Search results for: Decision trees

Authors: Pongsatorn Tantrabundit, Lersak Phothong, Ong-art Chanprasitchai

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Due to the emergence of the Internet, it has extended the traditional Word-of-Mouth (WOM) to a new form called “Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM).” Unlike traditional WOM, eWOM is able to present information in various ways by applying different components. Each eWOM component generates different effects on online consumer behavior. This research investigates the effects of Webcare (responding message) from product/ service providers on negative eWOM by applying two types of products (search and experience). The proposed conceptual model was developed based on the combination of the stages in consumer decision-making process, theory of reasoned action (TRA), theory of planned behavior (TPB), the technology acceptance model (TAM), the information integration theory and the elaboration likelihood model. The methodology techniques used in this study included multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis. The results suggest that Webcare does slightly increase Thai online consumer’s perceptions on perceived eWOM trustworthiness, information diagnosticity and quality. For negative eWOM, we also found that perceived eWOM Trustworthiness, perceived eWOM diagnosticity and quality have a positive relationship with eWOM influence whereas perceived valence has a negative relationship with eWOM influence in Thai online consumers.

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Authors: Amitrajit Sarkar

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The use of Electronic Commerce (EC) technologies enables Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to improve their efficiency and competitive position. Much of the literature proposes an extensive set of benefits for organizations that choose to adopt and implement ECommerce systems. Factors of Business –to-business (B2B) E-Commerce adoption and implementation have been extensively investigated. Despite enormous attention given to encourage Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to adopt and implement E-Commerce, little research has been carried out in identifying the factors of Business-to-Consumer ECommerce adoption and implementation for SMEs. To conduct the study, Tornatsky and Fleischer model was adopted and tested in four SMEs located in Christchurch, New Zealand. This paper explores the factors that impact the decision and method of adoption and implementation of ECommerce systems in automobile industry. Automobile industry was chosen because the product they deal with i.e. cars are not a common commodity to be sold online, despite this fact the eCommerce penetration in automobile industry is high. The factors that promote adoption and implementation of E-Commerce technologies are discussed, together with the barriers. This study will help SME owners to effectively handle the adoption and implementation process and will also improve the chance of successful E-Commerce implementation. The implications of the findings for managers, consultants, and government organizations engaged in promoting E-Commerce adoption and implementation in small businesses and future research are discussed.

Keywords: E-Commerce in SMEs, E-Commerce in automobile industry, B2C E-Commerce, E-Commerce adoption and Implementation, E-Commerce Website Implementation, E-Commerce Models.

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Authors: Seongcheol Kwon, Jeongmin Kim, Kwang Ryel Ryu

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We assume an IoT-based smart-home environment where the on-off status of each of the electrical appliances including the room lights can be recognized in a real time by monitoring and analyzing the smart meter data. At any moment in such an environment, we can recognize what the household or the user is doing by referring to the status data of the appliances. In this paper, we focus on a smart-home service that is to activate a robot vacuum cleaner at right time by recognizing the user situation, which requires a situation-aware model that can distinguish the situations that allow vacuum cleaning (Yes) from those that do not (No). We learn as our candidate models a few classifiers such as naïve Bayes, decision tree, and logistic regression that can map the appliance-status data into Yes and No situations. Our training and test data are obtained from simulations of user behaviors, in which a sequence of user situations such as cooking, eating, dish washing, and so on is generated with the status of the relevant appliances changed in accordance with the situation changes. During the simulation, both the situation transition and the resulting appliance status are determined stochastically. To compare the performances of the aforementioned classifiers we obtain their learning curves for different types of users through simulations. The result of our empirical study reveals that naïve Bayes achieves a slightly better classification accuracy than the other compared classifiers.

Keywords: Situation-awareness, Smart home, IoT, Machine learning, Classifier.

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Authors: Shahabeddin Sotudian, M. H. Fazel Zarandi, I. B. Turksen

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Hepatitis is one of the most common and dangerous diseases that affects humankind, and exposes millions of people to serious health risks every year. Diagnosis of Hepatitis has always been a challenge for physicians. This paper presents an effective method for diagnosis of hepatitis based on interval Type-II fuzzy. This proposed system includes three steps: pre-processing (feature selection), Type-I and Type-II fuzzy classification, and system evaluation. KNN-FD feature selection is used as the preprocessing step in order to exclude irrelevant features and to improve classification performance and efficiency in generating the classification model. In the fuzzy classification step, an “indirect approach” is used for fuzzy system modeling by implementing the exponential compactness and separation index for determining the number of rules in the fuzzy clustering approach. Therefore, we first proposed a Type-I fuzzy system that had an accuracy of approximately 90.9%. In the proposed system, the process of diagnosis faces vagueness and uncertainty in the final decision. Thus, the imprecise knowledge was managed by using interval Type-II fuzzy logic. The results that were obtained show that interval Type-II fuzzy has the ability to diagnose hepatitis with an average accuracy of 93.94%. The classification accuracy obtained is the highest one reached thus far. The aforementioned rate of accuracy demonstrates that the Type-II fuzzy system has a better performance in comparison to Type-I and indicates a higher capability of Type-II fuzzy system for modeling uncertainty.

