Search results for: Illustrated language activities

Authors: B. Likar, K. Širok

Abstract:

The paper presents a new method for efficient innovation process management. Even though the innovation management methods, tools and knowledge are well established and documented in literature, most of the companies still do not manage it efficiently. Especially in SMEs the front end of innovation - problem identification, idea creation and selection - is often not optimally performed. Our eMIPS methodology represents a sort of "umbrella methodology" - a well-defined set of procedures, which can be dynamically adapted to the concrete case in a company. In daily practice, various methods (e.g. for problem identification and idea creation) can be applied, depending on the company's needs. It is based on the proactive involvement of the company's employees supported by the appropriate methodology and external experts. The presented phases are performed via a mixture of face-to-face activities (workshops) and online (eLearning) activities taking place in eLearning Moodle environment and using other e-communication channels. One part of the outcomes is an identified set of opportunities and concrete solutions ready for implementation. The other also very important result is connected to innovation competences for the participating employees related with concrete tools and methods for idea management. In addition, the employees get a strong experience for dynamic, efficient and solution oriented managing of the invention process. The eMIPS also represents a way of establishing or improving the innovation culture in the organization. The first results in a pilot company showed excellent results regarding the motivation of participants and also as to the results achieved.

Keywords: Creativity, distance learning, front end, innovation, problem.

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Authors: Yuan-Jye Tseng, Shin-Han Lin

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In this research, a mathematical model for integrated evaluation of green design and green manufacturing processes is presented. To design a product, there can be alternative options to design the detailed components to fulfill the same product requirement. In the design alternative cases, the components of the product can be designed with different materials and detailed specifications. If several design alternative cases are proposed, the different materials and specifications can affect the manufacturing processes. In this paper, a new concept for integrating green design and green manufacturing processes is presented. A green design can be determined based the manufacturing processes of the designed product by evaluating the green criteria including energy usage and environmental impact, in addition to the traditional criteria of manufacturing cost. With this concept, a mathematical model is developed to find the green design and the associated green manufacturing processes. In the mathematical model, the cost items include material cost, manufacturing cost, and green related cost. The green related cost items include energy cost and environmental cost. The objective is to find the decisions of green design and green manufacturing processes to achieve the minimized total cost. In practical applications, the decision-making can be made to select a good green design case and its green manufacturing processes. In this presentation, an example product is illustrated. It shows that the model is practical and useful for integrated evaluation of green design and green manufacturing processes.

Keywords: Supply chain management, green supply chain, green design, green manufacturing, mathematical model.

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Authors: Nguyen Viet Tan

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The Bahnar is one of 11 indigenous groups living in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. It is one among the four most popular groups in this area, including the Mnong who speak the same language of Mon Khmer family, while both groups of the Jrai and the Rhade belong to the Malayo-Polynesian language family. These groups once captured fertile plateaus, left their cultural and artistic heritage which affected the remaining small groups. Despite the difference in ethnic origins, these groups seem to share similar beliefs, customs and related folk arts after a very long time living beside each other. However, through an in-depth study, this paper points out the fact that the decorative patterns used by the Bahnar are different from the other ethnic groups, especially in color. Based on historical materials from the local museums and some studies in 1980s when all of the ethnic groups in this area had still lived in self-sufficient condition, this paper characterizes the traditional color scheme used by the Bahnar and identifies the difference in decorative motifs of this group compared to the others by pointing out they do not use green in their usual decorative patterns. Moreover, combined with some field surveys recently, through comparative analysis, it also discovers stylistic variations of these patterns in the process of cultural exchange with the other ethnic groups, both in and out of the region, in modern living conditions. This study helps to preserve and promote the traditional values and cultural identity of the Bahnar people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, avoiding the fusion of styles among groups during the cultural exchange.

Keywords: Bahnar ethic group, decorative patterns, the central highland of Vietnam, traditional color scheme.

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Authors: Monday O. Ale, Adebukola A. Akintade, Olasunbo O. Orungbemi

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Fermentation as an important operation in the processing of cocoa beans is now affected by the recent climate change across the globe. The major requirement for effective fermentation is the ability of the material used to retain sufficient heat for the required microbial activities. Apart from the effects of climate on the rate of heat retention, the materials used for fermentation plays an important role. Most Farmers still restrict fermentation activities to the use of traditional methods. Improving on cocoa fermentation in this era of climate change makes it necessary to work on other materials that can be suitable for cocoa fermentation. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine the effects of fermentation techniques on the quality of cocoa beans. The materials used in this fermentation research were heap-leaves (traditional), stainless steel, plastic tin, plastic basket and wooden box. The period of fermentation varies from zero days to 10 days. Physical and chemical tests were carried out for variables in quality determination in the samples. The weight per bean varied from 1.0-1.2 g after drying across the samples and the major color of the dry beans observed was brown except with the samples from stainless steel. The moisture content varied from 5.5-7%. The mineral content and the heavy metals decreased with increase in the fermentation period. A wooden box can conclusively be used as an alternative to heap-leaves as there was no significant difference in the physical features of the samples fermented with the two methods. The use of a wooden box as an alternative for cocoa fermentation is therefore recommended for cocoa farmers.

