Search results for: user story

Authors: Jürgen Dorn, Tabbasum Naz

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In the area of Human Resource Management, the trend is towards online exchange of information about human resources. For example, online applications for employment become standard and job offerings are posted in many job portals. However, there are too many job portals to monitor all of them if someone is interested in a new job. We developed a prototype for integrating information of different job portals into one meta-search engine. First, existing job portals were investigated and XML schema documents were derived automated from these portals. Second, translation rules for transforming each schema to a central HR-XML-conform schema were determined. The HR-XML-schema is used to build a form for searching jobs. The data supplied by a user in this form is now translated into queries for the different job portals. Each result obtained by a job portal is sent to the meta-search engine that ranks the result of all received job offers according to user's preferences.

Keywords: Meta-search, Information extraction and integration, human resource management, job search.

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Authors: A. Joseph, D.B.L. Bong, D.A.A. Mat

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Security has been an important issue and concern in the smart home systems. Smart home networks consist of a wide range of wired or wireless devices, there is possibility that illegal access to some restricted data or devices may happen. Password-based authentication is widely used to identify authorize users, because this method is cheap, easy and quite accurate. In this paper, a neural network is trained to store the passwords instead of using verification table. This method is useful in solving security problems that happened in some authentication system. The conventional way to train the network using Backpropagation (BPN) requires a long training time. Hence, a faster training algorithm, Resilient Backpropagation (RPROP) is embedded to the MLPs Neural Network to accelerate the training process. For the Data Part, 200 sets of UserID and Passwords were created and encoded into binary as the input. The simulation had been carried out to evaluate the performance for different number of hidden neurons and combination of transfer functions. Mean Square Error (MSE), training time and number of epochs are used to determine the network performance. From the results obtained, using Tansig and Purelin in hidden and output layer and 250 hidden neurons gave the better performance. As a result, a password-based user authentication system for smart home by using neural network had been developed successfully.

Keywords: Neural Network, User Authentication, Smart Home, Security

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Authors: Keunhong Chae, Youngpo Lee, Seokho Yoon

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In cognitive radio (CR) systems, the primary user (PU) signal would randomly depart or arrive during the sensing period of a CR user, which is referred to as the high traffic environment. In this paper, we propose a novel spectrum sensing scheme based on the cyclostationarity of PU signals in high traffic environments. Specifically, we obtain a test statistic by applying an estimate of spectral autocoherence function of the PU signal to the generalized- likelihood ratio. From numerical results, it is confirmed that the proposed scheme provides a better spectrum sensing performance compared with the conventional spectrum sensing scheme based on the energy of the PU signals in high traffic environments.

Keywords: Spectrum sensing, cyclostationarity, high traffic environments.

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Authors: Jong-won Lee

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Since Cloud environment has appeared as the most powerful keyword in the computing industry, the growth in VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) became remarkable in domestic market. In recent years, with the trend that mobile devices such as smartphones and pads spread so rapidly, the strengths of VDI that allows people to access and perform business on the move along with companies' office needs expedite more rapid spread of VDI. In this paper, mobile OTP (One-Time Password) authentication method is proposed to secure mobile device portability through rapid and secure authentication using mobile devices such as mobile phones or pads, which does not require additional purchase or possession of OTP tokens of users. To facilitate diverse and wide use of Services in the future, service should be continuous and stable, and above all, security should be considered the most important to meet advanced portability and user accessibility, the strengths of VDI.

Keywords: Cloud, VDI, OTP, Mobility

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Authors: Lu Yanhui, Wang Chunming, Yin Changchuan, Yue Guangxin

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In this paper, we address the problem of adaptive radio resource allocation (RRA) and packet scheduling in the downlink of a cellular OFDMA system, and propose a downlink multi-carrier proportional fair (MPF) scheduler and its joint with adaptive RRA algorithm to distribute radio resources among multiple users according to their individual QoS requirements. The allocation and scheduling objective is to maximize the total throughput, while at the same time maintaining the fairness among users. The simulation results demonstrate that the methods presented provide for user more explicit fairness relative to RRA algorithm, but the joint scheme achieves the higher sum-rate capacity with flexible parameters setting compared with MPF scheduler.

Keywords: OFDMA, adaptive radio resource allocation, scheduling, QoS.

