ABSTRACT:
Nowadays, the globalisation complex and confused scenarios show that the industrialism cycle has arrived to an impasse; sustainable and long-lasting progress requests strong changeovers. The technology challenge needs solving the overpollution and over-consumption figures of the current industrialism: to that purpose the world ought to radically modify the political set-up moving to global village sustainable growth, ruled by ‹the force of the law› and turning to ‹hyperdemocracy›, to assuring balanced citizen/authority interplay.

ABSTRACT:
The game of cricket and the use of technology in the sport have grown rapidly over the past decade. However, technology-based systems introduced to adjudicate decisions such as run outs, stumpings, boundary infringements and close catches are still prone to human error, and thus their acceptance has not been fully embraced by cricketing administrators. In particular, technology is not employed for bat-pad decisions. Although the snickometer may assist in adjudicating such decisions it depends heavily on human interpretation. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of Wavelets in developing an edgedetection adjudication system for the game of cricket. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, namely Neural Networks, will be employed to automate this edge detection process. Live audio samples of ball-on-bat and ball-on-pad events from a cricket match will be recorded. DSP analysis, feature extraction and neural network classification will then be employed on these samples. Results will show the ability of the neural network to differentiate between these key events. This is crucial to developing a fully automated edge detection system.

ABSTRACT:
At the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Technikum Wien, Intelligent Transport System is a highly interdisciplinary Bachelor’s degree program. Its curriculum covers several mainly technical oriented disciplines. Especially the IT courses account for the high drop-out rate of the course program. Students come with different IT knowledge depending on the one hand on their previous school education and on the other hand depending on their personal interest in IT topics. Normally, for students, IT is not the number one reason for choosing this program. Nevertheless, IT is extremely important as it interacts with all other disciplines. Especially the heterogeneity of the IT knowledge made it necessary to rethink the way of teaching. The paper describes the new didactic approach of the IT courses in the course program Intelligent Transport Systems. The new approach faces the students’ difficulties and tries to overcome the varying pre-knowledge of students. Furthermore, it tries to increase students’ motivation by paying particular attention to the students’ assumed interests.

ABSTRACT:
This paper focuses on the concept of personalized e-Learning for the computer science (or informatics) education. Several authors have stated that personalization, in educational context, allows executing more efficient and effective learning processes. On the other side the use of Semantic Web technologies (e.g. ontologies) is more and more often considered as a technological basis for personalization in e-Learning (the so-called self-regulated learning). In this paper we describe how personalization can be exploited in e-Learning systems, focusing on our proposal: the Intelligent Web Teacher (IWT). Therefore we present the evaluation of our personalization tools tested in real academic courses, where e-Learning activities are carried out to complement the traditional lectures.

ABSTRACT:
A new online diagnostics system for the continuous condition monitoring of lubricating oils in industrial gearboxes is presented. Characteristic features of emerging component damage, such as wear, contamination or chemical aging, are identified in an early stage. The OilQSens® sensor effectively controls the proper operation conditions of bearings and cogwheels in gears. Also, the condition of insulating oils in transformers can be monitored. The online diagnostics system measures components of the specific complex impedance of oils. For instance, metal abrasion due to wear debris, broken oil molecules, forming acids or oil soaps result in an increase of the electrical conductivity, which directly correlates with the degree of contamination in the oil. The dielectrical properties of the oils are particularly determined by the water content that becomes accessible via an additional accurate measurement of the dielectric constant. For additivated oils, statements on the degradation of additives can also be derived from changes in the dielectric constant. For an efficient machine utilization and targeted damage prevention, the new OilQSens® online condition monitoring sensor system allows for timely preventative maintenance on demand rather than in rigid inspection intervals. The determination of impurities or reduction in the quality of the oil and the quasi continuous evaluation of wear and chemical aging follow the holistic approach of a real-time monitoring of a change in the condition of the oil-machine system. Once the oil condition monitoring sensors are installed on the plants, the measuring data can be displayed and evaluated elsewhere. The measuring signals are transmitted to a web-based condition monitoring system via LAN, WLAN or serial interfaces of the sensor system. Monitoring of the damage mechanisms during proper operation below the tolerance limits of the components enables specific preventive maintenance independent of rigid inspection intervals.

