Search results for: Slack Based Measure

Authors: C. Rogerson, E. Scott

Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to consider the introduction of online courses to replace the current classroom-based staff training. The current training is practical, and must be completed before access to the financial computer system is authorized. The long term objective is to measure the efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency of the training, and to establish whether a transfer of knowledge back to the workplace has occurred. This paper begins with an overview explaining the importance of staff training in an evolving, competitive business environment and defines the problem facing this particular organization. A summary of the literature review is followed by a brief discussion of the research methodology and objective. The implementation of the alpha version of the online course is then described. This paper may be of interest to those seeking insights into, or new theory regarding, practical interventions of online learning in the real world.

Keywords: Computer-based courses, e-learning, online training, workplace training.

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Authors: Saber Saati Mohtadi, Ali Payan, Azizallah Kord

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One of the most important issues in multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is to determine the weights of criteria so that all alternatives can be compared based on the collective performance of criteria. In this paper, one of popular methods in data envelopment analysis (DEA) known as common weights (CWs) is used to determine the weights in MCDA. Two frontiers named ideal and anti-ideal frontiers, instead of ideal and anti-ideal alternatives, are defined based on two new proposed CWs models. Ideal and antiideal frontiers are more flexible than that of alternatives. According to the optimal solutions of these two models, the distances of an alternative from the ideal and anti-ideal frontiers are derived. Then, a relative distance is introduced to measure the value of each alternative. The suggested models are linear and despite weight restrictions are feasible. An example is presented for explaining the method and for comparing to the existing literature.

Keywords: Anti-ideal frontier, Common weights (CWs), Ideal frontier, Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)

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Authors: Dyah Iswantini, Trivadila, Novik Nurhidayat, Waras Nurcholis

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The antioxidant compounds are needed for the food, beverages, and pharmaceuticals industry. For this purpose, an appropriate method is required to measure the antioxidant properties in various types of samples. Spectrophotometric method usually used has some weaknesses, including the high price, long sample preparation time, and less sensitivity. Among the alternative methods developed to overcome these weaknesses is antioxidant biosensor based on superoxide dismutase (SOD) enzyme. Therefore, this study was carried out to measure the SOD activity originating from Deinococcus radiodurans and to determine its kinetics properties. Carbon paste electrode modified with ferrocene and immobilized SOD exhibited anode and cathode current peak at potential of +400 and +300mv respectively, in both pure SOD and SOD of D. radiodurans. This indicated that the current generated was from superoxide catalytic dismutation reaction by SOD. Optimum conditions for SOD activity was at pH 9 and temperature of 27.50C for D. radiodurans SOD, and pH 11 and temperature of 200C for pure SOD. Dismutation reaction kinetics of superoxide catalyzed by SOD followed the Lineweaver-Burk kinetics with D. radiodurans SOD KMapp value was smaller than pure SOD. The result showed that D. radiodurans SOD had higher enzyme-substrate affinity and specificity than pure SOD. It concluded that D. radiodurans SOD had a great potential as biological recognition component for antioxidant biosensor.

Keywords: Antioxidant biosensor, Deinococcus radiodurans, enzyme kinetic, superoxide dismutase (SOD).

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Authors: Md. Mahbubur Rahim

Abstract:

B2E portals represent a new class of web-based information technologies which many organisations are introducing in recent years to stay in touch with their distributed workforces and enable them to perform value added activities for organisations. However, actual usage of these emerging systems (measured using suitable instruments) has not been reported in the contemporary scholarly literature. We argue that many of the instruments to measure usage of various types of IT-enabled information systems are not directly applicable for B2E portals because they were developed for the context of traditional mainframe and PC-based information systems. It is therefore important to develop a new instrument for web-based portal technologies aimed at employees. In this article, we report on the development and initial qualitative evaluation of an instrument that seeks to operationaise a set of independent factors affecting the usage of portals by employees. The proposed instrument is useful to IT/e-commerce researchers and practitioners alike as it enhances their confidence in predicting employee usage of portals in organisations.

Keywords: Portal, business-to-employees, instrument, evaluation, qualitative research.

