Volume 3, Issue 10, October 2011

Towards Mobile Supported Academic Information System

Simon S. Msanjila and Lupyana Muhiche

Access to information in timely, completeness and quality manner is very challenging in developing countries such as Tanzania. Students in particular, require receiving accurate and timely progressive information regarding their studies in order to make informed decision regarding their academic progress. Traditional practice for delivering academic information such as examinations results in universities in Tanzania is through paper announcement on the notice boards. The practice obliges students to travel to universities to see their results or provide their confidential information such as examination numbers to other people so that they can read and inform them about their results. This paper presents a Mobile Academic Information System (MAIS) aimed at automating management of student’s academic records with a possibility of remote access.

Keywords: Mobile systems, information system, academic records management, MAIS system, remote information access

COSMPC-COSMOS based Middleware for Pervasive Computing

R. Nagaraja and G. T. Raju

Ubiquitous computing environments are characterized by a high number of mobile devices, wireless networks and usage models. Distributed applications for such environments must continuously manage their execution context in order to detect the conditions under which some adaptation actions are required. This execution context contains various categories of observable entities, such as network interface, operating system resources or user preferences. Mobile devices like PDAs or mobile phones have become widespread. Similarly network functionality like GSM, Bluetooth or WLAN has become a standard. Nevertheless, not many applications take mobility into account. An application and its communication component are tightly coupled and the application assumes that network behavior does not change. Here in this paper we propose a new lightweight middleware architecture based on Service Component Architecture (SCA) and COntext entitieS coMpositiOn and Sharing (COSMOS) consisting of a small foot-print core layer and a modularized pluggable infrastructure. The SCA eases the reconfiguration of the components at runtime to support different communication mechanisms and service discovery protocols. Besides, using SCA, new functionalities can be added to the middleware platform that can be provided by remote applications (SCA or not). The architecture presented in this paper is suitable for mobile devices and extensible to make use of abstractions to conquer heterogeneity in mobile devices.

Keywords: CDC Connected Device Configuration, CLDC Connected Limited Device Configuration, COSMOS COntext entitieS coMpositiOn and Sharing, SCA Service Component Architecture, Fractal, Composite, Factory Method, Singleton, Flyweight

Analysis and Clustering of Movie Genres

Hasan Bulut and Serdar Korukoglu

Most of the movies blend a genre with other genres; that is movie directors combine elements from different genres with each other. A movie may blend the love-oriented plot of the romance genre with Western or Science Fiction. Hence a movie may belong to several genres. A movie is also related with some keywords to describe the contents of the movie. These keywords are usually used during search to bring a movie according to user's interest. In this paper, we establish genre keyword sets from movie keywords and use these keyword sets to analyze the proximity of genres with each other. In this study, we use movie data from The Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Genres are classified using hierarchical clustering algorithm and principal component factor analysis (PCFA). The study shows us which genres are mostly used together in a movie. We show that results of the two analyses support each other.

Keywords: Hierarchical clustering, Internet Movie Database, movie genres, principal component factor analysis

Exploring textural analysis for historical documents characterization

Anis Kricha and Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara

In this paper we propose a new approach to characterize images from historical documents based on textual analysis. Our contribution fits in the whole context of historical document digitalization delivered from the National Library of Tunisia. It mainly explores the correlation between different bands of decomposition in the wavelet transform. However, the choice of a set of non-redundant and relevant primitives remains delicate. The features chosen in our approach stem from a study based on both the reliefF algorithm, which eliminates irrelevant features, and factor analysis, which excludes the redundant features. The whole system is evaluated on a set of historical documents to separate text and graphics of historical documents and to separate different types of alphabet (Arabic, Latin and Hebrew).

Keywords: Correlation, wavelet transform, ReliefF, factor analysis, historical documents

Dynamic Spectrum Management Techniques Using Cognitive Radio: Issues and Proposed System

Dipak P.Patil and Vijay M.Wadhai

This article addresses various issues related to the dynamic spectrum management and also presents the proposed system for design of efficient and flexible spectrum acess and utilization of available spectrum amongst secondary (unlicensed) users.Because of the static spectrum allocation policy,the most of the available spectrum remains underutilized,hence efforts are required to switch from the current static spectrum management policy to a dynamic one.The cognitive radio technique is acknowledged as the most efficient method to improve the spectrum utilization, by utilizing the available spectrum effectively amongst the secondary users in an opportunistic manner in wireless communication networks. In this article the various issues related to the dynamic spectrum management are discussed for efficient spectrum use. Open research issues from spectrum management perspective like spectrum sensing, spectrum sharing, spectrum scheduling, mobility and Qos are also outlined. We propose the system model for design of efficient and flexible spectrum access and utilization of available spectrum amongst secondary (unlicensed) users. The proposed system presented, describes the way for improving the performance of the wireless networks by means of developing the efficient and fast algorithms to manage the spectrum dynamically.