ABSTRACT:
In his article we explore how educational institutions are faced with changes in the modern global business environment, and how this leads to need for changes in curricula for business schools and information systems schools. Most of academia still uses a strict disciplinary model of education resulting in a high degree of specialization within each discipline while the modern business environments require knowledge workers who can address problems that cut across disciplines on an increasingly global scale. Research papers and governmental reports call for more emphasis on particularly three interdisciplinary topics; 1) competencies in globalization issues, 2) communication/working in team, and 3) information literacy. The disciplines of business and in particular information systems education have received much attention in this respect with several calls for change. How to bring about such a change is, however, still an open question. This paper proposes to address this issue in two ways; by suggesting two new educational activities and by proposing a new educational interdisciplinary competency framework to guide curriculum development when including interdisciplinary topics.

ABSTRACT:
In the Digital Age teachers have fallen far behind the technical skills of their “digital native” students. The implementation of technology as a tool for classroom communication is foreign for most teachers, but highly preferred by students. While teenagers are using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to communicate, teachers continue to respond through face-to-face conversations, telephone calls, and email messaging. Twitter, a platform for short message service text, is an online social network site that allows users to send and receive messages using 140 characters or less called Tweets. To analyze the relationship of the teacher’s use of Twitter with student academic achievement, a correlation study conducted by Bess collected data from two matched samples of eighth grade science students: one utilizing Twitter and one not utilizing Twitter to reinforce classroom instruction. Two tests matching the science standards were given to both samples of students. The results of the tests were used as primary data. The findings suggested a positive correlation between the use of Twitter and student performance on the standardized tests. Implications for this study indicate that young teenagers may prefer Twitter as a mode of communication with their teacher, resulting in higher academic achievement in a middle school science class.

ABSTRACT:
AADL has been proposed for designing and analyzing SW and HW architectures for real-time mission-critical embedded systems. Although the Behavioral Annex improves its simulation semantics, AADL is a language for analyzing architectures and not for simulating them. AADS-T is an AADL simulation tool that supports the performance analysis of the AADL specification throughout the refinement process from the initial system architecture until the complete, detailed application and execution platform are developed. In this way, AADS-T enables the verification of the initial timing constraints during the complete design process. In this paper we focus on the compatibility of AADS-T with the Ravenscar Computational Model (RCM) as part of the TASTE toolset. Its flexibility enables AADS-T to support different processors. In this work we have focused on performing the simulation on a LEON2 processor.

ABSTRACT:
In video surveillance applications, trained operators watch a number of screens simultaneously to detect potential security threats. Looking for such events in real time, in multiple videos simultaneously, is cognitively challenging for human operators. This study suggests that there is a significant need to use an automated video analysis system to aid human perception of security events in video surveillance applications. In this paper the performance of humans in observing a simulated environment is studied and quantified. Furthermore, this paper proposes an automated mechanism to detect events before they occur by means of an automated intent recognition system. Upon the detection of a potential event the proposed mechanism communicates the location of such potential threat to the human operator to redirect attention to the areas of interest within the video. Studying the improvements achieved by applying the intent recognition into the simulated video surveillance application in a two phase trial supports the need for an automated event detection approach in improving human video surveillance performance. Moreover, this paper presents a comparison of the performance in video surveillance with and without the aid of the intent recognition mechanism.

ABSTRACT:
This paper describes a new intermediate course given in the Environmental Studies Program at The New School. It incorporates research activities by the class as a whole, in the process of which the class learns a great deal about the science and technology of non-fossil fuels, their promises and difficulties. Since ameliorating human influenced global climate change, educating and training students in the skills necessary to accomplish the necessary transition is essential. The course embodies a class project on which everyone works, entitled “Fueling America,” whose purpose is to determine what technologies deployed in what manner and in what quantities can eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the United States by a date certain. Knowing that it was impossible, we nevertheless chose an early date, 2030, so that it seemed reachable for the students. The project resulted in a technical paper, which included an economic analysis. In addition to alternative energy technologies, the technologies of energy efficiencies were also included.

