Search results for: Business knowledge

Authors: Sungnam Hong, Sun-Kyu Park, Dooyong Cho, Jinwoong Choi

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In this paper, a strategy for long-span bridge disaster response was developed, divided into risk analysis, business impact analysis, and emergency response plan. At the risk analysis stage, the critical risk was estimated. The critical risk was “car accident."The critical process by critical-risk classification was assessed at the business impact analysis stage. The critical process was the task related to the road conditions and traffic safety. Based on the results of the precedent analysis, an emergency response plan was established. By making the order of the standard operating procedures clear, an effective plan for dealing with disaster was formulated. Finally, a prototype software was developed based on the research findings. This study laid the foundation of an information-technology-based disaster response guideline and is significant in that it computerized the disaster response plan to improve the plan-s accessibility.

Keywords: Emergency response; Long-span bridge; Disaster management; Standard operating procedure; Ubiquitous.

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Authors: Giulio Mangano, Alberto De Marco, Giovanni Zenezini

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The concept of City Logistics (CL) has emerged to improve the impacts of last mile freight distribution in urban areas. In this paper, a System Dynamics (SD) model exploring the dynamics of the diffusion of a ICT platform for CL management across different populations is proposed. For the development of the model two sources have been used. On the one hand, the major diffusion variables and feedback loops are derived from a literature review of existing diffusion models. On the other hand, the parameters are represented by the value propositions delivered by the platform as a response to some of the users’ needs. To extract the most important value propositions the Business Model Canvas approach has been used. Such approach in fact focuses on understanding how a company can create value for her target customers. These variables and parameters are thus translated into a SD diffusion model with three different populations namely municipalities, logistics service providers, and own account carriers. Results show that, the three populations under analysis fully adopt the platform within the simulation time frame, highlighting a strong demand by different stakeholders for CL projects aiming at carrying out more efficient urban logistics operations.

Keywords: City logistics, simulation, system dynamics, business model.

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Authors: Matthew J. Zagumny

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The QUEST is an assessment of scientific epistemic beliefs and was developed to measure students’ intellectual development in regards to beliefs about knowledge and knowing. The QUEST utilizes Q-sort methodology, which requires participants to rate the degree to which statements describe them personally. As a measure of personal theories of knowledge, the QUEST instrument is described with the Q-sort distribution and scoring explained. A preliminary demonstration of the QUEST assessment is described with two samples of undergraduate students (novice/lower division compared to advanced/upper division students) being assessed and their average QUEST scores compared. The usefulness of an assessment of epistemology is discussed in terms of the principle that assessment tends to drive educational practice and university mission. The critical need for university and academic programs to focus on development of students’ scientific epistemology is briefly discussed.

Keywords: Scientific epistemology, critical thinking, Q-sort method, STEM undergraduates.

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Authors: Leandi Steenkamp

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The sectional title industry has been a part of the property landscape in South Africa for almost half a century, and plays a significant role in addressing the housing problem in the country. Stakeholders such as owners and investors in sectional title property are in most cases not directly involved in the management thereof, and place reliance on the audited annual financial statements of bodies corporate for decision-making purposes. Although the industry seems to be highly regulated, the legislation regarding accounting and auditing of sectional title is vague and ambiguous. Furthermore, there are no industry-specific auditing and accounting standards to guide accounting and auditing practitioners in performing their work and industry financial benchmarks are not readily available. In addition, financial pressure on sectional title schemes is often very high due to the fact that some owners exercise unrealistic pressure to keep monthly levies as low as possible. All these factors have an impact on the business risk as well as audit risk of bodies corporate. Very little academic research has been undertaken on the sectional title industry in South Africa from an accounting and auditing perspective. The aim of this paper is threefold: Firstly, to discuss the findings of a literature review on uncertainties, ambiguity and confusing aspects in current legislation regarding the audit of a sectional title property that may cause or increase audit and business risk. Secondly, empirical findings of risk-related aspects from the results of interviews with three groups of body corporate role-players will be discussed. The role-players were body corporate trustee chairpersons, body corporate managing agents and accounting and auditing practitioners of bodies corporate. Specific reference will be made to business risk and audit risk. Thirdly, practical recommendations will be made on possibilities of closing the audit expectation gap, and further research opportunities in this regard will be discussed.

Keywords: Assurance, audit, audit risk, body corporate, corporate governance, sectional title.

