ABSTRACT:
This concept paper is based on the new problem-solving model of Blended Leadership called Alloy Improvement Model (AIM). This model consists of an integration of change theory, leadership theory, and democratic principles and practices to form a comprehensive problem-solving strategy for organizational leaders. The utilization of AIM will assist leaders in moving from problems to solutions while engaging stakeholders in a comprehensive, efficient, inclusive, informative, integrated and transparent process.

ABSTRACT:
The progress of technology prompted the proliferation of services. Services are distinct, loosely coupled units of functionalities that are self-contained. These services are however developed by various vendors without following appropriate standards. However, the need for interoperability and reusability prompts the need for service integration. Service integration is not a new arena but emphasis is mostly on homogeneous services. However, the challenge lies on the integration of heterogeneous services to enforce reusability and maximize Total Cost of Deployment (TCD) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) at organization level.

The issue of service integration has become critical, due to the increase of these diverse services as they have different platforms, architecture and use different programming languages. The current methods of integrating heterogeneous services are manual integration methods. Therefore, the challenge with the current methods is time consumption, lack of flexibility, cost (TCO and TCD), total time to development, because the process is manual.

In this paper, we explore the challenges regarding dynamic integration of heterogeneous services and identify key issues that need to be addressed, in order to develop a successful mechanism that will enable dynamic integration of heterogeneous services.

ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a very brief overview of public attitudes towards robots from different geographical regions of the world but focuses on one such study in one particular geographic area, the European Union (EU) of 27 countries. By far, the Eurobarameter Survey on Public Attitudes towards Robots, released online in 2012, is the largest study of public attitudes towards robots. It focused exclusively on descriptive statistics which are mathematical procedures used to organize, summarize and simplify data. The statistical procedures used in this paper to perform a secondary data analysis of the data from the Eurobarameter Survey on Attitudes towards robots focused on inferential statistics which focus on inference and statistical comparisons. Secondary data analyses are often used when large data sets are posted online for public, professional, and educational use. A one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), and separate two-way independent-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to analyze participant responses on relevant survey questions. The results supported our hypotheses that there are significant differences in EU public attitudes by gender and age group.

ABSTRACT:
The present inter-disciplinary research is aimed at investigating the impact of computerized application of spatial visualization on motor and concentration skills. An experiment composed of experimental and control groups for checking the central hypothesis among subjects of the same age group was carried out by physical education MA students. Virtual simulations offer MA students and teachers the unique opportunity to observe and manipulate normally inaccessible objects, variables and processes in real time. The research design focused on a qualitative research comparing the pupils' percents of success in spatial visualization and motor skills between pre- and post- training. The findings showed that just as the students realized the experimental group pupils' achievements, the computer's inter-disciplinary impact on motor performance and concentration skills became clear to the MA students. The virtual computerized training based on spatial visualization mostly contributed to the inter-disciplinary research, physical education and communication. All the findings lead to the conclusion that computerized application of spatial visualization seem to mediate between virtual reality and developing motor skills in real time involving penalty kick, basketball, jumping, etc.

ABSTRACT:
Knowledge can get lost when workers leave the company, or it may be missed when new challenges emerge. Specific knowledge may be important for the value-added chain of an organization, and its inaccessibility could be a problem. The work on this paper seeks to juxtapose this problem with the concept of intangible knowledge. This concept is developed as an observation model for particular situations within organisations, in which specific, useful, knowledge is no longer available and is being missed.

This paper considers a potentially useful way to deal with absence of such knowledge by using the social science approach. In addition to social systems theory, the communication and cultural science view was selected here to propose a new understanding of the function of knowledge as a communicational or cultural parameter within structures and meanings of a social system. This should facilitate a better perception of the actions and dynamics inside organizations regarding knowledge or the lack thereof.

ABSTRACT:
Statistical process control (SPC) is one of the most widely applied techniques to control and improve processes in manufacturing industry, but very few studies have reported on the successful application of SPC in the food industry. This paper aims to critically assess the status of SPC in the UK food manufacturing industry and suggests avenues for future research. By surveying the UK food-manufacturing companies, forty-five percent of them were identified implemented SPC, with x-R and x-S charts found to be the most commonly applied SPC charts in this industry. Top management commitment was identified as the most critical factor, while lack of SPC training is the most significant challenge and lack of awareness of SPC as the main reason for food manufacturing companies not implementing SPC. The paper provides information to food companies in the UK on most common practiced and useful quality tools, SPC charts and critical success factors in the food industry. Furthermore, based on the process performance parameters, SPC companies were observed to achieving better results compared to non-SPC companies.

