authors: Saeed Sayyad Hagh Shomar

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Traffic congestion pricing in urban streets is one of the most suitable options for solving the traffic problems and environment pollutions in the cities of the country. Unlike its acceptable outcomes, there are problems concerning the necessity to pay by the mass. Regarding the fact that public response in order to succeed in this strategy is so influential, studying their response and behavior to get the feedback and improve the strategies is of great importance. In this study, a questionnaire was used to examine the public reactions to the traffic congestion pricing schemes at the center of Tehran metropolis and the factors involved in people’s decision making in accepting or rejecting the congestion pricing schemes were assessed based on the data obtained from the questionnaire as well as the international experiences. Then, by analyzing and comparing the schemes, guidelines to reduce public objections to them are discussed. The results of reviewing and evaluating the public reactions show that all the pros and cons must be considered to guarantee the success of these projects. Consequently, with targeted public education and consciousness-raising advertisements, prior to initiating a scheme and ensuring the mechanism of the implementation after the start of the project, the initial opposition is reduced and, with the gradual emergence of the real and tangible benefits of its implementation, users’ satisfaction will increase.

Keywords: Demand management, international experiences, traffic congestion pricing, public acceptance, public objection.

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Authors: Ahmad Aljaafreh

Abstract:

This paper proposes a hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM) to model the detection of M vehicles in a wireless sensor network (WSN). The HHMM model contains an extra level of hidden Markov model to model the temporal transitions of each state of the first HMM. By modeling the temporal transitions, only those hypothesis with nonzero transition probabilities needs to be tested. Thus, this method efficiently reduces the computation load, which is preferable in WSN applications.This paper integrates several techniques to optimize the detection performance. The output of the states of the first HMM is modeled as Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), where the number of states and the number of Gaussians are experimentally determined, while the other parameters are estimated using Expectation Maximization (EM). HHMM is used to model the sequence of the local decisions which are based on multiple hypothesis testing with maximum likelihood approach. The states in the HHMM represent various combinations of vehicles of different types. Due to the statistical advantages of multisensor data fusion, we propose a heuristic based on fuzzy weighted majority voting to enhance cooperative classification of moving vehicles within a region that is monitored by a wireless sensor network. A fuzzy inference system weighs each local decision based on the signal to noise ratio of the acoustic signal for target detection and the signal to noise ratio of the radio signal for sensor communication. The spatial correlation among the observations of neighboring sensor nodes is efficiently utilized as well as the temporal correlation. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of this scheme.

Keywords: Classification, decision fusion, fuzzy logic, hidden Markov model

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Authors: E. Golden Julie, S. Tamil Selvi, Y. Harold Robinson

Abstract:

Many Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications necessitate secure multicast services for the purpose of broadcasting delay sensitive data like video files and live telecast at fixed time-slot. This work provides a novel method to deal with end-to-end delay and drop rate of packets. Opportunistic Routing chooses a link based on the maximum probability of packet delivery ratio. Null Key Generation helps in authenticating packets to the receiver. Markov Decision Process based Adaptive Scheduling algorithm determines the time slot for packet transmission. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol ensures better performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing overhead.

Keywords: Delay-sensitive data, Markovian Decision Process based Adaptive Scheduling, Opportunistic Routing, Digital Signature authentication.

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