Search results for: Global economic environment (GEE)
2054 Integrating E-learning Environments with Computational Intelligence Assessment Agents
Authors: Christos E. Alexakos, Konstantinos C. Giotopoulos, Eleni J. Thermogianni, Grigorios N. Beligiannis, Spiridon D. Likothanassis
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In this contribution an innovative platform is being presented that integrates intelligent agents in legacy e-learning environments. It introduces the design and development of a scalable and interoperable integration platform supporting various assessment agents for e-learning environments. The agents are implemented in order to provide intelligent assessment services to computational intelligent techniques such as Bayesian Networks and Genetic Algorithms. The utilization of new and emerging technologies like web services allows integrating the provided services to any web based legacy e-learning environment.Keywords: Bayesian Networks, Computational Intelligence techniques, E-learning legacy systems, Service Oriented Integration, Intelligent Agents
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 19312053 Studying Effects of Alternative Biodiesel Fuel in Performance and Pollutants of Diesel Engines
Authors: Shakila Motamedi, Seyed Azizollah Ghotb, Fatemeh Torfi, Najaf Hedayat
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Since injection engines have a considerable portion, in consumption of energy and environmental pollution, using an alternative source of energy with lower pollutant effects in this regard is necessary. Biodiesel fuel is a suitable alternative for gasoline in diesel engines. In this research the property of biodiesel, the function and the pollution effects of diesel engine, when using 100% biodiesel, using 100% gasoline and mixing ratio of both fuels for comparing them, have been investigated. The researches have shown, using biodiesel fuel in prevalent diesel engine, will reduce the pollutants such as Co, half burned carbohydrate and suspended particles and a little increase in oxidation will achieve while power consumption, particularly fuel and thermal efficiency of diesel fuel has the same.Keywords: Biodiesel, Diesel Engine, Environment, Gasoline
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 15912052 Service-Based Application Adaptation Strategies: A Survey
Authors: Sahba Paktinat, Afshin Salajeghe, Mir Ali Seyyedi, Yousef Rastegari
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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows modeling of dynamic interaction between incongruous providers, which enables governing the development of complex applications. However, implementation of SOA comes with some challenges, including its adaptability and robustness. Dynamism is inherent to the nature of service based applications and of their running environment. These factors lead to necessity for dynamic adaptation. In this paper we try to describe basics and main structure of SOA adaptation process with a conceptual view to this issue. In this survey we will review the relevant adaptation approaches. This paper allows studying how different approaches deal with service oriented architecture adaptation life-cycle and provides basic guidelines for their analysis, evaluation and comparison.
Keywords: Context-aware, Dynamic Adaptation, Quality of Services, Service Oriented Architecture, Service Based Application.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25672051 Enhancement of Recycled Concrete Aggregate Properties by Mechanical Treatment and Verification in Concrete Mixes with Replacement up to 100%
Authors: Iveta Nováková, Martin-Andrè S. Husby, Boy-Arne Buyle
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The building industry has one of the most significant contributions to global warming due to the production of building materials, transportation, building activities, and demolition of structures when they reach the end of their life. Implementation of circular material flow and circular economy can significantly reduce greenhouse gasses and simultaneously reduce the need for natural resources. The use of recycled concrete aggregates (RCA) is one of the possibilities for reducing the depletion of raw materials for concrete production. Concrete is the most used building material worldwide, and aggregates constitute large part of its volume. RCA can replace a certain amount of natural aggregates (NA), and concrete will still perform as required. The aim of this scientific paper is to evaluate RCA properties with and without mechanical treatment. Analysis of RCA itself will be followed by compressive strength of concrete containing various amounts of treated and non-treated RCA. Results showed improvement in compressive strength of the mix with mechanically treated RCA compared to standard RCA, and even the strength of concrete with mechanically treated RCA in dose 50% of coarse aggregates was higher than the reference mix by 4%. Based on obtained results, it can be concluded that integration of RCA in industrial concrete production is feasible, at a replacement ratio of 50% for mechanically treated RCA and 30% if untreated RCA is used, without affecting the compressive strength negatively.
