Search results for: Information Quality

Authors: Manpreet Singh, Parvinder Singh, Suman

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The data is available in abundance in any business organization. It includes the records for finance, maintenance, inventory, progress reports etc. As the time progresses, the data keep on accumulating and the challenge is to extract the information from this data bank. Knowledge discovery from these large and complex databases is the key problem of this era. Data mining and machine learning techniques are needed which can scale to the size of the problems and can be customized to the application of business. For the development of accurate and required information for particular problem, business analyst needs to develop multidimensional models which give the reliable information so that they can take right decision for particular problem. If the multidimensional model does not possess the advance features, the accuracy cannot be expected. The present work involves the development of a Multidimensional data model incorporating advance features. The criterion of computation is based on the data precision and to include slowly change time dimension. The final results are displayed in graphical form.

Keywords: Multidimensional, data precision.

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Authors: Juliana C. Alencar, Monica Ferreira do Amaral Porto

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The blue-green infrastructure in recent years has been pointed out as a possibility to increase the environmental quality of watersheds. The regulation ecosystem services brought by these areas are many, such as the improvement of the air quality of the air, water, soil, microclimate, besides helping to control the peak flows and to promote the quality of life of the population. This study proposes a blue-green infrastructure scenario for the Jaguaré watershed, located in the western zone of the São Paulo city in Brazil. Based on the proposed scenario, it was verified the impact of the adoption of the blue and green infrastructure in the control of the peak flow of the basin, the benefits for the avifauna that are also reflected in the flora and finally, the quantification of the regulation ecosystem services brought by the adoption of the scenario proposed. A survey of existing green areas and potential areas for expansion and connection of these areas to form a network in the watershed was carried out. Based on this proposed new network of green areas, the peak flow for the proposed scenario was calculated with the help of software, ABC6. Finally, a survey of the ecosystem services contemplated in the proposed scenario was made. It was possible to conclude that the blue and green infrastructure would provide several regulation ecosystem services for the watershed, such as the control of the peak flow, the connection frame between the forest fragments that promoted the environmental enrichment of these fragments, improvement of the microclimate and the provision of leisure areas for the population.

Keywords: Blue and green infrastructure, sustainable drainage, urban waters, ecosystem services.

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Authors: Yoshifumi Ishizaki, Naoki Kanatani, Masaki Ito, Toshihiko Sasama, Takao Kawamura, Kazunori Sugahara

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This paper demonstrates the bus location system for the route bus through the experiment in the real environment. A bus location system is a system that provides information such as the bus delay and positions. This system uses actual services and positions data of buses, and those information should match data on the database. The system has two possible problems. One, the system could cost high in preparing devices to get bus positions. Two, it could be difficult to match services data of buses. To avoid these problems, we have developed this system at low cost and short time by using the smart phone with GPS and the bus route system. This system realizes the path planning considering bus delay and displaying position of buses on the map. The bus location system was demonstrated on route buses with smart phones for two months.

Keywords: Route Bus, Path Planning System, GPS, Smart Phone.

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Authors: Liv Gingnell, Evelina Ericsson, Joakim Lilliesköld, Robert Langerström

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In recent years, an increased competition and lower profit margins have necessitated a focus on improving the performance of the product development process, an area that traditionally have been excluded from detailed steering and evaluation. A systematic improvement requires a good understanding of the current performance, wherefore the interest for product development performance measurement has increased dramatically. This paper presents a case study that evaluates the performance of the product development performance measurement system used in a Swedish company that is a part of a global corporate group. The study is based on internal documentation and eighteen in-depth interviews with stakeholders involved in the product development process. The results from the case study includes a description of what metrics that are in use, how these are employed, and its affect on the quality of the performance measurement system. Especially, the importance of having a well-defined process proved to have a major impact on the quality of the performance measurement system in this particular case.

Keywords: Outcome metric, Performance driver, Performance measurement, Product development process.

