Search results for: end user development; natural language interfaces

Authors: Ishak, L., McHenry, M. T., Brown, P. H.

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Organic farming systems still depend on intensive, mechanical soil tillage. Frequent passes by machinery traffic cause substantial soil compaction that threatens soil health. Adopting practices as reduced tillage and organic matter retention on the soil surface are considered effective ways to control soil compaction. In tropical regions, however, the acceleration of soil organic matter decomposition and soil carbon turnover on the topsoil layer is influenced more rapidly by the oscillation process of drying and wetting. It is hypothesized therefore, that rapid reduction in soil organic matter hastens the potential for compaction to occur in organic farming systems. Compaction changes soil physical properties and as a consequence it has been implicated as a causal agent in the inhibition of natural disease suppression in soils. Here we describe relationships between soil management in organic vegetable systems, soil compaction, and declining soil capacity to suppress pathogenic microorganisms.

Keywords: Organic farming systems, soil compaction, soil disease suppression, tropical regions.

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Authors: Jalaluddin Abdul Malek, Mohd Asruladlyi Ibrahim, Zurinah Tahir

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This paper is to reveal developments in the areas of urban technology in Malaysia. Developments occur intend to add value intelligent city development to the ubiquitous city (U-city) or smart city. The phenomenon of change is called the development of post intelligent cities. U-City development discourse is seen from the perspective of the philosophy of the virtuous city organized by al-Farabi. The prosperity and perfection of a city is mainly caused by human personality factors, as well as its relationship with material and technological aspects of the city. The question is, to what extent to which human factors are taken into account in the concept of U-City as an added value to the intelligent city concept to realize the prosperity and perfection of the city? Previously, the intelligent city concept was developed based on global change and ICT movement, while the U-city added value to the development of intelligent cities and focused more on the development of information and communications technology (ICT). Value added is defined as the use of fiber optic technology that is wired to the use of wireless technology, such as wireless broadband. In this discourse, the debate on the concept of U-City is to the symbiosis between the U-City and the importance of local human e-participation (U-Society) for prosperity. In the context of virtuous city philosophy, it supports the thought of symbiosis so the concept of U-City can achieve sustainability, prosperity and perfection of the city.

Keywords: Smart city, ubiquitous city, U-Society, e-participation, prosperity.

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Authors: Setareh Shekarsaraei, Marjan Moridi, Nasser L. Hadipour

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In this study, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and nuclear quadrupole resonance spectroscopy parameters of 14N (Nitrogen in imidazole ring) in N–H…O hydrogen bonding for Histidine hydrochloride monohydrate were calculated via density functional theory. We considered a five-molecule model system of Histidine hydrochloride monohydrate. Also we examined the trends of environmental effect on hydrogen bonds as well as cooperativity. The functional used in this research is M06-2X which is a good functional and the obtained results has shown good agreement with experimental data. This functional was applied to calculate the NMR and NQR parameters. Some correlations among NBO parameters, NMR and NQR parameters have been studied which have shown the existence of strong correlations among them. Furthermore, the geometry optimization has been performed using M062X/6-31++G(d,p) method. In addition, in order to study cooperativity and changes in structural parameters, along with increase in cluster size, natural bond orbitals have been employed.

Keywords: Hydrogen bonding, Density Functional Theory (DFT), Natural bond Orbitals (NBO), cooperativity effects.

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Authors: Jamalizadeh, M.R., Moghaddamnia, A., Piri, J., Arbabi, V., Homayounifar, M., Shahryari, A.

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Dust storms are one of the most costly and destructive events in many desert regions. They can cause massive damages both in natural environments and human lives. This paper is aimed at presenting a preliminary study on dust storms, as a major natural hazard in arid and semi-arid regions. As a case study, dust storm events occurred in Zabol city located in Sistan Region of Iran was analyzed to diagnose and predict dust storms. The identification and prediction of dust storm events could have significant impacts on damages reduction. Present models for this purpose are complicated and not appropriate for many areas with poor-data environments. The present study explores Gamma test for identifying inputs of ANNs model, for dust storm prediction. Results indicate that more attempts must be carried out concerning dust storms identification and segregate between various dust storm types.

