Search results for: On-board computer
Commenced in January 2007
Frequency: Monthly
Edition: International
Paper Count: 1367

Search results for: On-board computer

257 EEG-Based Fractal Analysis of Different Motor Imagery Tasks using Critical Exponent Method

Authors: Montri Phothisonothai, Masahiro Nakagawa

Abstract:

The objective of this paper is to characterize the spontaneous Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of four different motor imagery tasks and to show hereby a possible solution for the present binary communication between the brain and a machine ora Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The processing technique used in this paper was the fractal analysis evaluated by the Critical Exponent Method (CEM). The EEG signal was registered in 5 healthy subjects,sampling 15 measuring channels at 1024 Hz.Each channel was preprocessed by the Laplacian space ltering so as to reduce the space blur and therefore increase the spaceresolution. The EEG of each channel was segmented and its Fractaldimension (FD) calculated. The FD was evaluated in the time interval corresponding to the motor imagery and averaged out for all the subjects (each channel). In order to characterize the FD distribution,the linear regression curves of FD over the electrodes position were applied. The differences FD between the proposed mental tasks are quantied and evaluated for each experimental subject. The obtained results of the proposed method are a substantial fractal dimension in the EEG signal of motor imagery tasks and can be considerably utilized as the multiple-states BCI applications.

Keywords: electroencephalogram (EEG), motor imagery tasks, mental tasks, biomedical signals processing, human-machine interface, fractal analysis, critical exponent method (CEM).

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256 Improving the Elder-s Quality of Life with Smart Television Based Services

Authors: Van-Quang Trinh, Gi-Soo Chung, Hee-Cheol Kim

Abstract:

The increasing number of senior population gradually causes to demand the use of information and communication technology for their satisfactory lives. This paper presents the development of an integrated TV based system which offers an opportunity to provide value added services to a large number of elderly citizens, and thus helps improve their quality of life. The design philosophy underlying this paper is to fulfill both technological and human aspects. The balance between these two dimensions has been currently stressed as a crucial element for the design of usable systems in real use, particularly to the elderly who have physical and mental decline. As the first step to achieve it, we have identified human and social factors that affect the elder-s quality of life by a literature review, and based on them, build four fundamental services: information, healthcare, learning and social network services. Secondly, the system architecture, employed technologies and the elderly-friendly system design considerations are presented. This reflects technological and human perspectives in terms of the system design. Finally, we describe some scenarios that illustrate the potentiality of the proposed system to improve elderly people-s quality of life.

Keywords: Elderly people, human computer interaction, quality of life, smart television, user-centered system design

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255 Multivariate Output-Associative RVM for Multi-Dimensional Affect Predictions

Authors: Achut Manandhar, Kenneth D. Morton, Peter A. Torrione, Leslie M. Collins

Abstract:

The current trends in affect recognition research are to consider continuous observations from spontaneous natural interactions in people using multiple feature modalities, and to represent affect in terms of continuous dimensions, incorporate spatio-temporal correlation among affect dimensions, and provide fast affect predictions. These research efforts have been propelled by a growing effort to develop affect recognition system that can be implemented to enable seamless real-time human-computer interaction in a wide variety of applications. Motivated by these desired attributes of an affect recognition system, in this work a multi-dimensional affect prediction approach is proposed by integrating multivariate Relevance Vector Machine (MVRVM) with a recently developed Output-associative Relevance Vector Machine (OARVM) approach. The resulting approach can provide fast continuous affect predictions by jointly modeling the multiple affect dimensions and their correlations. Experiments on the RECOLA database show that the proposed approach performs competitively with the OARVM while providing faster predictions during testing.

Keywords: Dimensional affect prediction, Output-associative RVM, Multivariate regression.

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254 Strengthening the HCI Approaches in the Software Development Process

Authors: Rogayah A. Majid, Nor Laila Md. Noor, Wan Adilah Wan Adnan

Abstract:

User-Centered Design (UCD), Usability Engineering (UE) and Participatory Design (PD) are the common Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) approaches that are practiced in the software development process, focusing towards issues and matters concerning user involvement. It overlooks the organizational perspective of HCI integration within the software development organization. The Management Information Systems (MIS) perspective of HCI takes a managerial and organizational context to view the effectiveness of integrating HCI in the software development process. The Human-Centered Design (HCD) which encompasses all of the human aspects including aesthetic and ergonomic, is claimed as to provide a better approach in strengthening the HCI approaches to strengthen the software development process. In determining the effectiveness of HCD in the software development process, this paper presents the findings of a content analysis of HCI approaches by viewing those approaches as a technology which integrates user requirements, ranging from the top management to other stake holder in the software development process. The findings obtained show that HCD approach is a technology that emphasizes on human, tools and knowledge in strengthening the HCI approaches to strengthen the software development process in the quest to produce a sustainable, usable and useful software product.