Keywords: Hepatitis disease, medical diagnosis, type-I fuzzy logic, type-II fuzzy logic, feature selection.

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Authors: Mat Isa, C. M., Mohd Saman, H., Mohd Nasir, S. R., Jaapar, A.

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International market expansion involves a strategic process of market entry decision through which a firm expands its operation from domestic to the international domain. Hence, entry timing choices require the needs to balance the early entry risks and the problems in losing opportunities as a result of late entry into a new market. Questionnaire surveys administered to 115 Malaysian construction firms operating in 51 countries worldwide have resulted in 39.1 percent response rate. Factor analysis was used to determine the most significant factors affecting entry timing choices of the firms to penetrate the international market. A logistic regression analysis used to examine the firms’ entry timing choices, indicates that the model has correctly classified 89.5 per cent of cases as late movers. The findings reveal that the most significant factor influencing the construction firms’ choices as late movers was the firm factor related to the firm’s international experience, resources, competencies and financing capacity. The study also offers valuable information to construction firms with intention to internationalize their businesses.

Keywords: Factors, early movers, entry timing choices, late movers, Logistic Regression Model, Principal Axis Factorial Analysis, Malaysian construction firms.

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Authors: Farhan Ismaeel Dakheel, Raoof Smko, K. Negrat, Abdelsalam Almarimi

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In this paper we used data mining techniques to identify outlier patients who are using large amount of drugs over a long period of time. Any healthcare or health insurance system should deal with the quantities of drugs utilized by chronic diseases patients. In Kingdom of Bahrain, about 20% of health budget is spent on medications. For the managers of healthcare systems, there is no enough information about the ways of drug utilization by chronic diseases patients, is there any misuse or is there outliers patients. In this work, which has been done in cooperation with information department in the Bahrain Defence Force hospital; we select the data for Cardiac patients in the period starting from 1/1/2008 to December 31/12/2008 to be the data for the model in this paper. We used three techniques for finding the drug utilization for cardiac patients. First we applied a clustering technique, followed by measuring of clustering validity, and finally we applied a decision tree as classification algorithm. The clustering results is divided into three clusters according to the drug utilization, for 1603 patients, who received 15,806 prescriptions during this period can be partitioned into three groups, where 23 patients (2.59%) who received 1316 prescriptions (8.32%) are classified to be outliers. The classification algorithm shows that the use of average drug utilization and the age, and the gender of the patient can be considered to be the main predictive factors in the induced model.

Keywords: Data Mining, Clustering, Classification, Drug Utilization..

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Authors: Gabriel Sitler, Yousef Sardahi, Asad Salem

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This paper presents an optimal and robust sliding mode controller (SMC) to regulate the position of the knee joint angle for patients suffering from knee injuries. The controller imitates the role of active orthoses that produce the joint torques required to overcome gravity and loading forces and regain natural human movements. To this end, a mathematical model of the shank, the lower part of the leg, is derived first and then used for the control system design and computer simulations. The design of the controller is carried out in optimal and multi-objective settings. Four objectives are considered: minimization of the control effort and tracking error; and maximization of the control signal smoothness and closed-loop system’s speed of response. Optimal solutions in terms of the Pareto set and its image, the Pareto front, are obtained. The results show that there are trade-offs among the design objectives and many optimal solutions from which the decision-maker can choose to implement. Also, computer simulations conducted at different points from the Pareto set and assuming knee squat movement demonstrate competing relationships among the design goals. In addition, the proposed control algorithm shows robustness in tracking a standard gait signal when accounting for uncertainty in the shank’s parameters.

Keywords: Optimal control, multi-objective optimization, sliding mode control, wearable knee exoskeletons.

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Authors: Zheni S. Stefanova, Kandethody M. Ramachandran

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With the increasing dependency on our computer devices, we face the necessity of adequate, efficient and effective mechanisms, for protecting our network. There are two main problems that Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) attempt to solve. 1) To detect the attack, by analyzing the incoming traffic and inspect the network (intrusion detection). 2) To produce a prompt response when the attack occurs (intrusion prevention). It is critical creating an Intrusion detection model that will detect a breach in the system on time and also challenging making it provide an automatic and with an acceptable delay response at every single stage of the monitoring process. We cannot afford to adopt security measures with a high exploiting computational power, and we are not able to accept a mechanism that will react with a delay. In this paper, we will propose an intrusion response mechanism that is based on artificial intelligence, and more precisely, reinforcement learning techniques (RLT). The RLT will help us to create a decision agent, who will control the process of interacting with the undetermined environment. The goal is to find an optimal policy, which will represent the intrusion response, therefore, to solve the Reinforcement learning problem, using a Q-learning approach. Our agent will produce an optimal immediate response, in the process of evaluating the network traffic.This Q-learning approach will establish the balance between exploration and exploitation and provide a unique, self-learning and strategic artificial intelligence response mechanism for IDS.

