Search results for: initial value problems

Authors: Josefina Bengoechea, Alex Bell

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Higher education, with its brick-and-mortar facilities and credits-based on hours of study, was developed to serve the needs of a national, industrial, analogue economy. However, the ongoing process of globalization on the one hand, and the emergence of ever-changing needs of employers on the other hand, make this type of process-based education obsolete, and exclusive to students who can afford to pay a full-time tuition and dedicate 4 years of their lives exclusively to study. The creative destruction brought about by new technologies in the 21st century will not only reconfigure the labour market, as millions of jobs will be lost to Artificial Intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to consider if the implementation of technology is the solution to the problems faced in higher education. The paper builds upon a constructivist approach, combining a literature review and research on key publications.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, employability, labour market, new technology in higher education.

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Authors: Shiva Subhedar, Abhishek Jain, Shivin Mittal

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Icons are not merely decorative elements in enterprise applications but very often used because of their many advantages such as compactness, visual appeal, etc. Despite these potential advantages, icons often cause usability problems when they are designed without consideration for their many potential downsides. The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of articulatory distance – the distance between the physical appearance of an interface element and what it actually means. In other words, will the subject find the association of the function and its appearance on the interface natural or is the icon difficult for them to associate with its function. We have calculated response time and quality of identification by varying icon concreteness, the context of usage and subject experience in the enterprise context. The subjects were asked to associate icons (prepared for study purpose) with given function options in context and out of context mode. Response time and their selection were recorded for analysis.

Keywords: Icons, icon concreteness, icon recognition, HCI.

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Authors: Parisut Jitpakdee, Pakinee Aimmanee, Bunyarit Uyyanonvara

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Color Image quantization (CQ) is an important problem in computer graphics, image and processing. The aim of quantization is to reduce colors in an image with minimum distortion. Clustering is a widely used technique for color quantization; all colors in an image are grouped to small clusters. In this paper, we proposed a new hybrid approach for color quantization using firefly algorithm (FA) and K-means algorithm. Firefly algorithm is a swarmbased algorithm that can be used for solving optimization problems. The proposed method can overcome the drawbacks of both algorithms such as the local optima converge problem in K-means and the early converge of firefly algorithm. Experiments on three commonly used images and the comparison results shows that the proposed algorithm surpasses both the base-line technique k-means clustering and original firefly algorithm.

Keywords: Clustering, Color quantization, Firefly algorithm, Kmeans.

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Authors: Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos, Nicos Komninos, Christina Kakderi

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Smart cities are high on the political agenda around the globe. However, planning smart cities and deploying applications dealing with the complex problems of the urban environment is a very challenging task that is difficult to be undertaken solely by the cities. We argue that the uptake of smart city strategies is facilitated, first, through the development of smart city application repositories allowing re-use of already developed and tested software, and, second, through cloud computing which disengages city authorities from any resource constraints, technical or financial, and has a higher impact and greater effect at the city level The combination of these two solutions allows city governments and municipalities to select and deploy a large number of applications dedicated to different city functions, which collectively could create a multiplier effect with a greater impact on the urban environment.

Keywords: Smart cities, applications, cloud computing, migration to the cloud, application repositories.

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Authors: Junya Takenami, Md. Azhar Uddin, Eiji Sasaoka, Yasushi Shioya, Tsuneyoshi Takase

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In this study, we sought to investigate the mercury removal efficiency of manganese oxides from natural gas. The fundamental studies on mercury removal with manganese oxides sorbents were carried out in a laboratory scale fixed bed reactor at 30 °C with a mixture of methane (20%) and nitrogen gas laden with 4.8 ppb of elemental mercury. Manganese oxides with varying surface area and crystalline phase were prepared by conventional precipitation method in this study. The effects of surface area, crystallinity and other metal oxides on mercury removal efficiency were investigated. Effect of Ag impregnation on mercury removal efficiency was also investigated. Ag supported on metal oxide such titania and zirconia as reference materials were also used in this study for comparison. The characteristics of mercury removal reaction with manganese oxide was investigated using a temperature programmed desorption (TPD) technique. Manganese oxides showed very high Hg removal activity (about 73-93% Hg removal) for first time use. Surface area of the manganese oxide samples decreased after heat-treatment and resulted in complete loss of Hg removal ability for repeated use after Hg desorption in the case of amorphous MnO2, and 75% loss of the initial Hg removal activity for the crystalline MnO2. Mercury desorption efficiency of crystalline MnO2 was very low (37%) for first time use and high (98%) after second time use. Residual potassium content in MnO2 may have some effect on the thermal stability of the adsorbed Hg species. Desorption of Hg from manganese oxides occurs at much higher temperatures (with a peak at 400 °C) than Ag/TiO2 or Ag/ZrO2. Mercury may be captured on manganese oxides in the form of mercury manganese oxide.