Keywords: Human-Centered Design (HCD), Management Information Systems (MIS), Participatory Design (PD), User- Centered Design (UCD), Usability Engineering (UE)

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253 Decision Analysis Module for Excel

Authors: Radomir Perzina, Jaroslav Ramik

Abstract:

The Analytic Hierarchy Process is frequently used approach for solving decision making problems. There exists wide range of software programs utilizing that approach. Their main disadvantage is that they are relatively expensive and missing intermediate calculations. This work introduces a Microsoft Excel add-in called DAME – Decision Analysis Module for Excel. Comparing to other computer programs DAME is free, can work with scenarios or multiple decision makers and displays intermediate calculations. Users can structure their decision models into three levels – scenarios/users, criteria and variants. Items on all levels can be evaluated either by weights or pair-wise comparisons. There are provided three different methods for the evaluation of the weights of criteria, the variants as well as the scenarios – Saaty’s Method, Geometric Mean Method and Fuller’s Triangle Method. Multiplicative and additive syntheses are supported. The proposed software package is demonstrated on couple of illustrating examples of real life decision problems.

Keywords: Analytic hierarchy process, multi-criteria decision making, pair-wise comparisons, Microsoft Excel, Scenarios.

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252 A Quantitative Tool for Analyze Process Design

Authors: Andrés Carrión García, Aura López de Murillo, José Jabaloyes Vivas, Angela Grisales del Río

Abstract:

Some quality control tools use non metric subjective information coming from experts, who qualify the intensity of relations existing inside processes, but without quantifying them. In this paper we have developed a quality control analytic tool, measuring the impact or strength of the relationship between process operations and product characteristics. The tool includes two models: a qualitative model, allowing relationships description and analysis; and a formal quantitative model, by means of which relationship quantification is achieved. In the first one, concepts from the Graphs Theory were applied to identify those process elements which can be sources of variation, that is, those quality characteristics or operations that have some sort of prelacy over the others and that should become control items. Also the most dependent elements can be identified, that is those elements receiving the effects of elements identified as variation sources. If controls are focused in those dependent elements, efficiency of control is compromised by the fact that we are controlling effects, not causes. The second model applied adapts the multivariate statistical technique of Covariance Structural Analysis. This approach allowed us to quantify the relationships. The computer package LISREL was used to obtain statistics and to validate the model.

Keywords: Characteristics matrix, covariance structure analysis, LISREL.

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251 MITOS-RCNN: Mitotic Figure Detection in Breast Cancer Histopathology Images Using Region Based Convolutional Neural Networks

Authors: Siddhant Rao

Abstract:

Studies estimate that there will be 266,120 new cases of invasive breast cancer and 40,920 breast cancer induced deaths in the year of 2018 alone. Despite the pervasiveness of this affliction, the current process to obtain an accurate breast cancer prognosis is tedious and time consuming. It usually requires a trained pathologist to manually examine histopathological images and identify the features that characterize various cancer severity levels. We propose MITOS-RCNN: a region based convolutional neural network (RCNN) geared for small object detection to accurately grade one of the three factors that characterize tumor belligerence described by the Nottingham Grading System: mitotic count. Other computational approaches to mitotic figure counting and detection do not demonstrate ample recall or precision to be clinically viable. Our models outperformed all previous participants in the ICPR 2012 challenge, the AMIDA 2013 challenge and the MITOS-ATYPIA-14 challenge along with recently published works. Our model achieved an F- measure score of 0.955, a 6.11% improvement in accuracy from the most accurate of the previously proposed models.

Keywords: Object detection, histopathology, breast cancer, mitotic count, deep learning, computer vision.

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250 Serviceability of Fabric-Formed Concrete Structures

Authors: Yadgar Tayfur, Antony Darby, Tim Ibell, Mark Evernden, John Orr

Abstract:

Fabric form-work is a technique to cast concrete structures with a great advantage of saving concrete material of up to 40%. This technique is particularly associated with the optimized concrete structures that usually have smaller cross-section dimensions than equivalent prismatic members. However, this can make the structural system produced from these members prone to smaller serviceability safety margins. Therefore, it is very important to understand the serviceability issue of non-prismatic concrete structures. In this paper, an analytical computer-based model to optimize concrete beams and to predict load-deflection behaviour of both prismatic and non-prismatic concrete beams is presented. The model was developed based on the method of sectional analysis and integration of curvatures. Results from the analytical model were compared to load-deflection behaviour of a number of beams with different geometric and material properties from other researchers. The results of the comparison show that the analytical program can accurately predict the load-deflection response of concrete beams with medium reinforcement ratios. However, it over-estimates deflection values for lightly reinforced specimens. Finally, the analytical program acceptably predicted load-deflection behaviour of on-prismatic concrete beams.