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Authors: Luis Arias, Jorge E. Pezoa, Daniel Sbárbaro

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In this paper, an automated algorithm to estimate and remove the continuous baseline from measured spectra containing both continuous and discontinuous bands is proposed. The algorithm uses previous information contained in a Continuous Database Spectra (CDBS) to obtain a linear basis, with minimum number of sampled vectors, capable of representing a continuous baseline. The proposed algorithm was tested by using a CDBS of flame spectra where Principal Components Analysis and Non-negative Matrix Factorization were used to obtain linear bases. Thus, the radical emissions of natural gas, oil and bio-oil flames spectra at different combustion conditions were obtained. In order to validate the performance in the baseline estimation process, the Goodness-of-fit Coefficient and the Root Mean-squared Error quality metrics were evaluated between the estimated and the real spectra in absence of discontinuous emission. The achieved results make the proposed method a key element in the development of automatic monitoring processes strategies involving discontinuous spectral bands.

Keywords: Flame spectra, removing baseline, recovering spectrum.

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Authors: I. R. Farah, I. B. Ismail, M. B. Ahmed

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The huge development of new technologies and the apparition of open communication system more and more sophisticated create a new challenge to protect digital content from piracy. Digital watermarking is a recent research axis and a new technique suggested as a solution to these problems. This technique consists in inserting identification information (watermark) into digital data (audio, video, image, databases...) in an invisible and indelible manner and in such a way not to degrade original medium-s quality. Moreover, we must be able to correctly extract the watermark despite the deterioration of the watermarked medium (i.e attacks). In this paper we propose a system for watermarking satellite images. We chose to embed the watermark into frequency domain, precisely the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). We applied our algorithm on satellite images of Tunisian center. The experiments show satisfying results. In addition, our algorithm showed an important resistance facing different attacks, notably the compression (JEPG, JPEG2000), the filtering, the histogram-s manipulation and geometric distortions such as rotation, cropping, scaling.

Keywords: Digital data watermarking, Spatial Database, Satellite images, Discrete Wavelets Transform (DWT).

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Authors: S. Raja Balachandar, K. Kannan

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A new Meta heuristic approach called "Randomized gravitational emulation search algorithm (RGES)" for solving large size set covering problems has been designed. This algorithm is found upon introducing randomization concept along with the two of the four primary parameters -velocity- and -gravity- in physics. A new heuristic operator is introduced in the domain of RGES to maintain feasibility specifically for the set covering problem to yield best solutions. The performance of this algorithm has been evaluated on a large set of benchmark problems from OR-library. Computational results showed that the randomized gravitational emulation search algorithm - based heuristic is capable of producing high quality solutions. The performance of this heuristic when compared with other existing heuristic algorithms is found to be excellent in terms of solution quality.

Keywords: Set covering problem, velocity, gravitational force, Newton's law, meta heuristic, combinatorial optimization.

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Authors: Amos Barkai, Guy Meredith, Fatima Felaar, Zahrah Dantie, Dave de Buys

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Fisheries management all around the world is hampered by the lack, or poor quality, of critical data on fish resources and fishing operations. The main reasons for the chronic inability to collect good quality data during fishing operations is the culture of secrecy common among fishers and the lack of modern data gathering technology onboard most fishing vessels. In response, OLRAC-SPS, a South African company, developed fisheries datalogging software (eLog in short) and named it Olrac. The Olrac eLog solution is capable of collecting, analysing, plotting, mapping, reporting, tracing and transmitting all data related to fishing operations. Olrac can be used by skippers, fleet/company managers, offshore mariculture farmers, scientists, observers, compliance inspectors and fisheries management authorities. The authors believe that using eLog onboard fishing vessels has the potential to revolutionise the entire process of data collection and reporting during fishing operations and, if properly deployed and utilised, could transform the entire commercial fleet to a provider of good quality data and forever change the way fish resources are managed. In addition it will make it possible to trace catches back to the actual individual fishing operation, to improve fishing efficiency and to dramatically improve control of fishing operations and enforcement of fishing regulations.

Keywords: data management, electronic logbook (eLog), electronic reporting system (ERS), fisheries management

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Authors: Bernat-Carles Serdà Ferrer, Arantza Del Valle Gómez