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Authors: J. Soini, P. Sillberg, J. Raitaniemi

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The task of strategic information technology management is to focus on adapting technology to ensure competitiveness. A key factor for success in this sector is awareness and readiness to deploy new technologies and exploit the services they offer. Recently, the need for more flexible and dynamic user interfaces (UIs) has been recognized, especially in mobile applications. An ongoing research project (MOP), initiated by TUT in Finland, is looking at how mobile device UIs can be adapted for different needs and contexts. It focuses on examining the possibilities to develop adapter software for solving the challenges related to the UI and its flexibility in mobile devices. This approach has great potential for enhancing information transfer in mobile devices, and consequently for improving information management. The technology presented here could be one of the key emerging technologies in the information technology sector in relation to mobile devices and telecommunications.

Keywords: Emerging technologies, Flexible user interfaces, Information management, Information technology, Mobile technology.

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Authors: Ahed Abugabah, Louis Sanzogni

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ERP systems are the largest software applications adopted by universities, along with quite significant investments in their implementation. However, unlike other applications little research has been conducted regarding these systems in a university environment. This paper aims at providing a critical review of previous research in ERP system in higher education with a special focus on higher education in Australia. The research not only forms the basis of an evaluation of previous research and research needs, it also makes inroads in identifying the payoff of ERPs in the sector from different perspectives with particular reference to the user. The paper is divided into two parts, the first part focuses on ERP literature in higher education at large, while the second focuses on ERP literature in higher education in Australia.

Keywords: Enterprise resource planning system, higher education, implementation, user level.

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Authors: Gabriel Chavira, Jorge Orozco, Salvador Nava, Eduardo Álvarez, Julio Rolón, Roberto Pichardo

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Ambient Intelligence promotes a shift in computing which involves fitting-out the environments with devices to support context-aware applications. One of main objectives is the reduction to a minimum of the user’s interactive effort, the diversity and quantity of devices with which people are surrounded with, in existing environments; increase the level of difficulty to achieve this goal. The mobile phones and their amazing global penetration, makes it an excellent device for delivering new services to the user, without requiring a learning effort. The environment will have to be able to perceive all of the interaction techniques. In this paper, we present the PICTAC model (Perceiving touch Interaction through TAgging Context), which similarly delivers service to members of a research group.

Keywords: Ambient Intelligence, Tagging Context, Touch Interaction, Touching Services.

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Authors: R. N. Begum, Ambalika Sharma, G. K. Singh

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Identity theft has serious ramifications beyond data and personal information loss. This necessitates the implementation of robust and efficient user identification systems. Therefore, automatic biometric recognition systems are the need of the hour, and electrocardiogram (ECG)-based systems are unquestionably the best choice due to their appealing inherent characteristics. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the recent state-of-the-art techniques for ECG-based user identification systems. However, the results obtained are significantly below standards, and the situation worsens as the number of users and types of heartbeats in the dataset grows. As a result, this study proposes a highly accurate and resilient ECG-based person identification system using CNN's dense learning framework. The proposed research explores explicitly the caliber of dense CNNs in the field of ECG-based human recognition. The study tests four different configurations of dense CNN which are trained on a dataset of recordings collected from eight popular ECG databases. With the highest False Acceptance Rate (FAR)  of 0.04% and the highest False Rejection Rate (FRR)  of 5%, the best performing network achieved an identification accuracy of 99.94%. The best network is also tested with various train/test split ratios. The findings show that DenseNets are not only extremely reliable, but also highly efficient. Thus, they might also be implemented in real-time ECG-based human recognition systems.

Keywords: Biometrics, dense networks, identification rate, train/test split ratio.

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Authors: Md. Sohidul Islam, Ahmad Fartheen Khan

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In recent times, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has received significant attention as an upcoming candidate in the world of 5G systems. The main reason for getting NOMA in 5G is because of its capacity to provide services to many users who have the same time and frequency resources. It is best used as "multiple-input, multiple-output" (MIMO) technology. In this paper, we are going to investigate outage probability as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and target rate user. These methods will be implemented using cooperative communication and fair power allocation, respectively.

Keywords: Non-orthogonal Multiple Access, Fair Power Allocation, Outage Probability, Target Rate User, Cooperative Communication, massive multiple input multiple output, MIMO, Successive Interference Cancellation.

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Authors: Sushma Satpute, Vaishali Katkar, Nilesh Sahare

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XML files contain data which is in well formatted manner. By studying the format or semantics of the grammar it will be helpful for fast retrieval of the data. There are many algorithms which describes about searching the data from XML files. There are no. of approaches which uses data structure or are related to the contents of the document. In these cases user must know about the structure of the document and information retrieval techniques using NLPs is related to content of the document. Hence the result may be irrelevant or not so successful and may take more time to search.. This paper presents fast XML retrieval techniques by using new indexing technique and the concept of RXML. When indexing an XML document, the system takes into account both the document content and the document structure and assigns the value to each tag from file. To query the system, a user is not constrained about fixed format of query.