Keywords: Mercury removal, Metal and metal oxide sorbents, Methane, Natural gas.

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Authors: A. Udomsakdigool, S. Bangsaranthip

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This paper presents an algorithm which combining ant colony optimization in the dynamic programming for solving a dynamic facility layout problem. The problem is separated into 2 phases, static and dynamic phase. In static phase, ant colony optimization is used to find the best ranked of layouts for each period. Then the dynamic programming (DP) procedure is performed in the dynamic phase to evaluate the layout set during multi-period planning horizon. The proposed algorithm is tested over many problems with size ranging from 9 to 49 departments, 2 and 4 periods. The experimental results show that the proposed method is an alternative way for the plant layout designer to determine the layouts during multi-period planning horizon.

Keywords: Ant colony optimization, Dynamicprogramming, Dynamic facility layout planning, Metaheuristic

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Authors: Ioannis P. Panagopoulos, Christos C. Pavlatos, George K. Papakonstantinou

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Conventional approaches in the implementation of logic programming applications on embedded systems are solely of software nature. As a consequence, a compiler is needed that transforms the initial declarative logic program to its equivalent procedural one, to be programmed to the microprocessor. This approach increases the complexity of the final implementation and reduces the overall system's performance. On the contrary, presenting hardware implementations which are only capable of supporting logic programs prevents their use in applications where logic programs need to be intertwined with traditional procedural ones, for a specific application. We exploit HW/SW codesign methods to present a microprocessor, capable of supporting hybrid applications using both programming approaches. We take advantage of the close relationship between attribute grammar (AG) evaluation and knowledge engineering methods to present a programmable hardware parser that performs logic derivations and combine it with an extension of a conventional RISC microprocessor that performs the unification process to report the success or failure of those derivations. The extended RISC microprocessor is still capable of executing conventional procedural programs, thus hybrid applications can be implemented. The presented implementation is programmable, supports the execution of hybrid applications, increases the performance of logic derivations (experimental analysis yields an approximate 1000% increase in performance) and reduces the complexity of the final implemented code. The proposed hardware design is supported by a proposed extended C-language called C-AG.

Keywords: Attribute Grammars, Logic Programming, RISC microprocessor.

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Authors: C. Ardil

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A multiple-criteria decision support system is proposed for the best aircraft selection decision. Various strategic, economic, environmental, and risk-related factors can directly or indirectly influence this choice, and they should be taken into account in the decision-making process. The paper suggests a multiple-criteria analysis to aid in the airline management's decision-making process when choosing an appropriate aircraft. In terms of the suggested approach, an integrated entropic preference optimization programming (POP) for fleet modeling risk analysis is applied. The findings of the study of multiple criteria analysis indicate that the A321(neo) aircraft type is the best alternative in this particular optimization instance. The proposed methodology can be applied to other complex engineering problems involving multiple criteria analysis.

Keywords: Aircraft selection, decision making, multiple criteria decision making, preference optimization programming, POP, entropic weight method, TOPSIS, WSM, WPM

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Authors: S. Esakkirajan, T. Veerakumar, V. Senthil Murugan, P. Navaneethan

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The existing image coding standards generally degrades at low bit-rates because of the underlying block based Discrete Cosine Transform scheme. Over the past decade, the success of wavelets in solving many different problems has contributed to its unprecedented popularity. Due to implementation constraints scalar wavelets do not posses all the properties such as orthogonality, short support, linear phase symmetry, and a high order of approximation through vanishing moments simultaneously, which are very much essential for signal processing. New class of wavelets called 'Multiwavelets' which posses more than one scaling function overcomes this problem. This paper presents a new image coding scheme based on non linear approximation of multiwavelet coefficients along with multistage vector quantization. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the results obtained from scalar wavelets.

