Digital Commons Network^™

A Deep Learning Approach For Real-Time Analysis Of Attendees’ Engagement In Public Events, Sujith Samuel Mathew, Manar Alkhatib, May El Barachi

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Smart city analytics requires the harnessing and analysis of emotions and sentiments conveyed by images and video footage. In recent years, facial sentiment analysis attracted significant attention for different application areas, including marketing, gaming, political analytics, healthcare, and human computer interaction. Aiming at contributing to this area, we propose a deep learning model enabling the accurate emotion analysis of crowded scenes containing complete and partially occluded faces, with different angles, various distances from the camera, and varying resolutions. Our model consists of a sophisticated convolutional neural network (CNN) that is combined with pooling, densifying, flattening, and Softmax layers to achieve …

Opposition-Based Quantum Bat Algorithm To Eliminate Lower-Order Harmonics Of Multilevel Inverters, Jahedul Islam, Sheikh Tanzim Meraj, Ammar Masaoud, Md Apel Mahmud, Amril Nazir, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Md Moinul Hossain, Farhan Mumtaz

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Selective harmonic elimination (SHE) technique is used in power inverters to eliminate specific lower-order harmonics by determining optimum switching angles that are used to generate Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals for multilevel inverter (MLI) switches. Various optimization algorithms have been developed to determine the optimum switching angles. However, these techniques are still trapped in local optima. This study proposes an opposition-based quantum bat algorithm (OQBA) to determine these optimum switching angles. This algorithm is formulated by utilizing habitual characteristics of bats. It has advanced learning ability that can effectively remove lower-order harmonics from the output voltage of MLI. It can …

An Efficient Scheme For Interference Mitigation In 6g-Iot Wireless Networks, Fahd N. Al-Wesabi, Imran Khan, Nadhem Nemri, Mohammed A. Al-Hagery, Huda G. Iskander, Quang Ngoc Nguyen, Babar Shah, Ki Il Kim

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is the fourth technological revolution in the global information industry after computers, the Internet, and mobile communication networks. It combines radio-frequency identification devices, infrared sensors, global positioning systems, and various other technologies. Information sensing equipment is connected via the Internet, thus forming a vast network. When these physical devices are connected to the Internet, the user terminal can be extended and expanded to exchange information, communicate with anything, and carry out identification, positioning, tracking, monitoring, and triggering of corresponding events on each device in the network. In real life, the IoT has a wide range …

Characterizing Visual Programming Approaches For End-User Developers: A Systematic Review, Mohammad Amin Kuhail, Shahbano Farooq, Rawad Hammad, Mohammed Bahja

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Recently many researches have explored the potential of visual programming in robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and education. However, there is a lack of studies that analyze the recent evidence-based visual programming approaches that are applied in several domains. This study presents a systematic review to understand, compare, and reflect on recent visual programming approaches using twelve dimensions: visual programming classification, interaction style, target users, domain, platform, empirical evaluation type, test participants' type, number of test participants, test participants' programming skills, evaluation methods, evaluation measures, and accessibility of visual programming tools. The results show that most of the selected …

Enhanced Concept-Level Sentiment Analysis System With Expanded Ontological Relations For Efficient Classification Of User Reviews, Asad Khattak, Muhammad Zubair Asghar, Zain Ishaq, Waqas Haider Bangyal, Ibrahim A. Hameed

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Background/introduction: Concept-level sentiment analysis deals with the extraction and classification of concepts and features from user reviews expressed online about products and other entities like political leaders, government policies, and others. The prior studies on concept-level sentiment analysis have used a limited set of linguistic rules for extracting concepts and their associated features. Furthermore, the ontological relations used in the early works for performing concept-level sentiment analysis need enhancement in terms of the extended set of features concepts and ontological relations. Methods: This work aims at addressing the aforementioned issues and tries to bridge the literature gap by proposing an …

A Parallelized Database Damage Assessment Approach After Cyberattack For Healthcare Systems, Sanaa Kaddoura, Ramzi A. Haraty, Karam Al Kontar, Omar Alfandi