Keywords: Intrusion prevention, network security, optimal policy, Q-learning.

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Authors: Karan Vishavjit, Aakash Lakra, Shafaq Khan

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The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed healthcare professionals to use big data analytics as a vital tool for tracking and evaluating the effects of contagious viruses. To effectively analyse huge datasets, efficient NoSQL databases are needed. The analysis of post-COVID-19 health and well-being outcomes and the evaluation of the effectiveness of government efforts during the pandemic is made possible by this research’s integration of several datasets, which cuts down on query processing time and creates predictive visual artifacts. We recommend applying sharding and indexing technologies to improve query effectiveness and scalability as the dataset expands. Effective data retrieval and analysis are made possible by spreading the datasets into a sharded database and doing indexing on individual shards. Analysis of connections between governmental activities, poverty levels, and post-pandemic wellbeing is the key goal. We want to evaluate the effectiveness of governmental initiatives to improve health and lower poverty levels. We will do this by utilising advanced data analysis and visualisations. The findings provide relevant data that support the advancement of UN sustainable objectives, future pandemic preparation, and evidence-based decision-making. This study shows how Big Data and NoSQL databases may be used to address problems with global health.

Keywords: COVID-19, big data, data analysis, indexing, NoSQL, sharding, scalability, poverty.

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Authors: M. Kosacka, I. Kudelska

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Vehicle is one of the most influential and complex product worldwide, which affects people’s life, state of the environment and condition of the economy (all aspects of sustainable development concept) during each stage of lifecycle. With the increase of vehicles’ number, there is growing potential for management of End of Life Vehicle (ELV), which is hazardous waste. From one point of view, the ELV should be managed to ensure risk elimination, but from another point, it should be treated as a source of valuable materials and spare parts. In order to obtain materials and spare parts, there are established recycling networks, which are an example of sustainable policy realization at the national level. The basic object in the polish recycling network is dismantling facility. The output material streams in dismantling stations include waste, which very often generate costs and spare parts, that have the biggest potential for revenues creation. Both outputs are stored into warehouses, according to the law. In accordance to the revenue creation and sustainability potential, it has been placed a strong emphasis on storage process. We present the concept of storage method, which takes into account the specific of the dismantling facility in order to support decision-making process with regard to the principles of sustainable development. The method was developed on the basis of case study of one of the greatest dismantling facility in Poland.

Keywords: Dismantling, end of life vehicle, sustainability, storage.

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Authors: Aref Aasi, Sahar Ebrahimi Bajgani, Erfan Aasi

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Breast cancer (BC) continues to be the most frequent cancer in females and causes the highest number of cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Inspired by recent advances in studying the relationship between different patient attributes and features and the disease, in this paper, we have tried to investigate the different classification methods for better diagnosis of BC in the early stages. In this regard, datasets from the University Hospital Centre of Coimbra were chosen, and different machine learning (ML)-based and neural network (NN) classifiers have been studied. For this purpose, we have selected favorable features among the nine provided attributes from the clinical dataset by using a random forest algorithm. This dataset consists of both healthy controls and BC patients, and it was noted that glucose, BMI, resistin, and age have the most importance, respectively. Moreover, we have analyzed these features with various ML-based classifier methods, including Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Logistic Regression (LR), Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) along with NN-based Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier. The results revealed that among different techniques, the SVM and MLP classifiers have the most accuracy, with amounts of 96% and 92%, respectively. These results divulged that the adopted procedure could be used effectively for the classification of cancer cells, and also it encourages further experimental investigations with more collected data for other types of cancers.

Keywords: Breast cancer, health diagnosis, Machine Learning, biomarker classification, Neural Network.