Keywords: Recycled concrete aggregates, RCA, mechanical treatment, aggregate properties, compression strength.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 4712050 Ontology and CDSS Based Intelligent Health Data Management in Health Care Server
Authors: Eun-Jung Ko, Hyung-Jik Lee, Jeun-Woo Lee
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In ubiqutious healthcare environment, user's health data are transfered to the remote healthcare server by the user's wearable system or mobile phone. These collected user's health data should be managed and analyzed in the healthcare server, so that care giver or user can monitor user's physiological state. In this paper, we designed and developed the intelligent Healthcare Server to manage the user's health data using CDSS and ontology. Our system can analyze user's health data semantically using CDSS and ontology, and report the result of user's physiological raw data to the user and care giver.
Keywords: u-healthcare, CDSS, healthcare server, health data, ontology.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 22342049 Earthquake Vulnerability and Repair Cost Estimation of Masonry Buildings in the Old City Center of Annaba, Algeria
Authors: Allaeddine Athmani, Abdelhacine Gouasmia, Tiago Ferreira, Romeu Vicente
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The seismic risk mitigation from the perspective of the old buildings stock is truly essential in Algerian urban areas, particularly those located in seismic prone regions, such as Annaba city, and which the old buildings present high levels of degradation associated with no seismic strengthening and/or rehabilitation concerns. In this sense, the present paper approaches the issue of the seismic vulnerability assessment of old masonry building stocks through the adaptation of a simplified methodology developed for a European context area similar to that of Annaba city, Algeria. Therefore, this method is used for the first level of seismic vulnerability assessment of the masonry buildings stock of the old city center of Annaba. This methodology is based on a vulnerability index that is suitable for the evaluation of damage and for the creation of large-scale loss scenarios. Over 380 buildings were evaluated in accordance with the referred methodology and the results obtained were then integrated into a Geographical Information System (GIS) tool. Such results can be used by the Annaba city council for supporting management decisions, based on a global view of the site under analysis, which led to more accurate and faster decisions for the risk mitigation strategies and rehabilitation plans.Keywords: Damage scenarios, masonry buildings, old city center, seismic vulnerability, vulnerability index.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 20942048 M-Learning the Next Generation of Education in Cyberspace
Authors: Nasser Alalwan, Ahmed Alzahrani, Mohamed Sarrab
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The technology usages of high speed Internet leads to establish and start new era of online education. With the advancement of the information technology and communication systems new opportunities have been created. This leads universities to have various online education channels to meet the demand of different learners- needs. One of these channels is M-learning, which can be used to improve the online education environment. With using such mobile technology in learning both students and instructors can easily access educational courses anytime from anywhere. The paper first presents literature about mobile learning and to what extent this approach can be utilized to enhance the overall learning system. It provides a comparison between mobile learning and traditional elearning showing the wide array of benefits of the new generation of technology. The possible challenges and potential advantages of Mlearning in the online education system are also discussed.Keywords: Mobile learning, M-learning, eLearning, Educational system.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 21082047 An Advanced Nelder Mead Simplex Method for Clustering of Gene Expression Data
Authors: M. Pandi, K. Premalatha
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The DNA microarray technology concurrently monitors the expression levels of thousands of genes during significant biological processes and across the related samples. The better understanding of functional genomics is obtained by extracting the patterns hidden in gene expression data. It is handled by clustering which reveals natural structures and identify interesting patterns in the underlying data. In the proposed work clustering gene expression data is done through an Advanced Nelder Mead (ANM) algorithm. Nelder Mead (NM) method is a method designed for optimization process. In Nelder Mead method, the vertices of a triangle are considered as the solutions. Many operations are performed on this triangle to obtain a better result. In the proposed work, the operations like reflection and expansion is eliminated and a new operation called spread-out is introduced. The spread-out operation will increase the global search area and thus provides a better result on optimization. The spread-out operation will give three points and the best among these three points will be used to replace the worst point. The experiment results are analyzed with optimization benchmark test functions and gene expression benchmark datasets. The results show that ANM outperforms NM in both benchmarks.