Keywords: Concrete beams, deflections, fabric formwork, optimisation, serviceability.

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249 Ezilla Cloud Service with Cassandra Database for Sensor Observation System

Authors: Kuo-Yang Cheng, Yi-Lun Pan, Chang-Hsing Wu, His-En Yu, Hui-Shan Chen, Weicheng Huang

Abstract:

The main mission of Ezilla is to provide a friendly interface to access the virtual machine and quickly deploy the high performance computing environment. Ezilla has been developed by Pervasive Computing Team at National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC). Ezilla integrates the Cloud middleware, virtualization technology, and Web-based Operating System (WebOS) to form a virtual computer in distributed computing environment. In order to upgrade the dataset and speedup, we proposed the sensor observation system to deal with a huge amount of data in the Cassandra database. The sensor observation system is based on the Ezilla to store sensor raw data into distributed database. We adopt the Ezilla Cloud service to create virtual machines and login into virtual machine to deploy the sensor observation system. Integrating the sensor observation system with Ezilla is to quickly deploy experiment environment and access a huge amount of data with distributed database that support the replication mechanism to protect the data security.

Keywords: Cloud, Virtualization, Cassandra, WebOS

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248 In vitro Effects of Viscum album on the Functionality of Rabbit Spermatozoa

Authors: Marek Halenár, Eva Tvrdá, Simona Baldovská, Ľubomír Ondruška, Peter Massányi, Adriana Kolesárová

Abstract:

This study aimed to assess the in vitro effects of different concentrations of the Viscum album extract on the motility, viability, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production by rabbit spermatozoa during different time periods (0, 2, and 8h). Spermatozoa motility was assessed by using the CASA (Computer aided sperm analysis) system. Cell viability was evaluated by using the metabolic activity MTT assay, and the luminol-based luminometry was applied to quantify the ROS formation. The CASA analysis revealed that low Viscum concentrations were able to prevent a rapid decline of spermatozoa motility, especially in the case of concentrations ranging between 1 and 5 µg/mL (P<0.05 with respect to time 8h). At the same time, concentrations ranging between 1 and 100 µg/mL of the extract led to a significant preservation of the cell viability (P<0.05 in case of 5, 50 and 100 µg/mL; P<0.01 with respect to 1 and 10 µg/mL, time 8h). 1 and 5 µg/mL of the extract exhibited antioxidant characteristics, translated into a significant reduction of the ROS production, particularly notable at time 8h (P<0.01). The results indicate that the Viscum extract is capable of delaying the damage inflicted to the spermatozoon by the in vitro environment.

Keywords: CASA, mistletoe, mitochondrial activity, motility, reactive oxygen species, rabbits, spermatozoa, Viscum album.

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247 Effects of Double Delta Doping on Millimeter and Sub-millimeter Wave Response of Two-Dimensional Hot Electrons in GaAs Nanostructures

Authors: N. Basanta Singh, Sanjoy Deb, G. P Mishra, Subir Kumar Sarkar

Abstract:

Carrier mobility has become the most important characteristic of high speed low dimensional devices. Due to development of very fast switching semiconductor devices, speed of computer and communication equipment has been increasing day by day and will continue to do so in future. As the response of any device depends on the carrier motion within the devices, extensive studies of carrier mobility in the devices has been established essential for the growth in the field of low dimensional devices. Small-signal ac transport of degenerate two-dimensional hot electrons in GaAs quantum wells is studied here incorporating deformation potential acoustic, polar optic and ionized impurity scattering in the framework of heated drifted Fermi-Dirac carrier distribution. Delta doping is considered in the calculations to investigate the effects of double delta doping on millimeter and submillimeter wave response of two dimensional hot electrons in GaAs nanostructures. The inclusion of delta doping is found to enhance considerably the two dimensional electron density which in turn improves the carrier mobility (both ac and dc) values in the GaAs quantum wells thereby providing scope of getting higher speed devices in future.

Keywords: Carrier mobility, Delta doping, Hot carriers, Quantum wells.