Keywords: XML Retrieval, Indexed Search, Information Retrieval.

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Authors: Saipunidzam Mahamad, Mohammad Noor Ibrahim, Rozana Kasbon, Chap Samol

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Animated graph gives some good impressions in presenting information. However, not many people are able to produce it because the process of generating an animated graph requires some technical skills. This work presents Content Management System with Animated Graph (CMS-AG). It is a webbased system enabling users to produce an effective and interactive graphical report in a short time period. It allows for three levels of user authentication, provides update profile, account management, template management, graph management, and track changes. The system development applies incremental development approach, object-oriented concepts and Web programming technologies. The design architecture promotes new technology of reporting. It also helps user cut off unnecessary expenses, save time and learn new things on different levels of users. In this paper, the developed system is described.

Keywords: Animated Graph, Content Management System.

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Authors: I. Severin, M. Caramihai, R. El Abdi, M. Poulain, A. Avadanii

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In order to assess optical fiber reliability in different environmental and stress conditions series of testing are performed simulating overlapping of chemical and mechanical controlled varying factors. Each series of testing may be compared using statistical processing: i.e. Weibull plots. Due to the numerous data to treat, a software application has appeared useful to interpret selected series of experiments in function of envisaged factors. The current paper presents a software application used in the storage, modelling and interpretation of experimental data gathered from optical fibre testing. The present paper strictly deals with the software part of the project (regarding the modelling, storage and processing of user supplied data).

Keywords: Optical fibres, computer aided analysis, data models, data processing, graphical user interfaces.

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Authors: Renata Mekovec, Dijana Peras, Ruben Picek

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The advent of the Internet, mobile devices and social media is revolutionizing the experience of retail customers by linking multiple sources through various channels. Omnichannel retailing is a retailing that combines multiple channels to allow customers to seamlessly leverage all the distribution information online and offline while shopping. Therefore, today data are an asset more critical than ever for all organizations. Nonetheless, because of its heterogeneity through platforms, developers are currently facing difficulties in dealing with personal data. Considering the possibilities of omnichannel communication, this paper presents channel categorization that could enhance the customer experience of omnichannel center called hyper center. The purpose of this paper is fundamentally to describe the connection between the omnichannel hyper center and the customer, with particular attention to privacy protection. The first phase was finding the most appropriate channels of communication for hyper center. Consequently, a selection of widely used communication channels has been identified and analyzed with regard to the effect requirements for optimizing user experience. The evaluation criteria are divided into 3 groups: general, user profile and channel options. For each criterion the weight of importance for omnichannel communication was defined. The most important thing was to consider how the hyper center can make user identification while respecting the privacy protection requirements. The study carried out also shows what customer experience across digital networks would look like, based on an omnichannel approach owing to privacy protection principles.

Keywords: Personal data, privacy protection, omnichannel communication, retail.

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Authors: Ali Hajiha, Farhad Ghaffari, Nooshin Gholamali Tehrani

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This study aims at investigating the empirical relationships between risk preference, internet preference, and internet knowledge which are known as user characteristics, in addition to perceived risk of the customers on the internet purchase intention. In order to test the relationships between the variables of model 174, a questionnaire was collected from the students with previous online experience. For the purpose of data analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation model (SEM) was used. Test results show that the perceived risk affects the internet purchase intention, and increase or decrease of perceived risk influences the purchase intention when the customer does the internet shopping. Other factors such as internet preference, knowledge of the internet, and risk preference affect the internet purchase intention.

Keywords: Perceived risk, Internet preference, Internetknowledge, Risk preference, Internet purchase intention

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Authors: Kyung Bae Park, Sung Ho Ha

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Online user-generated contents (UGC) significantly change the way customers behave (e.g., shop, travel), and a pressing need to handle the overwhelmingly plethora amount of various UGC is one of the paramount issues for management. However, a current approach (e.g., sentiment analysis) is often ineffective for leveraging textual information to detect the problems or issues that a certain management suffers from. In this paper, we employ text mining of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on a popular online review site dedicated to complaint from users. We find that the employed LDA efficiently detects customer complaints, and a further inspection with the visualization technique is effective to categorize the problems or issues. As such, management can identify the issues at stake and prioritize them accordingly in a timely manner given the limited amount of resources. The findings provide managerial insights into how analytics on social media can help maintain and improve their reputation management. Our interdisciplinary approach also highlights several insights by applying machine learning techniques in marketing research domain. On a broader technical note, this paper illustrates the details of how to implement LDA in R program from a beginning (data collection in R) to an end (LDA analysis in R) since the instruction is still largely undocumented. In this regard, it will help lower the boundary for interdisciplinary researcher to conduct related research.