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Authors: Elzo Alves Aranha, Marcio M. Araki

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Business model (BM) is a term that has been receiving the attention of scholars and practitioners and has been consolidating itself as a field of study and research. Although there is no agreement in the academic literature on the definition of BM, at least there is an explicit agreement: BM defines a logical structure of how an organization creates value, capture value and delivers value for the customers and stakeholders. The lack of understanding about connections and elements among BM and higher education, university, and entrepreneurship education opens a gap in the academic literature. Thus, it is interesting to analyze how BM has been approached by the literature and applied in higher education, university, and entrepreneurship education aimed to know the main streams of research. This is because higher education institutions are characterized by innovation, leading to a greater acceptance of new and modern concepts such as BM. Our research has the main motivation to fill the gap in the academic literature, making it possible to increase the power of understanding about connections and aspects among BM and higher education, university, and entrepreneurship education. The objective of the research is to analyze the main aspects among BM and higher education, university, and entrepreneurship education in academic literature. The research followed the systematic literature review (SLR). The SLR is based on three main factors: clarity, validity, and auditability. 82 academic papers were found in the past 10 years, from 2009-2019. The search was carried out in Science Direct and Periodicos Capes databases. The main findings indicate that there are links between BM and higher education, BM and university, BM, and entrepreneurship education. The main findings are inserted within seven aspects. The findings are innovative and contribute to increase the power of understanding about the connection among BM and higher education, university, and entrepreneurship education in academic literature. The research findings addressed to the gap exposed in academic literature. The research findings have several practical implications, and we highlight only two main ones. First, researchers will be able to use the research findings to mitigate a BM research agenda involving connections between BM and higher education, BM and university, and BM and entrepreneurship education. Second, directors, deans, and university leaders will be able to carry out BM awareness programs, BM professors training programs, and makers planning for the inclusion of BM, as one of the components of the curricula of the undergraduate and graduate courses.

Keywords: Business model, entrepreneurship education, higher education, university.

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Authors: B. Ferdousi, J. Bari

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Advanced technology can provide vital tools to promote authentic, meaningful, and efficient assessments that measure students' achievement of learning objectives in higher education. However, it also brings several challenges in the learning process. This literature review-based paper describes the challenges in ensuring academic integrity and cybersecurity when students' knowledge and performance are assessed in a digital environment. The paper also reviews the strategies that can be implemented to address these challenges. Using students' authentication and authorship verification of their classwork, designing and developing e-assessments, technology accessibility and instructor training are probable solutions to address these challenges. Given the increasing adoption of digital technology in assessing students' effective learning achievement, this paper will help enhance knowledge and in-depth understanding of measures needed in using technology in academic assessment.

Keywords: Fairness, cybersecurity, e-authentication, academic integrity, e-assessment.

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Authors: Martin H¨ausl, Maximilian Auch, Johannes Forster, Peter Mandl, Alexander Schill

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In order to survive on the market, companies must constantly develop improved and new products. These products are designed to serve the needs of their customers in the best possible way. The creation of new products is also called innovation and is primarily driven by a company’s internal research and development department. However, a new approach has been taking place for some years now, involving external knowledge in the innovation process. This approach is called open innovation and identifies customer knowledge as the most important source in the innovation process. This paper presents a concept of using social media posts as an external source to support the open innovation approach in its initial phase, the Ideation phase. For this purpose, the social media posts are semantically structured with the help of an ontology and the authors are evaluated using graph-theoretical metrics such as density. For the structuring and evaluation of relevant social media posts, we also use the findings of Natural Language Processing, e. g. Named Entity Recognition, specific dictionaries, Triple Tagger and Part-of-Speech-Tagger. The selection and evaluation of the tools used are discussed in this paper. Using our ontology and metrics to structure social media posts enables users to semantically search these posts for new product ideas and thus gain an improved insight into the external sources such as customer needs.

Keywords: Idea ontology, innovation management, open innovation, semantic search.