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In the current Internet of things era, all companies shifted from paper-based data to the electronic format. Although this shift increased the efficiency of data processing, it has security drawbacks. Healthcare databases are a precious target for attackers because they facilitate identity theft and cybercrime. This paper presents an approach for database damage assessment for healthcare systems. Inspired by the current behavior of COVID-19 infections, our approach views the damage assessment problem the same way. The malicious transactions will be viewed as if they are COVID-19 viruses, taken from infection onward. The challenge of this research is to discover the …

Q-Learning Based Routing Protocol For Congestion Avoidance, Daniel Godfrey, Beom Su Kim, Haoran Miao, Babar Shah, Bashir Hayat, Imran Khan, Tae Eung Sung, Ki Il Kim

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The end-to-end delay in a wired network is strongly dependent on congestion on intermediate nodes. Among lots of feasible approaches to avoid congestion efficiently, congestion-aware routing protocols tend to search for an uncongested path toward the destination through rule-based approaches in reactive/incident-driven and distributed methods. However, these previous approaches have a problem accommodating the changing network environments in autonomous and self-adaptive operations dynamically. To overcome this drawback, we present a new congestion-aware routing protocol based on a Q-learning algorithm in software-defined networks where logically centralized network operation enables intelligent control and management of network resources. In a proposed routing protocol, …

A Smart Dynamic Crowd Evacuation System For Exhibition Centers, Faouzi Kamoun, May El Barachi, Fatna Belqasmi, Abderrazak Hachani

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In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the safest evacuation route in a multi-exit exhibition center while the fire hazard spreads. We first propose a system composed of sensor nodes to collect pertinent safety data. We present a real-time dynamic evacuation system that considers the changing conditions in the risks associated with each hallway segment in terms of walking distance, heat, two major asphyxiant fire gases and congestion. Our system activates smart panels placed at major junctions of the hallways to guide evacuees towards the appropriate exit by displaying the proper escape direction. This work can pave the …

Smart Pansharpening Approach Using Kernel-Based Image Filtering, Ahmad A.L. Smadi, Shuyuan Yang, Atif Mehmood, Ahed Abugabah, Min Wang, Muzaffar Bashir

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Remote sensing image fusion plays important roles in numerous applications, including monitoring, metrology, and agriculture. Image fusion gathers essential information from several image sources and consolidates them into a single image called a fused image. The fused image involves relevant data, and it is more informative than any other images extracted from one source. This study proposed a pansharpening technique based on image filtering utilising a bilateral filter to generate high-frequency details from panchromatic image. The various types of side window guided filters are employed to enhance the multispectral band from panchromatic image and then used these filters to adjust …

Early Detection Of Lung Cancer - A Challenge, Fatma Taher, Neema Prakash, Ashraf Alzaabi

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Lung cancer or lung carcinoma, is a common and serious type of cancer caused by rapid cell growth in tissues of the lung. Lung cancer detection at its earlier stage is very difficult because of the structure of the cell alignment which makes it very challenging. Computed tomography (CT) scan is used to detect the presence of cancer and its spread. Visual analysis of CT scan can lead to late treatment of cancer; therefore, different steps of image processing can be used to solve this issue. A comprehensive framework is used for the classification of pulmonary nodules by combining appearance …

Deceptive Opinions Detection Using New Proposed Arabic Semantic Features, Amel Ziani, Nabiha Azizi, Didier Schwab, Djamel Zenakhra, Monther Aldwairi, Nassira Chekkai, Nawel Zemmal, Marwa Hadj Salah

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Some users try to post false reviews to promote or to devalue other’s products and services. This action is known as deceptive opinions spam, where spammers try to gain or to profit from posting untruthful reviews. Therefore, we conducted this work to develop and to implement new semantic features to improve the Arabic deception detection. These features were inspired from the study of discourse parse and the rhetoric relations in Arabic. Looking to the importance of the phrase unit in the Arabic language and the grammatical studies, we have analyzed and selected the most used unit markers and relations to …

Detection Of Freezing Of Gait Using Unsupervised Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder, Mohd Halim Mohd Noor, Amril Nazir, Mohd Nadhir Ab Wahab, Jodene Ooi Yen Ling