Keywords: Latent Dirichlet allocation, R program, text mining, topic model, user generated contents, visualization.

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Authors: Shafiq Ur Rehman, Jane-Lisa Coughlan

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One challenging direction of mobile commerce (mcommerce) that is getting a great deal of attention globally is mobile financing. The smart-phone and PDA users all around the world are facing difficulties to become accustomed and trust in m-commerce. The main rationale can be the slow variation and lack of trust in mobile payment systems. Mobile payment systems that are in use need to be more effective and efficient. This paper proposes: the interface design is not the only factor affecting the m-commerce adoption and lack of trust; in fact it is the combined effect of interface usability and trustworthy mobile payment systems, because it-s the money that the user has to spend at the end of the day, which the user requires to get transferred securely. The purpose of this research is to identify the problems regarding the trust and adaption of m-commerce applications by mobile users and to provide the best possible solution with respect to human computer interaction (HCI) principles.

Keywords: m-commerce, usability, mobile payment method, interface design.

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Authors: Mario Kubek, Herwig Unger

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Due to the large amount of information in the World Wide Web (WWW, web) and the lengthy and usually linearly ordered result lists of web search engines that do not indicate semantic relationships between their entries, the search for topically similar and related documents can become a tedious task. Especially, the process of formulating queries with proper terms representing specific information needs requires much effort from the user. This problem gets even bigger when the user's knowledge on a subject and its technical terms is not sufficient enough to do so. This article presents the new and interactive search application DocAnalyser that addresses this problem by enabling users to find similar and related web documents based on automatic query formulation and state-ofthe- art search word extraction. Additionally, this tool can be used to track topics across semantically connected web documents.

Keywords: DocAnalyser, interactive web search, search word extraction, query formulation, source topic detection, topic tracking.

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Authors: F. Raja, M. Rahgozar, F. Oroumchian

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XML is a markup language which is becoming the standard format for information representation and data exchange. A major purpose of XML is the explicit representation of the logical structure of a document. Much research has been performed to exploit logical structure of documents in information retrieval in order to precisely extract user information need from large collections of XML documents. In this paper, we describe an XML information retrieval weighting scheme that tries to find the most relevant elements in XML documents in response to a user query. We present this weighting model for information retrieval systems that utilize plausible inferences to infer the relevance of elements in XML documents. We also add to this model the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to express the uncertainty in plausible inferences and Dempster-Shafer rule of combination to combine evidences derived from different inferences.

Keywords: Dempster-Shafer theory, plausible inferences, XMLinformation retrieval.

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Authors: Chiung-Hui Chen

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Traditional service channel is losing its edge due to emerging service technology. To establish interaction with the clients, the service industry is using effective mechanism to give clients direct access to services with emerging technologies. Thus, as service science receives attention, special and unique consumption pattern evolves; henceforth, leading to new market mechanism and influencing attitudes toward life and consumption patterns. The market demand for customized services is thus valued due to the emphasis of personal value, and is gradually changing the demand and supply relationship in the traditional industry. In respect of interior design service, in the process of traditional interior design, a designer converts to a concrete form the concept generated from the ideas and needs dictated by a user (client), by using his/her professional knowledge and drawing tool. The final product is generated through iterations of communication and modification, which is a very time-consuming process. Although this process has been accelerated with the help of computer graphics software today, repeated discussions and confirmations with users are still required to complete the task. In consideration of what is addressed above a space user’s life model is analyzed with visualization technique to create an interaction system modeled after interior design knowledge. The space user document intuitively personal life experience in a model requirement chart, allowing a researcher to analyze interrelation between analysis documents, identify the logic and the substance of data conversion. The repeated data which is documented are then transformed into design information for reuse and sharing. A professional interior designer may sort out the correlation among user’s preference, life pattern and design specification, thus deciding the critical design elements in the process of service design.

Keywords: Information Design, Life Model-Based, Aesthetic Computing, Communication.

