Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Industrial and Management Systems Engineering Program Assessment Based on the New ABET Student Outcomes

The quality of engineering education has been improved by the accreditation criteria established by credentialing agencies. As a result, the Industrial and Management Systems Engineering program at Kuwait University has been maintaining accreditation by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology for over 15 years. Since the assessment process needs to be thorough and simple at the same time, this paper explains how the Industrial and Management Systems Engineering program at Kuwait University designed and implemented an efficient and effective process for the establishment and assessment of the new Student Outcomes required by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. All the seven new Student Outcomes specified by Criterion 3 of the accreditation requirements are shown to be satisfied by using four different assessment tools, two of which are direct and the other two are indirect. All the results have been statistically verified by using hypothesis testing with a significance level of 0.01. The paper presents a simple and practical assessment method which can be used by other engineering programs that are in the process of implementing the new Student Outcomes.
Designing an Experiential Learning with Simulations and Games to Improve Education in an Undergraduate Engineering Major

This paper illustrates an experiential learning exercise that is designed to be played in an engineering undergraduate program. The author uses simulation that creates an active and experiential learning environment in which individual teams make decisions based on imperfect information and conflicting goals. The simulation allows players to control certain aspects of the information flow relevant to the market, to develop relevant business strategies and communication skills, and to establish understanding of ethical values that are relevant to business environment. The simulation was designed to allow engineering students to advance and practice business skills that are essential for engineers to stay successful in an increasingly competitive business environment. The objective is to extract maximum learning from the experience using an experiential learning model. This paper contributes to the literature on designing active learning with the use of games and simulations while utilizing the Kolb experiential learning model.
Locus of Control: Influence of Internality, Externality- Others, Externality-Chance among Management Students

This paper examines the Locus of Control among management students. The study intends to compare male and female students on the dimensions of internal locus of control with external locus of control (others and chance). The data required was collected was based on Levenson’s Locus of Control Inventory questionnaire with necessary modifications in the items made with respect to this study. The research on gender found that internality among females is more than male students. The ratio of internality when compared with externality-total (others + chance) was <1 among the students who have undergone the survey. The sample of the study included students of Management Studies. The findings of the study showed that the percentage of females influenced by externality-others is more than male students. The gender comparison of the influence of externality-chance showed that male students are more influenced by externality chance factors then the female students. The study did not support the past literature related to influence of internal and external factors among female students compared to male.
Individual variation in the structure of bilingual grammars

Abstract:A bilingual's two languages can interact in their mind, but the mechanism of this interaction is still open to debate. In this article we employ a variant of gradient symbolic computation (GSC; Smolensky et al. 2014) to model the code-switched utterances of unbalanced Dutch-English bilinguals. We aimed to evaluate GSC as an appropriate architecture to model bilingual code-switching grammars, and to explore the extent of variability within and across individual bilingual speakers. The results indicate that the structure of individual grammars can vary widely from the structure of the grammar that emerges when the population is studied as a whole. We interpret these results as evidence that individual variation characterizes not only language processing (e.g. Fricke et al. 2019, Kidd et al. 2018), but also the structure of bilingual grammar itself. *
Improved Canny edge detection algorithm based on deep learning

In the edge detection algorithm, effectively reducing the noise in the image is the key to edge extraction. In order to solve the problem that the traditional Canny operator needs to set the variance and high and low threshold artificially, the particle swarm optimization algorithm in deep learning is proposed to adaptively optimize the Gaussian filter. The advantages of the proposed method are verified by comparing with the traditional Canny algorithm. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm has better adaptability, can suppress the noise well, reduce the false detection rate, and the detected image contour is clearer.
A Leading one bit based Scalable Approximate Multiplier with High-Speed Yet Energy-Efficient Truncation-And Rounding-Based for digital Signal Processing applications

Based on the position of the lead system a TOSAM is installed and the quantity of consumer goods is minimized by cutting any input step. The theoretical Elastic Multiplier (TOSAM) is needed here. That is clear. The proposed model would result in substantial changes in resources and regional employment by moving, removing, and restricting multiplier operations of a given length, as opposed to the efficient multiplier. The input formula for the multiplication equation is rounded up to the closest amount of shortcomings in order to increase overall accuracy. Depending on the input operators' truncated position, because the input operand range is low in precision and the multiplier can be scaled.Further changes will be made where design parameters (e.g. field and power consumption) decline in input-operand length. The planned estimated multiplier 's implementation parameters are compared with the actual multiplier and several other recently suggested expected multipliers for impact evaluation. The results show that the suggested average multiplier with an actual small error of 11% to 0.3% decreases time delays, region and energy consumption respectively to 90% and 98% to 41%. Same function in addition to this. Often multiple approximate multipliers are conducted in rpm, venue, and energy consumption.Multiplier dependent on situationFeatures a set of Gussian errors with a mean value of approximately 0 This is used to print, sharpen, and decorate JPEG encoders. The measures indicate little difference in production quality. We also give a configurable TOSAM precision to customize energy usage to the precision necessary for the propagation process.
A STUDY OF RATE CONTROL FOR H.265/HEVC VIDEO COMPRESSION by Reese