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At the advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease, patients may suffer from ‘freezing of gait’ episodes: a debilitating condition wherein a patient’s “feet feel as though they are glued to the floor”. The objective, continuous monitoring of the gait of Parkinson’s disease patients with wearable devices has led to the development of many freezing of gait detection models involving the automatic cueing of a rhythmic auditory stimulus to shorten or prevent episodes. The use of thresholding and manually extracted features or feature engineering returned promising results. However, these approaches are subjective, time-consuming, and prone to error. Furthermore, their performance varied when …

A Study Of Meta-Analyses Reporting Quality In The Large And Expanding Literature Of Educational Technology, Rana M. Tamim, Evgueni Borokhovski, Robert M. Bernard, Richard F. Schmid, Philip C. Abrami, David I. Pickup

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As the empirical literature in educational technology continues to grow, meta-analyses are increasingly being used to synthesise research to inform practice. However, not all meta-analyses are equal. To examine their evolution over the past 30 years, this study systematically analysed the quality of 52 meta-analyses (1988–2017) on educational technology. Methodological and reporting quality is defined here as the completeness of the descriptive and methodological reporting features of meta-analyses. The study employed the Meta-Analysis Methodological Reporting Quality Guide (MMRQG), an instrument designed to assess 22 areas of reporting quality in meta-analyses. Overall, MMRQG scores were negatively related to average effect size …

Multi-Branch Gabor Wavelet Layers For Pedestrian Attribute Recognition, Imran N. Junejo

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CCBYNCND Surveillance cameras are everywhere, keeping an eye on pedestrians as they navigate through a scene. With this context, our paper addresses the problem of pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR). This problem entails recognizing attributes such as age-group, clothing style, accessories, footwear style etc. This is a multi-label problem and challenging even for human observers. The problem has rightly attracted attention recently from the computer vision community. In this paper, we adopt trainable Gabor wavelets (TGW) layers and use it with a convolution neural network (CNN). Whereas other researchers are using fixed Gabor filters with the CNN, the proposed layers are …

Convolutional Neural Network Based Vehicle Classification In Adverse Illuminous Conditions For Intelligent Transportation Systems, Muhammad Atif Butt, Asad Masood Khattak, Sarmad Shafique, Bashir Hayat, Saima Abid, Ki Il Kim, Muhammad Waqas Ayub, Ahthasham Sajid, Awais Adnan

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© 2021 Muhammad Atif Butt et al. In step with rapid advancements in computer vision, vehicle classification demonstrates a considerable potential to reshape intelligent transportation systems. In the last couple of decades, image processing and pattern recognition-based vehicle classification systems have been used to improve the effectiveness of automated highway toll collection and traffic monitoring systems. However, these methods are trained on limited handcrafted features extracted from small datasets, which do not cater the real-time road traffic conditions. Deep learning-based classification systems have been proposed to incorporate the above-mentioned issues in traditional methods. However, convolutional neural networks require piles of …

A Comprehensive Review On Medical Diagnosis Using Machine Learning, Kaustubh Arun Bhavsar, Ahed Abugabah, Jimmy Singla, Ahmad Ali Alzubi, Ali Kashif Bashir, Nikita

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The unavailability of sufficient information for proper diagnosis, incomplete or miscommunication between patient and the clinician, or among the healthcare professionals, delay or incorrect diagnosis, the fatigue of clinician, or even the high diagnostic complexity in limited time can lead to diagnostic errors. Diagnostic errors have adverse effects on the treatment of a patient. Unnecessary treatments increase the medical bills and deteriorate the health of a patient. Such diagnostic errors that harm the patient in various ways could be minimized using machine learning. Machine learning algorithms could be used to diagnose various diseases with high accuracy. The use of machine …

Career And Mentorship Experiences Of Women Educational Administrators In Rural Community Colleges, Diane Ashley Gibson

Online Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the topic of current women administrators and their mentorship experiences. The purpose is to examine if these individuals had a mentor at all and how that relationship evolved. There is a universal graying of administration in Higher Education Leadership and many institutions lack a long-term plan to mentor and replace the administrators after retirement. Many of the current leaders in rural education are approaching retirement opening many opportunities for new leaders to come in. Not only that, but there is a large disparity in the number of women educational leaders. One study by Wallace & Marchant (2009) …