Keywords: Dust Storm, Gamma Test, Prediction, ANNs, Zabol.

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Authors: Jan Langebach, Peter Fischer, Christian Karcher

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A numerical study is presented on convective heat transfer in enclosures. The results are addressed to automotive headlights containing new-age light sources like Light Emitting Diodes (LED). The heat transfer from the heat source (LED) to the enclosure walls is investigated for mixed convection as interaction of the forced convection flow from an inlet and an outlet port and the natural convection at the heat source. Unlike existing studies, inlet and outlet port are thermally coupled and do not serve to remove hot fluid. The input power of the heat source is expressed by the Rayleigh number. The internal position of the heat source, the aspect ratio of the enclosure, and the inclination angle of one wall are varied. The results are given in terms of the global Nusselt number and the enclosure Nusselt number that characterize the heat transfer from the source and from the interior fluid to the enclosure walls, respectively. It is found that the heat transfer from the source to the fluid can be maximized if the source is placed in the main stream from the inlet to the outlet port. In this case, the Reynolds number and heat source position have the major impact on the heat transfer. A disadvantageous position has been found where natural and forced convection compete each other. The overall heat transfer from the source to the wall increases with increasing Reynolds number as well as with increasing aspect ratio and decreasing inclination angle. The heat transfer from the interior fluid to the enclosure wall increases upon decreasing the aspect ratio and increasing the inclination angle. This counteracting behaviour is caused by the variation of the area of the enclosure wall. All mixed convection results are compared to the natural convection limit.

Keywords: Enclosure, heat source, heat transfer, mixed convection.

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Authors: Ákos Malatinszky, Szilvia Ádám

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Climate change causes severe effects on natural habitats, especially wetlands. These challenges require the adaptation of their management to probable effects of climate change. A compilation of necessary changes in land management was collected in a Hungarian area being both national park and Natura 2000 SAC and SCI site in favor of increasing the resilience and reducing vulnerability. Several factors, such as ecological aspects, nature conservation and climatic adaptation should be combined with social and economic factors during the process of developing climate change adapted management on vulnerable wetlands. Planning adaptive management should be determined by a priority order of conservation aims and evaluation of factors at the determined planning unit. Mowing techniques, frequency and exact date should be observed as well as grazing species and their breed, due to different grazing, group forming and trampling habits. Integrating landscape history and historical land development into the planning process is essential.

Keywords: Adaptation, climate change, management, wetland.

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Authors: Lisa J. Piergallini

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This project uses panel regression analyses to investigate the relationships between geography, institutions, and economic development, as guided by the theories of the 18^th century French philosopher Montesquieu. Contemporary scholars of political economy perpetually misinterpret Montesquieu’s theories on climate, and in doing so they miss what could be the key to resolving the geography vs. institutions debate. There is a conspicuous gap in this literature, in that it does not consider whether geography and institutors might have an interactive, dynamic effect on economic development. This project seeks to bridge that gap. Data are used for all available countries over the years 1980-2013. Two interaction terms between geographic and institutional variables are employed within the empirical analyses, and these offer a unique contribution to the ongoing geography vs. institutions debate within the political economy literature. This study finds that there is indeed an interactive effect between geography and institutions, and that this interaction has a statistically significant effect on economic development. Democracy (as measured by Polity score) and rule of law and property rights (as measured by the Fraser index) have positive effects on economic development (as measured by GDP per capita), yet the magnitude of these effects are stronger in contexts where a low percent of the national population lives in the geographical tropics. This has implications for promoting economic development, and it highlights the importance of understanding geographical context.

Keywords: Montesquieu, geography, institutions, economic development, political philosophy, political economy.