Keywords: Effects, fermentation, fermentation materials, period, quality.

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Authors: Mohammad Rohani, Gholamali Shafabakhsh, Abdolhosein Haddad, Ehsan Asnaashari

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Visual simulation has emerged as a key planning tool in built environment because it enables architects, engineers and project managers to visualize construction process evolution before the project actual commences. This provides an efficient technology for reducing time and cost through planning and controlling resources, machines and materials. With the development of infrastructure projects and the massive civil constructions such as bridges, urban tunnels and highways as well as sensitivity of their construction operations, it is very necessary to apply proper planning methods. Implementation of visual techniques into management of construction projects can provide a fundamental foundation for projects with massive activities and duplicate items. So, the purpose of this paper is to develop visual simulation management techniques for infrastructure projects such as highways bridges by the use of Four-Dimensional Computer-Aided design Models. This project simulates operational assembly-line for Box-Girder Concrete Bridges which it would be able to optimize the sequence and interaction of project activities and on the other hand, it would minimize any unintended conflicts prior to project start. In this paper, after introducing the various planning methods by building information model and concrete bridges in highways, an executive case study is demonstrated and then a visual technique (4D CAD) will be applied for the case. In the final step, the user feedback for interacting by this system evaluated according to six criteria.

Keywords: 4D application area, Box-Girder concrete bridges, CAD model, visual planning.

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Authors: Barenten Suciu, Yuya Nakamoto

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Power generation effect, obtained by inserting a piezo- electric sheet in the backlash clearance of a circular arc helical gear, is evaluated. Such type of screw gear is preferred since, in comparison with the involute tooth profile, the circular arc profile leads to reduced stress-concentration effects, and improved life of the piezoelectric film. Firstly, geometry of the circular arc helical gear, and properties of the piezoelectric sheet are presented. Then, description of the test-rig, consisted of a right-hand thread gear meshing with a left-hand thread gear, and the voltage measurement procedure are given. After creating the tridimensional (3D) model of the meshing gears in SolidWorks, they are 3D-printed in acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) resin. Variation of the generated voltage versus time, during a meshing cycle of the circular arc helical gear, is measured for various values of the center distance. Then, the change of the maximal, minimal, and peak-to-peak voltage versus the center distance is illustrated. Optimal center distance of the gear, to achieve voltage maximization, is found and its significance is discussed. Such results prove that the contact pressure of the meshing gears can be measured, and also, the electrical power can be generated by employing the proposed technique.

Keywords: Power generation, circular arc helical gear, piezo- electric sheet, contact problem, optimal center distance.

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Authors: Larry Powell, Seth Polsley, Drew Casey, Tracy Hammond

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Human activity recognition (HAR) systems have shown positive performance when recognizing repetitive activities like walking, running, and sleeping. Water-based activities are a reasonably new area for activity recognition. However, water-based activity recognition has largely focused on supporting the elite and competitive swimming population, which already has amazing coordination and proper form. Beginner swimmers are not perfect, and activity recognition needs to support the individual motions to help beginners. Activity recognition algorithms are traditionally built around short segments of timed sensor data. Using a time window input can cause performance issues in the machine learning model. The window’s size can be too small or large, requiring careful tuning and precise data segmentation. In this work, we present a method that uses a time window as the initial segmentation, then separates the data based on the change in the sensor value. Our system uses a multi-phase segmentation method that pulls all peaks and valleys for each axis of an accelerometer placed on the swimmer’s lower back. This results in high recognition performance using leave-one-subject-out validation on our study with 20 beginner swimmers, with our model optimized from our final dataset resulting in an F-Score of 0.95.

Keywords: Time window, peak/valley segmentation, feature extraction, beginner swimming, activity recognition.

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Authors: Deeman Yousif Mahmood, Mohammed Abdullah Hussein

Abstract:

The goal of a network-based intrusion detection system is to classify activities of network traffics into two major categories: normal and attack (intrusive) activities. Nowadays, data mining and machine learning plays an important role in many sciences; including intrusion detection system (IDS) using both supervised and unsupervised techniques. However, one of the essential steps of data mining is feature selection that helps in improving the efficiency, performance and prediction rate of proposed approach. This paper applies unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm with information gain (IG) for feature selection and reduction to build a network intrusion detection system. For our experimental analysis, we have used the new NSL-KDD dataset, which is a modified dataset for KDDCup 1999 intrusion detection benchmark dataset. With a split of 60.0% for the training set and the remainder for the testing set, a 2 class classifications have been implemented (Normal, Attack). Weka framework which is a java based open source software consists of a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks has been used in the testing process. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is very accurate with low false positive rate and high true positive rate and it takes less learning time in comparison with using the full features of the dataset with the same algorithm.

Keywords: Information Gain (IG), Intrusion Detection System (IDS), K-means Clustering, Weka.