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Authors: S. Homrossukon, A. Anurathapunt

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This is an application research presenting the improvement of production quality using the six sigma solutions and the analyses of benefit-cost ratio. The case of interest is the production of tile-concrete. Such production has faced with the problem of high nonconforming products from an inappropriate surface coating and had low process capability based on the strength property of tile. Surface coating and tile strength are the most critical to quality of this product. The improvements followed five stages of six sigma solutions. After the improvement, the production yield was improved to 80% as target required and the defective products from coating process was remarkably reduced from 29.40% to 4.09%. The process capability based on the strength quality was increased from 0.87 to 1.08 as customer oriented. The improvement was able to save the materials loss for 3.24 millions baht or 0.11 million dollars. The benefits from the improvement were analyzed from (1) the reduction of the numbers of non conforming tile using its factory price for surface coating improvement and (2) the materials saved from the increment of process capability. The benefit-cost ratio of overall improvement was high as 7.03. It was non valuable investment in define, measure, analyses and the initial of improve stages after that it kept increasing. This was due to there were no benefits in define, measure, and analyze stages of six sigma since these three stages mainly determine the cause of problem and its effects rather than improve the process. The benefit-cost ratio starts existing in the improve stage and go on. Within each stage, the individual benefitcost ratio was much higher than the accumulative one as there was an accumulation of cost since the first stage of six sigma. The consideration of the benefit-cost ratio during the improvement project helps make decisions for cost saving of similar activities during the improvement and for new project. In conclusion, the determination of benefit-cost ratio behavior through out six sigma implementation period provides the useful data for managing quality improvement for the optimal effectiveness. This is the additional outcome from the regular proceeding of six sigma.

Keywords: Six Sigma Solutions, Process Improvement, QualityManagement, Benefit Cost Ratio

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Authors: N. W. U. D. Chathurani, Shlomo Geva, Vinod Chandran, Proboda Rajapaksha

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Selecting an appropriate image representation is the most important factor in implementing an effective Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system. This paper presents a multi-feature fusion approach for efficient CBIR, based on the distance distribution of features and relative feature weights at the time of query processing. It is a simple yet effective approach, which is free from the effect of features' dimensions, ranges, internal feature normalization and the distance measure. This approach can easily be adopted in any feature combination to improve retrieval quality. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated using two benchmark datasets for image classification (a subset of the Corel dataset and Oliva and Torralba) and compared with existing approaches. The performance of the proposed approach is confirmed with the significantly improved performance in comparison with the independently evaluated baseline of the previously proposed feature fusion approaches.

Keywords: Feature fusion, image retrieval, membership function, normalization.

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Authors: Prateek Maheshwari, Nitin Seth, Anoop Kumar Gupta

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The objective of present research paper is to highlight the importance of measuring advertisement effectiveness in print media and to develop a conceptual model for advertisement effectiveness. The developed model is based on dimensions on which advertisement effectiveness depends and on the dimensions which are used to measure the effectiveness. An in-depth and extensive literature review is carried out to understand the concept of advertisement effectiveness and its various determinants in context of print media. Based on the insights gained, a conceptual framework for advertisement effectiveness is presented. The model is an attempt to uncover the relatively less explored area of advertisement effectiveness in Indian advertising scenario. It is believed that present work will encourage scholars and academicians to further explore the area and will offer conceptual assistance and a fresh direction in the domain of advertisement effectiveness.

Keywords: Advertisement Effectiveness, Conceptual Model, Effectiveness Dimensions, Print Media.

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Authors: F. Meskine, N. Taleb, M. Chikr El-Mezouar, K. Kpalma, A. Almhdie

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Image registration is the process of establishing point by point correspondence between images obtained from a same scene. This process is very useful in remote sensing, medicine, cartography, computer vision, etc. Then, the task of registration is to place the data into a common reference frame by estimating the transformations between the data sets. In this work, we develop a rigid point registration method based on the application of genetic algorithms and Hausdorff distance. First, we extract the feature points from both images based on the algorithm of global and local curvature corner. After refining the feature points, we use Hausdorff distance as similarity measure between the two data sets and for optimizing the search space we use genetic algorithms to achieve high computation speed for its inertial parallel. The results show the efficiency of this method for registration of satellite images.

Keywords: Feature extraction, Genetic algorithms, Hausdorff distance, Image registration, Point registration.