Keywords: Spread out, simplex, multi-minima, fitness function, optimization, search area, monocyte, solution, genomes.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25572046 Cultural Effects on the Performance of Non- Profit and For-Profit Microfinance Institutions
Authors: Patrick M. Stanton, William R. McCumber
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Using a large dataset of more than 2,400 individual microfinance institutions (MFIs) from 120 countries from 1999 to 2016, this study finds that nearly half of the international MFIs operate as for-profit institutions. Formal institutions (business regulatory environment, property rights, social protection, and a developed financial sector) impact the likelihood of MFIs being for-profit across countries. Cultural differences across countries (power distance, individualism, masculinity, and indulgence) seem to be a factor in the legal status of the MFI (non-profit or for-profit). MFIs in countries with stronger formal institutions, a greater degree of power distance, and a higher degree of collectivism experience better financial and social performance.Keywords: Hofstede cultural dimensions, international finance, microfinance institutions, non-profit.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 9962045 The Fiscal and Macroeconomic Impacts of Reforming Energy Subsidy Policy in Malaysia
Authors: Nora Yusma Bte Mohamed Yusoff, Hussain Ali Bekhet
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The rationalization of a gradual subsidies reforms plan has been set out by the Malaysian government to achieve the high-income nation target. This paper attempts to analyze the impacts of energy subsidy reform policy on fiscal deficit and macroeconomics variables in Malaysia. The Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model is employed. Three simulations based on different groups of scenarios have been developed. Importantly, the overall results indicate that removal of fuel subsidy has significantly improved the real GDP and reduced the government fiscal deficit. On the other hand, the removal of the fuel subsidy has increased most of the local commodity prices, especially energy commodities. The findings of the study could provide some imperative inputs for policy makers, especially to identify the right policy mechanism. This is especially ensures the subsidy savings from subsidy removal could be transferred back into the domestic economy in the form of infrastructure development, compensation and increases in others sector output contributions towards a sustainable economic growth.Keywords: CGE, deficit, energy, reform, subsidy.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 10552044 Urban-Rural Balance, Regional Coordination and Land Transfer in China
Authors: Ling Zheng, Yaping Wei, Kang Cao, Songpo Shi, Jinxing Wang
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It-s difficult for China-s current land transfer institutions limited to county-wide to solve the contradiction between urban-rural development and construction land shortage. On the basis of analyzing China-s construction land transfer system, and evaluation toward Transfer of development rights (TDR) practices in Anhui and Chongqing, the passage proposes: (1) we should establish a multi-level land indicators trade market under the guidance of regional spatial objectives, and allow land transfer paid across cities and counties within a specific area following the regulation of both government and market; (2) it would be better to combine organically the policy ntentions of land plan, regional plan, urban plan and economic plan, and link them with land indicators transfer to promote a wider range of urban-rural balance and regional coordination.Keywords: China's land institutions, transfer of development rights, urban-rural balance, regional coordination.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 16752043 Automatic Segmentation of Lung Areas in Magnetic Resonance Images
Authors: Alireza Osareh, Bita Shadgar
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Segmenting the lungs in medical images is a challenging and important task for many applications. In particular, automatic segmentation of lung cavities from multiple magnetic resonance (MR) images is very useful for oncological applications such as radiotherapy treatment planning. However, distinguishing of the lung areas is not trivial due to largely changing lung shapes, low contrast and poorly defined boundaries. In this paper, we address lung segmentation problem from pulmonary magnetic resonance images and propose an automated method based on a robust regionaided geometric snake with a modified diffused region force into the standard geometric model definition. The extra region force gives the snake a global complementary view of the lung boundary information within the image which along with the local gradient flow, helps detect fuzzy boundaries. The proposed method has been successful in segmenting the lungs in every slice of 30 magnetic resonance images with 80 consecutive slices in each image. We present results by comparing our automatic method to manually segmented lung cavities provided by an expert radiologist and with those of previous works, showing encouraging results and high robustness of our approach.Keywords: Active contours, breast cancer, fuzzy c-means segmentation, treatment planning.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 20562042 An Introduction to Methods and Technologies Applied for Reduction of Energy Consumption in Transportation Sector and Air Pollution in Iran
Authors: Eshagh Rasouli Sarabi, Mir Saeed Moosavi
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In Iran, due to abundance of energy resources, energy consumption is extraordinarily higher than international standards and transportation sector is considered to be one of the major consumers of energy. Moreover, air pollution in urban areas as a result of high dependence on private vehicle and lower standards of vehicles, high subsidies spent on fuel and time waste due to traffic congestion in urban areas all have led to speculations on new strategies and policies in order to control energy consumption in transportation sector. These strategies and policies will be introduced in this paper and their consequences will be analyzed with consideration to socio-economic factors affecting the urban society of Iran. Besides, the intention is to suggest and analyze new approaches such as broader application of public transportation system, demand management in transport sector, replacement of deteriorated vehicles, quality improvement in car manufacture and introduction of substitute fuels.