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Authors: Ramaswamy Palaniappan, Nai-Jen Huan

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Classification of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals extracted during mental tasks is a technique that is actively pursued for Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) designs. In this paper, we compared the classification performances of univariateautoregressive (AR) and multivariate autoregressive (MAR) models for representing EEG signals that were extracted during different mental tasks. Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network (NN) trained by the backpropagation (BP) algorithm was used to classify these features into the different categories representing the mental tasks. Classification performances were also compared across different mental task combinations and 2 sets of hidden units (HU): 2 to 10 HU in steps of 2 and 20 to 100 HU in steps of 20. Five different mental tasks from 4 subjects were used in the experimental study and combinations of 2 different mental tasks were studied for each subject. Three different feature extraction methods with 6th order were used to extract features from these EEG signals: AR coefficients computed with Burg-s algorithm (ARBG), AR coefficients computed with stepwise least square algorithm (ARLS) and MAR coefficients computed with stepwise least square algorithm. The best results were obtained with 20 to 100 HU using ARBG. It is concluded that i) it is important to choose the suitable mental tasks for different individuals for a successful BCI design, ii) higher HU are more suitable and iii) ARBG is the most suitable feature extraction method.

Keywords: Autoregressive, Brain-Computer Interface, Electroencephalogram, Neural Network.

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Authors: Liang Wang, Wei Zhang

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Nowadays sustainable development has increasingly become an important research topic of engineering education all over the world. Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) highlighted the importance of addressing sustainable development in engineering practice. However, whether and how the professional engineering learning and experience affect those perceptions is an interesting research topic especially in Chinese context. Our study fills this gap by investigating perceptions bias of EESD among first-grade engineering students, fourth-grade engineering students and experienced engineers using a triple-dimensional model. Our goal is to find the effect of engineering learning and experience on sustainable development and make these learning and experiences more accessible for students and engineers in school and workplace context. The data (n = 138) came from a Likert questionnaire based on the triple-dimensional model of EESD adopted from literature reviews and the data contain 48 first-grade students, 56 fourth-grade students and 34 engineers with rich working experience from Environmental Engineering, Energy Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Civil Engineering in or graduated from Zhejiang University, China. One-way ANOVA analysis was used to find the difference in different dimensions among the three groups. The statistical results show that both engineering students and engineers have a well understanding of sustainable development in ecology dimension of EESD while there are significant differences among three groups as to the socio-economy and value rationality dimensions of EESD. The findings provide empirical evidence that both engineering learning and professional engineering experience are helpful to cultivate the cognition and perception of sustainable development in engineering education. The results of this work indicate that more practical content should be added to students’ engineering education while more theoretical content should be added to engineers’ training in order to promote the engineering students’ and engineers’ perceptions of sustainable development. In addition, as to the design of engineering courses and professional practice system for sustainable development, we should not only pay attention to the ecological aspects, but also emphasize the coordination of ecological, socio-economic and human-centered sustainable development (e.g., engineer's ethical responsibility).

Keywords: Engineering education, sustainable development, experienced engineers, engineering students.

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Authors: Gulnara N. Nabiyeva, Stephen M. Wheeler

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a multipurpose computer-based tool that provides a sophisticated ability to map and analyze data on different spatial layers. However, GIS is far more easily applied in some policy areas than others. This paper seeks to determine the areas of sustainable development, including environmental, economic, and social dimensions, where GIS has been used to date to support efforts to implement the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to discuss potential areas where it might be used more. Based on an extensive analysis of published literature, we ranked the SDGs according to how frequently GIS has been used to study related policy. We found that SDG#15 “Life on Land” is most often addressed with GIS, following by SDG#11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, and SDG#13 “Climate Action”. On the other hand, we determined that SDG#2 “Zero Hunger”, SDG#8 “Decent Work and Economic Growth”, and SDG#16 “Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions” are least addressed with GIS. The paper outlines some specific ways that GIS might be applied to the SDGs least linked to this tool currently.

Keywords: GIS, GIS application, sustainable community development, sustainable development goals.