Keywords: Image compression, Multiwavelets, Multi-stagevector quantization.

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Authors: Carine Cridelich, Pablo Juesas Cano, Emmanuel Ramasso, Noureddine Zerhouni, Bernd Weiler

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Safety is one of the most important considerations when buying a new car. While active safety aims at avoiding accidents, passive safety systems such as airbags and seat belts protect the occupant in case of an accident. In addition to legal regulations, organizations like Euro NCAP provide consumers with an independent assessment of the safety performance of cars and drive the development of safety systems in automobile industry. Those ratings are mainly based on injury assessment reference values derived from physical parameters measured in dummies during a car crash test. The components and sub-systems of a safety system are designed to achieve the required restraint performance. Sled tests and other types of tests are then carried out by car makers and their suppliers to confirm the protection level of the safety system. A Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process is proposed in order to minimize the number of tests. The KDD process is based on the data emerging from sled tests according to Euro NCAP specifications. About 30 parameters of the passive safety systems from different data sources (crash data, dummy protocol) are first analysed together with experts opinions. A procedure is proposed to manage missing data and validated on real data sets. Finally, a procedure is developed to estimate a set of rough initial parameters of the passive system before testing aiming at reducing the number of tests.

Keywords: KDD process, passive safety systems, sled test, dummy injury assessment reference values, frontal impact

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Authors: Rahmatollah Hooshmand, Mahdi Banejad

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One of the problems in fault diagnosis of transformer based on dissolved gas, is lack of matching the result of fault diagnosis of different standards with the real world. In this paper, the result of the different standards is analyzed using fuzzy and the result is compared with the empirical test. The comparison between the suggested method and existing methods indicate the capability of the suggested method in on-line fault diagnosis of the transformers. In addition, in some cases the existing standards are not able to diagnose the fault. In theses cases, the presented method has the potential of diagnosing the fault. The information of three transformers is used to the show the capability of the suggested method in diagnosing the fault. The results validate the capability of the presented method in fault diagnosis of the transformer.

Keywords: Fault Diagnosis of Transformer, Dissolved Gas, Fuzzy Logic.

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Authors: Abdelrahman A. Ramzy, Bassel S. Abdallah, Mohamed E. Bahgat, Sarah M. Abdelkader, Sherif H. ElGohary

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Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), epilepsy, and autism affect millions of children worldwide, many of which are undiagnosed despite the fact that all of these disorders are detectable in early childhood. Late diagnosis can cause severe problems due to the late treatment and to the misconceptions and lack of awareness as a whole towards these disorders. Moreover, electroencephalography (EEG) has played a vital role in the assessment of neural function in children. Therefore, quantitative EEG measurement will be utilized as a tool for use in the evaluation of patients who may have ADHD, epilepsy, and autism. We propose a screening tool that uses EEG signals and machine learning algorithms to detect these disorders at an early age in an automated manner. The proposed classifiers used with epilepsy as a step taken for the work done so far, provided an accuracy of approximately 97% using SVM, Naïve Bayes and Decision tree, while 98% using KNN, which gives hope for the work yet to be conducted.

Keywords: ADHD, autism, epilepsy, EEG, SVM.

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Authors: M.Ghotbi, M.Ghotbi, Gh. Azari Takami