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Authors: Yun-Yao Chi, Chieh-Kai Tsai, Dai-Ling Li

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In this paper, a method of fast 3D topography modeling using the high-resolution camera images is studied based on the characteristics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system for low altitude aerial photogrammetry and the need of three dimensional (3D) urban landscape modeling. Firstly, the existing high-resolution digital camera with special design of overlap images is designed by reconstructing and analyzing the auto-flying paths of UAVs, which improves the self-calibration function to achieve the high precision imaging by software, and further increased the resolution of the imaging system. Secondly, several-angle images including vertical images and oblique images gotten by the UAV system are used for the detail measure of urban land surfaces and the texture extraction. Finally, the aerial photography and 3D topography construction are both developed in campus of Chang-Jung University and in Guerin district area in Tainan, Taiwan, provide authentication model for construction of 3D topography based on combined UAV-based camera images from system. The results demonstrated that the UAV system for low altitude aerial photogrammetry can be used in the construction of 3D topography production, and the technology solution in this paper offers a new, fast, and technical plan for the 3D expression of the city landscape, fine modeling and visualization.

Keywords: 3D, topography, UAV, images.

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Authors: Tolga Gok, Kursad Sayin

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The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between expectation, satisfaction and loyalty of South Korean tourists visiting Turkey. In the research, a questionnaire was used as a data collecting tool. The questionnaires are filled by South Korean tourists coming to Turkey through package tours and individual. The survey was conducted in 2014 in Nevsehir (Cappadocia Region) and Istanbul. Tourist guides and agency staff have helped the implementation of surveys. The survey questions are composed of 4 parts, which are “demographic characteristics of tourists”, “travel behavior characteristics”, “perception of expectations on destination attributes” and “perception of destination loyalty”. 5-point Likert type scale including 28 destination attributes was used to measure the expectations of South Korean tourists coming to Turkey. Questions were directed to the tourists to measure the destination loyalty. The questions relating to destination loyalty are “Talking about Turkey to others”, “Recommendation Turkey to others” and “Tourists’ intentions to revisit Turkey”. The basic hypothesis of the research is that there is a statistically significant relationship among expectations, satisfactions and destination loyalty of South Korean tourists coming to Turkey. The results indicated that the expectation had a significant effect on overall satisfaction. In addition it was seen that between overall satisfaction of tourists and destination loyalty had a significant relationship. Based on findings, some suggestions for tour operators and travel agencies were made.

Keywords: Tourist expectation, tourist satisfaction, destination loyalty, destination attributes.

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Authors: Youssef Khmou, Said Safi, Miloud Frikel

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This paper treats different aspects of entropy measure in classical information theory and statistical quantum mechanics, it presents the possibility of extending the definition of Von Neumann entropy to image and array processing. In the first part, we generalize the quantum entropy using singular values of arbitrary rectangular matrices to measure the randomness and the quality of denoising operation, this new definition of entropy can be implemented to compare the performance analysis of filtering methods. In the second part, we apply the concept of pure state in quantum formalism to generalize the maximum entropy method for narrowband and farfield source localization problem. Several computer simulation results are illustrated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Keywords: Von Neumann entropy, Filtering, array, DoA, Maximum Entropy Method.

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Authors: Sunita Jahirabadkar, Parag Kulkarni

Abstract:

Many real-world data sets consist of a very high dimensional feature space. Most clustering techniques use the distance or similarity between objects as a measure to build clusters. But in high dimensional spaces, distances between points become relatively uniform. In such cases, density based approaches may give better results. Subspace Clustering algorithms automatically identify lower dimensional subspaces of the higher dimensional feature space in which clusters exist. In this paper, we propose a new clustering algorithm, ISC – Intelligent Subspace Clustering, which tries to overcome three major limitations of the existing state-of-art techniques. ISC determines the input parameter such as є – distance at various levels of Subspace Clustering which helps in finding meaningful clusters. The uniform parameters approach is not suitable for different kind of databases. ISC implements dynamic and adaptive determination of Meaningful clustering parameters based on hierarchical filtering approach. Third and most important feature of ISC is the ability of incremental learning and dynamic inclusion and exclusions of subspaces which lead to better cluster formation.

Keywords: Density based clustering, high dimensional data, subspace clustering, dynamic parameter setting.

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Authors: B. Bakken, O. Boe

Abstract:

The Norwegian Military Academy (Army) has initiated a project with the main ambition to explore possible avenues to enhancing operational effectiveness through an increased use of simulation-based training and exercises. Within a cost/benefit framework, we discuss opportunities and limitations of vertical and horizontal integration of the existing tactical training system. Vertical integration implies expanding the existing training system to span the full range of training from tactical level (platoon, company) to command and staff level (battalion, brigade). Horizontal integration means including other domains than army tactics and staff procedures in the training, such as military ethics, foreign languages, leadership and decision making. We discuss each of the integration options with respect to purpose and content of training, "best practice" for organising and conducting simulation-based training, and suggest how to evaluate training procedures and measure learning outcomes. We conclude by giving guidelines towards further explorative work and possible implementation.