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Authors: Mohamed El Morsy, Gabriela Achtenová

Abstract:

Research on damage of gears and gear pairs using vibration signals remains very attractive, because vibration signals from a gear pair are complex in nature and not easy to interpret. Predicting gear pair defects by analyzing changes in vibration signal of gears pairs in operation is a very reliable method. Therefore, a suitable vibration signal processing technique is necessary to extract defect information generally obscured by the noise from dynamic factors of other gear pairs.This article presents the value of cepstrum analysis in vehicle gearbox fault diagnosis. Cepstrum represents the overall power content of a whole family of harmonics and sidebands when more than one family of sidebands is present at the same time. The concept for the measurement and analysis involved in using the technique are briefly outlined. Cepstrum analysis is used for detection of an artificial pitting defect in a vehicle gearbox loaded with different speeds and torques. The test stand is equipped with three dynamometers; the input dynamometer serves asthe internal combustion engine, the output dynamometers introduce the load on the flanges of the output joint shafts. The pitting defect is manufactured on the tooth side of a gear of the fifth speed on the secondary shaft. Also, a method for fault diagnosis of gear faults is presented based on order Cepstrum. The procedure is illustrated with the experimental vibration data of the vehicle gearbox. The results show the effectiveness of Cepstrum analysis in detection and diagnosis of the gear condition.

Keywords: Cepstrum analysis, fault diagnosis, gearbox.

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Authors: A. M. Gadanya, M. S. Sule, M. K. Atiku

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Effect of oral administration of “Gadagi" tea on liver function was assessed on 50 healthy male albino rats which were grouped and administered with different doses(mg/kg) i.e low dose (380mg/kg, 415mg/kg, 365mg/kg, 315mg/kg for “sak", “sada" and “magani" respectively), standard dose ( 760mg/kg, 830mg/kg, 730mg/kg for “sak-, “sada" and “magani" respectively) and high dose (1500mg/kg, 1700mg/kg and 1460mg/kg for “sak--,"sada" and “magani" groups respectively) for a period of four weeks. Animals that were not administered with the tea constituted the control group. At the end of fourth week, the animals were sacrificed and their serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), total protein (TP), albumin (ALB), and globulins (GLO) were determined. Mean serum ALT and ALP activities were significantly higher (P<0.05) in rats orally administered with high dose of “sak" and those administered with standard dose of “sada" than those of the control group, suggesting a probable impairment of liver function due to liver cytolysis.Mean serum AST, ALT and ALP activities were significantly lower (P<0.05) in rats that were orally administered with high dose of “magani" than that of the control group, suggesting a probable improvement in liver function (due to decrease in liver cytolysis). Mean serum TP, ALB and GLO levels were significantly higher (P<0.05) in rats that were orally administered with the various doses of“sak", “sada" and “magani" than those of the control group. This also suggests a probable improvement in the synthetic function of the liver.Thus, some dosages of “sak" and “sada could be hepatotoxic, whereas “magani" especially at the high dose administered could have pharmacologically positive effect on the liver of the rats.

Keywords: Gadagi" tea, Liver function, Oral, Rats.

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Authors: M. Rodionov, Z. Dedovets

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The article describes the theoretical concept of teaching secondary school students proof demonstration skills in mathematics. It describes in detail different levels of mastery of the concept of proof-which correspond to Piaget’s idea of there being three distinct and progressively more complex stages in the development of human reflection. Lessons for each level contain a specific combination of the visual-figurative components and deductive reasoning. It is vital at the transition point between levels to carefully and rigorously recalibrate teaching to reflect the development of more complex reflective understanding. This can apply even within the same age range, since students will develop at different speeds and to different potential. The authors argue that this requires an aware and adaptive approach to lessons to reflect this complexity and variation. The authors also contend that effective teaching which enables students to properly understand the implementation of proof arguments must develop specific competences. These are: understanding of the importance of completeness and generality in making a valid argument; being task focused; having an internalised locus of control and being flexible in approach and evaluation. These criteria must be correlated with the systematic application of corresponding methodologies which are best likely to achieve success. The particular pedagogical decisions which are made to deliver this objective are illustrated by concrete examples from the existing secondary school mathematics courses. The proposed theoretical concept formed the basis of the development of methodological materials which have been tested in 47 secondary schools.

Keywords: Education, teaching of mathematics, proof, deductive reasoning, secondary school.

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Authors: Hossam el-ddin Mostafa, Pavel Čičak

Abstract:

IETF RFC 2002 originally introduced the wireless Mobile-IP protocol to support portable IP addresses for mobile devices that often change their network access points to the Internet. The inefficiency of this protocol mainly within the handoff management produces large end-to-end packet delays, during registration process, and further degrades the system efficiency due to packet losses between subnets. The criterion to initiate a simple and fast full-duplex connection between the home agent and foreign agent, to reduce the roaming duration, is a very important issue to be considered by a work in this paper. State-transition Petri-Nets of the modeling scenario-based CIA: communication inter-agents procedure as an extension to the basic Mobile-IP registration process was designed and manipulated. The heuristic of configuration file during practical Setup session for registration parameters, on Cisco platform Router-1760 using IOS 12.3 (15)T is created. Finally, stand-alone performance simulations results from Simulink Matlab, within each subnet and also between subnets, are illustrated for reporting better end-to-end packet delays. Results verified the effectiveness of our Mathcad analytical manipulation and experimental implementation. It showed lower values of end-to-end packet delay for Mobile-IP using CIA procedure. Furthermore, it reported packets flow between subnets to improve packet losses between subnets.