Keywords: Cognitive Radio, Dynamic Spectrum Acess, Spectrum allocation, Spectrum management

Hardware-Accelerated Raycasting: Towards an Effective Brain MRI Visualization

A.M. Adeshina, R. Hashim, N.E.A. Khalid and Siti Z.Z. Abidin

The rapid development in information technology has immensely contributed to the use of modern approaches for visualizing volumetric data. Consequently, medical volume visualization is increasingly attracting attension towards achieving an effective visualization algorithm for medical diagnosis and pre-treatment planning. Previously, research has been addressing implemention of algorithm that can visualize 2-D images into 3-D. Meanwhile, achieving such a rendering algorithm at an interactive speed and of good robustness to handle mass data still remains a challenging issue. However, in medical diagnosis, finding the exact location of brain tumor or diseases is an important step of surgery / disease management. This paper proposes a GPU-based raycasting algorithm for accurate allocation and localization of human brain abnormalities using magnetic resonance (MRI) images of normal and abnormal patients.

Keywords: Brain tumor, graphic processing units, magnetic resonance imaging, volume visualization

Square Topology for NoCs

M. Ghorbanian, R. Sabbaghi-Nadooshan and H. Doroud

In this paper different topologies are studied and their functions in networks are described. Ultimately, some novel topology are introduced and compared with existing ones in regard of factors such as power and delay. This paper proposes square topology as an efficient topology for Network-on-Chips (NoCs). Although the proposed topology imposes the cost near to that of the mesh topology, the proposed topology 1) provides lower diameter for NoC, 2) offers better performance under uniform and hotspot traffic pattern. Results of comparisons show that proposed topology perform better than Mesh and Spidergon topology.

Keywords: Square, Topology, NoCs, Performance evaluation, Power consumption

Specifying Time-Based Users' Requirements in Service Oriented Systems

Seyyed Hossein Seyyedi Arani and Mostafa Ghobaei Arani

In service oriented system, services can be called by application programs and other services. Using the system, organizations implements inter-organizational workflow by composing their services dynamically. For this purpose, the necessary requirement is the existence of formally defined standard methods for specification of these compositions in an abstract way. Additionally, for many of these compositions, time constraint is a determinant of requirement satisfaction. In this paper, we first specify common types of elaborate and time-based users' requirements in service oriented systems, and then using an three-step approach, suggest a specific composition of services for each type of requirement. In the first step of the approach, an operator is introduced for informal stating a composite service. In the second step, the composition is formally specified using a model based on Transition Timed Petri-Nets, and in the third step, the model is defined formally.

Keywords: Petri-Nets, Requirement specification, Service oriented architecture (SOA), Web service

A Survey on Large Scale Schema and Ontology Matching Techniques

K. Saruladha, G. Aghila and B. Sathiya

With the fast growth and the increasing usage of the large variety of data like XML schemas, ontologies. In many domains, the heterogeneity among the data increases enormously. Hence solving such heterogeneity needs matching techniques. In areas like E-business, web and life sciences the size of XML schema and ontology is large. But most of the existing matching techniques address only small match tasks. So, we present an overview of recently proposed matching techniques like early pruning of the search space, divide and conquer strategies, parallel matching and some renowned ontology matching tools which achieve high match efficiency or/and high quality for large-scale matching. In addition to this the pros and cons of various matching techniques is summarized.

Keywords: Similarity Measure, Schema Matching, Ontology Matching, Ontology Alignment

A comparison of mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) calculation techniques

Amelia C. Kelly and Christer Gobl

Unit selection speech synthesis involves concatenating segments of speech contained in a large database in such a way as to create novel utterances. The sequence of speech segments is chosen using a cost function. In particular the join cost determines how well consecutive speech segments fit together by extracting acoustic parameters from frames of speech on either side of a potential join point and calculating the distance between them. The mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) is a popular numerical representation of acoustic signals and is widely used in the fields of speech synthesis and recognition. In this paper we investigate some of the parameters that affect the calculation of the MFCC, particularly (i) the window length used to examine the speech segments, (ii) the time-frequency pre-processing performed on the signal, and (iii) the shape of the filters used in the mel filter bank. We show with experimental results that the choices of (i) – (iii) have a direct impact on the MFCC values calculated, and hence the ability of the distance measure to predict discontinuity, which has a significant impact on the ability of the synthesiser to produce quality speech output. In addition, while previous research tended to focus on sonorant sounds such as vowels, diphthongs and nasals, the speech data used in this study has been classified into the following three groups according to their acoustic characteristics – 1. Vowels (non-turbulent, periodic), 2. Voiced fricatives (turbulent, periodic sounds), 3. Voiceless fricatives (turbulent, non-periodic sounds). The choice of (i) is shown to significantly affect the calculation of MFCC values differently for each sound group. One possible application of these findings is altering the cost function in unit selection speech synthesis so that it accounts for the type of sound being joined.

Keywords: Feature extraction, signal analysis, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), speech synthesis