ABSTRACT:
Practice and application-oriented approach in education is important, and some research on active learning and cooperative problem-solving have shown that a student will learn faster and develop communication skill, leadership and team work through these methods. This paper presents a study of student preference and performance while learning the microcontroller subject with a 2-day curriculum that emphasized on hands-on approach. The curriculum uses the PIC16F877A microcontroller and participants learned to develop basic circuits and several other applications. Programming was completed on the MPLAB platform. Results show that participants had better understanding in this subject after attending the hands-on course.

ABSTRACT:
A first part of this paper gives a rough picture of some difficulties encountered in research, in education, and in problem solving, for integrating them to one another. One can notice a much too global characterization of cognitive processes and a lack in the characterization of semiotic aspects. A second part analyses some theoretical limits to this integration. They are mainly due to the current conception of memories unable to take into consideration the micro-cognitive-processes at work under the reorganizations of knowledge when actualized within the situation. A third part presents a way toward the integration research-education-problem solving, relying on a cognitive approach of Culioli’s enunciative theory of language, and presents some of the author’s data. Micro-cognitive-processes are depicted in terms of the construction of aggregates (declarative versus procedural ones, standing at different levels of internalization and externalization), and of different processes of detachment from the situation. Then several kinds of interactions allow an on-line identification of the constraints of the task. The characterization of these constraints seems basic for each of the considered areas, research, education, and problem solving.

ABSTRACT:
Risk assessment is an important factor for successful and sustainable entrepreneurship of bioenergy production that has become one of the priorities in energy sector of Latvia. Promotion of the use of renewable energy is included as one of the strategic goals for European Union (EU) and Latvia. As this field of energy production in Latvia is rather new and scantily explored there are many risk factors arising in different stages of production, starting with planning and building of a bioreactor and ending with production and further use and distribution of energy. The present research focuses on risk assessment in renewable energy production form biomass as this kind of energy is seen as a perspective source for renewable energy under the conditions of Latvia. A risk assessment module for renewable energy production made by using the Analytic Network Process (ANP) software is described in the paper.

ABSTRACT:
Relationship marketing has become extremely important recently due to the fierce competition in today’s marketplace. Companies are required to build long-term profitable relationship with customers and to achieve customer loyalty. Also, switching behaviors frequently occur among most of targeted customers. Fewer studies, however, discuss the effects of relationship quality efforts on customer loyalty. Therefore, this study is aimed to investigate the impact of relationship quality on customer loyalty in B2B context in the Egyptian shipping services sector. Building on prior research, we propose relationship quality as a higher construct comprising trust, commitment and satisfaction. An analytical model is developed as a guideline to test the relationships between relationship quality dimensions and customer loyalty.

ABSTRACT:
In this paper, a grid-connected desalination plant operation approach is suggested. In desalination plant, large amount of energy is needed to operate pump and motor; hence most of energy is electricity. For this reason, the largest part of the operation cost is electricity charges. To demonstrate power usage, small size desalination measuring system mounted plant is used. Finally, to show the result of a grid-connected desalination plant operation, electric tariff rate of Korea is used. The result shows that total cost reduction rate is calculated about 1.6% of annual total electric plant operation cost.

ABSTRACT:
Approximately 5 million central venous catheters (CVCs) are placed by physicians annually in the United States, with a complication rate of 15%.1 Guidelines and recommendations are continually being established and updated regarding CVC placement.2 While much has been done regarding training the technical skills of CVC placement using part-task trainers (i.e., mannequins), successfully finding and cannulating a central vein is but one part of the process. In fact, many steps designed to prevent untoward complications involve non-technical skills which are perhaps more important in training practitioners to safely place CVCs. First in aviation and now in healthcare, practitioners are being trained in realistic and highly interactive simulated environments so they can learn not just technical skills , but the key management and non-technical steps which make their task safer.3 One modality being used to improve performance is video gaming simulation, or “serious gaming.” Gaming as a learning tool is being increasingly utilized in health care fields and can lead to better skill-based outcomes.4 As such, we have developed a game based around the placement of CVCs that will be used as a new teaching modality in a pilot program for instructing residents in safe CVC placement.