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246 Determining Fire Resistance of Wooden Construction Elements through Experimental Studies and Artificial Neural Network

Authors: Sakir Tasdemir, Mustafa Altin, Gamze Fahriye Pehlivan, Ismail Saritas, Sadiye Didem Boztepe Erkis, Selma Tasdemir

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence applications are commonly used in industry in many fields in parallel with the developments in the computer technology. In this study, a fire room was prepared for the resistance of wooden construction elements and with the mechanism here, the experiments of polished materials were carried out. By utilizing from the experimental data, an artificial neural network (ANN) was modelled in order to evaluate the final cross sections of the wooden samples remaining from the fire. In modelling, experimental data obtained from the fire room were used. In the developed system, the first weight of samples (ws-gr), preliminary cross-section (pcs-mm2), fire time (ft-minute), and fire temperature (t-oC) as input parameters and final cross-section (fcs-mm2) as output parameter were taken. When the results obtained from ANN and experimental data are compared after making statistical analyses, the data of two groups are determined to be coherent and seen to have no meaning difference between them. As a result, it is seen that ANN can be safely used in determining cross sections of wooden materials after fire and it prevents many disadvantages.

Keywords: Artificial neural network, final cross-section, fire retardant polishes, fire safety, wood resistance.

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245 An Empirical Study on Switching Activation Functions in Shallow and Deep Neural Networks

Authors: Apoorva Vinod, Archana Mathur, Snehanshu Saha

Abstract:

Though there exists a plethora of Activation Functions (AFs) used in single and multiple hidden layer Neural Networks (NN), their behavior always raised curiosity, whether used in combination or singly. The popular AFs – Sigmoid, ReLU, and Tanh – have performed prominently well for shallow and deep architectures. Most of the time, AFs are used singly in multi-layered NN, and, to the best of our knowledge, their performance is never studied and analyzed deeply when used in combination. In this manuscript, we experiment on multi-layered NN architecture (both on shallow and deep architectures; Convolutional NN and VGG16) and investigate how well the network responds to using two different AFs (Sigmoid-Tanh, Tanh-ReLU, ReLU-Sigmoid) used alternately against a traditional, single (Sigmoid-Sigmoid, Tanh-Tanh, ReLU-ReLU) combination. Our results show that on using two different AFs, the network achieves better accuracy, substantially lower loss, and faster convergence on 4 computer vision (CV) and 15 Non-CV (NCV) datasets. When using different AFs, not only was the accuracy greater by 6-7%, but we also accomplished convergence twice as fast. We present a case study to investigate the probability of networks suffering vanishing and exploding gradients when using two different AFs. Additionally, we theoretically showed that a composition of two or more AFs satisfies Universal Approximation Theorem (UAT).

Keywords: Activation Function, Universal Approximation function, Neural Networks, convergence.

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244 Improvising Intrusion Detection for Malware Activities on Dual-Stack Network Environment

Authors: Zulkiflee M., Robiah Y., Nur Azman Abu, Shahrin S.

Abstract:

Malware is software which was invented and meant for doing harms on computers. Malware is becoming a significant threat in computer network nowadays. Malware attack is not just only involving financial lost but it can also cause fatal errors which may cost lives in some cases. As new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) emerged, many people believe this protocol could solve most malware propagation issues due to its broader addressing scheme. As IPv6 is still new compares to native IPv4, some transition mechanisms have been introduced to promote smoother migration. Unfortunately, these transition mechanisms allow some malwares to propagate its attack from IPv4 to IPv6 network environment. In this paper, a proof of concept shall be presented in order to show that some existing IPv4 malware detection technique need to be improvised in order to detect malware attack in dual-stack network more efficiently. A testbed of dual-stack network environment has been deployed and some genuine malware have been released to observe their behaviors. The results between these different scenarios will be analyzed and discussed further in term of their behaviors and propagation methods. The results show that malware behave differently on IPv6 from the IPv4 network protocol on the dual-stack network environment. A new detection technique is called for in order to cater this problem in the near future.

Keywords: Dual-Stack, Malware, Worm, IPv6;IDS

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243 Investigating the Individual Difference Antecedents of Perceived Enjoyment in the Acceptance of Blogging

Authors: Yi-Shun Wang, Hsin-Hui Lin, Yi-Wen Liao

Abstract:

With the proliferation of Weblogs (blogs) use in educational contexts, gaining a better understanding of why students are willing to utilize blog systems has become an important topic for practitioners and academics. While perceived enjoyment has been found to have a significant influence on behavioral intentions to use blogs or hedonic systems, few studies have investigated the antecedents of perceived enjoyment in the acceptance of blogging. The main purpose of the present study is to explore the individual difference antecedents of perceived enjoyment and examine how they influence behavioral intention to blog through the mediation of perceived enjoyment. Based on the previous literature, the Big Five personality traits (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience), as well as computer self-efficacy and personal innovation in information technology (PIIT), are hypothesized as potential antecedents of perceived enjoyment in the acceptance of blogging. Data collected from 358 respondents in Taiwan are tested against the research model using the structural equation modeling approach. The results indicate that extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and PIIT have a significant influence on perceived enjoyment, which in turn significantly influences the behavioral intention to blog. These findings lead to several important implications for future research.