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Authors: Hilal A. Abdelwali, Elsayed E.M. Ellaimony, Ahmad E.M. Murad, Jasem M.S. Al-Rajhi

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Due to the excess of a vehicle operation through its life, some elements may face failure and deteriorate with time. This leads us to carry out maintenance, repair, tune up or full overhaul. After a certain period, the vehicle elements deteriorations increase with time which causes a very high increase of doing the maintenance operations and their costs. However, the logic decision at this point is to replace the current vehicle by a new one with minimum failure and maximum income. The importance of studying vehicle replacement problems come from the increase of stopping days due to many deteriorations in the vehicle parts. These deteriorations increase year after year causing an increase of operating costs and decrease the vehicle income. Vehicle replacement aims to determine the optimum time to keep, maintain, overhaul, renew and replace vehicles. This leads to an improvement in vehicle income, total operating costs, maintenance cost, fuel and oil costs, ton-kilometers, vehicle and engine performance, vehicle noise, vibration, and pollution. The aim of this paper is to find the optimum replacement policies of Kuwait Passenger Transport Company (KPTCP) fleet of busses. The objective of these policies is to maximize the busses pure profits. The dynamic programming (D.P.) technique is used to generate the busses optimal replacement policies

Keywords: Replacement Problem, Automotive Replacement, Dynamic Programming, Equipment Replacement, K.P.T.C.

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Authors: Wen-Hong Liu, Hao-Tang Jhan, Kun-Lung Lin, Meng-Tsung Lee

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Weather disaster events were frequent and caused loss of lives and property in Taiwan recently. Excessive concentration of population and lacking of integrated planning led to Taiwanese coastal zone face the impacts of climate change directly. Comparing to many countries which have already set up legislation, competent authorities and national adaptation strategies, the ability of coastal management adapting to climate change is still insufficient in Taiwan. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a complete institutional arrangement for coastal management due to climate change in order to protect environment and sustain socio-economic development. This paper firstly reviews the impact of climate change on Taiwanese coastal zone. Secondly, development of Taiwanese institutional arrangement of coastal management is introduced. Followed is the analysis of four dimensions of legal basis, competent authority, scientific and financial support and international cooperations of institutional arrangement. The results show that Taiwanese government shall: 1) integrate climate change issue into Coastal Act, Wetland Act and territorial planning Act and pass them; 2) establish the high level competent authority for coastal management; 3) set up the climate change disaster coordinate platform; 4) link scientific information and decision markers; 5) establish the climate change adjustment fund; 6) participate in international climate change organizations and meetings actively; 7) cooperate with near countries to exchange experiences.

Keywords: Climate Change, Coastal Zone Management, Institution Arrangement, Adaptation.

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Authors: Berna Eren Tokgoz, Mahdi Safa, Seokyon Hwang

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Power distribution systems are essential and crucial infrastructures for the development and maintenance of a sustainable society. These systems are extremely vulnerable to various types of natural and man-made disasters. The assessment of resilience focuses on preparedness and mitigation actions under pre-disaster conditions. It also concentrates on response and recovery actions under post-disaster situations. The aim of this study is to present a methodology to assess the resilience of electric power distribution poles against wind-related events. The proposed methodology can improve the accuracy and rapidity of the evaluation of the conditions and the assessment of the resilience of poles. The methodology provides a metric for the evaluation of the resilience of poles under pre-disaster and post-disaster conditions. The metric was developed using mathematical expressions for physical forces that involve various variables, such as physical dimensions of the pole, the inclination of the pole, and wind speed. A three-dimensional imaging technology (photogrammetry) was used to determine the inclination of poles. Based on expert opinion, the proposed metric was used to define zones to visualize resilience. Visual representation of resilience is helpful for decision makers to prioritize their resources before and after experiencing a wind-related disaster. Multiple electric poles in the City of Beaumont, TX were used in a case study to evaluate the proposed methodology.  

Keywords: Photogrammetry, power distribution systems, resilience metric, system resilience, wind-related disasters.

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Authors: Walid MOUDANI

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The healthcare environment is generally perceived as being information rich yet knowledge poor. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. In fact, valuable knowledge can be discovered from application of data mining techniques in healthcare system. In this study, a proficient methodology for the extraction of significant patterns from the Coronary Heart Disease warehouses for heart attack prediction, which unfortunately continues to be a leading cause of mortality in the whole world, has been presented. For this purpose, we propose to enumerate dynamically the optimal subsets of the reduced features of high interest by using rough sets technique associated to dynamic programming. Therefore, we propose to validate the classification using Random Forest (RF) decision tree to identify the risky heart disease cases. This work is based on a large amount of data collected from several clinical institutions based on the medical profile of patient. Moreover, the experts- knowledge in this field has been taken into consideration in order to define the disease, its risk factors, and to establish significant knowledge relationships among the medical factors. A computer-aided system is developed for this purpose based on a population of 525 adults. The performance of the proposed model is analyzed and evaluated based on set of benchmark techniques applied in this classification problem.

Keywords: Multi-Classifier Decisions Tree, Features Reduction, Dynamic Programming, Rough Sets.