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Authors: Negar Riazifar, Mehran Yazdi

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Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) has demonstrated far superior to previous Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and standard JPEG in natural as well as medical image compression. Due to its localization properties both in special and transform domain, the quantization error introduced in DWT does not propagate globally as in DCT. Moreover, DWT is a global approach that avoids block artifacts as in the JPEG. However, recent reports on natural image compression have shown the superior performance of contourlet transform, a new extension to the wavelet transform in two dimensions using nonseparable and directional filter banks, compared to DWT. It is mostly due to the optimality of contourlet in representing the edges when they are smooth curves. In this work, we investigate this fact for medical images, especially for CT images, which has not been reported yet. To do that, we propose a compression scheme in transform domain and compare the performance of both DWT and contourlet transform in PSNR for different compression ratios (CR) using this scheme. The results obtained using different type of computed tomography images show that the DWT has still good performance at lower CR but contourlet transform performs better at higher CR.

Keywords: Computed Tomography (CT), DWT, Discrete Contourlet Transform, Image Compression.

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Authors: Seungsuk Ha, Youngjoon Han, Hernsoo Hahn

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This paper proposes a method of adaptively generating a gait pattern of biped robot. The gait synthesis is based on human's gait pattern analysis. The proposed method can easily be applied to generate the natural and stable gait pattern of any biped robot. To analyze the human's gait pattern, sequential images of the human's gait on the sagittal plane are acquired from which the gait control values are extracted. The gait pattern of biped robot on the sagittal plane is adaptively generated by a genetic algorithm using the human's gait control values. However, gait trajectories of the biped robot on the sagittal plane are not enough to construct the complete gait pattern because the biped robot moves on 3-dimension space. Therefore, the gait pattern on the frontal plane, generated from Zero Moment Point (ZMP), is added to the gait one acquired on the sagittal plane. Consequently, the natural and stable walking pattern for the biped robot is obtained.

Keywords: Biped robot, gait pattern, genetic algorithm.

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Authors: P. Mbecke

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Developmental social welfare implemented through developmental social work is being applauded internationally as an approach that facilitates social development theory and practice. However, twenty-two years into democracy, there are no tangible evidences that the much-desired developmental social welfare approach has assisted the post-apartheid macroeconomic policy frameworks in addressing poverty and inequality, thus, the derailment of the post-apartheid development approach in South Africa. Based on the implementation research theory, and the literature review technique, this paper recognizes social work as a principal role-player in social development. It recommends the redesign and implementation of an effective developmental social welfare approach with specific strategies, programs, activities and sufficient resources aligned to and appropriate in delivering on the promises of the government’s macroeconomic policy frameworks. Such approach should be implemented by skilled and dedicated developmental social workers in order to achieve transformation in South Africa.

Keywords: Apartheid, developmental social welfare, developmental social work, inequality, poverty alleviation, social development, South Africa.

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Authors: Chao He, Shunhua Zhou, Peijun Guo

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The vast majority of existing underground railway lines consist of twin tunnels. In this paper, the dynamic interaction between two neighboring tunnels in a layered half-space is investigated by an analytical model. The two tunnels are modelled as cylindrical thin shells, while the soil in the form of a layered half-space with two cylindrical cavities is simulated by the elastic continuum theory. The transfer matrix method is first used to derive the relationship between the plane wave vectors in arbitrary layers and the source layer. Thereafter, the wave translation and transformation are introduced to determine the plane and cylindrical wave vectors in the source layer. The solution for the dynamic interaction between twin tunnels in a layered half-space is obtained by means of the compatibility of displacements and equilibrium of stresses on the two tunnel–soil interfaces. By coupling the proposed model with a fully track model, the train-induced vibrations from twin tunnels in a multi-layered half-space are investigated. The numerical results demonstrate that the existence of a neighboring tunnel has a significant effect on ground vibrations.

Keywords: Underground railway, twin tunnels, wave translation and transformation, transfer matrix method.

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Authors: Amr Sayed, Y. Hiroshi, T. Goto, N. Enteria, M. M. Radwan, M. Abdelsamei Eid

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Climate considerations are essential dimensions in the assessment of thermal comfort and indoor environments inside Egyptian housing. The primary aim of this paper is to analyze the indoor environment of new housing in the new city of Assiut in the Southern Upper Egypt zone, in order to evaluate its thermal environment and determine the acceptable indoor operative temperatures. The psychrometric charts for ASHRAE Standard 55 and ACS used in this study would facilitate an overall representation of the climate in one of the hottest months in the summer season. This study helps to understand and deal with this problem and work on a passive cooling ventilation strategy in these contexts in future studies. The results that demonstrated the indoor temperature is too high, ranges between 31°C to 40°C in different natural ventilation strategies. This causes the indoor environment to be far from the optimum comfort operative temperature of ACS except when using air conditioners. Finally, this study is considered a base for developing a new system using natural ventilation with passive cooling strategies.