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Authors: O. V. Missioura

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MC (Management Control)& IC (Internal Control) – what is the relationship? (an empirical study into the definitions between MC and IC) based on the wider considerations of Internal Control and Management Control terms, attention is focused not only on the financial aspects but also more on the soft aspects of the business, such as culture, behaviour, standards and values. The limited considerations of Management Control are focused mainly in the hard, financial aspects of business operation. The definitions of Management Control and Internal Control are often used interchangeably and the results of this empirical study reveal that Management Control is part of Internal Control, there is no causal link between the two concepts. Based on the interpretation of the respondents, the term Management Control has moved from a broad term to a more limited term with the soft aspects of the influencing of behaviour, performance measurements, incentives and culture. This paper is an exploratory study based on qualitative research and on a qualitative matrix method analysis of the thematic definition of the terms Management Control and Internal Control.

Keywords: Management Control (MC), Internal Control (IC), definition, causal link, COSO 1992/2004, CoCo (Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants), Russian CG code (КОДЕКС) , limited and broad concepts MC and IC.

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Authors: Vasudha Bhatnagar, Ahmed Sultan Al-Hegami, Naveen Kumar

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Rule Discovery is an important technique for mining knowledge from large databases. Use of objective measures for discovering interesting rules lead to another data mining problem, although of reduced complexity. Data mining researchers have studied subjective measures of interestingness to reduce the volume of discovered rules to ultimately improve the overall efficiency of KDD process. In this paper we study novelty of the discovered rules as a subjective measure of interestingness. We propose a hybrid approach that uses objective and subjective measures to quantify novelty of the discovered rules in terms of their deviations from the known rules. We analyze the types of deviation that can arise between two rules and categorize the discovered rules according to the user specified threshold. We implement the proposed framework and experiment with some public datasets. The experimental results are quite promising.

Keywords: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), Data Mining, Rule Discovery, Interestingness, Subjective Measures, Novelty Measure.

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Authors: Rosnani Jusoh, Afifuddin Husairi Hussain, Fadzilah Abdul Rahman, Adi Irfan Che Ani, Haziyah Hussin

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New conceptualizations were introduced to address the emerging need to develop innovativeness and creativity attitudes in future engineering professional. Thus, entrepreneurial engineering education needs an environment where future engineers can be formed through practical learning and the interaction with forces, ideas and inspirations, in the final perspective of effectively identifying, acquiring, developing, and transferring technology into new business products and services. This paper aims to investigate the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur for engineering students. A questionnaire was used to measure the level of entrepreneurial competencies. The questionnaire was based on the Personal Entrepreneurial Competence Model, developed by McClelland Individual. Participants were recruited from the final year students of eight programs under the Faculty of Engineering. Of the 432 questionnaires distributed, 210 were collected back, giving a response rate of approximately 49%. Findings suggest that final year engineering students have respectable entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors, and are competent to be engineerpreneur. The study also recommended that we need an environment that does not insist that engineers become entrepreneurs, but one where the two can meet, and business leaders can organize our nation effectively.

Keywords: Engineerpreneur, entrepreneurship, engineering students, higher education institutions.

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Authors: Gholamreza Momenzadeh, Forough Nematolahi

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The Extended Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPII) system usually requires massive amounts of storage space, powerful servers, and large upfront and ongoing investments to purchase and manage the software and the related hardware which are not affordable for organizations. In recent decades, organizations prefer to adapt their business structures with new technologies for remaining competitive in the world economy. Therefore, cloud computing (which is one of the tools of information technology (IT)) is a modern system that reveals the next-generation application architecture. Also, cloud computing has had some advantages that reduce costs in many ways such as: lower upfront costs for all computing infrastructure and lower cost of maintaining and supporting. On the other hand, traditional ERPII is not responding for huge amounts of data and relations between the organizations. In this study, based on a literature study, ERPII is investigated in the context of cloud computing where the organizations operate more efficiently. Also, ERPII conditions have a response to needs of organizations in large amounts of data and relations between the organizations.

Keywords: Extended enterprise resource planning, cloud computing, business process, enterprise information integration.