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The Quality of Life (QoL) paradigm is multidimensional, dynamic and modular and its definition differs across the cancer continuum. The challenge in the interpretation of QoL data in clinical research is that QoL is influenced by psychological phenomena such as adaptation to illness. This research aims to obtain a valid and sensitive assessment of QoL change over the continuum disease, and to evaluate a rehabilitation programme aimed at inverting the observed decrease in QoL when patients return to daily living activities. The sample comprised 66 men. Patients were first assessed to establish a baseline (P1-diagnosis). This was followed by a post-test (P2-discharge) and a then-test measurement (P3-retrospective evaluation) and after returning home patients were randomized in experimental and control groups. The experimental group attended a rehabilitation programme over 24 weeks (P4). Results show that from baseline to post-test, QoL decreased significantly. The recalibration then-test confirmed a low QoL in all periods evaluated. Significant differences between the experimental and control groups prove the positive effect of the Exercise Rehabilitation Programme (ERP) on QoL. Understanding the real dynamic of QoL over time would help to adapt rehabilitation programmes by improving sensitivity and efficacy and provide professionals with a more accurate perception of the impact of treatment and side effects on patients’ QoL. Our results underline the importance of changing the approach adopted by health professionals towards one of watchful waiting on patients’ QoL until their complete recovery in daily life.

Keywords: Prostate cancer, quality of life, rehabilitation programme, response shift.

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Authors: M. Mohemmed Sha, T. Manesh, A. Mohamed Mustaq Ahmed

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In this corporate world, the technology of Web services has grown rapidly and its significance for the development of web based applications gradually rises over time. The success of Business to Business integration rely on finding novel partners and their services in a global business environment. However, the selection of the most suitable Web service from the list of services with the identical functionality is more vital. The satisfaction level of the customer and the provider’s reputation of the Web service are primarily depending on the range it reaches the customer’s requirements. In most cases, the customer of the Web service feels that he is spending for the service which is undelivered. This is because the customer always thinks that the real functionality of the web service is not reached. This will lead to change of the service frequently. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate the Quality of Service (QoS) and its cost that makes the optimal correlation between each other. In addition, this research work proposes some management decision against the functional deviancy of the web service that is guaranteed at time of selection.

Keywords: Web service, service level agreement, quality of a service, cost of a service, QoS, CoS, SOA, WSLA, WsRF.

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Authors: Sitthichon Kanitthakun, Pinit Kumhom, Kosin Chamnongthai

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In quality control of freeze-dried durian, crispiness is a key quality index of the product. Generally, crispy testing has to be done by a destructive method. A nondestructive testing of the crispiness is required because the samples can be reused for other kinds of testing. This paper proposed a crispiness classification method of freeze-dried durians using fuzzy logic for decision making. The physical changes of a freeze-dried durian include the pores appearing in the images. Three physical features including (1) the diameters of pores, (2) the ratio of the pore area and the remaining area, and (3) the distribution of the pores are considered to contribute to the crispiness. The fuzzy logic is applied for making the decision. The experimental results comparing with food expert opinion showed that the accuracy of the proposed classification method is 83.33 percent.

Keywords: Durian, crispiness, freeze drying, pore, fuzzy logic.

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Authors: Bertalan Forstner, Dr. Hassan Charaf

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In the world of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking different protocols have been developed to make the resource sharing or information retrieval more efficient. The SemPeer protocol is a new layer on Gnutella that transforms the connections of the nodes based on semantic information to make information retrieval more efficient. However, this transformation causes high clustering in the network that decreases the number of nodes reached, therefore the probability of finding a document is also decreased. In this paper we describe a mathematical model for the Gnutella and SemPeer protocols that captures clustering-related issues, followed by a proposition to modify the SemPeer protocol to achieve moderate clustering. This modification is a sort of link management for the individual nodes that allows the SemPeer protocol to be more efficient, because the probability of a successful query in the P2P network is reasonably increased. For the validation of the models, we evaluated a series of simulations that supported our results.

Keywords: Peer-to-Peer, model, performance, networkmanagement.

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Authors: Shang-Hsin Ou, Yang-Chun Lin, Ke-Hao Cheng

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The year 2021 marked a historic drought in Taiwan, posing unprecedented challenges due to record-low rainfall and inadequate reservoir storage. The central region experienced water scarcity, leading to the implementation of "Groundwater Utilization at Construction Sites" for drought-resilient livelihood water supply. This study focuses on the establishment process of temporary groundwater treatment plants at construction sites in Taichung City, serving as a reference for future emergency response and the utilization of construction site groundwater. To identify suitable sites for groundwater reuse projects, site selection operations were carried out based on relevant water quality regulations and assessment principles. Subsequently, the planning and design of temporary water treatment plants were conducted, considering the water quality, quantity, and on-site conditions of groundwater wells associated with construction projects. The study consolidates the major water treatment facilities at each site and addresses encountered challenges during the establishment process. Practical insights gained from operating temporary groundwater treatment plants are presented, including improvements related to stable water quality, water quantity, equipment operation, and hydraulic control. In light of possible future droughts, this study provides an outlook and recommendations to expedite and improve the setup of groundwater treatment plants at construction sites. This includes considering on-site water abstraction, treatment, and distribution conditions. The study aims to provide concise guidelines for setting up and managing temporary groundwater treatment plants at construction sites, drawing insights from Taichung City's establishment process. It offers recommendations for addressing challenges like water quality, quantity, equipment operation, and regulation compliance. By sharing these insights, it aims to aid regions facing similar emergencies, ensuring sustainable water supply and societal stability amidst water shortages and droughts.