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Authors: Jerry Szatko, Edan L. Jorgensen, Stacia Jorgensen

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A crucial component to the success of any financial advising relationship is for the financial professional to understand the perceptions, preferences and thought-processes carried by the financial clients they serve. Armed with this information, financial professionals are more quickly able to understand how they can tailor their approach to best match the individual preferences and needs of each personal investor. Our research explores the use of a quantitative assessment tool in the financial services industry to assist in the identification of the personal investor’s consumer behaviors, especially in terms of financial risk tolerance, as it relates to their financial decision making. Through this process, the Unitifi Consumer Insight Tool (UCIT) was created and refined to capture and categorize personal investor financial behavioral categories and the financial personality tendencies of individuals prior to the initiation of a financial advisement relationship. This paper discusses the use of this tool to place individuals in one of four behavior-based financial risk tolerance categories. Our discoveries and research were aided through administration of a web-based survey to a group of over 1,000 individuals. Our findings indicate that it is possible to use a quantitative assessment tool to assist in predicting the behavioral tendencies of personal consumers when faced with consumer financial risk and decisions.

Keywords: Behavior based advising, behavioral finance, financial advising, financial advisor tools, financial risk tolerance.

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Authors: Fatima Z. Cherhabil, Mammar Sedrati, Sonia-Sabrina Bendib‎

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In order to support the continued growth, critical latency of ‎IoT ‎applications and ‎various obstacles of traditional data centers, ‎Mobile Edge ‎Computing (MEC) has ‎emerged as a promising solution that extends the cloud data-processing and decision-making to edge devices. ‎By adopting a MEC structure, IoT applications could be executed ‎locally, on ‎an edge server, different fog nodes or distant cloud ‎data centers. However, we are ‎often ‎faced with wanting to optimize conflicting criteria such as ‎minimizing energy ‎consumption of limited local capabilities (in terms of CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth) of mobile edge ‎devices and trying to ‎keep ‎high performance (reducing ‎response time, increasing throughput and service availability) ‎at the same ‎time‎. Achieving one goal may affect the other making Task Offloading (TO), ‎Resource Allocation (RA) and Service Placement (SP) complex ‎processes. ‎It is a nontrivial multi-objective optimization ‎problem ‎to study the trade-off between conflicting criteria. ‎The paper provides a survey on different TO, SP and RA recent Multi-‎Objective Optimization (MOO) approaches used in edge computing environments, particularly Artificial Intelligent (AI) ones, to satisfy various objectives, constraints and dynamic conditions related to IoT applications‎.

Keywords: Mobile Edge Computing, Multi-Objective Optimization, Artificial Intelligence ‎Approaches, Task Offloading, Resource Allocation, Service Placement‎.

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Authors: Alaa Tag Eldin Mohamed

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The environmental, cultural, social, and technological changes have led higher education institutes to question their traditional roles. Many declarations and frameworks highlight the importance of fulfilling social responsibility of higher education institutes. The study aims at developing a framework of university social responsibility and sustainability (USR&S) with focus on South Valley University (SVU) as a case study of Egyptian Universities. The study used meetings with 12 vice deans of community services and environmental affairs on social responsibility and environmental issues. The proposed framework integrates social responsibility with strategic management through the establishment and maintenance of the vision, mission, values, goals and management systems; elaboration of policies; provision of actions; evaluation of services and development of social collaboration with stakeholders to meet current and future needs of the community and environment. The framework links between different stakeholders internally and externally using communication and reporting tools. The results show that SVU integrates social responsibility and sustainability in its strategic plans. It has policies and actions however fragmented and lack of appropriate structure and budgeting. The proposed framework could be valuable for researchers and decision makers of the Egyptian Universities. The study proposed recommendations and highlighted building on the results and conducting future research.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility (CSR), South Valley University, Sustainable University, university social responsibility and sustainability (USR&S).

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Authors: Chiung-Hui Chen

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With advancements in science and technology, the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) has gradually developed. The development of the intelligent environment adds intelligence to objects in the living space by using the IoT. In the smart environment, when multiple users share the living space, if different service requirements from different users arise, then the context-aware system will have conflicting situations for making decisions about providing services. Therefore, the purpose of establishing a communication and negotiation mechanism among objects in the intelligent environment is to resolve those service conflicts among users. This study proposes developing a decision-making methodology that uses “Event Agents” as its core. When the sensor system receives information, it evaluates a user’s current events and conditions; analyses object, location, time, and environmental information; calculates the priority of the object; and provides the user services based on the event. Moreover, when the event is not single but overlaps with another, conflicts arise. This study adopts the “Multiple Events Correlation Matrix” in order to calculate the degree values of incidents and support values for each object. The matrix uses these values as the basis for making inferences for system service, and to further determine appropriate services when there is a conflict.