Keywords: Consumption, energy, fuel, transportation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 16252041 Ideal School of the Future from the Parents´ View: Quantitative Research of Faculty of Education of the University of Hradec Králové
Authors: Yveta Pohnětalová
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The topic of possible forms of future schools according to rapid changes of life in the 21st century has become to reach several economic and social prognoses. In our research, we have tried to find out what the future school form is according to pupils’ parent’s view. School is a part of life of each person and based on own experience there is a certain individual picture created about a possible look of future education. The aim of our quantitative research was to find out how parents of first grade primary school pupils see the ideal school of the future. The quantitative research realized at the Faculty of Education of the University of Hradec Králové (Czech Republic). By statistical analysis of gained data from 120 respondents, there have been several views of schools of future identified in terms of mission and also the way of education. But a common indicator according to addressed parents would be more focused on the overall personality development rather than the field practice which is related to a realistic idea that school of the future is not and will not be the only source of education.Keywords: Parents’ approach, school of the future, survey, ways of education.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 19072040 A New Proxy Signature Scheme As Secure As ElGamal Signature
Authors: Song Han, Elizabeth Chang, Jie Wang, Wanquan Liu
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Proxy signature helps the proxy signer to sign messages on behalf of the original signer. It is very useful when the original signer (e.g. the president of a company) is not available to sign a specific document. If the original signer can not forge valid proxy signatures through impersonating the proxy signer, it will be robust in a virtual environment; thus the original signer can not shift any illegal action initiated by herself to the proxy signer. In this paper, we propose a new proxy signature scheme. The new scheme can prevent the original signer from impersonating the proxy signer to sign messages. The proposed scheme is based on the regular ElGamal signature. In addition, the fair privacy of the proxy signer is maintained. That means, the privacy of the proxy signer is preserved; and the privacy can be revealed when it is necessary.Keywords: ElGamal signature, Proxy signature, Security, Hash function, Fair privacy.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 15962039 Using High Performance Computing for Online Flood Monitoring and Prediction
Authors: Stepan Kuchar, Martin Golasowski, Radim Vavrik, Michal Podhoranyi, Boris Sir, Jan Martinovic
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The main goal of this article is to describe the online flood monitoring and prediction system Floreon+ primarily developed for the Moravian-Silesian region in the Czech Republic and the basic process it uses for running automatic rainfall-runoff and hydrodynamic simulations along with their calibration and uncertainty modeling. It takes a long time to execute such process sequentially, which is not acceptable in the online scenario, so the use of a high performance computing environment is proposed for all parts of the process to shorten their duration. Finally, a case study on the Ostravice River catchment is presented that shows actual durations and their gain from the parallel implementation.
Keywords: Flood prediction process, High performance computing, Online flood prediction system, Parallelization.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 23292038 Cultural Production and Urban Regeneration: The Case Study of Amphawa District, Thailand
Authors: P. Techaratpong
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This research aims to study the role of cultural production in urban regeneration and argue that cultural production, if properly used, can play a vital role in reviving cities and create substantial positive impacts to the cities. The argument can be elucidated by the case study of Amphawa, a district in Samutsongkram province, Thailand, as an example of successful use of cultural productions. The conceptual framework is based on the model of culture contributions in regeneration to examine the impacts.
The research methodology is qualitative. This study found that cultural productions can revive cities into vibrant ones and exert considerable impacts: physical, social and economic.
It is suggested that, despite that there is not one-fit-all model, cultural production can be an important initiative for any city transformation if it is appropriately implemented. The city planners and authorities ought to consider the conditions and factors and design a specific plan to fit the city context and integrated with other planning.