Keywords: Adaptive comfort standard (ACS), indoor environment, thermal comfort, ventilation.

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Authors: T. Konst

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Most jobs include training and communication tasks, but often the people in these jobs lack pedagogical competences to plan, implement and assess learning. This paper aims to discuss how a learning approach called innovation pedagogy developed in higher education can be utilized for learning development in various organizations. The methods presented how to implement innovation pedagogy such as process consultation and train the trainer model can provide added value to develop pedagogical knowhow in organizations and thus support their internal learning and development.

Keywords: Innovation pedagogy, learning, organizational development, process consultation.

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Authors: Mahdiyeh Zafaranchi, Ethan S. Cantor, William T. Riddell, Jess W. Everett

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The New Jersey Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs (NJ DMAVA) operates over 50 facilities throughout the state of New Jersey, US. NJ DMAVA is under a mandate to move toward decarbonization, which will eventually include eliminating the use of natural gas and other fossil fuels for heating. At the same time, the organization requires increased resiliency regarding electric grid disruption. These competing goals necessitate adopting the use of on-site renewables such as photovoltaic and geothermal power, as well as implementing power control strategies through microgrids. Planning for these changes requires a detailed understanding of current and future electricity use on yearly, monthly, and shorter time scales, as well as a breakdown of consumption by heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. This paper discusses case studies of two buildings that were simulated using the QUick Energy Simulation Tool (eQUEST). Both buildings use electricity from the grid and photovoltaics. One building also uses natural gas. While electricity use data are available in hourly intervals and natural gas data are available in monthly intervals, the simulations were developed using monthly and yearly totals. This approach was chosen to reflect the information available for most NJ DMAVA facilities. Once completed, simulation results are compared to metrics recommended by several organizations to validate energy use simulations. In addition to yearly and monthly totals, the simulated peak demands are compared to actual monthly peak demand values. The simulations resulted in monthly peak demand values that were within 30% of the measured values. These benchmarks will help to assess future energy planning efforts for NJ DMAVA.

Keywords: Building Energy Modeling, eQUEST, peak demand, smart meters.

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Authors: Khalid Khan, Atique Ahmad Zafar, Mohammed A. Alnuem, Hashim Khan

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Global Software Development (GSD) projects are passing through different boundaries of a company, country and even in other continents where time zone differs between both sites. Beside many benefits of such development, research declared plenty of negative impacts on these GSD projects. It is important to understand problems which may lie during the execution of GSD project with different time zones. This research project discussed and provided different issues related to time delays in GSD projects. In this paper, authors investigated some of the time delay factors which usually lie in GSD projects with different time zones. This investigation is done through systematic review of literature. Furthermore, the practices to overcome these delay factors which have already been reported in literature and GSD organizations are also explored through literature survey and case studies.

Keywords: Case Studies, Global Software Development, Global Software Engineering, Temporal Difference, Time Delay

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Authors: Andrew R.H. Rigit, Patrick T.K. Low

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Majority of pepper farmers in Malaysia are using the open-sun method for drying the pepper berries. This method is time consuming and exposed the berries to rain and contamination. A maintenance-friendly and properly enclosed dryer is therefore desired. A dryer design with a solar collector and a chimney was studied and adapted to suit the needs of small-scale pepper farmers in Malaysia. The dryer will provide an environment with an optimum operating temperature meant for drying pepper berries. The dryer model was evaluated by using commercially available computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software in order to understand the heat and mass transfer inside the dryer. Natural convection was the only mode of heat transportation considered in this study as in accordance to the idea of having a simple and maintenance-friendly design. To accommodate the effect of low buoyancy found in natural convection driers, a biomass burner was integrated into the solar dryer design.