v LIST OF TABLES . ix LIST OF FIGURES . x LIST OF EQUATIONS.xi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.xii CHAPTER 1 VIDEO COMPRESSION BASICS . 1 1.1 Basic Principles of Video Compression . 2 1.1.1 Temporal Redundancy Removal Motion Estimation & Compensation . 3 1.1.2 Spatial Redundancy Removal Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) . 4 1.1.3 Quantization . 5 1.1. 4 Zigzag Scan and Entropy Encoding . 6 1.1. 5 Frame Types and Group of Pictures (GOP) . 7 1.1. 6 General Encoding Process . 9 1.2 Video Compression International Standards Overview . 10 1.2. 1 Compression Standard Overview . 10 1.3 Video Rate Control . 13 1.3. 1 Rate Control Definition. 13 1.3. 2 Rate Control Basics . 15 1.3. 3 Rate Control Process . 18
A realistic nonlinear benchmark problem for wave energy controllers-COERbuoy1

This paper presents a realistic, nonlinear numerical open-source benchmark model for Wave Energy Converters (WECs) to facilitate the effective comparison of WEC control strategies. The model represents a pointabsorber WEC, and was developed in cooperation with CorPower Ocean to obtain a realistic control problem (COERbuoy1), constituting real device characteristics. At the same time, the model is sufficiently representative of the broad class of point absorbers to allow universal findings. The hydrodynamic forces are calculated using instantaneous linearisation of the hydrodynamic parameters for body-exact wave-body interactions in two degrees of freedom. Additionally, the model includes nonlinear effects such as viscous drag, static and dynamic friction, a powertake-off using an electric generator with saturation effects, and a nonlinear spring opposing the hydrostatic stiffness. The benchmark problem consists of three stages: Testing the control performance in (1) regular and (2) irregular waves and by (3) using small modifications in the model to challenge the controller’s ability to handle modelling errors. The benchmark scoring system evaluates the controller on the basis of the absorbed power and adherence to motion and power constraints. The system is tested with an illustrative constant damping power-take-off, showing reasonably good results in power absorption for low period cases, but poor results for long wave periods.
A Defense Against Adversarial Examples based on Image Reconstruction by Variational Autoencoders

commonly chosen to be the multivariate normal distribution. The constraint on the posterior distribution has the eﬀect on the information content of the latent variable, indeed it possible to see experimentally how the number of latent variables which carry information is problem dependent but ﬁxed, independently from the dimension of the latent space. Motivated by this analysis, we conjecture that the information bottleneck imposed by VAE allows to generate reconstructed images more robust to adversarial perturbations, with respect to standard autoencoders which, on the contrary, do not show this property. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the ﬁrst attempt to use VAEs for clean image reconstruction as a defense strategy for AEs. In this work we show, through experimental results on the MNIST and CIFAR datasets, the advantages of our proposed method over other types of autoencoders, for diﬀerent types of attacks
Data immutability and event management via blockchain in the Internet of things

: The Internet of things (IoT) is the key enabler of the smart systems used in many areas, from agriculture to 3 aviation, industrial automation to autonomous vehicles. Most IoT deployments employ cost-eﬃcient lightweight devices 4 with limited resources (e.g., bandwidth, energy, storage). Although an IoT network must be built in its simplest form, 5 engineers include more sophisticated devices like gateways and servers to provide web-based services and beneﬁt from 6 cloud systems. So that, although the nodes can be widely distributed geographically or topologically, the system becomes 7 centralized, which causes bottlenecks and single-points-of-failure. Furthermore, providing data integrity, non-repudiation, 8 and event management becomes tricky. In most IoT scenarios, data usually ﬂows from sensors to storage and processing 9 units, whereas event-driven commands and triggers ﬂow from these units to actuators, if any. Therefore, an attacker who 10 gained access to parts of the centralized systems may leak, alter, or remove critical data and may exploit event handling 11 features. This is where blockchain technology can be extremely useful. Using a decentralized ledger as the data storage 12 unit provides integrity, immutability, and non-repudiation for any IoT deployment. And a customized smart contract 13 lets the IoT deployment beneﬁt from decentralized and immutable (i.e., non-manipulatable) event management features, 14 too. Further, decentralization provides resilience against availability attacks to a large extent. With this motivation, we 15 introduced a novel IoT architecture that incorporates an Ethereum-based private (Quorum) blockchain running a unique 16 ad-hoc smart contract and a message queue telemetry transport (MQTT) based communication scheme between sensor 17 and actuator nodes. The scheme, the ledger, and the smart contract have also been implemented with several nodes, 18 a broker, and a server all on a PC using Docker containers, where the server was running a forest ﬁre risk detection 19 algorithm as the use case scenario. The proof-of-concept successfully validates the abovesaid functionality, scalability, 20 and eﬃciency for the given IoT scenario (and some others). Moreover, performance tests showed that an instance of 21 the system with 1000 nodes could stably process and record incoming (sensor) data up to 12.5 transactions per second 22 (TPS) and distribute commands up to 4 TPS, whereas higher TPS is achievable depending on the network conditions 23 and tolerance to losses. The scheme was shown to have polynomial message and time complexity. 24
LEADERSHIP COMPETENCE: THE MISPLACED EMPHASIS IN THE SUSTENANCE OF INDIGENOUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN NIGERIA