Keywords: Cisco configuration, handoff, packet delay, Petri-Nets, registration process, Simulink.

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Authors: Inas Hussein

Abstract:

Communication in the modern world is increasingly becoming multimodal due to globalization and the digital space we live in which have remarkably affected how people communicate. Accordingly, Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) is an emerging paradigm in discourse studies with the underlying assumption that other semiotic resources such as images, colours, scientific symbolism, gestures, actions, music and sound, etc. combine with language in order to  communicate meaning. One of the effective multimodal media that combines both verbal and non-verbal elements to create meaning is political cartoons. Furthermore, since political and social issues are mirrored in political cartoons, these are regarded as potential objects of discourse analysis since they not only reflect the thoughts of the public but they also have the power to influence them. The aim of this paper is to analyze some selected cartoons on the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital by the American President, Donald Trump, adopting a multimodal approach. More specifically, the present research examines how the various semiotic tools and resources utilized by the cartoonists function in projecting the intended meaning. Ten political cartoons, among a surge of editorial cartoons highlighted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States - as publications in different Arabic-language newspapers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Iran and UK, were purposively selected for semiotic analysis. These editorial cartoons, all published during 6^th–18^th December 2017, invariably suggest one theme: Jewish and Israeli domination of the United States. The data were analyzed using the framework of Visual Social Semiotics. In accordance with this methodological framework, the selected visual compositions were analyzed in terms of three aspects of meaning: representational, interactive and compositional. In analyzing the selected cartoons, an interpretative approach is being adopted. This approach prioritizes depth to breadth and enables insightful analyses of the chosen cartoons. The findings of the study reveal that semiotic resources are key elements of political cartoons due to the inherent political communication they convey. It is proved that adequate interpretation of the three aspects of meaning is a prerequisite for understanding the intended meaning of political cartoons. It is recommended that further research should be conducted to provide more insightful analyses of political cartoons from a multimodal perspective.

Keywords: Multimodal discourse analysis, multimodal text, political cartoons, visual modality.

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Authors: Hossam el-ddin Mostafa, Pavel Čičak

Abstract:

In IETF RFC 2002, Mobile-IP was developed to enable Laptobs to maintain Internet connectivity while moving between subnets. However, the packet loss that comes from switching subnets arises because network connectivity is lost while the mobile host registers with the foreign agent and this encounters large end-to-end packet delays. The criterion to initiate a simple and fast full-duplex connection between the home agent and foreign agent, to reduce the roaming duration, is a very important issue to be considered by a work in this paper. State-transition Petri-Nets of the modeling scenario-based CIA: communication inter-agents procedure as an extension to the basic Mobile-IP registration process was designed and manipulated to describe the system in discrete events. The heuristic of configuration file during practical Setup session for registration parameters, on Cisco platform Router-1760 using IOS 12.3 (15)T and TFTP server S/W is created. Finally, stand-alone performance simulations from Simulink Matlab, within each subnet and also between subnets, are illustrated for reporting better end-toend packet delays. Results verified the effectiveness of our Mathcad analytical manipulation and experimental implementation. It showed lower values of end-to-end packet delay for Mobile-IP using CIA procedure-based early registration. Furthermore, it reported packets flow between subnets to improve losses between subnets.

Keywords: Cisco configuration, handoff, Mobile-IP, packetdelay, Petri-Nets, registration process, Simulink

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Authors: Chin-Yu Lee, Iau-Teh Wang

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The mountain road slope failures triggered by earthquake activities and torrential rain namely to create the disaster. Province Road No. 24 is a main route to the Wutai Township. The area of the study is located at the mileages between 46K and 47K along the road. However, the road has been suffered frequent damages as a result of landslide and slope failures during typhoon seasons. An understanding of the sliding behaviors in the area appears to be necessary. Slope failures triggered by earthquake activities and heavy rainfalls occur frequently. The study is to understand the mechanism of slope failures and to look for the way to deal with the situation. In order to achieve these objectives, this paper is based on theoretical and structural geology data interpretation program to assess the potential slope sliding behavior. The study showed an intimate relationship between the landslide behavior of the slopes and the stratum materials, based on structural geology analysis method to analysis slope stability and finds the slope safety coefficient to predict the sites of destroyed layer. According to the case study and parameter analyses results, the slope mainly slips direction compared to the site located in the southeast area. Find rainfall to result in the rise of groundwater level is main reason of the landslide mechanism. Future need to set up effective horizontal drain at corrective location, that can effective restrain mountain road slope failures and increase stability of slope.

Keywords: slope stability analysis, Stereographic Projection, wedge Failure.