Keywords: Internet of things, intelligent object, event agents, negotiation mechanism, degree of similarity.

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Authors: Erika Martinez Ramirez, Rene V. Mayorga

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In our modern world, more physical transactions are being substituted by electronic transactions (i.e. banking, shopping, and payments), many businesses and companies are performing most of their operations through the internet. Instead of having a physical commerce, internet visitors are now adapting to electronic commerce (e-Commerce). The ability of web users to reach products worldwide can be greatly benefited by creating friendly and personalized online business portals. Internet visitors will return to a particular website when they can find the information they need or want easily. Dealing with this human conceptualization brings the incorporation of Artificial/Computational Intelligence techniques in the creation of customized portals. From these techniques, Fuzzy-Set technologies can make many useful contributions to the development of such a human-centered endeavor as e-Commerce. The main objective of this paper is the implementation of a Paradigm for the Intelligent Design and Operation of Human-Computer interfaces. In particular, the paradigm is quite appropriate for the intelligent design and operation of software modules that display information (such Web Pages, graphic user interfaces GUIs, Multimedia modules) on a computer screen. The human conceptualization of the user personal information is analyzed throughout a Cascaded Fuzzy Inference (decision-making) System to generate the User Ascribe Qualities, which identify the user and that can be used to customize portals with proper Web links.

Keywords: Fuzzy Logic, Internet, Electronic Commerce, Intelligent Portals, Electronic Shopping.

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Authors: M. Vogiatzis, K. Perakis

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Spatial-explicit and up-to-date land use/land cover information is fundamental for spatial planning, land management, sustainable development, and sound decision-making. In the last decade, many satellite-derived land cover products at different spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions have been developed, such as the European Copernicus Land Cover product. However, more efficient and detailed information for land use/land cover is required at the regional or local scale. A typical Mediterranean basin with a complex landscape comprised of various forest types, crops, artificial surfaces, and wetlands was selected to test and develop our approach. In this study, we investigate the improvement of Copernicus Land Cover product (CLC2018) using Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 pixel-based classification based on all available existing geospatial data (Forest Maps, LPIS, Natura2000 habitats, cadastral parcels, etc.). We examined and compared the performance of the Random Forest classifier for land use/land cover mapping. In total, 10 land use/land cover categories were recognized in Landsat 8 and 11 in Sentinel-2A. A comparison of the overall classification accuracies for 2018 shows that Landsat 8 classification accuracy was slightly higher than Sentinel-2A (82,99% vs. 80,30%). We concluded that the main land use/land cover types of CLC2018, even within a heterogeneous area, can be successfully mapped and updated according to CLC nomenclature. Future research should be oriented toward integrating spatiotemporal information from seasonal bands and spectral indexes in the classification process.

Keywords: land use/land cover, random forest, Landsat-8 OLI, Sentinel-2A MSI, Corine land cover

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Authors: Pucheng Zhou, Bingrong Hong

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How to coordinate the behaviors of the agents through learning is a challenging problem within multi-agent domains. Because of its complexity, recent work has focused on how coordinated strategies can be learned. Here we are interested in using reinforcement learning techniques to learn the coordinated actions of a group of agents, without requiring explicit communication among them. However, traditional reinforcement learning methods are based on the assumption that the environment can be modeled as Markov Decision Process, which usually cannot be satisfied when multiple agents coexist in the same environment. Moreover, to effectively coordinate each agent-s behavior so as to achieve the goal, it-s necessary to augment the state of each agent with the information about other existing agents. Whereas, as the number of agents in a multiagent environment increases, the state space of each agent grows exponentially, which will cause the combinational explosion problem. Profit sharing is one of the reinforcement learning methods that allow agents to learn effective behaviors from their experiences even within non-Markovian environments. In this paper, to remedy the drawback of the original profit sharing approach that needs much memory to store each state-action pair during the learning process, we firstly address a kind of on-line rational profit sharing algorithm. Then, we integrate the advantages of modular learning architecture with on-line rational profit sharing algorithm, and propose a new modular reinforcement learning model. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated using the pursuit problem.

Keywords: Multi-agent learning; reinforcement learning; rationalprofit sharing; modular architecture.

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Authors: Okolo Chimaobi Valentine

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Commercial banks in Nigeria adopted many strategies to attract fresh deposits including the use of high deposit rate. However, pricing of banking services moved in favor of the banks at the expense of customers, resulting in their seeking other investment alternatives rather than saving their money in the bank. Both deposit and lending rates were greatly influenced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) decision on interest rate. Therefore, commercial bank effort to attract deposits via manipulation of her rates was greatly limited, otherwise the banks will be giving out more than it earned. The study aimed at examining the relationship between interest rate and fixed fund deposit of commercial banks, how policy-controlled interest rate affected commercial bank’s fixed fund deposit The researcher employed ordinary least square technique, using, multiple linear regression, unrestricted vector auto-regression, correlation matrix test, granger causality and impulse response graph in the analysis. Commercial bank’s interest rates affected commercial bank’s fixed fund deposit significantly while policy-controlled interest rate did not significantly transmit through the commercial bank’s interest rates to affect fixed fund deposit. While commercial banks seek creative ways to expand their fixed fund deposit, policy authorities in Nigeria should better coordinate interest rate fluctuation and induce competition in the entire financial sector.