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Authors: Shobhit Mittal

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Headcount budgeting stands as a pivotal element in organizational financial management, extending beyond traditional budgeting to encompass strategic resource allocation for workforce-related expenses. This process is integral to maintaining financial stability and fostering a productive workforce, requiring a comprehensive analysis of factors such as market trends, business growth projections, and evolving workforce skill requirements. It demands a collaborative approach, primarily involving Human Resources (HR) and finance departments, to align workforce planning with an organization's financial capabilities and strategic objectives. The dynamic nature of headcount budgeting necessitates continuous monitoring and adjustment in response to economic fluctuations, business strategy shifts, technological advancements, and market dynamics. Its significance in talent management is also highlighted, aligning financial planning with talent acquisition and retention strategies to ensure a competitive edge in the market. The consequences of incorrect headcount budgeting are explored, showing how it can lead to financial strain, operational inefficiencies, and hindered strategic objectives. Examining case studies like IBM's strategic workforce rebalancing and Microsoft's shift for long-term success, the importance of aligning headcount budgeting with organizational goals is underscored. These examples illustrate that effective headcount budgeting transcends its role as a financial tool, emerging as a strategic element crucial for an organization's success. This necessitates continuous refinement and adaptation to align with evolving business goals and market conditions, highlighting its role as a key driver in organizational success and sustainability.

Keywords: Strategic planning, fiscal budget, headcount planning, resource allocation, financial management, decision-making, operational efficiency, risk management, headcount budget.

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Authors: Liwen Hou

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The booming mobile business has been penetrating the taxi industry worldwide with P2P (peer to peer) taxi services, as an emerging business model, transforming the industry. Parallel with other mobile businesses, member recommendations and online reviews are believed to be very effective with regard to acquiring new users for P2P taxi services. Based on an empirical dataset of the taxi industry in China, this study aims to reveal which factors influence users’ recommendations and review-writing behaviors. Differing from the existing literature, this paper takes the taxi driver’s perspective into consideration and hence selects a group of variables related to the drivers. We built two models to reflect the factors that influence the number of recommendations and reviews posted on the platform (i.e., the app). Our models show that all factors, except the driver’s score, significantly influence the recommendation behavior. Likewise, only one factor, passengers’ bad reviews, is insignificant in generating more drivers’ reviews. In the conclusion, we summarize the findings and limitations of the research.

Keywords: Online recommendation, P2P taxi service, review-writing, word of mouth.

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Authors: Young-Seok Choi

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We present a family of data-reusing and affine projection algorithms. For identification of a noisy linear finite impulse response channel, a partial knowledge of a channel, especially noise, can be used to improve the performance of the adaptive filter. Motivated by this fact, the proposed scheme incorporates an estimate of a knowledge of noise. A constraint, called the adaptive noise constraint, estimates an unknown information of noise. By imposing this constraint on a cost function of data-reusing and affine projection algorithms, a cost function based on the adaptive noise constraint and Lagrange multiplier is defined. Minimizing the new cost function leads to the adaptive noise constrained (ANC) data-reusing and affine projection algorithms. Experimental results comparing the proposed schemes to standard data-reusing and affine projection algorithms clearly indicate their superior performance.

Keywords: Data-reusing, affine projection algorithm, error constraint, system identification.

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Authors: Jether Gomes, Thiago M. R. Dias, Gray F. Moita

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The production and publication of scientific works have increased significantly in the last years, being the Internet the main factor of access and diffusion of these. In view of this, researchers from several areas of knowledge have carried out several studies on scientific production data in order to analyze phenomena and trends about science. The understanding of how research has evolved can, for example, serve as a basis for building scientific policies for further advances in science and stimulating research groups to become more productive. In this context, the objective of this work is to analyze the main research topics investigated along the trajectory of the Brazilian science of researchers working in the areas of engineering, in order to map scientific knowledge and identify topics in highlights. To this end, studies are carried out on the frequency and relationship of the keywords of the set of scientific articles registered in the existing curricula in the Lattes Platform of each one of the selected researchers, counting with the aid of bibliometric analysis features.

Keywords: Research topics, bibliometrics, topics of interest, Lattes Platform.

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Authors: Luís M. João, Patrício Langa