Keywords: Individual difference, Big Five personality traits, perceived enjoyment, blogging

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242 Generalized Morphological 3D Shape Decomposition Grayscale Interframe Interpolation Method

Authors: Dragos Nicolae VIZIREANU

Abstract:

One of the main image representations in Mathematical Morphology is the 3D Shape Decomposition Representation, useful for Image Compression and Representation,and Pattern Recognition. The 3D Morphological Shape Decomposition representation can be generalized a number of times,to extend the scope of its algebraic characteristics as much as possible. With these generalizations, the Morphological Shape Decomposition 's role to serve as an efficient image decomposition tool is extended to grayscale images.This work follows the above line, and further develops it. Anew evolutionary branch is added to the 3D Morphological Shape Decomposition's development, by the introduction of a 3D Multi Structuring Element Morphological Shape Decomposition, which permits 3D Morphological Shape Decomposition of 3D binary images (grayscale images) into "multiparameter" families of elements. At the beginning, 3D Morphological Shape Decomposition representations are based only on "1 parameter" families of elements for image decomposition.This paper addresses the gray scale inter frame interpolation by means of mathematical morphology. The new interframe interpolation method is based on generalized morphological 3D Shape Decomposition. This article will present the theoretical background of the morphological interframe interpolation, deduce the new representation and show some application examples.Computer simulations could illustrate results.

Keywords: 3D shape decomposition representation, mathematical morphology, gray scale interframe interpolation

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241 A Formative Assessment Tool for Effective Feedback

Authors: Rami Rashkovits, Ilana Lavy

Abstract:

In this study we present our developed formative assessment tool for students' assignments. The tool enables lecturers to define assignments for the course and assign each problem in each assignment a list of criteria and weights by which the students' work is evaluated. During assessment, the lecturers feed the scores for each criterion with justifications. When the scores of the current assignment are completely fed in, the tool automatically generates reports for both students and lecturers. The students receive a report by email including detailed description of their assessed work, their relative score and their progress across the criteria along the course timeline. This information is presented via charts generated automatically by the tool based on the scores fed in. The lecturers receive a report that includes summative (e.g., averages, standard deviations) and detailed (e.g., histogram) data of the current assignment. This information enables the lecturers to follow the class achievements and adjust the learning process accordingly. The tool was examined on two pilot groups of college students that study a course in (1) Object-Oriented Programming (2) Plane Geometry. Results reveal that most of the students were satisfied with the assessment process and the reports produced by the tool. The lecturers who used the tool were also satisfied with the reports and their contribution to the learning process.

Keywords: Computer-based formative assessment tool, science education.

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240 Dynamic Response of Strain Rate Dependent Glass/Epoxy Composite Beams Using Finite Difference Method

Authors: M. M. Shokrieh, A. Karamnejad

Abstract:

This paper deals with a numerical analysis of the transient response of composite beams with strain rate dependent mechanical properties by use of a finite difference method. The equations of motion based on Timoshenko beam theory are derived. The geometric nonlinearity effects are taken into account with von Kármán large deflection theory. The finite difference method in conjunction with Newmark average acceleration method is applied to solve the differential equations. A modified progressive damage model which accounts for strain rate effects is developed based on the material property degradation rules and modified Hashin-type failure criteria and added to the finite difference model. The components of the model are implemented into a computer code in Mathematica 6. Glass/epoxy laminated composite beams with constant and strain rate dependent mechanical properties under dynamic load are analyzed. Effects of strain rate on dynamic response of the beam for various stacking sequences, load and boundary conditions are investigated.

Keywords: Composite beam, Finite difference method, Progressive damage modeling, Strain rate.

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239 Perceptions toward Adopting Virtual Reality as a Learning Aid in Information Technology

Authors: S. Alfalah, J. Falah, T. Alfalah, M. Elfalah, O. Falah

Abstract:

The field of education is an ever-evolving area constantly enriched by newly discovered techniques provided by active research in all areas of technologies. The recent years have witnessed the introduction of a number of promising technologies and applications to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Virtual Reality (VR) applications are considered one of the evolving methods that have contributed to enhancing education in many fields. VR creates an artificial environment, using computer hardware and software, which is similar to the real world. This simulation provides a solution to improve the delivery of materials, which facilitates the teaching process by providing a useful aid to instructors, and enhances the learning experience by providing a beneficial learning aid. In order to assure future utilization of such systems, students’ perceptions were examined toward utilizing VR as an educational tool in the Faculty of Information Technology (IT) in The University of Jordan. A questionnaire was administered to IT undergraduates investigating students’ opinions about the potential opportunities that VR technology could offer and its implications as learning and teaching aid. The results confirmed the end users’ willingness to adopt VR systems as a learning aid. The result of this research forms a solid base for investing in a VR system for IT education.