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Authors: R. Tamborrino, F. Rinaudo

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Digital technologies offer possibilities to effectively convert historical archives into instruments of knowledge able to provide a guide for the interpretation of historical phenomena. Digital conversion and management of those documents allow the possibility to add other sources in a unique and coherent model that permits the intersection of different data able to open new interpretations and understandings. Urban history uses, among other sources, the inventories that register human activities in a specific space (e.g. cadastres, censuses, etc.). The geographic localisation of that information inside cartographic supports allows for the comprehension and visualisation of specific relationships between different historical realities registering both the urban space and the peoples living there. These links that merge the different nature of data and documentation through a new organisation of the information can suggest a new interpretation of other related events. In all these kinds of analysis, the use of GIS platforms today represents the most appropriate answer. The design of the related databases is the key to realise the ad-hoc instrument to facilitate the analysis and the intersection of data of different origins. Moreover, GIS has become the digital platform where it is possible to add other kinds of data visualisation. This research deals with the industrial development of Turin at the beginning of the 20th century. A census of factories realized just prior to WWI provides the opportunity to test the potentialities of GIS platforms for the analysis of urban landscape modifications during the first industrial development of the town. The inventory includes data about location, activities, and people. GIS is shaped in a creative way linking different sources and digital systems aiming to create a new type of platform conceived as an interface integrating different kinds of data visualisation. The data processing allows linking this information to an urban space, and also visualising the growth of the city at that time. The sources, related to the urban landscape development in that period, are of a different nature. The emerging necessity to build, enlarge, modify and join different buildings to boost the industrial activities, according to their fast development, is recorded by different official permissions delivered by the municipality and now stored in the Historical Archive of the Municipality of Turin. Those documents, which are reports and drawings, contain numerous data on the buildings themselves, including the block where the plot is located, the district, and the people involved such as the owner, the investor, and the engineer or architect designing the industrial building. All these collected data offer the possibility to firstly re-build the process of change of the urban landscape by using GIS and 3D modelling technologies thanks to the access to the drawings (2D plans, sections and elevations) that show the previous and the planned situation. Furthermore, they access information for different queries of the linked dataset that could be useful for different research and targets such as economics, biographical, architectural, or demographical. By superimposing a layer of the present city, the past meets to the present-industrial heritage, and people meet urban history.

Keywords: Digital urban history, census, digitalisation, GIS, modelling, digital humanities.

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Authors: Olumide Simeon Ogunnusi, Shukor Abd Razak, Michael Kolade Adu

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Inter-agent communication manager facilitates communication among mobile agents via message passing mechanism. Until now, all Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) compliant agent systems are capable of exchanging messages following the standard format of sending and receiving messages. Previous works tend to secure messages to be exchanged among a community of collaborative agents commissioned to perform specific tasks using cryptosystems. However, the approach is characterized by computational complexity due to the encryption and decryption processes required at the two ends. The proposed approach to secure agent communication allows only agents that are created by the host agent server to communicate via the agent communication channel provided by the host agent platform. These agents are assumed to be harmless. Therefore, to secure communication of legitimate agents from intrusion by external agents, a 2-phase policy enforcement system was developed. The first phase constrains the external agent to run only on the network server while the second phase confines the activities of the external agent to its execution environment. To implement the proposed policy, a controller agent was charged with the task of screening any external agent entering the local area network and preventing it from migrating to the agent execution host where the legitimate agents are running. On arrival of the external agent at the host network server, an introspector agent was charged to monitor and restrain its activities. This approach secures legitimate agent communication from Man-in-the Middle and Replay attacks.

Keywords: Agent communication, introspective agent, isolation of agent, policy enforcement system.

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Authors: Elnaz Afshari, Siamak Najarian, Naser Simforoosh, Siamak Hajizadeh Farkoush

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Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is now being widely used as a preferred choice for various types of operations. The need to detect various tactile properties, justifies the key role of tactile sensing that is currently missing in MIS. In this regard, Laparoscopy is one of the methods of minimally invasive surgery that can be used in kidney stone removal surgeries. At this moment, determination of the exact location of stone during laparoscopy is one of the limitations of this method that no scientific solution has been found for so far. Artificial tactile sensing is a new method for obtaining the characteristics of a hard object embedded in a soft tissue. Artificial palpation is an important application of artificial tactile sensing that can be used in different types of surgeries. In this study, a new method for determining the exact location of stone during laparoscopy is presented. In the present study, the effects of stone existence on the surface of kidney were investigated using conceptual 3D model of kidney containing a simulated stone. Having imitated palpation and modeled it conceptually, indications of stone existence that appear on the surface of kidney were determined. A number of different cases were created and solved by the software and using stress distribution contours and stress graphs, it is illustrated that the created stress patterns on the surface of kidney show not only the existence of stone inside, but also its exact location. So three-dimensional analysis leads to a novel method of predicting the exact location of stone and can be directly applied to the incorporation of tactile sensing in artificial palpation, helping surgeons in non-invasive procedures.

Keywords: Kidney Stone, Laparoscopic Surgery, Artificial Tactile Sensing, Finite Element Method.