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Authors: Shih-Chieh Liao, Cheng-Yan Shuai

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The feature of a side-scrolling shooting game is facing the surrounding enemy and barraging in an entire screen. The player will be in trouble when they are trying to do complicated operations because of the physical and system limitations of the joystick in the games. This study designed the prototype of a type of arcade stick by focus group and assessed by the expert. We selected the most representative joystick prototype and built the control system for the joystick. We conducted two experimental tests using time and bullet consumption as objective indicators, aiming to demonstrate its efficiency in the game. Finally, the prototype of L-1 solves the dilemma of scroll shooting games when the player uses the arcade stick and improves the function of the arcade stick.

Keywords: Joystick, user interface, side-scrolling shooting game, improved user experience.

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Authors: Jagmohan Mago, Parvinder S. Sandhu, Neeru Chawla

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In this paper, a Bayesian Network (BN) based system is presented for providing clinical decision support to healthcare practitioners in rural or remote areas of India for young infants or children up to the age of 5 years. The government is unable to appoint child specialists in rural areas because of inadequate number of available pediatricians. It leads to a high Infant Mortality Rate (IMR). In such a scenario, Intelligent Pediatric System provides a realistic solution. The prototype of an intelligent system has been developed that involves a knowledge component called an Intelligent Pediatric Assistant (IPA); and User Agents (UA) along with their Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). The GUI of UA provides the interface to the healthcare practitioner for submitting sign-symptoms and displaying the expert opinion as suggested by IPA. Depending upon the observations, the IPA decides the diagnosis and the treatment plan. The UA and IPA form client-server architecture for knowledge sharing.

Keywords: Network, Based Intelligent, Pediatric System

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Authors: M. Z. Ibrahim, M. Z. Norashikin

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People nowadays love to travel around the world. Regardless of their location and time, they especially Muslims still need to perform their five times prayer. Normally for travelers, they need to bring maps, compass and for Muslim, they even have to bring Qibla pointer when they travel. It is slightly difficult to determine the Qibla direction and to know the time for each prayer. In this paper we present a new electronic device called Universal Qibla and Prayer Time Finder to locate the Qibla direction and to determine each prayer time based on the current user-s location. This device use PIC microcontroller equipped with digital compass and Global Positioning System (GPS) where it will display the exact Qibla direction and prayer time automatically at any place in the world. This device is reliable, user friendly and accurate in determining the Qibla direction and prayer time.

Keywords: Digital compass, embedded system, global position system, prayer time, qibla

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Authors: Erika Martinez Ramirez, Rene V. Mayorga

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Nowadays, more engineering systems are using some kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the development of their processes. Some well-known AI techniques include artificial neural nets, fuzzy inference systems, and neuro-fuzzy inference systems among others. Furthermore, many decision-making applications base their intelligent processes on Fuzzy Logic; due to the Fuzzy Inference Systems (FIS) capability to deal with problems that are based on user knowledge and experience. Also, knowing that users have a wide variety of distinctiveness, and generally, provide uncertain data, this information can be used and properly processed by a FIS. To properly consider uncertainty and inexact system input values, FIS normally use Membership Functions (MF) that represent a degree of user satisfaction on certain conditions and/or constraints. In order to define the parameters of the MFs, the knowledge from experts in the field is very important. This knowledge defines the MF shape to process the user inputs and through fuzzy reasoning and inference mechanisms, the FIS can provide an “appropriate" output. However an important issue immediately arises: How can it be assured that the obtained output is the optimum solution? How can it be guaranteed that each MF has an optimum shape? A viable solution to these questions is through the MFs parameter optimization. In this Paper a novel parameter optimization process is presented. The process for FIS parameter optimization consists of the five simple steps that can be easily realized off-line. Here the proposed process of FIS parameter optimization it is demonstrated by its implementation on an Intelligent Interface section dealing with the on-line customization / personalization of internet portals applied to E-commerce.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy InferenceSystems, Nonlinear Optimization.

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Authors: Danielle Morin, Jennifer D. E. Thomas, Raafat G. Saade, Daniela Petrachi

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Over the past few decades, more and more students choose to enroll in online classes instead of attending in-class lectures. While past studies consider students’ attitudes towards online education and how their grades differed from in-class lectures, the profile of the online student remains a blur. To shed light on this, an online survey was administered to about 1,500 students enrolled in an undergraduate Fundamental Business Technology course at a Canadian University. The survey was comprised of questions on students’ demographics, their reasons for choosing online courses, their expectations towards the course, the communication channels they use for the course with fellow students and with the instructor. This paper focused on the research question: Do the perspectives of online students concerning the online experience, in general, and in the course in particular, differ according to age profile? After several statistical analyses, it was found that age does have an impact on the reasons why students select online classes instead of in-class. For example, it was found that the perception that an online course might be easier than in-class delivery was a more important reason for younger students than for older ones. Similarly, the influence of friends is much more important for younger students, than for older students. Similar results were found when analyzing students’ expectation about the online course and their use of communication tools. Overall, the age profile of online users had an impact on reasons, expectations and means of communication in an undergraduate Fundamental Business Technology course. It is left to be seen if this holds true across other courses, graduate and undergraduate.