ABSTRACT:
Since the introduction of iPhone in 2007, many location-based services (LBSs) have been created and new LBSs are found every day. This research proposes yet another LBS, which is practical and was not found before to the best of authors’ knowledge. The problem is described as follows. It happens all the times while several groups of people are traveling towards a destination, they lose contact from each other on the way. This research tries to have the groups travel as closely as possible until they reach the destination. It uses a method of minimum covering ellipses to find whether the groups are separated by more than a threshold/distance. If they are, the system will find a convenient rendezvous for all groups by using a method of geometric median. After meeting at the rendezvous, the groups reset the service and continue their journey. By using this LBS, travelers do not need to worry about losing connections with others. This method can also be applied to the problem of finding a convenient meeting place for mobile users.

ABSTRACT:
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) which have many advantages are used in various devices. Use of the FPGAs is not only prototyping and verification of circuits but also an important part of the commercial products. A CPU of hardcore is required in the FPGAs. But it has a problem with the architecture of the CPU is limited. The method of solving these problems is developing a system on a chip (SoC) which is equipped with FPGAs and a customized CPU. From the view point of ease of design and shortening a design period, development techniques on a register-transfer level (RTL) using a standard cell library are essential. On the other hand, applying this method without using a design technique has a problem in terms of throughput. In this paper, a connection block for routing using wave-pipeline technique is proposed to solve the throughput problems. This block is evaluated, and it is shown that it is useful for wave pipeline operation.

ABSTRACT:
Cable television (CATV) systems generally consist of a headend, trunk cables, distribution cables in the neighborhood, drop cables to a home and in-house wiring, and terminal equipment. Coaxial cables bring a CATV signal to customer premises through a service drop, an overhead or underground cable. Hermetic inline amplifiers are used to amplify the attenuated CATV signal due to propagation loss or splitting the coaxial cable. They are usually installed on utility poles. Therefore, maintenance methods for inline amplifiers on utility poles are important issues in CATV operations. This paper proposes a new maintenance system for inline amplifiers in CATV systems, and develops a prototype implementation. The proposed system consists of an amplifier gain analyser to measure amplification performance of inline amplifiers, a special smartphone application, and a cloud server. The proposed amplifier gain analyser is composed of three functions: a generation of high frequency signals for testing, measurement of the test signal gain, and wireless communication based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). We develop a signal generation circuit for a test signal and a smoothing circuit for converting the high frequency test signals into DC signals. The amplifier gain analyser can evaluate an amplifier gain by comparing an input test signal from the signal generation circuit and an output test signal from an inline amplifier. The measurement function uses Nordic nRF51822, which is a System on Chip (SoC) for BLE because Nordic nRF51822 has some AD converter ports for evaluating the DC signals. The smartphone application employs BLE communication function to collect the measured amplifier gain from the amplifier gain analyser. Therefore, we developed a special data collection application for iOS. The data collection application has a central function of BLE, and can find a target peripheral device that is the amplifier gain analyser in this paper. Therefore, technicians of CATV systems can easily check the operational status of inline amplifiers on utility poles. Additionally, the smartphone application can upload the measured information to a cloud storage server. We employ Google App Engine and use Cloud Datastore to implement the cloud storage service. Therefore, our storage service has flexibility for various kinds of information.

ABSTRACT:
The aim of this study was to make a method for an early detection of malfunction, e.g., abnormal vibration/fluctuation in recorded signals. We conducted experimentations of heart health and structural health monitoring. We collected natural signals, e.g., heartbeat fluctuation and mechanical vibration. For the analysis, we used modified detrended fluctuation analysis (mDFA) method that we have made recently. mDFA calculated the scaling exponent (SI) from the time series data, e.g., R-R interval time series obtained from electrocardiograms. In the present study, peaks were identified by our own method. In every single mDFA computation, we identified ~2000 consecutive peaks from a data: “2000” was necessary number to conduct mDFA. mDFA was able to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviors: Normal healthy hearts exhibited an SI around 1.0, which is a phenomena comparable to 1/f fluctuation. Job-related stressful hearts and extrasystolic hearts both exhibited a low SI such as 0.7. Normally running car’s vibration?recorded steering wheel vibration?exhibited an SI around 0.5, which is white noise like fluctuation. Normally spinning ball-bearings (BB) exhibited an SI around 0.1, which belongs to the anti-correlation phenomena. A malfunctioning BB showed an increased SI. At an SI value over 0.2, an inspector must check BB’s correct functioning. Here we propose that healthiness in various cyclic vibration behaviors can be quantitatively analyzed by mDFA.