Keywords: Drought resilience, groundwater treatment, construction site, water supply.

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Authors: Pratik Dhabal Deo, Manoj P.

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With the increasing number of social media users, the amount of video content available has also significantly increased. Currently, the number of smartphone users is at its peak, and many are increasingly using their smartphones as their main photography and recording devices. There have been a lot of developments in the field of video quality assessment in since the past years and more research on various other aspects of video and image are being done. Datasets that contain a huge number of videos from different high-end devices make it difficult to analyze the performance of the metrics on the content from most used devices even if they contain contents taken in poor lighting conditions using lower-end devices. These devices face a lot of distortions due to various factors since the spectrum of contents recorded on these devices is huge. In this paper, we have presented an analysis of the objective Video Quality Analysis (VQA) metrics on contents taken only from most used devices and their performance on them, focusing on full-reference metrics. To carry out this research, we created a custom dataset containing a total of 90 videos that have been taken from three most commonly used devices, and Android smartphone, an iOS smartphone and a Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera. On the videos taken on each of these devices, the six most common types of distortions that users face have been applied in addition to already existing H.264 compression based on four reference videos. These six applied distortions have three levels of degradation each. A total of the five most popular VQA metrics have been evaluated on this dataset and the highest values and the lowest values of each of the metrics on the distortions have been recorded. Finally, it is found that blur is the artifact on which most of the metrics did not perform well. Thus, in order to understand the results better the amount of blur in the data set has been calculated and an additional evaluation of the metrics was done using High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, which is the next version of H.264 compression, on the camera that proved to be the sharpest among the devices. The results have shown that as the resolution increases, the performance of the metrics tends to become more accurate and the best performing metric among them is VQM with very few inconsistencies and inaccurate results when the compression applied is H.264, but when the compression is applied is HEVC, Structural Similarity (SSIM) metric and Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) have performed significantly better.

Keywords: Distortion, metrics, recording, frame rate, video quality assessment.

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Authors: Pham Thu Thuy, Nguyen Lan Huong, Chu Ky Son

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Champs Bourcin black grape originated from Aquitaine, France and planted in Sapa, Lao cai provice, exhibited high total acidity (11.72 g/L). After 9 days of alcoholic fermentation at 25oC using Saccharomyces cerevisiae UP3OY5 strain, the ethanol concentration of wine was 11.5% v/v, however the sharp sour taste of wine has been found. The malolactic fermentation (MLF) was carried out by Oenococcus oeni ATCCBAA-1163 strain which had been preadapted to acid (pH 3-4) and ethanol (8-12%v/v) conditions. We obtained the highest vivability (83.2%) upon malolactic fermentation after 5 days at 22oC with early stationary phase O. oeni cells preadapted to pH 3.5 and 8% v/v ethanol in MRS medium. The malic acid content in wine was decreased from 5.82 g/L to 0.02 g/L after MLF (21 days at 22oC). The sensory quality of wine was significantly improved.

Keywords: Champs Bourcin grape, malolactic fermentation, pre-adaptation, Oenococcus oeni

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Authors: Jaouad Oukrich, Belaid Bouikhalene, Noureddine Askour

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This paper deals with the problem of management of information resources in libraries of the public institution Sultan Moulay Slimane University (SMSU) in order to analyze the satisfaction of the readers, and allow university leaders to make better strategic and instant decisions. For this, the integration of an integrated management decision library system is a priority program of higher education, as part of the Digital Morocco, which has a proactive policy to develop the use of new technologies information and communication in higher institutions. This operational information system can provide better services to the students and for the leaders. Our approach is to integrate the tools of business intelligence (BI) in the library management by using power BI.