Keywords: Communication channels, fundamentals of business technology, online classes, pedagogy, user age profile, user perspectives.

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

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

Keywords: Energy, Optimization, Hydrothermal Power Systemsand Genetic Algorithms

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Authors: Fernando Miguel Campos, Fernando Jesus Aguiar, Pedro Campos

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A large amount of software products offer a wide range and number of features. This is called featuritis or creeping featurism and tends to rise with each release of the product. Feautiris often adds unnecessary complexity to software, leading to longer learning curves and overall confusing the users and degrading their experience. We take a look to a new design approach tendency that has been coming up, the so-called “What You Get is What You Need” concept that argues that products should be very focused, simple and with minimalistic interfaces in order to help users conduct their tasks in distraction-free ambiences. This isn’t as simple to implement as it might sound and the developers need to cut down features. Our contribution illustrates and evaluates this design method through a novel distraction-free diagramming tool named Delineato Pro for Mac OS X in which the user is confronted with an empty canvas when launching the software and where tools only show up when really needed.

Keywords: Diagramming, HCI, usability, user interface.

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Authors: Paraskevi Theodorou, Apostolos Meliones

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In the context of the development process of two assistive navigation mobile apps for blind and visually impaired people (BVI) an extensive qualitative analysis of the requirements of potential users has been conducted. The analysis was based on interviews with BVIs and aimed to elicit not only their needs with respect to autonomous navigation but also their preferences on specific features of the apps under development. The elicited requirements were structured into four main categories, namely, requirements concerning the capabilities, functionality and usability of the apps, as well as compatibility requirements with respect to other apps and services. The main categories were then further divided into nine sub-categories. This classification, along with its content, aims to become a useful tool for the researcher or the developer who is involved in the development of digital services for BVI.

Keywords: Accessibility, assistive mobile apps, blind and visually impaired people, user requirements analysis.

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Authors: Zurinahni Zainol, Rosalina Abdul Salam, Rosni Abdullah, Nur'Aini, Wahidah Husain

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The size, complexity and number of databases used for protein information have caused bioinformatics to lag behind in adapting to the need to handle this distributed information. Integrating all the information from different databases into one database is a challenging problem. Our main research is to develop a tool which can be used to access and manipulate protein information from difference databases. In our approach, we have integrated difference databases such as Swiss-prot, PDB, Interpro, and EMBL and transformed these databases in flat file format into relational form using XML and Bioperl. As a result, we showed this tool can search different sizes of protein information stored in relational database and the result can be retrieved faster compared to flat file database. A web based user interface is provided to allow user to access or search for protein information in the local database.

Keywords: Protein sequence database, relational database, integrated database.

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Authors: Alexander Wachtel, Michael T. Franzen, Walter F. Tichy

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Programming requires years of training. With natural language and end user development methods, programming could become available to everyone. It enables end users to program their own devices and extend the functionality of the existing system without any knowledge of programming languages. In this paper, we describe an Interactive Spreadsheet Processing Module (ISPM), a natural language interface to spreadsheets that allows users to address ranges within the spreadsheet based on inferred table schema. Using the ISPM, end users are able to search for values in the schema of the table and to address the data in spreadsheets implicitly. Furthermore, it enables them to select and sort the spreadsheet data by using natural language. ISPM uses a machine learning technique to automatically infer areas within a spreadsheet, including different kinds of headers and data ranges. Since ranges can be identified from natural language queries, the end users can query the data using natural language. During the evaluation 12 undergraduate students were asked to perform operations (sum, sort, group and select) using the system and also Excel without ISPM interface, and the time taken for task completion was compared across the two systems. Only for the selection task did users take less time in Excel (since they directly selected the cells using the mouse) than in ISPM, by using natural language for end user software engineering, to overcome the present bottleneck of professional developers.

Keywords: Natural language processing, end user development; natural language interfaces, human computer interaction, data recognition, dialog systems, spreadsheet.

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