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In this study Vitaton (an organic supplement which contains fermentative β-carotene) and synthetic astaxanthin (CAROPHYLL® Pink) were evaluated as pro-growth factors in Rainbow trout diet. An 8 week feeding trial was conducted to determine the effects of Vitaton versus astaxanthin on rearing factors, survival rate and visual flesh color of Rainbow trout (Oncorhnchynchus mykiss) with initial weight of 196±5. Four practical diets were formulated to contain 50 and 80 (ppm) of β- carotene and astaxanthin and also a control diet was prepared without any pigment. Each diet was fed to triplicate groups of fish rearing in fresh water. Fish were fed twice daily. The water temperature fluctuated from 12 to 15 (C˚) and also dissolved oxygen content was between 7 to 7.5 (mg/lit) during the experimental period. At the end of the experiment, growth and food utilization parameters and survival rate were unaffected by dietary treatments (p>0.05). Also, there was no significant difference between carcass yield within treatments (p>0.05). No significant difference recognized between visual flesh color (SalmoFan score) of fish fed Vitaton-containing diets. On the contrary, feeding on diets containing 50 and 80 (ppm) of astaxanthin, increased SalmoFan score (flesh astaxanthin concentration) from <20 (<1 mg/kg) to 23.33 (2.03 mg/kg) and 27.67 (5.74 mg/kg), respectively. Ultimately, a significant difference was seen between flesh carotenoid concentrations of fish feeding on astaxanthin containing treatments and control treatment (P<0.05). It should be mentioned that just raw fillet color of fish belonged to 80 (ppm) of astaxanthin treatment was seen to be close to color targets (SalmoFan scores) adopted for harvest-size fish.

Keywords: Astaxanthin, Flesh color, Rainbow trout, Vitaton, β- carotene,

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Authors: K.V. Sridhar, Varun Gunnala, K.S.R Krishna Prasad

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In this paper three basic approaches and different methods under each of them for extracting region of interest (ROI) from stationary images are explored. The results obtained for each of the proposed methods are shown, and it is demonstrated where each method outperforms the other. Two main problems in ROI extraction: the channel selection problem and the saliency reversal problem are discussed and how best these two are addressed by various methods is also seen. The basic approaches are 1) Saliency based approach 2) Wavelet based approach 3) Clustering based approach. The saliency approach performs well on images containing objects of high saturation and brightness. The wavelet based approach performs well on natural scene images that contain regions of distinct textures. The mean shift clustering approach partitions the image into regions according to the density distribution of pixel intensities. The experimental results of various methodologies show that each technique performs at different acceptable levels for various types of images.

Keywords: clustering, ROI, saliency, wavelets.

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Authors: T. R. Alencar, P. T. Leite

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Several optimization algorithms specifically applied to the problem of Operation Planning of Hydrothermal Power Systems have been developed and are used. Although providing solutions to various problems encountered, these algorithms have some weaknesses, difficulties in convergence, simplification of the original formulation of the problem, or owing to the complexity of the objective function. Thus, this paper presents the development of a computational tool for solving optimization problem identified and to provide the User an easy handling. Adopted as intelligent optimization technique, Genetic Algorithms and programming language Java. First made the modeling of the chromosomes, then implemented the function assessment of the problem and the operators involved, and finally the drafting of the graphical interfaces for access to the User. The program has managed to relate a coherent performance in problem resolution without the need for simplification of the calculations together with the ease of manipulating the parameters of simulation and visualization of output results.

Keywords: Energy, Optimization, Hydrothermal Power Systemsand Genetic Algorithms

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Authors: Yanan Yang, Zhigang Wang, Xiang Chen

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This paper presents the use of Legendre pseudospectral method for the optimization of finite-thrust orbital transfer for spacecrafts. In order to get an accurate solution, the System-s dynamics equations were normalized through a dimensionless method. The Legendre pseudospectral method is based on interpolating functions on Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto (LGL) quadrature nodes. This is used to transform the optimal control problem into a constrained parameter optimization problem. The developed novel optimization algorithm can be used to solve similar optimization problems of spacecraft finite-thrust orbital transfer. The results of a numerical simulation verified the validity of the proposed optimization method. The simulation results reveal that pseudospectral optimization method is a promising method for real-time trajectory optimization and provides good accuracy and fast convergence.

Keywords: Finite-thrust, Orbital transfer, Legendre pseudospectral method

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Authors: Ciprian Dobre

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The scale, complexity and worldwide geographical spread of the LHC computing and data analysis problems are unprecedented in scientific research. The complexity of processing and accessing this data is increased substantially by the size and global span of the major experiments, combined with the limited wide area network bandwidth available. We present the latest generation of the MONARC (MOdels of Networked Analysis at Regional Centers) simulation framework, as a design and modeling tool for large scale distributed systems applied to HEP experiments. We present simulation experiments designed to evaluate the capabilities of the current real-world distributed infrastructure to support existing physics analysis processes and the means by which the experiments bands together to meet the technical challenges posed by the storage, access and computing requirements of LHC data analysis within the CMS experiment.