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Authors: Sheikh Shams Azam, Manoj Raju, Venkatesh Pagidimarri, Vamsi Kasivajjala

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Over the past decade, there has been a steep rise in the data-driven analysis in major areas of medicine, such as clinical decision support system, survival analysis, patient similarity analysis, image analytics etc. Most of the data in the field are well-structured and available in numerical or categorical formats which can be used for experiments directly. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, there exists a wide expanse of data that is intractable for direct analysis owing to its unstructured nature which can be found in the form of discharge summaries, clinical notes, procedural notes which are in human written narrative format and neither have any relational model nor any standard grammatical structure. An important step in the utilization of these texts for such studies is to transform and process the data to retrieve structured information from the haystack of irrelevant data using information retrieval and data mining techniques. To address this problem, the authors present Q-Map in this paper, which is a simple yet robust system that can sift through massive datasets with unregulated formats to retrieve structured information aggressively and efficiently. It is backed by an effective mining technique which is based on a string matching algorithm that is indexed on curated knowledge sources, that is both fast and configurable. The authors also briefly examine its comparative performance with MetaMap, one of the most reputed tools for medical concepts retrieval and present the advantages the former displays over the latter.

Keywords: Information retrieval (IR), unified medical language system (UMLS), Syntax Based Analysis, natural language processing (NLP), medical informatics.

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Authors: K. Aravindhan, Trishit Bandyopadhyay, Mahesh Mehendale, Supriya Kumar De

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The inherent iterative nature of product design and development poses significant challenge to reduce the product design and development time (PD). In order to shorten the time to market, organizations have adopted concurrent development where multiple specialized tasks and design activities are carried out in parallel. Iterative nature of work coupled with the overlap of activities can result in unpredictable time to completion and significant rework. Many of the products have missed the time to market window due to unanticipated or rather unplanned iteration and rework. The iterative and often overlapped processes introduce greater amounts of ambiguity in design and development, where the traditional methods and tools of project management provide less value. In this context, identifying critical metrics to understand the iteration probability is an open research area where significant contribution can be made given that iteration has been the key driver of cost and schedule risk in PD projects. Two important questions that the proposed study attempts to address are: Can we predict and identify the number of iterations in a product development flow? Can we provide managerial insights for a better control over iteration? The proposal introduces the concept of decision points and using this concept intends to develop metrics that can provide managerial insights into iteration predictability. By characterizing the product development flow as a network of decision points, the proposed research intends to delve further into iteration probability and attempts to provide more clarity.

Keywords: Decision Points, Iteration, Product Design, Rework.

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Authors: Hossein Ahmadi, Ogholgol Nazari

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The necessity of grading and sequencing tasks has led to the development of different criteria in this regard. However, appropriateness of these criteria in different situations is less discussed. This paper attempts to shed more light on the priority of different criteria in relation with different factors including learners, teachers, educational, and cultural factors.

Keywords: Criteria, Grading, Sequencing, Language learning tasks.

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Authors: Nastaran Hajiheydari, Mohammad Soltani Delgosha

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Vendor (supplier) selection is a group decision-making (GDM) process, in which, based on some predetermined criteria, the experts’ preferences are provided in order to rank and choose the most desirable suppliers. In the real business environment, our attitudes or our choices would be made in an uncertain and indecisive situation could not be expressed in a crisp framework. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) could handle such situations in the best way. VIKOR method was developed to solve multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. This method, which is used to determine the compromised feasible solution with respect to the conflicting criteria, introduces a multi-criteria ranking index based on the particular measure of 'closeness' to the 'ideal solution'. Until now, there has been a little investigation of VIKOR with IFS, therefore we extended the intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) VIKOR to solve vendor selection problem under IF GDM environment. The present study intends to develop an IF VIKOR method in a GDM situation. Therefore, a model is presented to calculate the criterion weights based on entropy measure. Then, the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy weighted geometric (IFWG) operator utilized to obtain the total decision matrix. In the next stage, an approach based on the positive idle intuitionistic fuzzy number (PIIFN) and negative idle intuitionistic fuzzy number (NIIFN) was developed. Finally, the application of the proposed method to solve a vendor selection problem illustrated.

Keywords: Group decision making, intuitionistic fuzzy entropy measure, intuitionistic fuzzy set, vendor selection VIKOR.

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Authors: Fadi Eleiwi, Taous Meriem Laleg-Kirati

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This paper presents a complete dynamic modeling of a membrane distillation process. The model contains two consistent dynamic models. A 2D advection-diffusion equation for modeling the whole process and a modified heat equation for modeling the membrane itself. The complete model describes the temperature diffusion phenomenon across the feed, membrane, permeate containers and boundary layers of the membrane. It gives an online and complete temperature profile for each point in the domain. It explains heat conduction and convection mechanisms that take place inside the process in terms of mathematical parameters, and justify process behavior during transient and steady state phases. The process is monitored for any sudden change in the performance at any instance of time. In addition, it assists maintaining production rates as desired, and gives recommendations during membrane fabrication stages. System performance and parameters can be optimized and controlled using this complete dynamic model. Evolution of membrane boundary temperature with time, vapor mass transfer along the process, and temperature difference between membrane boundary layers are depicted and included. Simulations were performed over the complete model with real membrane specifications. The plots show consistency between 2D advection-diffusion model and the expected behavior of the systems as well as literature. Evolution of heat inside the membrane starting from transient response till reaching steady state response for fixed and varying times is illustrated.