Keywords: Cultural production, culture, cultural planning, impact, urban regeneration.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 27852037 A Semantic Registry to Support Brazilian Aeronautical Web Services Operations
Authors: Luís Antonio de Almeida Rodriguez, José Maria Parente de Oliveira, Ednelson Oliveira
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In the last two decades, the world’s aviation authorities have made several attempts to create consensus about a global and accepted approach for applying semantics to web services registry descriptions. This problem has led communities to face a fat and disorganized infrastructure to describe aeronautical web services. It is usual for developers to implement ad-hoc connections among consumers and providers and manually create non-standardized service compositions, which need some particular approach to compose and semantically discover a desired web service. Current practices are not precise and tend to focus on lightweight specifications of some parts of the OWL-S and embed them into syntactic descriptions (SOAP artifacts and OWL language). It is necessary to have the ability to manage the use of both technologies. This paper presents an implementation of the ontology OWL-S that describes a Brazilian Aeronautical Web Service Registry, which makes it able to publish, advertise, make multi-criteria semantic discovery aligned with the ideas of the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Program, and invoke web services within the Air Traffic Management context. The proposal’s best finding is a generic approach to describe semantic web services. The paper also presents a set of functional requirements to guide the ontology development and to compare them to the results to validate the implementation of the OWL-S Ontology.
Keywords: Aeronautical Web Services, OWL-S, Semantic Web Services Discovery, Ontologies.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1792036 Renewable Energy Supply Options in Kuwait
Authors: Osamah A. Alsayegh, Fatma A. Fairouz
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This paper compares planning results of the electricity and water generation inventory up to year 2030 in the State of Kuwait. Currently, the generation inventory consists of oil and gas fired technologies only. The planning study considers two main cases. The first case, Reference case, examines a generation inventory based on oil and gas fired generation technologies only. The second case examines the inclusion of renewables as part of the generation inventory under two scenarios. In the first scenario, Ref-RE, renewable build-out is based on optimum economic performance of overall generation system. Result shows that the optimum installed renewable capacity with electric energy generation of 11% . In the second scenario, Ref-RE20, the renewable capacity build-out is forced to provide 20% of electric energy by 2030. The respective energy systems costs of Reference, Ref-RE and Ref-RE20 case scenarios reach US dollar 24, 10 and 14 billion annually in 2030.Keywords: Generation inventory, solar, planning, TIMES, wind.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 26342035 Kirchhoff’s Depth Migration over Heterogeneous Velocity Models with Ray Tracing Modeling Approach
Authors: Alok Kumar Routa, Priya Ranjan Mohanty
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Complex seismic signatures are generated due to the complexity of the subsurface which is difficult to interpret. In the present study, an attempt has been made to model the complex subsurface using the Ray tracing modeling technique. Add to this, for the imaging of these geological features, Kirchhoff’s prestack depth migration is applied over the synthetic common shot gather dataset. It is found that the Kirchhoff’s migration technique in addition with the Ray tracing modeling concept has the flexibility towards the imaging of various complex geology which gives satisfactory results with proper delineation of the reflectors at their respective true depth position. The entire work has been carried out under the MATLAB environment.
Keywords: Kirchhoff’s migration, Prestack depth migration, Ray tracing modeling, Velocity model.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 13732034 Technology and Its Social Implications: Myths and Realities in the Interpretation of the Concept
Authors: E. V. Veraszto, J. T. F. Camargo, D. Silva, N. A. Miranda, F. O. Simon, S. F. Amaral, L. V. Freitas
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The concept of technology as well as itself has evolved continuously over time, such that, nowadays, this concept is still marked by myths and realities. Even the concept of science is frequently misunderstood as technology. In this way, this paper presents different forms of interpretation of the concept of technology in the course of history, as well as the social and cultural aspects associated with it, through an analysis made by means of insights from sociological studies of science and technology and its multiple relations with society. Through the analysis of contents, the paper presents a classification of how technology is interpreted in the social sphere and search channel efforts to show how a broader understanding can contribute to better interpretations of how scientific and technological development influences the environment in which we operate. The text also presents a particular point of view for the interpretation of the concept from the analysis throughout the whole work.