Keywords: Modeling and simulation, evaluation, large scale distributed systems, LHC experiments, CMS.

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Authors: Mohamed Afla, Mohamad Reza

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Land shortage for burials is one of many issues that emerge out of accelerated urban growth in most developing Asian cities, including Kuala Lumpur. Despite actions taken by the federal government and local authorities in addressing this issue, there is no strategic solution being formulated. Apart from making provisions for land to be developed as new cemeteries, the future plan is merely to allocate reserve land to accommodate the increasing demands of burial grounds around the city. This paper examines problems that arise from the traditional practices of Malay funerary as well as an insight to current urban practices in managing Muslim burial spaces around Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region. This paper will also provide some solutions through design approach that can be applied to counter the existing issues.

Keywords: Kuala Lumpur metropolitan region, Malay burial practices, sustainable development, urban cemeteries.

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Authors: Carmen E. Pérez-Donado, Fernando Pérez-Muñoz, Rosa N. Chávez-Jáuregui

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Plantain contains starch as the main component and represents a relevant source of this carbohydrate. Starches from different cultivars of plantain and bananas have been studied for industrialization purposes due to their morphological and thermal characteristics and their influence in food products. This study aimed to characterize the physical, chemical, and thermal properties of starch from three different plantain cultivated in Puerto Rico: Maricongo, Maiden and FHIA 20. Amylose and amylopectin content, color, granular size, morphology, and thermal properties were determined. According to the amylose content in starches, FHIA 20 presented lowest content of the three cultivars studied. In terms of color, Maiden and FHIA 20 starches exhibited significantly higher whiteness indexes compared to Maricongo starch. Starches of the three cultivars had an elongated-ovoid morphology, with a smooth surface and a non-porous appearance. Regardless of similarities in their morphology, FHIA 20 exhibited a lower aspect ratio since its granules tended to be more elongated. Comparison of the thermal properties of starches showed that initial starch gelatinization temperature was similar among cultivars. However, FHIA 20 starch presented a noticeably higher final gelatinization temperature (87.95°C) and transition enthalpy than Maricongo (79.69°C) and Maiden (77.40°C). Despite similarities, starches from plantain cultivars showed differences in their composition and thermal behavior. This represents an opportunity to diversify plantain starch use in food-related applications.

Keywords: aspect ratio, morphology, Musa spp., starch, thermal properties, amylose content

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Authors: R. Rezaeipour

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One of the key aspects of power quality improvement in power system is the mitigation of voltage sags/swells and flicker. Custom power devices have been known as the best tools for voltage disturbances mitigation as well as reactive power compensation. Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR) which is the most efficient and effective modern custom power device can provide the most commercial solution to solve several problems of power quality in distribution networks. This paper deals with analysis and simulation technique of DVR based on instantaneous power theory which is a quick control to detect signals. The main purpose of this work is to remove three important disturbances including voltage sags/swells and flicker. Simulation of the proposed method was carried out on two sample systems by using Matlab software environment and the results of simulation show that the proposed method is able to provide desirable power quality in the presence of wide range of disturbances.

Keywords: DVR, Power quality, Voltage sags, Voltage swells, Flicker.

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Authors: Rakkrit Duangsoithong, Jermphiphut Jaruenpunyasak, Alba Garcia

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The use of foot recognition can be applied in many medical fields such as the gait pattern analysis and the knee exercises of patients in rehabilitation. Generally, a camera-based foot recognition system is intended to capture a patient image in a controlled room and background to recognize the foot in the limited views. However, this system can be inconvenient to monitor the knee exercises at home. In order to overcome these problems, this paper proposes to use the deep learning method using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for foot recognition. The results are compared with the traditional classification method using LBP and HOG features with kNN and SVM classifiers. According to the results, deep learning method provides better accuracy but with higher complexity to recognize the foot images from online databases than the traditional classification method.

Keywords: Convolutional neural networks, deep learning, foot recognition, knee rehabilitation.