Keywords: Effectiveness, integration, simulation, training.

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Authors: Jehad Al Dallal

Abstract:

Program slicing is the task of finding all statements in a program that directly or indirectly influence the value of a variable occurrence. The set of statements that can affect the value of a variable at some point in a program is called a program slice. In several software engineering applications, such as program debugging and measuring program cohesion and parallelism, several slices are computed at different program points. In this paper, algorithms are introduced to compute all backward and forward static slices of a computer program by traversing the program representation graph once. The program representation graph used in this paper is called Program Dependence Graph (PDG). We have conducted an experimental comparison study using 25 software modules to show the effectiveness of the introduced algorithm for computing all backward static slices over single-point slicing approaches in computing the parallelism and functional cohesion of program modules. The effectiveness of the algorithm is measured in terms of time execution and number of traversed PDG edges. The comparison study results indicate that using the introduced algorithm considerably saves the slicing time and effort required to measure module parallelism and functional cohesion.

Keywords: Backward slicing, cohesion measure, forward slicing, parallelism measure, program dependence graph, program slicing, static slicing.

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Authors: Amilia Hasbullah, Wan Zahari Wan Yussof, Maziah Ismail

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The primary education system in Indonesia involved the community recognized as the school committee, to take a part in the process of achieving the quality of education via the school facility performance, the low level of school committee involvement in the education system has become the issue in the development of education and reflected to the quality of education. This paper will discuss the conceptual framework and methodology for the performance of school committees within the management of school facilities in Batubara district of Indonesia. The concepts of Community based Facility Management (CbFM) and Logometrix are used as a basis to measure the school committee performance in order to address the needs of quality school management. The data will be taken from questionnaires distributed for those who work and use school facilities spread over seven sub district of Batubara, Indonesia. The result of this study is expected to provide a guide for evaluating the performance of existing school committee in improving the quality of education in Indonesia.

Keywords: community based facility management, School facility management, School committee performance.

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Authors: A. K. Abd El-Aleem, W. F. Abd El-wahed, N. A. Ismail, F. A. Torkey

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This study suggests a model of a new set of evaluation criteria that will be used to measure the efficiency of real-world E-commerce websites. Evaluation criteria include design, usability and performance for websites, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique has been used to measure the websites efficiency. An efficient Web site is defined as a site that generates the most outputs, using the smallest amount of inputs. Inputs refer to measurements representing the amount of effort required to build, maintain and perform the site. Output is amount of traffic the site generates. These outputs are measured as the average number of daily hits and the average number of daily unique visitors.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis, E-commerce, Efficiency.

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Authors: Sandeep Khimta, Parvinder S. Sandhu, Amanpreet Singh Brar

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The traditional software product and process metrics are neither suitable nor sufficient in measuring the complexity of software components, which ultimately is necessary for quality and productivity improvement within organizations adopting CBSE. Researchers have proposed a wide range of complexity metrics for software systems. However, these metrics are not sufficient for components and component-based system and are restricted to the module-oriented systems and object-oriented systems. In this proposed study it is proposed to find the complexity of the JavaBean Software Components as a reflection of its quality and the component can be adopted accordingly to make it more reusable. The proposed metric involves only the design issues of the component and does not consider the packaging and the deployment complexity. In this way, the software components could be kept in certain limit which in turn help in enhancing the quality and productivity.

Keywords: JavaBean Components, Complexity, Metrics, Validation.

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Authors: S. Mohamed Rabeek, Mi Kyoung Park, M. Annamalai Arasu

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This paper presents a design of a wireless read out system for tracking the frequency shift of the polymer coated piezoelectric micro electromechanical resonator due to gas absorption. The measure of this frequency shift indicates the percentage of a particular gas the sensor is exposed to. It is measured using an oscillator and an FPGA based frequency counter by employing the resonator as a frequency determining element in the oscillator. This system consists of a Gas Sensing Wireless Readout (GSWR) and an USB Wireless Transceiver (UWT). GSWR consists of an oscillator based on a trans-impedance sustaining amplifier, an FPGA based frequency readout, a sub 1GHz wireless transceiver and a micro controller. UWT can be plugged into the computer via USB port and function as a wireless module to transfer gas sensor data from GSWR to the computer through its USB port. GUI program running on the computer periodically polls for sensor data through UWT - GSWR wireless link, the response from GSWR is logged in a file for post processing as well as displayed on screen.