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The article reviews the literature on quality assurance (QA) in African Higher Education Studies (HES) conducted through a bibliometric mapping of published papers between 1999 and 2019. Specifically, the article highlights the nuances of knowledge production in four scientific databases: Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), African Journal Online (AJOL), and Google Scholar. The analysis included 531 papers, of which 127 are from Scopus, 60 are from WoS, 85 are from AJOL, and 259 are from Google Scholar. In essence, 284 authors wrote these papers from 231 institutions and 69 different countries (i.e., Africa = 54 and outside Africa = 15). Results indicate the existing knowledge. This analysis allows the readers to understand the growth and development of the field during the two-decade period, identify key contributors, and observe potential trends or gaps in the research. The paper employs bibliometric mapping as its primary analytical lens. By utilizing this method, the study quantitatively assesses the publications related to QA in African HES, helping to identify patterns, collaboration networks, and disparities in research output. The bibliometric approach allows for a systematic and objective analysis of large datasets, offering a comprehensive view of the knowledge production in the field. Furthermore, the study highlights the lack of shared resources available to enhance quality in higher education institutions (HEIs) in Africa. This finding underscores the importance of promoting collaborative research efforts, knowledge exchange, and capacity building within the region to improve the overall quality of higher education. The paper argues that despite the growing quantity of QA research in African higher education, there are challenges related to citation impact and access to high-impact publication avenues for African researchers. It emphasizes the need to promote collaborative research and resource-sharing to enhance the quality of HEIs in Africa. The analytical lenses of bibliometric mapping and the examination of publication players' scenarios contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the field and its implications for African higher education.

Keywords: Africa, bibliometric research, higher education studies, quality assurance, scientific database, systematic review.

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Authors: Parit Kanjanavirojkul, Kiatwarakorn Keeratishananond, Prapun Suksompong

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We study the performance of compressed beamforming weights feedback technique in generalized triangular decomposition (GTD) based MIMO system. GTD is a beamforming technique that enjoys QoS flexibility. The technique, however, will perform at its optimum only when the full knowledge of channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter. This would be impossible in the real system, where there are channel estimation error and limited feedback. We suggest a way to implement the quantized beamforming weights feedback, which can significantly reduce the feedback data, on GTD-based MIMO system and investigate the performance of the system. Interestingly, we found that compressed beamforming weights feedback does not degrade the BER performance of the system at low input power, while the channel estimation error and quantization do. For comparison, GTD is more sensitive to compression and quantization, while SVD is more sensitive to the channel estimation error. We also explore the performance of GTDbased MU-MIMO system, and find that the BER performance starts to degrade largely at around -20 dB channel estimation error.

Keywords: MIMO, MU-MIMO, GTD, Imperfect CSI.

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Authors: Mirjana Jeleč Raguž, Barbara Pisker

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Development of knowledge based society carries multiple challenges to the higher education system. Some of the challenges laid before the higher education sector of countries which aspire to become knowledge based societies are: the entrepreneurial leadership of the higher education institutions, finding new sources of financing in order to minimize dependence on public resources, creating connections with the labor market, commercial utilization of R&D results, promotion of innovations as well as the overall promotion of science excellence relevant to the economic sector. Within a framework of this paper and its main subject of research, the challenge which is being put before the higher education institutions is an effort of establishing regional mission of higher education through the open collaboration with regional key factors, both private and public. Development of the mentioned collaboration and its contribution to the overall regional development in Croatia is the main subject of empirical research in this paper.

Keywords: Croatia, Higher Education Institutions, Regional Role, Science-Industry Interaction

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Authors: Wenbo Wang, Yi-fang Brook Wu

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The spread of misinformation and disinformation has become a major concern, particularly with the rise of social media as a primary source of information for many people. As a means to address this phenomenon, automated fact-checking has emerged as a safeguard against the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Existing fact-checking approaches aim to determine whether a news claim is true or false, and they have achieved decent veracity prediction accuracy. However, the state of the art methods rely on manually verified external information to assist the checking model in making judgments, which requires significant human resources. This study presents a framework, SAC, which focuses on 1) augmenting the representation of a claim by incorporating additional context using general-purpose, comprehensive and authoritative data; 2) developing a search function to automatically select relevant, new and credible references; 3) focusing on the important parts of the representations of a claim and its reference that are most relevant to the fact-checking task. The experimental results demonstrate that: 1) Augmenting the representations of claims and references through the use of a knowledge base, combined with the multi-head attention technique, contributes to improved performance of fact-checking. 2) SAC with auto-selected references outperforms existing fact-checking approaches with manual selected references. Future directions of this study include I) exploring knowledge graph in Wikidata to dynamically augment the representations of claims and references without introducing too much noises; II) exploring semantic relations in claims and references to further enhance fact-checking.

Keywords: Fact checking, claim verification, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing.