Keywords: Computational fluid dynamics, heat and masstransfer, solar dryer.

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Authors: Mohammad Ali Abdi, Sima Mehdizadegan Namin

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Sustainable development is a concept which was originated in Burtland commission in 1978. Although this concept was born with environmental aspects, it is penetrated in all areas rapidly, turning into a dominate view of planning. Concentrating on future generation issue, especially when talking about heritage has a long story. Each approach with all of its characteristics illustrates differences in planning, hence planning always reflects the dominate idea of its age. This paper studies sustainable development in planning for historical cities with the aim of finding ways to deal with heritage in planning for historical cities in Iran. Through this, it will be illustrated how challenges between sustainable concept and heritage could be concluded in planning. Consequently, the paper will emphasize on: Sustainable development in city planning Trends regarding heritage Challenges due to planning for historical cities in Iran For the first two issues, documentary method regarding the sustainable development and heritage literature is considered. As the next step focusing on Iranian historical cities require considering the urban planning and management structure and identifying the main challenges related to heritage, so analyzing challenges regarding heritage is considered. As the result it would be illustrated that key issue in such planning is active conservation to improve and use the potential of heritage while it's continues conservation is guaranteed. By emphasizing on the planning system in Iran it will be obvious that some reforms are needed in this system and its way of relating with heritage. The main weakness in planning for historical cities in Iran is the lack of independent city management. Without this factor achieving active conservation as the main factor of sustainable development would not be possible.

Keywords: Active conservation, city planning, heritage, sustainable development.

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Authors: Berardina De Carolis, Giovanni Cozzolongo

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In this paper, we present C@sa, a multiagent system aiming at modeling, controlling and simulating the behavior of an intelligent house. The developed system aims at providing to architects, designers and psychologists a simulation and control tool for understanding which is the impact of embedded and pervasive technology on people daily life. In this vision, the house is seen as an environment made up of independent and distributed devices, controlled by agents, interacting to support user's goals and tasks.

Keywords: Ambient intelligence, agent-based systems, influence diagrams.

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Authors: Maria E. Eggink

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It is the aim of this paper to place the role of innovation in economic development in its theoretical context through a literature review. The review compares classical economic theory and the neoclassical theories of “equilibrium in the markets” and “perfectly competitive markets” with the Schumpeterian theory. It was found that Schumpeter’s role in contributing towards economic development theories, and by creating awareness of the role of innovation in these theories is of immeasurable importance. His contribution led to a change in economic thinking, although this was only realized much later than when his theories were first published. The neo-Schumpeterian thinking expanded on the Schumpeterian theory by studying innovation within a system of interaction among different role players. Studies on innovation should be founded in the neo-Schumpeterian school of thought in order to accommodate the complexity of the innovation system concept.

Keywords: Economic development, evolutionary economics, innovation, Schumpeter.

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Authors: M. Mohamadi, A. M. Maskooki., S. A. Mortazavi

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The quality and shelf life of foods of containing lipids (fats and oils) significantly reduces due to rancidity.Applications of natural antioxidants are one of the most effective manners to prevent the oxidation of oils and lipids. The antioxidant properties of juice extracted from barberry fruit (Berberris vulgaris.L) using maceration and SWE (10 bars and 120 - 180°C) methods were investigated and compared with conventional method. The amount of phenolic compound and reduction power of all samples were determined and the data were statistically analyzed using multifactor design. The results showed that the total amount of phenolic compound increased with increasing of pressure and temprature from 1861.9 to 2439.1 (mg Gallic acid /100gr Dry matter). The ability of reduction power of SWE obtained antioxidant extract compared with BHA (synthetic antioxidant) and ascorbic acid (natural antioxidant). There were significant differences among reduction power of extracts and there were remarkable difference with BHA and Ascorbic acid (P<0.01).