Keywords: Gas sensor, GSWR, micro-mechanical system, UWT, volatile emissions.

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Authors: Sandip Sadhukhan, Arpita Sarkar, Debprasad Sinha, Goutam Kumar Ghorai, Gautam Sarkar, Ashis K. Dhara

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Accurate segmentation of the optic disc is very important for computer-aided diagnosis of several ocular diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and hypertensive retinopathy. The paper presents an accurate and fast optic disc detection and segmentation method using an attention based fully convolutional network. The network is trained from scratch using the fundus images of extended MESSIDOR database and the trained model is used for segmentation of optic disc. The false positives are removed based on morphological operation and shape features. The result is evaluated using three-fold cross-validation on six public fundus image databases such as DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1, DRIVE, AV-INSPIRE, CHASE DB1 and MESSIDOR. The attention based fully convolutional network is robust and effective for detection and segmentation of optic disc in the images affected by diabetic retinopathy and it outperforms existing techniques.

Keywords: Ocular diseases, retinal fundus image, optic disc detection and segmentation, fully convolutional network, overlap measure.

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Authors: J. Zagorskas, I. Veteikyte

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Physical urban form is recognized to be the media for human transactions. It directly influences the travel demand of people in a specific urban area and the amount of energy used for transportation. Distorted, sprawling form often creates sustainability problems in urban areas. It is declared in EU strategic planning documents that compact urban form and mixed land use pattern must be given the main focus to achieve better sustainability in urban areas, but the methods to measure and compare these characteristics are still not clear. This paper presents the simple methods to measure the spatial characteristics of urban form by analyzing the location and distribution of objects in an urban environment. The extended CA (cellular automata) model is used to simulate urban development scenarios.

Keywords: Cellular automata (CA), Mixed used planning, Spatial analysis, Urban compactness, Geographic information systems (GIS).

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Authors: Loai AbdAllah, Mahmoud Kaiyal

Abstract:

Missing values in real-world datasets are a common problem. Many algorithms were developed to deal with this problem, most of them replace the missing values with a fixed value that was computed based on the observed values. In our work, we used a distance function based on Bhattacharyya distance to measure the distance between objects with missing values. Bhattacharyya distance, which measures the similarity of two probability distributions. The proposed distance distinguishes between known and unknown values. Where the distance between two known values is the Mahalanobis distance. When, on the other hand, one of them is missing the distance is computed based on the distribution of the known values, for the coordinate that contains the missing value. This method was integrated with Wikaya, a digital health company developing a platform that helps to improve prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer. In order for Wikaya’s recommendation system to work distance between users need to be measured. Since there are missing values in the collected data, there is a need to develop a distance function distances between incomplete users profiles. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed distance function in reflecting the actual similarity between different objects, when some of them contain missing values, we integrated it within the framework of k nearest neighbors (kNN) classifier, since its computation is based only on the similarity between objects. To validate this, we ran the algorithm over diabetes and breast cancer datasets, standard benchmark datasets from the UCI repository. Our experiments show that kNN classifier using our proposed distance function outperforms the kNN using other existing methods.

Keywords: Missing values, distance metric, Bhattacharyya distance.

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Authors: Snezhana P. Kostova, Krassi V. Rumchev, Todor Vlaev, Silviya B. Popova

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Air pollution is still considered as one of the major environmental and health issues. There is enough research evidence to show a strong relationship between exposure to air contaminants and respiratory illnesses among children and adults. In this paper we used the Copula approach to study a potential relationship between selected air pollutants (PM10 and NO2) and hospital admissions for respiratory diseases. Kendall-s tau and Spearman-s rho rank correlation coefficients are calculated and used in Copula method. This paper demonstrates that copulas can be used to provide additional information as a measure of an association when compared to the standard correlation coefficients. The results find a significant correlation between the selected air pollutants and hospital admissions for most of the selected respiratory illnesses.

Keywords: Air pollution, Copula, Respiratory Health.