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Authors: Guo Yanru, Zhu Xiaobo, Lee Chu Keong

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This paper maps the structure of the social network of the 2011 class ofsixty graduate students of the Masters of Science (Knowledge Management) programme at the Nanyang Technological University, based on their friending relationships on Facebook. To ensure anonymity, actual names were not used. Instead, they were replaced with codes constructed from their gender, nationality, mode of study, year of enrollment and a unique number. The relationships between friends within the class, and among the seniors and alumni of the programme wereplotted. UCINet and Pajek were used to plot the sociogram, to compute the density, inclusivity, and degree, global, betweenness, and Bonacich centralities, to partition the students into two groups, namely, active and peripheral, and to identify the cut-points. Homophily was investigated, and it was observed for nationality and study mode. The groups students formed on Facebook were also studied, and of fifteen groups, eight were classified as dead, which we defined as those that have been inactive for over two months.

Keywords: Facebook, friending relationships, Social network analysis, social network sites, structural position

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Authors: Philomena Ibuh Adzongo, Margaret U. Oluwole, Justina Nguveren Jor.

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This paper investigated the need for the development of entrepreneurial skills for Benue State University students. The population consisted of all 1,500 final year students in Benue State University. A sample of 100 students was selected using simple random sampling. A 12-item self-constructed and content validated questionnaire by research experts titled, the Need for the Development of Entrepreneurial Skills in Benue State University Students (NDECBSUS) was used to collect the data. The questionnaire items were rated using a 4-point modified rating scale of Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree, assigned the following scores of 4,3,2 and 1, respectively. The questionnaire was administered by the researcher with the help of two research assistants through the primary source. Simple percentages and chi-square were used to answer the research questions and test the hypotheses, respectively. The findings revealed that in business management, business management skills, personal skills, and technical skills need to be developed in students for them to become effective and efficient entrepreneurs and concluded that the acquisition of these skills will reduce the challenge of unemployment. The study recommended that funds should be made available by all education stakeholders for such programmes to remain functional.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial skill, entrepreneurship, need for development, university students.

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Authors: N. Ikasari, T. Sumransat, U. Eko, R. Kusumastuti

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Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are regarded as the engine for economic development, notwithstanding their continuous financing conundrum. In the case of developing countries, access to finance is a reflection of the effectiveness of government policy. The widely accepted perspective to assess small businesses’ access to finance is that of economic view. The existing body of literature presents access to finance in three dimensions; they are accessibility, eligibility and affordability. Within this perspective, the role of socio-cultural has not explored. This study is aimed at investigating the existence of any socio-cultural factors within access to finance issue in Asian countries where governance is enriched by countries’ values and beliefs. The significance of this study is the instigation of supplementary dimension to assess access to finance that eventually contributes to the development of micro-finance policy. Indonesia and Thailand are selected as cases in point, where distinction is drawn on the level of cultural diversity and micro-finance policy in respective country. A questionnaire is used to collect information related to the three dimensions of access to finance as well as to explore alternative financing reasoning to elaborate the issue from the demand side. Questionnaires are distributed to 60 small business owners operating in Indonesia and the same number in Thailand. In order to present a complete understanding on the matter at hand, interviews with banks are conducted to capture the perspective as presented by the supply side. Research findings show that small business owners and banks in Indonesia and Thailand are in agreement that access to finance is not deemed as an issue. However, trust issue that exists mutually between financing users and providers leads small business owners in Indonesia to look for alternative financing other than banks. The findings contribute to the refinement of micro-financing policy in Indonesia and Thailand.

Keywords: Access to finance, Indonesia, small and medium enterprises, Thailand.

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Authors: Diego Renan G. Tudela, Veruska C. Dutra, Mary Lucia Gomes Silveira de Senna, Afonso R. Aquino

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Tourism in the present is the largest industry in the world, being an important global activity that has grown a lot in recent times. In this context, the activity of cultural tourism is growing, being seen as an important source of knowledge and information enjoyed by visitors. This article aims to discuss the cultural tourism, archaeological records and indigenous communities and the importance of preserving these invaluable sources of information, focusing on the records of the first peoples inhabiting the South American and North American lands. The study was based on discussions, theoretical studies, bibliographical research. Archaeological records are an important source of knowledge and information. Indigenous ethnic tourism represents a rescue of the authenticity of indigenous traditional cultures and their relation to the natural habitat. Cultural and indigenous tourism activity requires long-term planning to make it a sustainable activity.