Keywords: PMB, integrated library management system, ILMS, document, SMSU, power BI, satisfaction.

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Authors: A. Tellaeche, R. Arana, I.Maurtua

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The exhaustive quality control is becoming more and more important when commercializing competitive products in the world's globalized market. Taken this affirmation as an undeniable truth, it becomes critical in certain sector markets that need to offer the highest restrictions in quality terms. One of these examples is the percussion cap mass production, a critical element assembled in firearm ammunition. These elements, built in great quantities at a very high speed, must achieve a minimum tolerance deviation in their fabrication, due to their vital importance in firing the piece of ammunition where they are built in. This paper outlines a machine vision development for the 100% inspection of percussion caps obtaining data from 2D and 3D simultaneous images. The acquisition speed and precision of these images from a metallic reflective piece as a percussion cap, the accuracy of the measures taken from these images and the multiple fabrication errors detected make the main findings of this work.

Keywords: critical tolerance, high speed decision makingsimultaneous 2D/3D machine vision.

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Authors: Darren Thompson, Philip Morrow, Bryan Scotney, John Winder

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Patients with diabetes are susceptible to chronic foot wounds which may be difficult to manage and slow to heal. Diagnosis and treatment currently rely on the subjective judgement of experienced professionals. An objective method of tissue assessment is required. In this paper, a data fusion approach was taken to wound tissue classification. The supervised Maximum Likelihood and unsupervised Multi-Modal Expectation Maximisation algorithms were used to classify tissues within simulated wound models by weighting the contributions of both colour and 3D depth information. It was found that, at low weightings, depth information could show significant improvements in classification accuracy when compared to classification by colour alone, particularly when using the maximum likelihood method. However, larger weightings were found to have an entirely negative effect on accuracy.

Keywords: Classification, data fusion, diabetic foot, stereophotogrammetry, tissue colour.

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Authors: James A. Nelson

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The history of technology and banking is examined as it relates to risk and technological determinism. It is proposed that the services that banks offer are determined by technology and that banks must adopt new technologies to be competitive. The adoption of technologies paradoxically forces the adoption of other new technologies to protect the bank from the increased risk of technology. This cycle will lead to bank examiners and regulators to focus on human behavior, not on the ever changing technology.

Keywords: Banking, information security, risk, technologicaldeterminism.

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Authors: C. C. Liang

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MSN used to be the most popular application for communicating among social networks, but Facebook chat is now the most popular. Facebook and MSN have similar characteristics, including usefulness, ease-of-use, and a similar function, which is the exchanging of information with friends. Facebook outperforms MSN in both of these areas. However, the adoption of Facebook and abandonment of MSN have occurred for other reasons. Functions can be improved, but users’ willingness to use does not just depend on functionality. Flow status has been established to be crucial to users’ adoption of cyber applications and to affects users’ adoption of software applications. If users experience flow in using software application, they will enjoy using it frequently, and even change their preferred application from an old to this new one. However, no investigation has examined choice behavior related to switching from Facebook to MSN based on a consideration of flow experiences and functions. This investigation discusses the flow experiences and functions of social-networking applications. Flow experience is found to affect perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness; perceived ease of use influences information ex-change with friends, and perceived usefulness; information exchange influences perceived usefulness, but information exchange has no effect on flow experience.

Keywords: Consumer behavior, social media, technology acceptance model.

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Authors: A. Elyousfi, A. Tamtaoui, E. Bouyakhf

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The H.264/AVC standard uses an intra prediction, 9 directional modes for 4x4 luma blocks and 8x8 luma blocks, 4 directional modes for 16x16 macroblock and 8x8 chroma blocks, respectively. It means that, for a macroblock, it has to perform 736 different RDO calculation before a best RDO modes is determined. With this Multiple intra-mode prediction, intra coding of H.264/AVC offers a considerably higher improvement in coding efficiency compared to other compression standards, but computational complexity is increased significantly. This paper presents a fast intra prediction algorithm for H.264/AVC intra prediction based a characteristic of homogeneity information. In this study, the gradient prediction method used to predict the homogeneous area and the quadratic prediction function used to predict the nonhomogeneous area. Based on the correlation between the homogeneity and block size, the smaller block is predicted by gradient prediction and quadratic prediction, so the bigger block is predicted by gradient prediction. Experimental results are presented to show that the proposed method reduce the complexity by up to 76.07% maintaining the similar PSNR quality with about 1.94%bit rate increase in average.