Keywords: Membrane distillation, Dynamical modeling, Advection-diffusion equation, Thermal equilibrium, Heat equation.

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Authors: M. Arefi, A.M. Amini, K. Fallahi

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One of the basic concepts in marketing is the concept of meeting customers- needs. Since customer satisfaction is essential for lasting survival and development of a business, screening and observing customer satisfaction and recognizing its underlying factors must be one of the key activities of every business. The purpose of this study is to recognize the drivers that effect customer satisfaction in a business-to-business situation in order to improve marketing activities. We conducted a survey in which 93 business customers of a manufacturer of Diesel Generator in Iran participated and they talked about their ideas and satisfaction of supplier-s services related to its products. We developed the measures for drivers of satisfaction first by as investigative research (by means of feedback from executives and customers of sponsoring firm). Then based on these measures, we created a mail survey, and asked the respondents to explain their opinion about the sponsoring firm which was a supplier of diesel generator and similar products. Furthermore, the survey required the participants to mention their functional areas and their company features. In Conclusion we found that there are three drivers for customer satisfaction, which are reliability, information about product, and commercial features. Buyers/users from different functional areas attribute different degree of importance to the last two drivers. For instance, people from buying and management areas believe that commercial features are more important than information about products. But people in engineering, maintenance and production areas believe that having information about products is more important than commercial aspects. Marketing experts should consider the attribute of customers regarding information about the product and commercial features to improve market share.

Keywords: B2B, Customer satisfaction, Commercial, Industry.

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Authors: D. Jayalakshmi, S. Bhosale

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This paper, in its first part, presents the state-of-the-art literature of design approaches for geosynthetic reinforced unpaved roads. The literature starting since 1970 and the critical appraisal of flexible pavement design by Giroud and Han (2004) and Jonathan Fannin (2006) is presented. The design example is illustrated for Indian conditions. The example emphasizes the results computed by Giroud and Han's (2004) design method with the Indian road congress guidelines by IRC SP 72 -2015. The input data considered are related to the subgrade soil condition of Maharashtra State in India. The unified soil classification of the subgrade soil is inorganic clay with high plasticity (CH), which is expansive with a California bearing ratio (CBR) of 2% to 3%. The example exhibits the unreinforced case and geotextile as reinforcement by varying the rut depth from 25 mm to 100 mm. The present result reveals the base thickness for the unreinforced case from the IRC design catalogs is in good agreement with Giroud and Han (2004) approach for a range of 75 mm to 100 mm rut depth. Since Giroud and Han (2004) method is applicable for both reinforced and unreinforced cases, for the same data with appropriate Nc factor, for the same rut depth, the base thickness for the reinforced case has arrived for the Indian condition. From this trial, for the CBR of 2%, the base thickness reduction due to geotextile inclusion is 35%. For the CBR range of 2% to 5% with different stiffness in geosynthetics, the reduction in base course thickness will be evaluated, and the validation will be executed by the full-scale accelerated pavement testing set up at the College of Engineering Pune (COE), India.

Keywords: Base thickness, design approach, equation, full scale accelerated pavement set up, Indian condition.

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Authors: K. F. Khan, Samsuddin Khan

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The Paleoproterozoic phosphorite deposit of Sallopat block of Banswara district of Rajasthan belongs to kalinjara formation of lunavada group of Aravalli Super Group. The phosphorites are found to occur as massive, brecciated, laminated and stromatolitic associated with calcareous quartzite, interbedded dolomite and multi coloured chert. The phosphorites are showing alternate brown and grey coloured concentric rims which are composed of phosphate, calcite and quartz minerals. Petro-mineralogical studies of phosphorite samples using petrological microscope, XRD, FEG- SEM and EDX reveal that apatite-(CaF) and apatite-(CaOH) are phosphate minerals which are intermixed with minor amount of carbonate materials. Sporadic findings of the uniform tiny granules of partially anisotropic apatite-(CaF) along with dolomite, calcite, quartz, muscovite, zeolite and other gangue minerals have been observed with the replacement of phosphate material by quartz and carbonate. The presence of microbial filaments of organic matter and alternate concentric rims of stromatolitic structure may suggest that the deposition of the phosphate took place in shallow marine oxidizing environmental conditions leading to the formation of phosphorite layers as primary biogenic precipitates by bacterial or algal activities. Different forms and texture of phosphate minerals may be due to environmental vicissitudes at the time of deposition followed by some replacement processes and biogenic activities.

Keywords: Petro-mineralogy, phosphorites, sallopat, apatite.