Absorbent Household Materials For The Collection Of Ignitable Liquid Residues From Surfaces Of Varying Porosity, Jessica Carlotti

Online Theses and Dissertations

Ignitable liquids (ILs) are used as accelerants to burn items at a faster rate and the presence of an IL indicates that arson has occurred. Upon arrival to an arson scene, fire investigators access the scene and collect substrates containing ILs. The substrates, such as concrete and wood, are removed from the scene by methods that are time consuming, and require heavy machinery and tools. The evidence is transported in air-tight containers to the laboratory where analysts identify the chemical classification of the IL using gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In this work, readily available absorbent household materials such as …

The Barriers Students Of Color Experience During The Online College Application, Tichaedza Stephen Chikuni

Online Theses and Dissertations

Recruitment of Students of Color (African American and Latino) is a growing obligation of colleges and universities around the United States (Bauman et al., 2019). Personally, the culmination of my passion for diversity recruitment and my experiences with information technology has led me to study why Students of Color encounter barriers during their online college application process. A vicious cycle of seeing Students of Color students not being able to access key resources during their college application process has frequently left me heartbroken. There are an abundance of excuses and I want to be a part of the solution.

Understanding The Impact Of An Act Intervention Course Through The Perspectives Of Previous Students, April Clement

Online Theses and Dissertations

College admission exams have long been the determining factor in students' college acceptance as well as being used as a predictor of success in college. States across America also used college admission exams as a way to measure a school's success in multiple dimensions. This study examined the effect of placing participants in an ACT intervention course that provides them with instruction and material to help them in areas they were struggling in on the ACT. This study focused on an ACT test that participants took before taking the intervention course and a test after taking the course. Along with …

Introductory Mathematics And Stem Persistence: Examining The Differences Between Online And In-Person Performance At A Hbcu, Wendy Dixie

Online Theses and Dissertations

The United States is losing its position as an innovative global leader because of a shortage of skilled workers in STEM. This decline is due in part to the US producing a lower number of graduates from STEM related fields. One reason for the shortage is that US students are selecting or graduating with STEM majors at a lower rate than those of competing countries. As a result of these shortages, the US has undertaken several initiatives to increase public awareness of and training in STEM that will ultimately produce STEM degrees.

The purpose of this research was to examine …

Examining Formative Critique In The High School Visual Arts Classroom, Peter C. Edwards

Online Theses and Dissertations

Formative assessment techniques are integral to high school visual arts teachers’ curricula, but are not clearly delineated by state and national organizations. Additionally, formative assessment in the high school visual arts classroom, defined in this study as formative critique, had not been examined as extensively, and most research investigated either high school core content practices or critique procedures in higher education settings. This qualitative phenomenological study sought to understand commonalities in the implementation of formative critique by high school visual arts teachers in central Kentucky. In this study, six veteran high school visual arts teachers were interviewed, using open-ended questions …

Perceptions Of Education Attainment In Rural And Appalachian Schools, Michael Estep

Online Theses and Dissertations

Today, education methods and strategies are ever changing. Educators and administrators of public schools are looking for the best methods and strategies. Appalachia is a region that is known by outsiders for its backwardness, violence, poverty, and hopelessness (Amerikaner, 2016). Counselors are the front-line workers and educators when discussing a student’s family, community, future, and plans. The plan for this study was to dive into the perceptions of counselors and what they see is a determining factor of a student’s choice of college or career technical education pathways. Testing data gives us only part of the information needed, but the …

Evidence Of Non-Strike Induced Chemosensory Searching By Eastern Copperheads (Agkistrodon Contortrix) During Cicada Predation, Henderson Cyrenius Gull

Online Theses and Dissertations

New evidence of active foraging by eastern copperheads, Agkistrodon contortrix, contradicts its description as an envenomation-reliant ambush predator. Evidence of active foraging through non-strike induced chemosensory searching (NSICS) was previously found in cottonmouths (A. piscivorus) but could not be replicated with A. contortrix in later experiments. I observed foraging methods similar to non-strike induced chemoreception when specifically predating upon cicada nymphs during seasonal emergences. I hypothesized that A. contortrix actively forage using chemoreception without envenomation, and that tongue flick rates would be higher during foraging behaviors than during non-predatory or resting behaviors. Behavior of twelve A. contortrix were filmed at …