Keywords: Intra prediction, H.264/AVC, video coding, encodercomplexity.

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Authors: Sumalee Lekprayura

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The purposes of this research were 1) to study consumer-based equity of luxury brands, 2) to study consumers- purchase intention for luxury brands, 3) to study direct factors affecting purchase intention towards luxury brands, and 4) to study indirect factors affecting purchase intention towards luxury brands through brand consciousness and brand equity to analyze information by descriptive statistic and hierarchical stepwise regression analysis. The findings revealed that the eight variables of the framework which were: need for uniqueness, normative susceptibility, status consumption, brand consciousness, brand awareness, perceived quality, brand association, and brand loyalty affected the purchase intention of the luxury brands (at the significance of 0.05). Brand Loyalty had the strongest direct effect while status consumption had the strongest indirect effect affecting the purchase intention towards luxury brands. Brand consciousness and brand equity had the mediators through the purchase intention of the luxury brands (at the significance of 0.05).

Keywords: Brand Consciousness, Brand Equity, Luxury Brands, Purchase intention.

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Authors: Emanuele A. Solagna, Ricardo S, Tozetto, Roberto dos S. Rabello

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Nowadays, physical processes are becoming digitized by the evolution of communication, sensing and storage technologies which promote the development of smart cities. The evolution of this technology has generated multiple challenges related to the generation of big data and the active participation of electronic devices in society. Thus, devices can send information that is captured and processed over large areas, but there is no guarantee that all the obtained data amount will be effectively stored and correctly persisted. Because, depending on the technology which is used, there are parameters that has huge influence on the full delivery of information. This article aims to characterize the project, currently under development, of a platform that based on data science will perform a performance and effectiveness evaluation of an industrial network that implements LoRaWAN technology considering its main parameters configuration relating these parameters to the information loss.

Keywords: Internet of Things, LoRa, LoRaWAN, smart cities.

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Authors: Ghulam Haider Haidaree, Nsenda Lukumwena

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Most developing nations face energy production and supply problems. This is also the case of Afghanistan whose generating capacity does not meet its energy demand. This is due in part to high security and risk caused by war which deters foreign investments and insufficient internal revenue. To address the issue above, this paper would like to suggest an alternative and affordable way to deal with the energy problem. That is by converting Solid Waste to energy. As a result, this approach tackles the municipal solid waste issue (potential cause of several diseases), contributes to the improvement of the quality of life, local economy, and so on. While addressing the solid waste problem in general, this paper samples specifically one municipality which is District-12, one of the 22 districts of Kabul city. Using geographic information system (GIS) technology, District-12 is divided into nine different zones whose municipal solid waste is respectively collected, processed, and converted into electricity and distributed to the closest area. It is important to mention that GIS has been used to estimate the amount of electricity to be distributed and to optimally position the production plant.

Keywords: Energy problem, estimation of electricity, GIS zones, solid waste management system.

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Authors: Hala A. Hassan, Vasiliki K. Tsiouri, Konstantinos E. Konstantinos

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Fugitive particulate matter (PM) is a major source of airborne pollution in the Middle East countries. The meteorological conditions and topography of the area makes it highly susceptible to wind-blown particles which raise many air quality concerns. Air quality tools such as field monitoring, emission factors and dispersion modeling have been used in previous research studies to analyze the release and impacts of fugitive PM in the region. However, these tools have been originally developed based on experiments made for European and North American regions. In this work, an experimental campaign was conducted on April-May 2014 in a construction site in Doha city, Qatar. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the applicability of the existing emission factors for construction sites in dry and arid areas like the Middle East.

Keywords: Air pollution, construction, emissions, middle east, fugitive particulate matter.

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Authors: Mario Gonzalez, David Dominguez, Francisco B. Rodriguez

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An attractor neural network on the small-world topology is studied. A learning pattern is presented to the network, then a stimulus carrying local information is applied to the neurons and the retrieval of block-like structure is investigated. A synaptic noise decreases the memory capability. The change of stability from local to global attractors is shown to depend on the long-range character of the network connectivity.

Keywords: Hebbian learning, image recognition, small world, spatial information.