Keywords: Technology, conceptions of technology, technological myths, definition of technology.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 15402033 Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Dispersion of Microparticles Emitted by Machining Operation
Authors: F. Tafnout, E. Belut, B. Oesterlé, J.R. Fontaine
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As a part of the development of a numerical method of close capture exhausts systems for machining devices, a test rig recreating a situation similar to a grinding operation, but in a perfectly controlled environment, is used. The properties of the obtained spray of solid particles are initially characterized using particle tracking velocimetry (PTV), in order to obtain input and validation parameters for numerical simulations. The dispersion of a tracer gas (SF6) emitted simultaneously with the particle jet is then studied experimentally, as the dispersion of such a gas is representative of that of finer particles, whose aerodynamic response time is negligible. Finally, complete modeling of the test rig is achieved to allow comparison with experimental results and thus to progress towards validation of the models used to describe a twophase flow generated by machining operation.Keywords: Pollutants, capture, tracer gas, SF6, PTV, numericalmodeling.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 15202032 Enhancing Privacy-Preserving Cloud Database Querying by Preventing Brute Force Attacks
Authors: Ambika Vishal Pawar, Ajay Dani
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Considering the complexities involved in Cloud computing, there are still plenty of issues that affect the privacy of data in cloud environment. Unless these problems get solved, we think that the problem of preserving privacy in cloud databases is still open. In tokenization and homomorphic cryptography based solutions for privacy preserving cloud database querying, there is possibility that by colluding with service provider adversary may run brute force attacks that will reveal the attribute values.
In this paper we propose a solution by defining the variant of K –means clustering algorithm that effectively detects such brute force attacks and enhances privacy of cloud database querying by preventing this attacks.
Keywords: Privacy, Database, Cloud Computing, Clustering, K-means, Cryptography.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25552031 Entrepreneurship and the Discovery and Exploitation of Business Opportunities: Empirical Evidence from the Malawian Tourism Sector
Authors: Aravind Mohan Krishnan
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This paper identifies a research gap in the literature on tourism entrepreneurship in Malawi, Africa, and investigates how entrepreneurs from the Malawian tourism sector discover and exploit business opportunities. In particular, the importance of prior experience and business networks in the opportunity development process is debated. Another area of empirical research examined here is the opportunity recognition-venture creation sequence. While Malawi presents fruitful business opportunities, exploiting these opportunities into fully realized business ideas is a real challenge due to the country’s difficult business environment and poor promotional and marketing efforts. The study concludes by calling for further research in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to develop our understanding of entrepreneurship in this (African) context.
Keywords: Tourism, entrepreneurship, Malawi, business opportunities.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 23482030 Spread Spectrum Code Estimationby Particle Swarm Algorithm
Authors: Vahid R. Asghari, Mehrdad Ardebilipour
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In the context of spectrum surveillance, a new method to recover the code of spread spectrum signal is presented, while the receiver has no knowledge of the transmitter-s spreading sequence. In our previous paper, we used Genetic algorithm (GA), to recover spreading code. Although genetic algorithms (GAs) are well known for their robustness in solving complex optimization problems, but nonetheless, by increasing the length of the code, we will often lead to an unacceptable slow convergence speed. To solve this problem we introduce Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) into code estimation in spread spectrum communication system. In searching process for code estimation, the PSO algorithm has the merits of rapid convergence to the global optimum, without being trapped in local suboptimum, and good robustness to noise. In this paper we describe how to implement PSO as a component of a searching algorithm in code estimation. Swarm intelligence boasts a number of advantages due to the use of mobile agents. Some of them are: Scalability, Fault tolerance, Adaptation, Speed, Modularity, Autonomy, and Parallelism. These properties make swarm intelligence very attractive for spread spectrum code estimation. They also make swarm intelligence suitable for a variety of other kinds of channels. Our results compare between swarm-based algorithms and Genetic algorithms, and also show PSO algorithm performance in code estimation process.Keywords: Code estimation, Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO), Spread spectrum.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 21352029 Design and Implementation of Real-Time Automatic Censoring System on Chip for Radar Detection
Authors: Imron Rosyadi, Ridha A. Djemal, Saleh A. Alshebeili