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Authors: Ye. B. Utepov, A. S. Tulebekova, A. B. Kazkeyev

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Maturity sensors are used to determine concrete strength by the non-destructive method. The method of placement of the maturity sensors determines their number required for a certain frame of a monolithic building. This paper proposes a cheap prototype of an embedded wireless sensor for monitoring concrete structures, as well as an alternative strategy for placing sensors based on the transitional boundaries of the temperature distribution of concrete curing, which were determined by building a heat map of the temperature distribution, where unknown values are calculated by the method of inverse distance weighing. The developed prototype can simultaneously measure temperature and relative humidity over a smartphone-controlled time interval. It implements a maturity method to assess the in-situ strength of concrete, which is considered an alternative to the traditional shock impulse and compression testing method used in Kazakhstan. The prototype was tested in laboratory and field conditions. The tests were aimed at studying the effect of internal and external temperature and relative humidity on concrete's strength gain. Based on an experimentally poured concrete slab with randomly integrated maturity sensors, it the transition boundaries form elliptical forms were determined. Temperature distribution over the largest diameter of the ellipses was plotted, resulting in correct and inverted parabolas. As a result, the distance between the closest opposite crossing points of the parabolas is accepted as the maximum permissible step for setting the maturity sensors. The proposed placement strategy can be applied to sensors that measure various continuous phenomena such as relative humidity. Prototype testing has also revealed Bluetooth inconvenience due to weak signal and inability to access multiple prototypes simultaneously. For this reason, further prototype upgrades are planned in the future work.

Keywords: Heat map, placement strategy, temperature and relative humidity, wireless embedded sensor.

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Authors: Neelima Gupta, Seema Aggarwal

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Most of the biclustering/projected clustering algorithms are based either on the Euclidean distance or correlation coefficient which capture only linear relationships. However, in many applications, like gene expression data and word-document data, non linear relationships may exist between the objects. Mutual Information between two variables provides a more general criterion to investigate dependencies amongst variables. In this paper, we improve upon our previous algorithm that uses mutual information for biclustering in terms of computation time and also the type of clusters identified. The algorithm is able to find biclusters with mixed relationships and is faster than the previous one. To the best of our knowledge, none of the other existing algorithms for biclustering have used mutual information as a similarity measure. We present the experimental results on synthetic data as well as on the yeast expression data. Biclusters on the yeast data were found to be biologically and statistically significant using GO Tool Box and FuncAssociate.

Keywords: Biclustering, mutual information.

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Authors: Jaroslav Polec, Petra Heribanová, Tomáš Hirner

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In this paper we proposed a method for finding video frames representing one sign in the finger alphabet. The method is based on determining hands location, segmentation and the use of standard video quality evaluation metrics. Metric calculation is performed only in regions of interest. Sliding mechanism for finding local extrema and adaptive threshold based on local averaging is used for key frames selection. The success rate is evaluated by recall, precision and F1 measure. The method effectiveness is compared with metrics applied to all frames. Proposed method is fast, effective and relatively easy to realize by simple input video preprocessing and subsequent use of tools designed for video quality measuring.

Keywords: Key frame, video, quality, metric, MSE, MSAD, SSIM, VQM, sign language, finger alphabet.

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Authors: A. Irudaya Veni Mary, M. Victor Louis Anthuvan, P. Christie, A. Indira

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In India, social enterprises are working to create social value in various fields including education; health; women and child development; environment protection and community development. Although social enterprises have brought about tremendous changes in the lives of beneficiaries, the importance of their works is not understood thoroughly. One of the ways to prove themselves is to measure the impact, which in recent times has received much attention. This paper focuses on the study of social value created by the social enterprises in the field of community development. It also aims to put forth a research tool for measuring the social value created by the social enterprises in the field of community development. A close-ended interview schedule was prepared to measure the social value creation and it was administered among 60 beneficiaries of two social enterprises who work in the field of community development. The study results show that the social enterprises have brought four types of impact in the life of their beneficiaries; economic impact, social impact, political impact and cultural impact. This study is limited to the social enterprises those who work towards community development. This empirical finding will enable the reader to understand various types of social value created by the social enterprises working in the field of community development. This study will also serve as guide for social enterprises in community development activities to measure their impact and thereby improve their operation towards the betterment of the society. This paper is derived from an empirical research carried out to describe the different types of social value created by the social enterprises in India.

Keywords: Social enterprise, social entrepreneurs, social impact, social value, tool for social impact measurement.