Keywords: Subcritical water, Antioxidant, Barberry, Phenolic compound, Reduction power

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Authors: Mohamed Amine Ouddan, Hassane Essafi

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Source code retrieval is of immense importance in the software engineering field. The complex tasks of retrieving and extracting information from source code documents is vital in the development cycle of the large software systems. The two main subtasks which result from these activities are code duplication prevention and plagiarism detection. In this paper, we propose a Mohamed Amine Ouddan, and Hassane Essafi source code retrieval system based on two-level fingerprint representation, respectively the structural and the semantic information within a source code. A sequence alignment technique is applied on these fingerprints in order to quantify the similarity between source code portions. The specific purpose of the system is to detect plagiarism and duplicated code between programs written in different programming languages belonging to the same class, such as C, Cµ, Java and CSharp. These four languages are supported by the actual version of the system which is designed such that it may be easily adapted for any programming language.

Keywords: Source code retrieval, plagiarism detection, clonedetection, sequence alignment.

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Authors: Eckhard M. Ammann

Abstract:

Knowledge development in companies relies on knowledge-intensive business processes, which are characterized by a high complexity in their execution, weak structuring, communication-oriented tasks and high decision autonomy, and often the need for creativity and innovation. A foundation of knowledge development is provided, which is based on a new conception of knowledge and knowledge dynamics. This conception consists of a three-dimensional model of knowledge with types, kinds and qualities. Built on this knowledge conception, knowledge dynamics is modeled with the help of general knowledge conversions between knowledge assets. Here knowledge dynamics is understood to cover all of acquisition, conversion, transfer, development and usage of knowledge. Through this conception we gain a sound basis for knowledge management and development in an enterprise. Especially the type dimension of knowledge, which categorizes it according to its internality and externality with respect to the human being, is crucial for enterprise knowledge management and development, because knowledge should be made available by converting it to more external types. Built on this conception, a modeling approach for knowledgeintensive business processes is introduced, be it human-driven,e-driven or task-driven processes. As an example for this approach, a model of the creative activity for the renewal planning of a product is given.

Keywords: Conception of knowledge, knowledge dynamics, modeling notation, knowledge-intensive business processes.

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Authors: M. Boumaza, Y. Bakhabkhi

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Water recycling represents an important challenge for many countries, in particular in countries where this natural resource is rare. On the other hand, in many operations, water is used as a cooling medium, as a high proportion of water consumed in industry is used for cooling purposes. Generally this water is rejected directly to the nature. This reject will cause serious environment damages as well as an important waste of this precious element.. On way to solve these problems is to reuse and recycle this warm water, through the use of natural cooling medium, such as air in a heat exchanger unit, known as a cooling tower. A poor performance, design or reliability of cooling towers will result in lower flow rate of cooling water an increase in the evaporation of water, an hence losses of water and energy. This paper which presents an experimental investigate of thermal and hydraulic performances of a mechanical cooling tower, enables to show that the water evaporation rate, Mev, increases with an increase in the air and water flow rates, as well as inlet water temperature and for fixed air flow rates, the pressure drop (ΔPw/Z) increases with increasing , L, due to the hydrodynamic behavior of the air/water flow.

Keywords: water, recycle, performance, cooling tower

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Authors: S. M. Amin Hosseini, Oriol Pons, Carmen Mendoza Arroyo, Albert de la Fuente

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In the aftermath of a natural disaster, the major challenge most cities and societies face, regardless of their diverse level of prosperity, is to provide temporary housing (TH) for the displaced population (DP). However, the features of TH, which have been applied in previous recovery programs, greatly varied from case to case. This situation demonstrates that providing temporary accommodation for DP in a short period time and usually in great numbers is complicated in terms of satisfying all the beneficiaries’ needs, regardless of the societies’ welfare levels. Furthermore, when previously used strategies are applied to different areas, the chosen strategies are most likely destined to fail, unless the strategies are context and culturally based. Therefore, as the population of disaster-prone cities are increasing, decision-makers need a platform to help to determine all the factors, which caused the outcomes of the prior programs. To this end, this paper aims to assess the problems, requirements, limitations, potential responses, chosen strategies, and their outcomes, in order to determine the main elements that have influenced the TH process. In this regard, and in order to determine a customizable strategy, this study analyses the TH programs of five different cases as: Marmara earthquake, 1999; Bam earthquake, 2003; Aceh earthquake and tsunami, 2004; Hurricane Katrina, 2005; and, L’Aquila earthquake, 2009. The research results demonstrate that the main vertexes of TH are: (1) local characteristics, including local potential and affected population features, (2) TH properties, which needs to be considered in four phases: planning, provision/construction, operation, and second life, and (3) natural hazards impacts, which embraces intensity and type. Accordingly, this study offers decision-makers the opportunity to discover the main vertexes, their subsets, interactions, and the relation between strategies and outcomes based on the local conditions of each case. Consequently, authorities may acquire the capability to design a customizable method in the face of complicated post-disaster housing in the wake of future natural disasters.