Keywords: Education, information, technology, virtual reality.

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238 In vitro Effects of Berberine on the Vitality and Oxidative Profile of Bovine Spermatozoa

Authors: Eva Tvrdá, Hana Greifová, Peter Ivanič, Norbert Lukáč

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The aim of this study was to evaluate the dose- and time-dependent in vitro effects of berberine (BER), a natural alkaloid with numerous biological properties on bovine spermatozoa during three time periods (0 h, 2 h, 24 h). Bovine semen samples were diluted and cultivated in physiological saline solution containing 0.5% DMSO together with 200, 100, 50, 10, 5, and 1 μmol/L BER. Spermatozoa motility was assessed using the computer assisted semen analyzer. The viability of spermatozoa was assessed by the metabolic (MTT) assay, production of superoxide radicals was quantified using the nitroblue tetrazolium (NBT) test, and chemiluminescence was used to evaluate the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Cell lysates were prepared and the extent of lipid peroxidation (LPO) was evaluated using the TBARS assay. The results of the movement activity showed a significant increase in the motility during long term cultivation in case of concentrations ranging between 1 and 10 μmol/L BER (P < 0.01; P < 0.001; 24 h). At the same time, supplementation of 1, 5 and 10 μmol/L BER led to a significant preservation of the cell viability (P < 0.001; 24 h). BER addition at a range of 1-50 μmol/L also provided a significantly higher protection against superoxide (P < 0.05) and ROS (P < 0.001; P < 0.01) overgeneration as well as LPO (P < 0.01; P<0.05) after a 24 h cultivation. We may suggest that supplementation of BER to bovine spermatozoa, particularly at concentrations ranging between 1 and 50 μmol/L, may offer protection to the motility, viability and oxidative status of the spermatozoa, particularly notable at 24 h.

Keywords: Berberine, bulls, motility, oxidative profile, spermatozoa, viability.

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237 A Watermarking Scheme for MP3 Audio Files

Authors: Dimitrios Koukopoulos, Yiannis Stamatiou

Abstract:

In this work, we present for the first time in our perception an efficient digital watermarking scheme for mpeg audio layer 3 files that operates directly in the compressed data domain, while manipulating the time and subband/channel domain. In addition, it does not need the original signal to detect the watermark. Our scheme was implemented taking special care for the efficient usage of the two limited resources of computer systems: time and space. It offers to the industrial user the capability of watermark embedding and detection in time immediately comparable to the real music time of the original audio file that depends on the mpeg compression, while the end user/audience does not face any artifacts or delays hearing the watermarked audio file. Furthermore, it overcomes the disadvantage of algorithms operating in the PCMData domain to be vulnerable to compression/recompression attacks, as it places the watermark in the scale factors domain and not in the digitized sound audio data. The strength of our scheme, that allows it to be used with success in both authentication and copyright protection, relies on the fact that it gives to the users the enhanced capability their ownership of the audio file not to be accomplished simply by detecting the bit pattern that comprises the watermark itself, but by showing that the legal owner knows a hard to compute property of the watermark.

Keywords: Audio watermarking, mpeg audio layer 3, hardinstance generation, NP-completeness.

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236 Fuzzy Sequential Algorithm for Discrimination and Decision Maker in Sporting Events

Authors: Mourad Moussa, Ali Douik, Hassani Messaoud

Abstract:

Events discrimination and decision maker in sport field are the subject of many interesting studies in computer vision and artificial intelligence. A large volume of research has been conducted for automatic semantic event detection and summarization of sports videos. Indeed the results of these researches have a very significant contribution, as well to television broadcasts as to the football teams, since the result of sporting event can be reflected on the economic field. In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy sequential technique which lead to discriminate events and specify the technico-tactics on going the game, nor the fuzzy system or the sequential one, may be able to respond to the asked question, in fact fuzzy process is not sufficient, it does not respect the chronological order according the time of various events, similarly the sequential process needs flexibility about the parameters used in this study, it may affect a membership degree of each parameter on the one hand and respect the sequencing of events for each frame on the other hand. Indeed this technique describes special events such as dribbling, headings, short sprints, rapid acceleration or deceleration, turning, jumping, kicking, ball occupation, and tackling according velocity vectors of the two players and the ball direction.

Keywords: Sequential process, Event detection, Soccer videos analysis, Fuzzy process, Spatio-temporal parameters.