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Authors: Ali Anaissi, Paul J. Kennedy, Madhu Goyal

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Analysis and visualization of microarraydata is veryassistantfor biologists and clinicians in the field of diagnosis and treatment of patients. It allows Clinicians to better understand the structure of microarray and facilitates understanding gene expression in cells. However, microarray dataset is a complex data set and has thousands of features and a very small number of observations. This very high dimensional data set often contains some noise, non-useful information and a small number of relevant features for disease or genotype. This paper proposes a non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm Local Principal Component (LPC) which aims to maps high dimensional data to a lower dimensional space. The reduced data represents the most important variables underlying the original data. Experimental results and comparisons are presented to show the quality of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, experiments also show how this algorithm reduces high dimensional data whilst preserving the neighbourhoods of the points in the low dimensional space as in the high dimensional space.

Keywords: Linear Dimension Reduction, Non-Linear Dimension Reduction, Principal Component Analysis, Biologists.

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Authors: Balqees A. Al-Thuhli, Ali H. Al-Badi, Khamis Al-Gharbi

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Information technology is changing rapidly and the users’ expectations are also growing. Dealing with these changes in information technology, while satisfying the users’ needs and expectations is a big challenge. IT managers need to explore new mechanisms/strategies to enable them to cope with such challenges.

 The objectives of this research are to identify the significant challenges that might face IT managers in higher education institutes in the face of the high and ever growing customer expectations and to propose possible solutions to cope with such high-speed changes in information technology.

To achieve these objectives, interviews with the IT professionals from different higher education institutes in Oman were conducted. In addition, documentation (printed and online) related to these institutions were studied and an intensive literature review of published work was examined.

The findings of this research are expected to give a better understanding of the challenges that might face the IT managers at higher education institutes. This acquired understanding is expected to highlight the importance of being adaptable and fast in keeping up with the ever-growing technological changes. Moreover, adopting different tools and technologies could assist IT managers in developing their organisations’ IT policies and strategies.

Keywords: Information technology, IT rapid changes, CIO roles, challenges, IT managers, coping mechanisms, users' expectations.

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Authors: Jitendra Jain, Cassandra Hidajat, Hansraj Riteesh Bookun

Abstract:

Graft patency underpins long-term prognosis after coronary artery bypass grafting surgery (CABG). The benefits of the combined use of only the left internal mammary artery and radial artery, referred to as total arterial revascularisation (TAR), on long-term clinical outcomes and quality of life are relatively unknown. The aim of this study was to identify whether there were differences in long term clinical outcomes between recipients of TAR compared to a cohort of mostly arterial revascularization involving the left internal mammary, at least one radial artery and at least one saphenous vein graft. A retrospective analysis was performed on all patients who underwent TAR or were re-vascularized with supplementary saphenous vein graft from February 1996 to December 2004. Telephone surveys were conducted to obtain clinical outcome parameters including major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) and Short Form (SF-36v2) Health Survey responses. A total of 176 patients were successfully contacted to obtain postop follow up results. The mean follow-up length from time of surgery in our study was TAR 12.4±1.8 years and conventional 12.6±2.1. PCS score was TAR 45.9±8.8 vs LIMA/Rad/ SVG 44.9±9.2 (p=0.468) and MCS score was TAR 52.0±8.9 vs LIMA/Rad/SVG 52.5±9.3 (p=0.723). There were no significant differences between groups for NYHA class 3+ TAR 9.4% vs. LIMA/Rad/SVG 6.6%; or CCS 3+ TAR 2.35% vs. LIMA/Rad/SVG 0%.

Keywords: CABG, MACCEs, quality of life, total arterial revascularization.

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Authors: Mohamed A. Ahmed, Lydia J. Campbell

Abstract:

The fortified of soft wheat flour with cowpea flour in bread making was investigated. The Soft wheat flour (SWF) was substituted by cowpea flour at levels of 5, 15 and 20%. The protein content of composite breads ranged from 6.1 – 9.9%. Significant difference was observed in moisture, protein and crude fibre contents of control (wheat bread) and composite bread at 5% addition of cowpea. Water absorption capacities of composite flours increased with increasing levels of cowpea flour in the blend. The specific loaf volume decreased significantly with increased cowpea content of blends. The overall acceptability of the 5% cowpea flour content of composite bread was not significantly different from the control (Soft Wheat-bread) but there is significantly different with increasing the levels of cowpea flour in the blend more than 5%.

Keywords: Cowpea flour, wheat flour, baking properties, sensory quality.

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