Keywords: Post-disaster temporary accommodation, urban resilience, natural disaster, local characteristic.

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Authors: Naveen Kumar, Shyambihari Prajapati

Abstract:

Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution that focuses on interconnectivity of machine to machine, human to machine and human to human via Internet of Things (IoT). Technologies of industry 4.0 facilitate communication between human and machine through IoT and forms Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS). In CPPS, multiple shop floors sensor data are connected through IoT and displayed through sensor dashboard to the operator. These sensor dashboards have enormous amount of information to be presented which becomes complex for operators to perform monitoring, controlling and interpretation tasks. Designing handheld sensor dashboards for supervision task will become a challenge for the interface designers. This paper reports emerging technologies of industry 4.0, changing context of increasing information complexity in consecutive industrial revolutions and upcoming design challenges for interface designers in context of Industry 4.0. Authors conclude that information complexity of sensor dashboards design has increased with consecutive industrial revolutions and designs of sensor dashboard causes cognitive load on users. Designing such complex dashboards interfaces in Industry 4.0 context will become main challenges for the interface designers.

Keywords: Industry 4.0, sensor dashboard design, Cyber-physical production system, Interface designer.

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Authors: Manuela Ciocoiu, Laur Badescu, Oana Badulescu, Magda Badescu

Abstract:

The research focuses on the effects of polyphenols extracted from Sambucus nigra fruit, using an experimental arterial hypertension pattern, as well as their influence on the oxidative stress. The results reveal the normalization of the reduced glutathion concentration, as well as a considerable reduction in the malondialdehide serum concentration by the polyphenolic protection. The rat blood pressure values were recorded using a CODATM system, which uses a non-invasive blood pressure measuring method. All the measured blood pressure components revealed a biostatistically significant (p<0.05) blood pressure drop between the AHT and the AHT+P groups. The results prove that oxidative stress is considerably lower, statistically speaking, in rats with hypertension but also provided with natural polyphenolic protection from Sambucus nigra fruits than in the rats belonging to the control group. In addition to the demonstrated antioxidant effects, natural polyphenols also have other biological properties that might contribute to the cardioprotective effects.

Keywords: Arterial hypertension, Oxidative stress, Sambucus nigra

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Authors: Naser Ahmadi Sani, Karim Solaimani, Lida Razaghnia, Jalal Zandi

Abstract:

In recent decades, rapid and incorrect changes in land-use have been associated with consequences such as natural resources degradation and environmental pollution. Detecting changes in land-use is one of the tools for natural resource management and assessment of changes in ecosystems. The target of this research is studying the land-use changes in Haraz basin with an area of 677000 hectares in a 15 years period (1996 to 2011) using LANDSAT data. Therefore, the quality of the images was first evaluated. Various enhancement methods for creating synthetic bonds were used in the analysis. Separate training sites were selected for each image. Then the images of each period were classified in 9 classes using supervised classification method and the maximum likelihood algorithm. Finally, the changes were extracted in GIS environment. The results showed that these changes are an alarm for the HARAZ basin status in future. The reason is that 27% of the area has been changed, which is related to changing the range lands to bare land and dry farming and also changing the dense forest to sparse forest, horticulture, farming land and residential area.

Keywords: HARAZ Basin, Change Detection, Land-use, Satellite Data.

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