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235 An Efficient and Optimized Multi Constrained Path Computation for Real Time Interactive Applications in Packet Switched Networks

Authors: P.S. Prakash, S. Selvan

Abstract:

Quality of Service (QoS) Routing aims to find path between source and destination satisfying the QoS requirements which efficiently using the network resources and underlying routing algorithm and to fmd low-cost paths that satisfy given QoS constraints. One of the key issues in providing end-to-end QoS guarantees in packet networks is determining feasible path that satisfies a number of QoS constraints. We present a Optimized Multi- Constrained Routing (OMCR) algorithm for the computation of constrained paths for QoS routing in computer networks. OMCR applies distance vector to construct a shortest path for each destination with reference to a given optimization metric, from which a set of feasible paths are derived at each node. OMCR is able to fmd feasible paths as well as optimize the utilization of network resources. OMCR operates with the hop-by-hop, connectionless routing model in IP Internet and does not create any loops while fmding the feasible paths. Nodes running OMCR not necessarily maintaining global view of network state such as topology, resource information and routing updates are sent only to neighboring nodes whereas its counterpart link-state routing method depend on complete network state for constrained path computation and that incurs excessive communication overhead.

Keywords: QoS Routing, Optimization, feasible path, multiple constraints.

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234 A Novel Digital Implementation of AC Voltage Controller for Speed Control of Induction Motor

Authors: Ali M. Eltamaly, A. I. Alolah, R. Hamouda, M. Y. Abdulghany

Abstract:

In this paper a novel, simple and reliable digital firing scheme has been implemented for speed control of three-phase induction motor using ac voltage controller. The system consists of three-phase supply connected to the three-phase induction motor via three triacs and its control circuit. The ac voltage controller has three modes of operation depending on the shape of supply current. The performance of the induction motor differs in each mode where the speed is directly proportional with firing angle in two modes and inversely in the third one. So, the control system has to detect the current mode of operation to choose the correct firing angle of triacs. Three sensors are used to feed the line currents to control system to detect the mode of operation. The control strategy is implemented using a low cost Xilinx Spartan-3E field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. Three PI-controllers are designed on FPGA to control the system in the three-modes. Simulation of the system is carried out using PSIM computer program. The simulation results show stable operation for different loading conditions especially in mode 2/3. The simulation results have been compared with the experimental results from laboratory prototype.

Keywords: FPGA, Induction motor, PSIM, triac, Voltage controller.

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233 Lane Changing and Merging Maneuvers of Carlike Robots

Authors: Bibhya Sharma, Jito Vanualailai, Ravindra Rai

Abstract:

This research paper designs a unique motion planner of multiple platoons of nonholonomic car-like robots as a feasible solution to the lane changing/merging maneuvers. The decentralized planner with a leaderless approach and a path-guidance principle derived from the Lyapunov-based control scheme generates collision free avoidance and safe merging maneuvers from multiple lanes to a single lane by deploying a split/merge strategy. The fixed obstacles are the markings and boundaries of the road lanes, while the moving obstacles are the robots themselves. Real and virtual road lane markings and the boundaries of road lanes are incorporated into a workspace to achieve the desired formation and configuration of the robots. Convergence of the robots to goal configurations and the repulsion of the robots from specified obstacles are achieved by suitable attractive and repulsive potential field functions, respectively. The results can be viewed as a significant contribution to the avoidance algorithm of the intelligent vehicle systems (IVS). Computer simulations highlight the effectiveness of the split/merge strategy and the acceleration-based controllers.

Keywords: Lane merging, Lyapunov-based control scheme, path-guidance principle, split/merge strategy.

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232 Promoting Mathematical Understanding Using ICT in Teaching and Learning

Authors: Kamel Hashem, Ibrahim Arman

Abstract:

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in mathematical education is a very active field of research and innovation, where learning is understood to be meaningful and grasping multiple linked representation rather than rote memorization, a great amount of literature offering a wide range of theories, learning approaches, methodologies and interpretations, are generally stressing the potentialities for teaching and learning using ICT. Despite the utilization of new learning approaches with ICT, students experience difficulties in learning concepts relevant to understanding mathematics, much remains unclear about the relationship between the computer environment, the activities it might support, and the knowledge that might emerge from such activities. Many questions that might arise in this regard: to what extent does the use of ICT help students in the process of understanding and solving tasks or problems? Is it possible to identify what aspects or features of students' mathematical learning can be enhanced by the use of technology? This paper will highlight the interest of the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) into the teaching and learning of mathematics (quadratic functions), it aims to investigate the effect of four instructional methods on students- mathematical understanding and problem solving. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to report about 43 students in middle school. Results showed that mathematical thinking and problem solving evolves as students engage with ICT activities and learn cooperatively.

Keywords: Dynamic Geometry Software, Information and Communication Technologies, Visualization, Mathematical Education.