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Authors: Hashem Dehghanniri

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Crime scripting is a simple and effective crime modeling technique that aims to improve understanding of security analysts about security and crime incidents. Low-quality scripts provide a wrong, incomplete, or sophisticated understanding of the crime commission process, which oppose the purpose of their application, e.g., identifying effective and cost-efficient situational crime prevention (SCP) measures. One important and overlooked factor in generating quality scripts is the crime scripting method. This study investigates the problems within the existing crime scripting practices and proposes a crime scripting approach that contributes to generating quality crime scripts. It was validated by experienced crime scripters. This framework helps analysts develop better crime scripts and contributes to their effective application, e.g., SCP measures identification or policy-making.

Keywords: Attack modeling, crime commission process, crime script, situational crime prevention.

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Authors: L. Bouqbis, H.W. Koyro, M. C. Harrouni, S. Daoud, L. F. Z. Ainlhout, C. I. Kammann

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The application of biochar to soils is becoming more and more common. Its application which is generally reported to improve the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils, has an indirect effect on soil health and increased crop yields. However, many of the previous results are highly variable and dependent mainly on the initial soil properties, biochar characteristics, and production conditions. In this study, two biochars which are biochar II (BC II) derived from a blend of paper sludge and wheat husks and biochar 005 (BC 005) derived from sewage sludge with a KCl additive, are used, and the physical and chemical properties of BC II are characterized. To determine the potential impact of salt stress and toxic and volatile substances, the second part of this study focused on the effect biochars have on germination of salad (Lactuca sativa L.), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and cress (Lepidium sativum) respectively. Our results indicate that Biochar II showed some unique properties compared to the soil, such as high EC, high content of K, Na, Mg, and low content of heavy metals. Concerning salad and barley germination test, no negative effect of BC II and BC 005 was observed. However, a negative effect of BC 005 at 8% level was revealed. The test of the effect of volatile substances on germination of cress revealed a positive effect of BC II, while a negative effect was observed for BC 005. Moreover, the water holding capacities of biochar-sand mixtures increased with increasing biochar application. Collectively, BC II could be safely used for agriculture and could provide the potential for a better plant growth.

Keywords: Biochar, phytotoxic tests, seedlings growth, water holding capacity.

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Authors: Somkiat Lerkvaranyu, Yoshikazu Miyanaga

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In this paper, a new technique of signal detection has been proposed for detecting the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signal in the presence of nonlinear distortion.There are several advantages of OFDM communications system.However, one of the existing problems is remain considered as the nonlinear distortion generated by high-power-amplifier at the transmitter end due to the large dynamic range of an OFDM signal. The proposed method is the maximum likelihood detection with the symbol estimation. When the training data are available, the neural network has been used to learn the characteristic of received signal and to estimate the new positions of the transmitted symbol which are provided to the maximum likelihood detector. Resulting in the system performance, the nonlinear distortions of a traveling wave tube amplifier with OFDM signal are considered in this paper.Simulation results of the bit-error-rate performance are obtained with 16-QAM OFDM systems.

Keywords: OFDM, TWTA, nonlinear distortion, detection.

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Authors: Nurul Liyana Abdul Aziz, Nur Aidya Hanum Aizam

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Course timetabling problems occur every semester in a university which includes the allocation of resources (subjects, lecturers and students) to a number of fixed rooms and timeslots. The assignment is carried out in a way such that there are no conflicts within rooms, students and lecturers, as well as fulfilling a range of constraints. The constraints consist of rules and policies set up by the universities as well as lecturers’ and students’ preferences of courses to be allocated in specific timeslots. This paper specifically focuses on the preferences of the course timetabling problem in one of the public universities in Malaysia. The demands will be considered into our existing mathematical model to make it more generalized and can be used widely. We have distributed questionnaires to a number of lecturers and students of the university to investigate their demands and preferences for their desired course timetable. We classify the preferences thus converting them to construct one mathematical model that can produce such timetable.

Keywords: University course timetabling problem, integer programming, preferences, constraints.

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Authors: Vichai Rungreunganaun, Chirawat Woarawichai

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The objective of this research is to calculate the optimal inventory lot-sizing for each supplier and minimize the total inventory cost which includes joint purchase cost of the products, transaction cost for the suppliers, and holding cost for remaining inventory. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are applied to the multi-product and multi-period inventory lot-sizing problems with supplier selection under storage space. Also a maximum storage space for the decision maker in each period is considered. The decision maker needs to determine what products to order in what quantities with which suppliers in which periods. It is assumed that demand of multiple products is known over a planning horizon. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming and is solved with the GAs. The detailed computation results are presented.