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Authors: Kahil Amar, Boukais Said, Kezmane Ali, Hamizi Mohand, Hannachi Naceur Eddine

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The principle of the seismic performance evaluation methods is to provide a measure of capability for a building or set of buildings to be damaged by an earthquake. The common objective of many of these methods is to supply classification criteria. The purpose of this study is to present a method for assessing the seismic performance of structures, based on Pushover method; we are particularly interested in reinforced concrete frame structures, which represent a significant percentage of damaged structures after a seismic event. The work is based on the characterization of seismic movement of the various earthquake zones in terms of PGA and PGD that is obtained by means of SIMQK_GR and PRISM software and the correlation between the points of performance and the scalar characterizing the earthquakes will developed.

Keywords: Seismic performance, Pushover method, characterization of seismic motion, harmfulness of the seismic signal

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Authors: Muhammad Irfan Aziz, Thomas Owens, Uzair Khaleeq uz Zaman

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The instantaneous and spatial localization for visually impaired people in dynamically changing environments with unexpected hazards and obstacles, is the most demanding and challenging issue faced by the navigation systems today. Since Bluetooth cannot utilize techniques like Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) and Time of Arrival (TOA), it uses received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to measure Receive Signal Strength (RSS). The measurements using RSSI can be improved significantly by improving the existing methodologies related to RSSI. Therefore, the current paper focuses on proposing an improved method using trilateration for localization of Bluetooth devices for visually impaired people. To validate the method, class 2 Bluetooth devices were used along with the development of a software. Experiments were then conducted to obtain surface plots that showed the signal interferences and other environmental effects. Finally, the results obtained show the surface plots for all Bluetooth modules used along with the strong and weak points depicted as per the color codes in red, yellow and blue. It was concluded that the suggested improved method of measuring RSS using trilateration helped to not only measure signal strength affectively but also highlighted how the signal strength can be influenced by atmospheric conditions such as noise, reflections, etc.

Keywords: Bluetooth, indoor/outdoor localization, received signal strength indicator, visually impaired.

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Authors: Mohammad Javad Shariatzadeh, Dana Grecov

Abstract:

The tribological tests were performed on a new tribometer, in order to measure the coefficient of friction of a gland seal packing material on stainless steel shafts in presence of Cellulose Nanocrystal (CNC) suspension as a sustainable, environmentally friendly, water-based lubricant. To simulate the real situation from the slurry pumps, silica sands were used as slurry particles. The surface profiles after tests were measured by interferometer microscope to characterize the surface wear. Moreover, the coefficient of friction and surface wear were measured between stainless steel shaft and chrome steel ball to investigate the tribological effects of CNC in boundary lubrication region. Alignment of nanoparticles in the CNC suspensions are the main reason for friction and wear reduction. The homogeneous concentrated suspensions showed fingerprint patterns of a chiral nematic liquid crystal. These properties made CNC a very good lubricant additive in water.

Keywords: Gland seal, lubricant additives, nanocrystalline cellulose, water-based lubricants.

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Authors: Giorgi Bregadze

Abstract:

Tourism is the most viable and sustainable economic development option for Georgia and one of the main sources of foreign exchange earnings. Events are considered as one of the most effective ways to attract foreign visitors to the country, and, recently, the government of Georgia has begun investing in this sector very actively. This article stresses the necessity of research based economic policy in the tourism sector. In this regard, it is of paramount importance to measure the economic effects of the events which are subsidized by taxpayers’ money. The economic effect of events can be analyzed from two perspectives; financial perspective of the government and perspective of economic effects of the tourism administration. The article emphasizes more realistic and all-inclusive focus of the economic effect analysis of the tourism administration as it concentrates on the income of residents and local businesses, part of which generate tax revenues for the government. The public would like to know what the economic returns to investment are. In this article, the methodology used to describe the economic effects of UEFA Super Cup held in Tbilisi, will help to answer this question. Methodology is based on three main principles and covers three stages. Using the suggested methodology article estimates the direct economic effect of UEFA Super cup on Georgian economy. Although the attempt to make an economic effect analysis of the event was successful in Georgia, some obstacles and insufficiencies were identified during the survey. The article offers several recommendations that will help to refine methodology and improve the accuracy of the data. Furthermore, it is very important to receive the correct standard of measurement of events in Georgia. In this caseü non-ethical acts of measurement which are widely utilized by different research companies will not trigger others to show overestimated effects. It is worth mentioning that to author’s best knowledge, this is the first attempt to measure the economic effect of an event held in Georgia.

Keywords: Biased economic effect analysis, expenditure of local citizens, time switchers and casuals, UEFA super cup.

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