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231 Efficient Boosting-Based Active Learning for Specific Object Detection Problems

Authors: Thuy Thi Nguyen, Nguyen Dang Binh, Horst Bischof

Abstract:

In this work, we present a novel active learning approach for learning a visual object detection system. Our system is composed of an active learning mechanism as wrapper around a sub-algorithm which implement an online boosting-based learning object detector. In the core is a combination of a bootstrap procedure and a semi automatic learning process based on the online boosting procedure. The idea is to exploit the availability of classifier during learning to automatically label training samples and increasingly improves the classifier. This addresses the issue of reducing labeling effort meanwhile obtain better performance. In addition, we propose a verification process for further improvement of the classifier. The idea is to allow re-update on seen data during learning for stabilizing the detector. The main contribution of this empirical study is a demonstration that active learning based on an online boosting approach trained in this manner can achieve results comparable or even outperform a framework trained in conventional manner using much more labeling effort. Empirical experiments on challenging data set for specific object deteciton problems show the effectiveness of our approach.

Keywords: Computer vision, object detection, online boosting, active learning, labeling complexity.

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230 Computer Aided Drug Design and Studies of Antiviral Drug against H3N2 Influenza Virus

Authors: Aditi Shukla, Ambarish S. Vidyarthi, Subir Samanta

Abstract:

The worldwide prevalence of H3N2 influenza virus and its increasing resistance to the existing drugs necessitates for the development of an improved/better targeting anti-influenza drug. H3N2 influenza neuraminidase is one of the two membrane-bound proteins belonging to group-2 neuraminidases. It acts as key player involved in viral pathogenicity and hence, is an important target of anti-influenza drugs. Oseltamivir is one of the potent drugs targeting this neuraminidase. In the present work, we have taken subtype N2 neuraminidase as the receptor and probable analogs of oseltamivir as drug molecules to study the protein-drug interaction in anticipation of finding efficient modified candidate compound. Oseltamivir analogs were made by modifying the functional groups using Marvin Sketch software and were docked using Schrodinger-s Glide. Oseltamivir analog 10 was detected to have significant energy value (16% less compared to Oseltamivir) and could be the probable lead molecule. It infers that some of the modified compounds can interact in a novel manner with increased hydrogen bonding at the active site of neuraminidase and it might be better than the original drug. Further work can be carried out such as enzymatic inhibition studies; synthesis and crystallizing the drug-target complex to analyze the interactions biologically.

Keywords: H3N2 Influenza, Neuraminidase, Oseltamiviranalogs, structure based drug designing

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229 Distinguishing Playing Pattern between Winning and Losing Field Hockey Team in Delhi FIH Road to London 2012 Tournament

Authors: Sofwan N., Norasrudin S., Redzuan P., Mubin A.

Abstract:

The aim of the present study was to analyze and distinguish playing pattern between winning and losing field hockey team in Delhi 2012 tournament. The playing pattern is focus to the D penetration (right, center, left.) and to distinguish D penetration linking to end shot made from it. The data was recorded and analyzed using Sportscode elite computer software. 12 matches were analyzed from the tournament. Two groups of performance indicators are used to analyze, that is D penetration right, center, and left. The type of shot chosen is hit, push, flick, drag, drag flick, deflect sweep, deflect push, scoop, sweep, and reverse hit. This is to distinguish the pattern of play between winning and losing, only 2 performance indicator showed high significant differences from right (Z=-2.87, p=.004, p<0.05) and left penetration (Z=-2.49, p=.013, p<0.05). Winning team had higher significant in hit shot from right penetration (Z=- 2.719, p=.007, p<0.05) same as left penetration showed high in push shot (Z=-2.236, p=.025, p<0.05) and hit (Z=-1.983, p=.047, p<0.05). The shots made from the center penetration had no significant between winning and losing team.

Keywords: D penetration, field hockey playing pattern, goals scored.

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228 Futuristic Black Box Design Considerations and Global Networking for Real Time Monitoring of Flight Performance Parameters

Authors: K. Parandhama Gowd

Abstract:

The aim of this research paper is to conceptualize, discuss, analyze and propose alternate design methodologies for futuristic Black Box for flight safety. The proposal also includes global networking concepts for real time surveillance and monitoring of flight performance parameters including GPS parameters. It is expected that this proposal will serve as a failsafe real time diagnostic tool for accident investigation and location of debris in real time. In this paper, an attempt is made to improve the existing methods of flight data recording techniques and improve upon design considerations for futuristic FDR to overcome the trauma of not able to locate the block box. Since modern day communications and information technologies with large bandwidth are available coupled with faster computer processing techniques, the attempt made in this paper to develop a failsafe recording technique is feasible. Further data fusion/data warehousing technologies are available for exploitation.

Keywords: Flight data recorder (FDR), black box, diagnostic tool, global networking, cockpit voice and data recorder (CVDR), air traffic control (ATC), air traffic, telemetry, tracking and control centers ATTTCC).

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