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Authors: H K Lakshminarayana, J S Bhat, H M Mahesh

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A new estimator for evolutionary spectrum (ES) based on short time Fourier transform (STFT) and modified group delay function (MGDF) by signal decomposition (SD) is proposed. The STFT due to its built-in averaging, suppresses the cross terms and the MGDF preserves the frequency resolution of the rectangular window with the reduction in the Gibbs ripple. The present work overcomes the magnitude distortion observed in multi-component non-stationary signals with STFT and MGDF estimation of ES using SD. The SD is achieved either through discrete cosine transform based harmonic wavelet transform (DCTHWT) or perfect reconstruction filter banks (PRFB). The MGDF also improves the signal to noise ratio by removing associated noise. The performance of the present method is illustrated for cross chirp and frequency shift keying (FSK) signals, which indicates that its performance is better than STFT-MGDF (STFT-GD) alone. Further its noise immunity is better than STFT. The SD based methods, however cannot bring out the frequency transition path from band to band clearly, as there will be gap in the contour plot at the transition. The PRFB based STFT-SD shows good performance than DCTHWT decomposition method for STFT-GD.

Keywords: Evolutionary Spectrum, Modified Group Delay, Discrete Cosine Transform, Harmonic Wavelet Transform, Perfect Reconstruction Filter Banks, Short Time Fourier Transform.

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Authors: Ranjan Sarukkalige, Dinushi Gamage

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The aim of this study was to develop a storm water quality improvement strategy plan (WQISP) which assists managers and decision makers of local city councils in enhancing their activities to improve regional water quality. City of Gosnells in Western Australia has been considered as a case study. The procedure on developing the WQISP consists of reviewing existing water quality data, identifying water quality issues in the study areas and developing a decision making tool for the officers, managers and decision makers. It was found that land use type is the main factor affecting the water quality. Therefore, activities, sources and pollutants related to different land use types including residential, industrial, agricultural and commercial are given high importance during the study. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with coordinators of different management sections of the regional councils in order to understand the associated management framework and issues. The issues identified from these interviews were used in preparing the decision making tool. Variables associated with the defined “value versus threat" decision making tool are obtained from the intensive literature review. The main recommendations provided for improvement of water quality in local city councils, include non-structural, structural and management controls and potential impacts of climate change.

Keywords: Storm water quality, Storm water Management, Land use, Strategy plan

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Authors: E. Grochowska-Niedworok, K. Brukało, M. Hadasik, M. Kardas

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Consumption of vegetables by school children and adolescents is essential for their normal growth, development and health, but a significant minority of the world's population consumes the right amount of these products. The aim of the study was to evaluate the preferences and frequency of consumption of vegetables by school children and adolescents. It has been assumed that effectively implemented nutrition education programs should have an impact on increasing the frequency of vegetable consumption among the recipients. The study covered 514 students of five schools in the Opole Voivodeship aged 9 years to 22 years. The research tool was an author's questionnaire, which consisted of closed questions on the frequency of vegetable consumption and the use of 10 ways to treat them. Preferences and frequencies are shown in percentages, while correlations were estimated on the basis of Cramer`s V and gamma coefficients. In each of the examined age groups, the relationship between sex and vegetable consumption (the Cramer`s V coefficient value was 0.06 to 0.38) was determined and the various methods of culinary processing were used (V Craméra was 0.08 to 0.34). For both sexes, the relationship between age and frequency of vegetable consumption was shown (gamma values ranged from ~ 0.00 to 0.39) and different cooking methods (gamma values were 0.01 to 0.22). The most important determinant of nutritional choices is the taste and availability of products. The fact that they have a positive effect on their health is only in third position. As has been shown, obesity prevention programs can not only address nutrition education but also teach about new flavors and increase the availability of healthy foods. In addition, the frequency of vegetable consumption can be a good indicator reflecting the healthy behaviors of children and adolescents.

Keywords: Children and adolescents, frequency, welfare rate, vegetables.

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Authors: Amira Abbes Kheriji, Faouzi Bouani, Mekki Ksouri, Mohamed Ben Ahmed

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Model Predictive Control (MPC) is increasingly being proposed for real time applications and embedded systems. However comparing to PID controller, the implementation of the MPC in miniaturized devices like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and microcontrollers has historically been very small scale due to its complexity in implementation and its computation time requirement. At the same time, such embedded technologies have become an enabler for future manufacturing enterprises as well as a transformer of organizations and markets. Recently, advances in microelectronics and software allow such technique to be implemented in embedded systems. In this work, we take advantage of these recent advances in this area in the deployment of one of the most studied and applied control technique in the industrial engineering. In fact in this paper, we propose an efficient framework for implementation of Generalized Predictive Control (GPC) in the performed STM32 microcontroller. The STM32 keil starter kit based on a JTAG interface and the STM32 board was used to implement the proposed GPC firmware. Besides the GPC, the PID anti windup algorithm was also implemented using Keil development tools designed for ARM processor-based microcontroller devices and working with C/Cµ langage. A performances comparison study was done between both firmwares. This performances study show good execution speed and low computational burden. These results encourage to develop simple predictive algorithms to be programmed in industrial standard hardware. The main features of the proposed framework are illustrated through two examples and compared with the anti windup PID controller.

Keywords: Embedded systems, Model Predictive Control, microcontroller, Keil tool.

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