Keywords: Tourism, culture, preservation, discussions.

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Authors: C. Cruz, A. Breda

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Emotions are manifestations of everything that happens around us, influencing, consequently, our actions. People experience emotions continuously when socialize with friends, when facing complex situations, and when at school, among many other situations. Although the influence of emotions in the teaching and learning process is nothing new, its study in the academic field has been more popular in recent years, distinguishing between positive (e.g., enjoyment and curiosity) and negative emotions (e.g., boredom and frustration). There is no doubt that emotions play an important role in the students’ learning process since the development of knowledge involves thoughts, actions, and emotions. Nowadays, one of the most significant changes in acquiring knowledge, accessing information, and communicating is the way we do it through technological and digital resources. Faced with an increasingly frequent use of technological or digital means with different purposes, whether in the acquisition of knowledge or in communicating with others, the emotions involved in these processes change naturally. The speed with which the Internet provides information reduces the excitement for searching for the answer, the gratification of discovering something through our own effort, the patience, the capacity for effort, and resilience. Thus, technological and digital devices are bringing changes to the emotional domain. For this reason and others, it is essential to educate children from an early age to understand that it is not possible to have everything with just one click and to deal with negative emotions. Currently, many curriculum guidelines highlight the importance of the development of so-called soft skills, in which the emotional domain is present, in academic contexts. Within the scope of the Portuguese reality, the “Students’ profile by the end of compulsory schooling” and the “Health education reference” also emphasize the importance of emotions in education. There are several resources to stimulate good emotions in articulation with cognitive development. One of the most predictable and not very used resources in the most diverse areas of knowledge after pre-school education is the literature. Due to its characteristics, in the narrative or in the illustrations, literature provides the reader with a journey full of emotions. On the other hand, literature makes it possible to establish bridges between narrative and different areas of knowledge, reconciling the cognitive and emotional domains. This study results from the presentation session of a children's book, entitled “From the Outside to Inside and from the Inside to Outside”, to children attending the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years of basic education in the Portuguese education system. In this book, rationale and emotion are in constant dialogue, so in this session, based on excerpts from the book dramatized by the authors, some questions were asked to the children in a large group, with an aim to explore their perception regarding certain emotions or events that trigger them. According to the aim of this study, qualitative, descriptive, and interpretative research was carried out based on participant observation and audio records.

Keywords: Emotions, children’s literature, basic education, soft skills.

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Authors: Rahmad Wisnu Wardana, Eakachai Warinsiriruk, Sutep Joy-A-Ka

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Selecting the most suitable welding process usually depends on experiences or common application in similar companies. However, this approach generally ignores many criteria that can be affecting the suitable welding process selection. Therefore, knowledge automation through knowledge-based systems will significantly improve the decision-making process. The aims of this research propose integrated data envelopment analysis (DEA) and fuzzy credibility constrained programming approach for identifying the best welding process for stainless steel storage tank in the food and beverage industry. The proposed approach uses fuzzy concept and credibility measure to deal with uncertain data from experts' judgment. Furthermore, 12 parameters are used to determine the most appropriate welding processes among six competitive welding processes.

Keywords: Welding process selection, data envelopment analysis, fuzzy credibility constrained programming, storage tank.

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Authors: Areej M. Abduldaim, Nadia M. G. Al-Saidi

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Algebra is one of the important fields of mathematics. It concerns with the study and manipulation of mathematical symbols. It also concerns with the study of abstractions such as groups, rings, and fields. Due to the development of these abstractions, it is extended to consider other structures, such as vectors, matrices, and polynomials, which are non-numerical objects. Computer algebra is the implementation of algebraic methods as algorithms and computer programs. Recently, many algebraic cryptosystem protocols are based on non-commutative algebraic structures, such as authentication, key exchange, and encryption-decryption processes are adopted. Cryptography is the science that aimed at sending the information through public channels in such a way that only an authorized recipient can read it. Ring theory is the most attractive category of algebra in the area of cryptography. In this paper, we employ the algebraic structure called skew -Armendariz rings to design a neoteric algorithm for zero knowledge proof. The proposed protocol is established and illustrated through numerical example, and its soundness and completeness are proved.

Keywords: Cryptosystem, identification, skew π-Armendariz rings, skew polynomial rings, zero knowledge protocol.