Effective Strategies For Recruiting African American Males Into Teacher Education Programs, Fredrick Wellington Snodgrass

Online Theses and Dissertations

In today’s society, the teaching workforce should be more diverse. However, it still consists of majority white females. From a survey reported by Education Week in 2017-2018, the teaching workforce consisted of 79.2% white teachers. The same data reported that the teaching workforce consists of 7% African-Americans (Will, 2020). From that 7% of African-Americans, African-American males consists of 2% of the teaching workforce (Bell, 2017). Some school districts are seeking to attract more minority teachers to reflect their student demographics. In 2018, data reported from statista.com shows the following student demographics in K-12 public schools across the U.S.: 47% White, …

The Examination Of Attendance Support Teams In Urban Middle Schools, John Christopher Young

Online Theses and Dissertations

The research study was conducted to analyze effect of an attendance support team in urban middle schools. The study utilized a six-month time window using students in three middle schools that accumulated five unexcused absences. The attendance support team was comprised of a school social worker, a family resource student support coordinator, a district-level director of pupil personnel, and a court-designated worker from family court. The function of this team was to share attendance policies, requirements, and mitigate barriers through system support to increase regular attendance for students. The research was analyzed to measure the effect on gender, grade level, …

$\Lambda_C \To \Lambda$ Form Factors In Lattice Qcd, Hüseyi̇n Bahti̇yar

Turkish Journal of Physics

Studying the semileptonic decays of charmed particles is prominent in testing the standard model of particle physics. Motivated by recent experimental progress in weak decays of the charm baryon sector, we study the form factors of $\Lambda_c \to \Lambda \ell^+ \nu$ transition on two flavor lattices. We compute two- and three-point functions, extract the dimensionless projected correlators, and combine them to form the Weinberg form factors. In the zero transferred momentum limit $f_1$, $f_2$ and $g_1$ form factors are found to be in agreement with other models, furthermore $f_3$ and $g_3$ form factors are comparable to model determinations. The $g_2$ …

Study Of The Average Transverse Sphericity In $Pp$ Collisions At Large Hadron Collider (Lhc) Energies, Uzma Tabassam, Safdar Abbas, Muhammad Anns Saif, Zain Ul Abidin, Yasir Ali

Turkish Journal of Physics

In the current analysis we have reported the spectra of average transverse-sphericity as a function of multiplicity ($N_ch$) in $pp$ collisions for primary charged particles ($\pi^{+}, \pi^{-}, K^+, K^-, p$ and $\bar{p}$) in mid pseudo-rapidity of $ \eta < 0.8$ and in the kinematic transverse momentum range of $p_T > 0.5 \; GeV/c$ at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 0.9 and $7 \,TeV$. Two Monte Carlo event generators have been used for current analysis and the predictions of the model are compared to the results coming from the ALICE experiment based at the LHC. A detailed analysis has been carried out for three types of events (soft events, hard events and bulk events) categorized by …

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Turkish Journal of Physics

No abstract provided.

Combined Experimental And Modeling Analysis For Thedevelopment Of Optical Materials Suitable To Enhance Theimplementation Of Plasmonic-Enhanced Luminescent Down-Shifting Solutions On Existing Silicon-Based Photovoltaic Devices, James Walshe, Mihaela Girtan, Sarah Mccormack, John Doran, George Amarandei

Articles

The development of highly efficient solar collectors requires modulating the light interactions with the semiconducting materials. Incorporating luminescent species and metal nanoparticles within a semitransparent polymeric material (e.g., polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)) leads to the formation of a plasmon-enhanced luminescent down-shifting (PLDS) layer, which offers a retrofittable approach toward expanding the wavelength range over which the conversion process can effectively occur. Adding antireflection coatings (ARCs) further controls the spectral response. However, with each additional component comes additional loss pathways. In this study, the losses related to light interactions with the PMMA and the ARCs have been investigated theoretically using a transfer …