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Design and implementation of a novel B-ACOSD CFAR algorithm is presented in this paper. It is proposed for detecting radar target in log-normal distribution environment. The BACOSD detector is capable to detect automatically the number interference target in the reference cells and detect the real target by an adaptive threshold. The detector is implemented as a System on Chip on FPGA Altera Stratix II using parallelism and pipelining technique. For a reference window of length 16 cells, the experimental results showed that the processor works properly with a processing speed up to 115.13MHz and processing time0.29 ┬Ás, thus meets real-time requirement for a typical radar system.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 31112028 Enhancing Competition in Public Procurement for Sustained Growth: Applying a Double Selection Model to Road Procurement Auctions
Authors: Antonio Estache, Atsushi Iimi
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Limited competition has been a serious concern in infrastructure procurement. Importantly, however, there are normally a number of potential bidders initially showing interest in proposed projects. This paper focuses on tackling the question why these initially interested bidders fade out. An empirical problem is that no bids of fading-out firms are observable. They could decide not to enter the process at the beginning of the tendering or may be technically disqualified at any point in the selection process. The paper applies the double selection model to procurement data from road development projects in developing countries and shows that competition ends up restricted, because bidders are self-selective and auctioneers also tend to limit participation depending on the size of contracts.Limited competition would likely lead to high infrastructure procurement costs, threatening fiscal sustainability and economic growth.
Keywords: Auction theory, endogenous bidder entry, infrastructure development, public procurement.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 14132027 Optimum Design of Photovoltaic Water Pumping System Application
Authors: Sarah Abdourraziq, Rachid El Bachtiri
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The solar power source for pumping water is one of the most promising areas in photovoltaic applications. The implementation of these systems allows to protect the environment and reduce the CO2 gas emission compared to systems trained by diesel generators. This paper presents a comparative study between the photovoltaic pumping system driven by DC motor, and AC motor to define the optimum design of this application. The studied system consists of PV array, DC-DC Boost Converter, inverter, motor-pump set and storage tank. The comparison was carried out to define the characteristics and the performance of each system. Each subsystem is modeled in order to simulate the whole system in MATLAB/ Simulink. The results show the efficiency of the proposed technique.
Keywords: Photovoltaic water pumping system, DC motor-pump, AC motor-pump, DC-DC boost converter.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 19282026 Interfacing C and TMS320C6713 Assembly Language (Part-I)
Authors: Abdullah A. Wardak
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This paper describes an interfacing of C and the TMS320C6713 assembly language which is crucially important for many real-time applications. Similarly, interfacing of C with the assembly language of a conventional microprocessor such as MC68000 is presented for comparison. However, it should be noted that the way the C compiler passes arguments among various functions in the TMS320C6713-based environment is totally different from the way the C compiler passes arguments in a conventional microprocessor such as MC68000. Therefore, it is very important for a user of the TMS320C6713-based system to properly understand and follow the register conventions when interfacing C with the TMS320C6713 assembly language subroutine. It should be also noted that in some cases (examples 6-9) the endian-mode of the board needs to be taken into consideration. In this paper, one method is presented in great detail. Other methods will be presented in the future.Keywords: Assembly language, high level language, interfacing, stack, arguments.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25202025 Estimating Correlation Dimension on Japanese Candlestick, Application to FOREX Time Series
Authors: S. Mahmoodzadeh, J. Shahrabi, M. A. Torkamani, J. Sabaghzadeh Ghomi
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Recognizing behavioral patterns of financial markets is essential for traders. Japanese candlestick chart is a common tool to visualize and analyze such patterns in an economic time series. Since the world was introduced to Japanese candlestick charting, traders saw how combining this tool with intelligent technical approaches creates a powerful formula for the savvy investors. This paper propose a generalization to box counting method of Grassberger-Procaccia, which is based on computing the correlation dimension of Japanese candlesticks instead commonly used 'close' points. The results of this method applied on several foreign exchange rates vs. IRR (Iranian Rial). Satisfactorily show lower chaotic dimension of Japanese candlesticks series than regular Grassberger-Procaccia method applied merely on close points of these same candles. This means there is some valuable information inside candlesticks.Keywords: Chaos, Japanese candlestick, generalized box counting, strange attractor.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2436