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Authors: Gysele Lima Ricci, Jose Miguel Rodriguez Anton

Abstract:

Companies in the tourism sector need to achieve competitive advantages for their survival in the market. In this way, the models based on association, cooperation, complementarity, distribution, exchange and mutual assistance arise as a possibility of organizational development, taking as reference the concept of networks. Many companies seek to partner in local networks as clusters to act together and associate. The main objective of the present research is to identify the specificities of management and the practices of cooperation in the tourist destination of São Paulo - Brazil, and to propose a new management model with possible cluster of tourism. The empirical analysis was carried out in three phases. As a first phase, a research was made by the companies, associations and tourism organizations existing in São Paulo, analyzing the characteristics of their business. In the second phase, the management specificities and cooperation practice used in the tourist destination. And in the third phase, identifying the possible strengths and weaknesses that potential or potential tourist cluster could have, proposing the development of the management model of the same adapted to the needs of the companies, associations and organizations. As a main result, it has been identified that companies, associations and organizations could be looking for synergies with each other and collaborate through a Hiperred organizational structure, in which they share their knowledge, try to make the most of the collaboration and to benefit from three concepts: flexibility, learning and collaboration. Finally, it is concluded that, the proposed tourism cluster management model is viable for the development of tourism destinations because it makes it possible to strategically address agents which are responsible for public policies, as well as public and private companies and organizations in their strategies competitiveness and cooperation.

Keywords: Cluster, management model, networks, tourism sector.

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Authors: Ya-Ting Carolyn Yang, Ping-Han Cheng, Shi-Hui Gilbert Chang, Terry Yuan-Fang Chen, Chih-Chieh Li

Abstract:

Nanotechnology is widely applied in various areas so professionals in the related fields have to know more than nano knowledge. In the study, we focus on adopting ICT-assisted PBL in college general education to foster professionals who possess multiple abilities. The research adopted a pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design. The control group received traditional instruction, and the experimental group received ICT-assisted PBL instruction. Descriptive statistics will be used to describe the means, standard deviations, and adjusted means for the tests between the two groups. Next, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) will be used to compare the final results of the two research groups after 6 weeks of instruction. Statistics gathered in the end of the research can be used to make contrasts. Therefore, we will see how different teaching strategies can improve students’ understanding about nanotechnology and learning skills.

Keywords: Nanotechnology, science education, project-based learning, information and communication technology.

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Authors: Shohreh Ajoudanian, Mohammad Davarpanah Jazi

Abstract:

The rapid expansion of the web is causing the constant growth of information, leading to several problems such as increased difficulty of extracting potentially useful knowledge. Web content mining confronts this problem gathering explicit information from different web sites for its access and knowledge discovery. Query interfaces of web databases share common building blocks. After extracting information with parsing approach, we use a new data mining algorithm to match a large number of schemas in databases at a time. Using this algorithm increases the speed of information matching. In addition, instead of simple 1:1 matching, they do complex (m:n) matching between query interfaces. In this paper we present a novel correlation mining algorithm that matches correlated attributes with smaller cost. This algorithm uses Jaccard measure to distinguish positive and negative correlated attributes. After that, system matches the user query with different query interfaces in special domain and finally chooses the nearest query interface with user query to answer to it.

Keywords: Content mining, complex matching, correlation mining, information extraction.

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Authors: Cha-Hwa Lin, Je-Wei Hu

Abstract:

The conventional GA combined with a local search algorithm, such as the 2-OPT, forms a hybrid genetic algorithm(HGA) for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). However, the geometric properties which are problem specific knowledge can be used to improve the search process of the HGA. Some tour segments (edges) of TSPs are fine while some maybe too long to appear in a short tour. This knowledge could constrain GAs to work out with fine tour segments without considering long tour segments as often. Consequently, a new algorithm is proposed, called intelligent-OPT hybrid genetic algorithm (IOHGA), to improve the GA and the 2-OPT algorithm in order to reduce the search time for the optimal solution. Based on the geometric properties, all the tour segments are assigned 2-level priorities to distinguish between good and bad genes. A simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the IOHGA. The experimental results indicate that in general the IOHGA could obtain near-optimal solutions with less time and better accuracy than the hybrid genetic algorithm with simulated annealing algorithm (HGA(SA)).

Keywords: Traveling salesman problem, hybrid geneticalgorithm, priority selection, 2-OPT.

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