The entrepreneur is by the nature of his/her perception on the venture, a leader who must seek opportunity, initiate projects, combine financial and human resources needed for implementing business activities, set goals for him/herself and others as well as directing and guiding people to accomplish organizational objectives. Thus, entrepreneurship is presumed to revolve around leadership competence. This is a dynamic process because individual influences others to contribute voluntarily to attain firm‟s high performance in a given situation, where it is possible to demonstrate quality of a good leader. Furthermore, business ideas generated in a complex economic environment require leadership effectiveness and competence, the cornerstone for continuous entrepreneurial existence. It is therefore, pertinent to review and examine the attributes of human competence in fostering leadership styles for entrepreneurship development.
A multicarrier amplifier with low third-order intermodulation distortion

This paper describes the application of a novel amplifier linearisation technique that reduces third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3). Linearity is improved by adding a carefully-engineered linearising signal to the RF carrier(s). Mathematical analysis, simulation and practical results are presented. Typical measured results with 4-tone input signals show a reduction in third-order intermodulation distortion components of between 9 dB and 26 dB.
In vitro Antifungal Activities of Essential Oils of Three Lamiaceae Plant Species against Plenodomus tracheiphilus (syn. Phoma tracheiphila)

Leila Kalai-Grami*, LR / Biotechnologie Appliquée à l’Agriculture, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique de Tunisie, Université de Carthage, Rue Hedi Karray, 1004 El Menzah 1, Tunis, Tunisia, Bochra Amina Bahri*, Mohja Chemekh, LR / Bio-agresseurs et Protection Intégrée en Agriculture, Institut National Agronomique de Tunisie, Université de Carthage, 43 Avenue Charles Nicolle, 1082, Tunis-Mahrajene, Tunisia, Majdi Hammami, LR / Plantes Aromatiques et Médicinales, Centre de Biotechnologie de Borj Cedria, Université du Manar, BP 901, 2050, Hammam-Lif, Tunisia, Ferid Limam, LR / Substances Bioactives, Centre de Biotechnologie de Borj Cedria, Université du Manar, BP 901, 2050, Hammam-Lif, Tunisia, and Mohamed Rabeh Hajlaoui, LR / Biotechnologie Appliquée à l’Agriculture, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique de Tunisie, Université de Carthage, Rue Hedi Karray, 1004 El Menzah 1, Tunis, Tunisia (Tunisia)
REFLECTION ON COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN TOURISM REFLEXIÓN SOBRE LA PANDEMIA DE COVID-19 Y GESTIÓN DE CRISIS

The contemporary history of tourism has been shaken by different types of crises as natural disasters, economic crises, terrorist attacks and pandemics, resulting in economic, political and social implications that impact the tourist destination, the volume and direction of tourist flows. In early 2020, COVID-19 took the world by surprise, causing a worldwide pandemic in just a few months. The dimension of this outbreak coupled to the mobility that characterizes tourism in the Anthropocene, now raises a need for reflection on the arising and control of future pandemics. Several models of crisis management in tourism are presented in the scientific literature, however, all of generalist nature. It is urgent to examine and refine the existing crisis management models, since the models already developed have little specificity in the theme of pandemic crisis management in tourism.
Predicting Air Quality from Twitter Data

In this project, we train NLP models for topic modeling and sentiment analysis on tweets, then use data from these models to establish a prediction of regional air quality. Our models for sentiment analysis achieve a positive accuracy of 92% and a negative accuracy of 87%, with comparable accuracies for topic modeling. Our overall system has an air quality prediction accuracy of about 65%.
Diagnostic/Prognostic Experiments for Capacitor Degradation and Health Monitoring in DC-DC Converters