Keywords: Genetic Algorithms, Inventory lot-sizing, Supplier selection, Storage space.

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Authors: Zonglin Yang, Tatsuya Akiyama, Kerry S. Williamson, Michael J. Franklin, Thiruvarangan Ramaraj

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Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that forms surface-associated microbial communities (biofilms) on artificial implant devices and on human tissue. Biofilm infections are difficult to treat with antibiotics, in part, because the bacteria in biofilms are physiologically heterogeneous. One measure of biological heterogeneity in a population of cells is to quantify the cellular concentrations of ribosomes, which can be probed with fluorescently labeled nucleic acids. The fluorescent signal intensity following fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis correlates to the cellular level of ribosomes. The goals here are to provide computationally and statistically robust approaches to automatically quantify cellular heterogeneity in biofilms from a large library of epifluorescent microscopy FISH images. In this work, the initial steps were developed toward these goals by developing an automated biofilm detection approach for use with FISH images. The approach allows rapid identification of biofilm regions from FISH images that are counterstained with fluorescent dyes. This methodology provides advances over other computational methods, allowing subtraction of spurious signals and non-biological fluorescent substrata. This method will be a robust and user-friendly approach which will enable users to semi-automatically detect biofilm boundaries and extract intensity values from fluorescent images for quantitative analysis of biofilm heterogeneity.

Keywords: Image informatics, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, biofilm, FISH, computer vision, data visualization.

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Authors: Li Qiang, Yang Ze-Ming, Liu Bao-Xu, Jiang Zheng-Wei

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With the increasing complexity of cyberspace security, the cyber-attack attribution has become an important challenge of the security protection systems. The difficult points of cyber-attack attribution were forced on the problems of huge data handling and key data missing. According to this situation, this paper presented a reasoning method of cyber-attack attribution based on threat intelligence. The method utilizes the intrusion kill chain model and Bayesian network to build attack chain and evidence chain of cyber-attack on threat intelligence platform through data calculation, analysis and reasoning. Then, we used a number of cyber-attack events which we have observed and analyzed to test the reasoning method and demo system, the result of testing indicates that the reasoning method can provide certain help in cyber-attack attribution.

Keywords: Reasoning, Bayesian networks, cyber-attack attribution, kill chain, threat intelligence.

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Authors: Caroline Foulquier-Expert

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In many states around the world, actions to improve judicial ethics are developing significantly through the production of professional standards for judges. The quest to improve the ethics of judges is legitimate. However, as this development tends to be very important at the moment, some risks it presents must be highlighted. Indeed, if the objective of improving Judges’ Ethics is legitimate, it can also lead to banalization of justice, reinforcement of criticism against the judiciary and to broach incidentally the question of the limits of judgment, which is most perilous for the independence of the judiciary. This research, based on case studies, interviews with judges and an analysis of the literature on this topic (mainly from the United States of America and European Union Member States), tends to draw attention to the fact that the result of the development of these professional standards is that the ethical requirements of judges become ethical requirements of justice, which is an undesirable effect of which we must be aware, in order to prevent it.

Keywords: Judicial Ethics, Codes of conduct, Independence, Limits of Judgment.

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Authors: Martha C. Orazulume, Jibril D. Jiya

Abstract:

Flexible satellites are equipped with various appendages which vibrate under the influence of any excitation and make the attitude of the satellite to be unstable. Therefore, the system must be able to adjust to balance the effect of these appendages in order to point accurately and satisfactorily which is one of the most important problems in satellite design. Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) Controller is simple to design and computationally efficient to implement which is used to stabilize the effect of these flexible appendages. However, manual turning of the PID is time consuming, waste energy and money. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to tune the parameters of PID Controller. Simulation results obtained show that PSO tuned PID Controller is able to re-orient the spacecraft attitude as well as dampen the effect of mechanical resonance and yields better performance when compared with manually tuned PID Controller.

Keywords: Attitude control, flexible satellite, particle swarm optimization, PID controller.

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