Keywords: Commercial bank, fixed fund deposit, fluctuation effects, interest rate.

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Authors: Vladimir Korovkin, Albert Park, Evgeny Kaganer

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Digital divide, the gap in the access to the world of digital technologies and the socio-economic opportunities that they create is an important phenomenon of the XXI century. This gap may exist between countries, regions within a country or socio-demographic groups, creating the classes of “digital have and have nots”. While the 1st-level divide (the difference in opportunities to access the digital networks) was demonstrated to diminish with time, the issues of 2nd level divide (the difference in skills and usage of digital systems) and 3rd level divide (the difference in effects obtained from digital technology) may grow. The paper offers a systemic review of literature on the measurement of the digital divide, noting the certain conceptual stagnation due to the lack of effective instruments that would capture the complex nature of the phenomenon. As a result, many important concepts do not receive the empiric exploration they deserve. As a solution the paper suggests a composite Digital Life Index, that studies separately the digital supply and demand across seven independent dimensions providing for 14 subindices. The Index is based on Internet-borne data, a distinction from traditional research approaches that rely on official statistics or surveys. The application of the model to the study of the digital divide between Russian regions and between cities in China have brought promising results. The paper advances the existing methodological literature on the 2nd level digital divide and can also inform practical decision-making regarding the strategies of national and regional digital development.

Keywords: Digital transformation, second-level digital divide, composite index, digital policy.

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Authors: Zviad Ghadua, Biswa Bhattacharya

Abstract:

The Flash Flood Guidance (FFG) provides the rainfall amount of a given duration necessary to cause flooding. The approach is based on the development of rainfall-runoff curves, which helps us to find out the rainfall amount that would cause flooding. An alternative approach, mostly experimented with Italian Alpine catchments, is based on determining threshold discharges from past events and on finding whether or not an oncoming flood has its magnitude more than some critical discharge thresholds found beforehand. Both approaches suffer from large uncertainties in forecasting flash floods as, due to the simplistic approach followed, the same rainfall amount may or may not cause flooding. This uncertainty leads to the question whether a probabilistic model is preferable over a deterministic one in forecasting flash floods. We propose the use of a Bayesian probabilistic approach in flash flood forecasting. A prior probability of flooding is derived based on historical data. Additional information, such as antecedent moisture condition (AMC) and rainfall amount over any rainfall thresholds are used in computing the likelihood of observing these conditions given a flash flood has occurred. Finally, the posterior probability of flooding is computed using the prior probability and the likelihood. The variation of the computed posterior probability with rainfall amount and AMC presents the suitability of the approach in decision making in an uncertain environment. The methodology has been applied to the Posina basin in Italy. From the promising results obtained, we can conclude that the Bayesian approach in flash flood forecasting provides more realistic forecasting over the FFG.

Keywords: Flash flood, Bayesian, flash flood guidance, FFG, forecasting, Posina.

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Authors: Ali Alotaibi, Francis Edum-Fotwe, Andrew Price /

Abstract:

Mega construction projects create buildings and major infrastructure to respond to work and life requirements while playing a vital role in promoting any nation’s economy. However, the industry is often criticised for not balancing economic, environmental and social dimensions of their projects, with emphasis typically on one aspect to the detriment of the others. This has resulted in many negative impacts including environmental pollution, waste throughout the project lifecycle, low productivity, and avoidable accidents. The identification of comprehensive Social Responsibility (SR) indicators, which combine social, environmental and economic aspects, is urgently needed. This is particularly the case in the context of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), which often has mega public construction projects. The aim of this paper is to develop a set of wide-ranging SR indicators which encompass social, economic and environmental aspects unique to the KSA. A qualitative approach was applied to explore relevant indicators through a review of the existing literature, international standards and reports. A list of appropriate indicators was developed, and its comprehensiveness was corroborated by interviews with experts on mega construction projects working with SR concepts in the KSA. The findings present 39 indicators and their metrics, covering 10 economic, 12 environmental and 17 social aspects of SR mapped against their references. These indicators are a valuable reference for decision-makers and academics in the KSA to understand factors related to SR in mega construction projects. The indicators are related to mega construction projects within the KSA and require validation in a real case scenario or within a different industry to demonstrate their generalisability.