ABSTRACT:
Building a system that is functional and resilient to change can be challenging. For many established disciplines, knowledge and techniques have been developed to build something to achieve a design goal. Architects do this for houses and other structures. Engineers do this for a variety of systems, both physical and electronic. The challenge comes when trying to design a system that not only achieves a goal, but is also adaptable to accomplishing new goals in the future or the same goal in a different environment or context. This requires thinking beyond the standard design process for the current goal, environment, and available technology. This paper describes an approach to build a system for both today and tomorrow. The methods in this paper are applicable when 1) there is a defined goal, 2) accomplishing the goal requires a substantial up-front investment in planning and resources, and 3) the goal or its context or environment are likely to change over time. This approach is applied to the specific case of the Enterprise Level Security (ELS) system, which is an architecture for a secure enterprise to share information. The benefits for ELS included improved security, cost savings, and improved vendor interactions.

ABSTRACT:
Maintaining, updating, and modifying such a system based on changing enterprise needs and advancing technology is even more challenging. Decisions and informal rules that were made and enacted in the initial build are often lost, forgotten, or ignored when changes are needed. When the original system designers have moved on, the system is entrusted to an administrator who understands how the system works but not why it was designed to work that way. Without this higher-level understanding, the secure system devolves into a collection of loosely integrated partial solutions with security vulnerabilities at the seams and edges. This work presents a method of documenting the design logic of a secure enterprise information system, from basic principles to implementable requirements. Important design decisions are captured, along with the logic supporting them. Before changes to the system are made, an assessment is made against the core design decisions to ensure the original security goals are maintained. This provides clarity to the system owner and administrators to help guide future changes, and it provides a way to convey security goals to product vendors in a structured and logical way, which can help to reduce the back-and-forth arguing over whether a product meets security requirements. The Enterprise Level Security (ELS) architecture is used as an example of the application of this method to a real-world security system

ABSTRACT:
New Technologies of Information and Communication (TIC) are located out of time and out of space. Indeed, the permanent connectivity of people through digital interfaces (binary type) is at the origin of the implementation of completely new paradigms. Anonymity and privacy are two phenomena that oppose one another with respect to both the social practices and their concepts involved; they have a huge impact on the organizational structure of the various civil societies in the world. In addition, if the digital society is rooted in civil society, it does not duplicate. Moreover, on Internet users identify themselves by creating their pseudonymous and by the use of pseudonyms in a relationship without any hierarchy, while in civil society nomination is subject to the law.

ABSTRACT:
Higher education is typically compartmentalized by field and expertise level leading to a lack of collaboration across disciplines and reduced interaction among students of the same discipline that possess varying levels of expertise. The divisions between disciplines and expertise levels can be perforated through the use of a concentrated, short-term design problem called a charrette. The charrette is commonly used in architecture and interior design, and applications in other disciplines are possible. The use of the charrette in an educational context provides design students the opportunity to collaborate in teams where members have varying levels of expertise and consult with experts in allied disciplines in preparation for a profession that will expect the same.

In the context of a competitive charrette, this study examines the effectiveness of forming teams of design students that possess a diversity of expertise. This study also looks at the effectiveness of integrating input from professional experts in design-allied disciplines (urban planning, architecture, mechanical and electrical engineering) and a design-scenario-specific discipline (medicine) into the students’ design process. Using a chi-square test of goodness-of-fit, it is possible to determine student preferences in terms of the team configurations as well as their preferences on the experts.

In this charrette context, the students indicated that the cross-expertise student team make-up had a positive effect for both the more experienced students and the less experienced students. Overall, the students placed high value on the input from experts in design-allied fields for the charrette. They also perceived a preference of input from external experts that had an immediate and practical implication to their design process. This article will also show student work examples as additional evidence of the successful cross-expertise collaboration among the design students and evidence of the integration of information from the experts into the design results.