Studying and analyzing the ageing mechanisms of electronic components avionics in systems such as the GPS and INAV are of critical importance. In DC-DC power converter systems electrolytic capacitors and MOSFET’s have higher failure rates among the components. Degradation in the capacitors under varying operating conditions leads to high ripples output voltages and currents affecting downstream components leading to cascading faults. For example, in avionics systems where the power supply drives a GPS unit, ripple currents can cause glitches in the GPS position and velocity output, and this may cause errors in the Inertial Navigation (INAV) system, causing the aircraft to fly off course The work in this paper proposes a detail experimental and systematic study on analyzing the degradation phenomenon is electrolytic capacitors under high stress operating conditions. The output degradation is typically measured by an increase in ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) and decrease in the capacitance value. We present the details of our accelerated ageing methodology along with analysis and comparison of the results.
EMI ambient cancellation and source localization technology

CASSPER is a new generation of instrumentation systems for conducting RF measurements. CASSPER is designed to overcome the shortcomings inherent in using spectrum analyzers for radiated emissions testing and RF source localization. CASSPER combines RF measurement capabilities with the rapidly expanding area of digital signal processing. CASSPER was initially developed under contract for the US Air Force Research Laboratory. CASSPER ENII is a dual channel spectrum analyzer-like system which harnesses the power to simultaneously and synchronously make two RF measurements.
Developers Are Neither Enemies Nor Users: They Are Collaborators

Developers struggle to program securely. Prior works have reviewed the methods used to run user-studies with developers, systematized the ancestry of security API usability recommendations, and proposed research agendas to help understand developers’ knowledge, attitudes towards security and priorities. In contrast we study the research to date and abstract out categories of challenges, behaviors and interventions from the results of developer-centered studies. We analyze the abstractions and identify five misplaced beliefs or tropes about developers embedded in the core design of APIs and tools. These tropes hamper the effectiveness of interventions to help developers program securely. Increased collaboration between developers, security experts and API designers to help developers understand the security assumptions of APIs alongside creating new useful abstractions—derived from such collaborations—will lead to systems with better security.
Applications of Lignin in Wood

Natural lignin is mainly built from three monomers, ρ-coumaryl alcohol (H-lignin unit), coniferyl alcohol (Glignin unit) and sinapyl alcohol (S-lignin unit). The ratio between these monomers differs among lignins of different plant species and in different parts of the plants . As such, the lignin in hardwood contains a higher quantity of S-lignin units, while softwood lignin contains more G-lignin units. H-lignin units are less abundant in wood, they can mainly be found in other plants . The most common bond connecting the monomers in all natural lignins is the β-O-4 ether bond . About 45–50% of the bonds in softwoods, and 60–62% in hardwoods are β-O-4 ether bonds .
Building Deep Structured Semantic Similarity Features to Improve the Media Search

In media search, it’s often found that for a query, a content without any shared term in its title or concise description can still be highly relevant. Therefore, document retrieval based on only word matching can miss important contents. On the other hand, even with an exact-word match in its document, the content can still be an unsatisfactory result. These observations suggest that query-document matching should be established at the semantic level other than the term level. In this paper, we introduce some latest results of applying the Deep Structured Semantic Model (DSSM) to build the similarity features for document retrieval and ranking in media search. To test the new features, we perform the experiments of retrieving and ranking media documents from Xbox, with and without the DSSM involved. To have a DSSM, we leverage the Bing’s large web search logs to train a seed DSSM and then tune the model using the Xbox’s ranker training data. We also train the Xbox’s rankers with and without adding the DSSM similarity features. Our experimental results have shown that adding the DSSM similarity features significantly improves the results of document retrieval and ranking.
A microstrip re-entrant mode quadrature coupler for hybrid and monolithic circuit applications

The reentrant mode TEM (transverse electromagnetic) coupling method allows the MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) design engineer to fabricate low loss couplers on either GaAs or Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/ substrates without the problems encountered in fabricating long fine-line structures. In addition, since the odd mode energy is mainly contained in a high-dielectric region rather than in air, the even and odd mode velocities are closely matched, thus enabling the coupler to exhibit excellent VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio) and differential phase performance. Because of the excellent coupler performance and design flexibility obtained with this technique, coupled structures which used to require multilayer stripline or suspended substrate approaches can now be easily fabricated and integrated with conventional MIC (microwave integrated circuit) circuitry. The technique also allows the MMIC designer to fabricate very tightly coupled structures without the problems encountered with fine-line lithography. <<ETX>>