Keywords: Social responsibility, construction projects, economic, social, environmental, indicators.

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Authors: Adekunle O. Afolabi, Pekka Toivanen

Abstract:

The world is expected to experience growth in the number of ageing population, and this will bring about high cost of providing care for these valuable citizens. In addition, many of these live with chronic diseases that come with old age. Providing adequate care in the face of rising costs and dwindling personnel can be challenging. However, advances in technologies and emergence of the Internet of Things are providing a way to address these challenges while improving care giving. This study proposes the integration of recommendation systems into homecare to provide real-time recommendations for effective management of people receiving care at home and those living with chronic diseases. Using the simplified Training Logic Concept, stakeholders and requirements were identified. Specific requirements were gathered from people living with cancer. The solution designed has two components namely home and community, to enhance recommendations sharing for effective care giving. The community component of the design was implemented with the development of a mobile app called Recommendations Sharing Community for Aged and Chronically Ill People (ReSCAP). This component has illustrated the possibility of real-time recommendations, improved recommendations sharing among care receivers and between a physician and care receivers. Full implementation will increase access to health data for better care decision making.

Keywords: Recommendation systems, healthcare, internet of things, real-time, homecare.

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Authors: Abdulkadir Abu Lawal

Abstract:

The study was carried out to establish the probability density function of some selected building construction projects of similar complexity delivered using Bill of Quantities (BQ) and Lump Sum (LS) forms of contract, and to draw a reliability scenario for each form of contract. 30 of such delivered projects are analyzed for each of the contract forms using Weibull Analysis, and their Weibull functions (α, and β) are determined based on their completion times. For the BQ form of contract delivered projects, α is calculated as 1.6737E20 and β as + 0.0115 and for the LS form, α is found to be 5.6556E03 and β is determined as + 0.4535. Using these values, respective probability density functions are calculated and plotted, as handy tool for risk analysis of future projects of similar characteristics. By input of variables from other projects, decision making processes can be made for a whole project or its components using EVM Analysis in project evaluation and review techniques. This framework, as a quantitative approach, depends on the assumption of normality in projects completion time, it can help greatly in determining the completion time probability for veritable projects using any of the contract forms under consideration. Projects aspects that are not amenable to measurement, on the other hand, can be analyzed using fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. This scenario can be drawn for different types of building construction projects, and using different suitable forms of contract in projects delivery.

Keywords: Building construction, Projects, Forms of contract, Probability density function, Reliability scenario.

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Authors: Josiel Delgadillo, Johnson Kinyua, Charles Mutigwe

Abstract:

The purpose of sentiment analysis is to determine the sentiment strength (e.g., positive, negative, neutral) from a textual source for good decision-making. Natural Language Processing (NLP) in domains such as financial markets requires knowledge of domain ontology, and pre-trained language models, such as BERT, have made significant breakthroughs in various NLP tasks by training on large-scale un-labeled generic corpora such as Wikipedia. However, sentiment analysis is a strong domain-dependent task. The rapid growth of social media has given users a platform to share their experiences and views about products, services, and processes, including financial markets. StockTwits and Twitter are social networks that allow the public to express their sentiments in real time. Hence, leveraging the success of unsupervised pre-training and a large amount of financial text available on social media platforms could potentially benefit a wide range of financial applications. This work is focused on sentiment analysis using social media text on platforms such as StockTwits and Twitter. To meet this need, SkyBERT, a domain-specific language model pre-trained and fine-tuned on financial corpora, has been developed. The results show that SkyBERT outperforms current state-of-the-art models in financial sentiment analysis. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SkyBERT.

Keywords: BERT, financial markets, Twitter, sentiment analysis.

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Authors: Yuan-Jye Tseng, Yen-Jung Wang

Abstract:

A product development for green logistics model using the fuzzy analytic network process method is presented for evaluating the relationships among the product design, the manufacturing activities, and the green supply chain. In the product development stage, there can be alternative ways to design the detailed components to satisfy the design concept and product requirement. In different design alternative cases, the manufacturing activities can be different. In addition, the manufacturing activities can affect the green supply chain of the components and product. In this research, a fuzzy analytic network process evaluation model is presented for evaluating the criteria in product design, manufacturing activities, and green supply chain. The comparison matrices for evaluating the criteria among the three groups are established. The total relational values between the three groups represent the relationships and effects. In application, the total relational values can be used to evaluate the design alternative cases for decision-making to select a suitable design case and the green supply chain. In this presentation, an example product is illustrated. It shows that the model is useful for integrated evaluation of design and manufacturing and green supply chain for the purpose of product development for green logistics.

Keywords: Supply chain management, green supply chain, product development for logistics, fuzzy analytic network process.

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