bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Development Of A Qatar National Biodiversity Grid (Qnbg) To Create Biodiversity Atlas In Qatar
Authors: Valdeón Aitor
Published: November 2013

Biodiversity Atlas of animals and plants are very popular in many countries and constitute an essential tool for species management and regional planning. Many coordinate systems and spatial resolutions are used depending on the surface area covered in an Atlas. The 10x10Km resolution is considered standard in other Atlases conducted in geographic areas of similar size than Qatar. The standardization of different tools about the spatial distribution of the study objects allows comparing and integrating all data in the same space. This make possible to realize spatial analyses in a single project or in a global project, such as the management of "Sustaining the environment for future generations", which is one of the four pillars of the Qatar National Development Strategy (2011-2016). In order to identify the distribution of animals and proceed with the mapping of biodiversity in Qatar, it is important to assign the names of the squares in the Qatar grid. To do that, we have developed a Qatar National Biodiversity Grid (QNBG), employing a method based in the UTM nomenclature, where each square is codified in alpha-numerical nomenclature considering the QND95 coordinates. 100x100Km square names are designed with two letters, corresponding the first letter to the X axis and the second letter to the Y axis, being "A" when the coordinate is between 0 and 99999, "B" when it is between 100000 and 199999, "C" when it is between 200000 and 299999, and so on. The 10x10 Km squares are named with the letters of the 100x100 Km squares in which is included, and two digits from 0 to 9, which are the second digit of the X coordinate, and the second digit of the Y coordinate. Because this method uses standard squares, it has other useful advantages. For example, it is possible to estimate "hot spots" of high conservation value because of its biodiversity or other important features (e.g., archaeological, geological). This can be done using GIS tools that combine layers with the same resolution and spatial position considering diverse objects of research. Besides, as the squares are based on a standardized Qatar National Datum (QND95) coordinates, it is possible to know in situ in which square we are working, by only using a handheld GPS, previously configured with QND95 datum. In addition, the data obtained in other datum can be converted to the QND95 with a coordinate converser, integrating all data in the Biodiversity Atlas. This abstract is a contribution for the Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference (QF-ARC-2013).
Energy Efficiency And Flux Production From Direct Contact Membrane Distillation: Effect Of Operating Parameters From Qatari Industrial Desalination Feed Water.
Authors: Kayvanifard Ahmad
Published: November 2013

More than 70% of the global population finds its fresh water from aquifers, rivers, and lakes. Global population estimated to approach 9 billion by 2050 and the standard of living of fast developing countries, such as Qatar, increases and the demand for fresh water is increasing dramatically. Qatar is located in an arid region where there is no source of surface fresh water give the very low precipitation per year. Qatar's primary source of fresh water is through seawater desalination. Thermal desalination processes (MSF and MED) and Reverse Osmosis (RO) are highly expensive due to high energy input requirements and high operating costs associated with maintenance and stress induced on the systems in harsh alkaline media. Beside that cost, environmental food print of these desalination techniques are significant; from damaging marine eco-system, to huge land use, to release of tons of GHG and huge carbon footprint. Other less energy consuming techniques based on membrane separation are being sought to reduce both the carbon footprint and operating costs. Membrane Distillation (MD) process involves the evaporation of a hot feed, typically below boiling point of brine at standard conditions, by creating a water vapor pressure difference across the thickness of a porous, hydrophobic membrane. To achieve the objective of this study, state of the art flat-sheet cross-flow DCMD bench scale unit was designed, commissioned, and tested. The objective of this study is to conduct an energy efficiency analysis of DCMD with varied process parameters. Comparison with available literature data is undertaken where appropriate. Energy efficiency analysis showed that, feed flow rate is an important factor and doubling feed flow rate can increase the energy efficiency by about 2 folds. Similarly, increasing feed temperature, increases energy efficiency significantly due to an increase in driving force and hence flux. Effect of concentration and permeate temperature also has been studied and showed increasing these factor cause lead to a decline in energy efficiency. MD has not yet been commercialized and to be practically implemented and feasible, MD should use free and cheap waste energy such as industrial waste heat from flue gas or other sources. Other factors in improving feasibility of MD might be optimization of process conditions, preparation of novel membranes, module configurations as well as spacers support.
Risk Assessment Of The Thermal Decomposition Of Organic Peroxide Hybrid And Gassy Systems By Calorimetry And Computational Techniques
Authors: Vechot Luc
Published: November 2013

Risk Assessment of the thermal decomposition of organic peroxide hybrid and gassy systems by calorimetry and computational techniques
Chirality And Hierarchy In Cellular Structures
Authors: Mousanezhad Viyand Davood
Published: November 2013

A comprehensive analytical and numerical study on the elastic response of a series of novel 2D cellular structures including chiral, anti-chiral, and hierarchical honeycombs with square, and hexagonal unit cells are performed. The elastic properties of the cellular lattices are obtained through the energy method. The method leads to closed-form relations for the elastic response of the structures under general 2D state of stress. The work provides insight into the effect of structural organization (chirality and hierarchy) in regulating the mechanical behavior of materials, and new opportunities for developing low-weight cellular structures. Keywords: chirality, structural hierarchy, honeycombs, cellular structures.
Measurement Of Refractive Indices Of Ternary Mixtures Using Digital Interferometry And Multi-Wavelength Abbemat Refractometer
Authors: Yahya Mohammed
Published: November 2013

Abstract Knowing the liquid mixtures properties are significantly important in scientific experimentation and technological development. Thermal diffusion in mixtures plays a crucial role in both nature and technology. The temperature and concentration coefficients of refractive indices so called the Contrast factors contribute to study in various fields including, crude oil experiments (SCCO) and the distribution of crude oil components. The Abbemat Refractometer and Mach-Zehnder Interferometer technique has been proven a precise, highly accurate, and non-intrusive method for measuring the refractive index of a transparent medium. Refractive indices for three ternary mixtures containing three hydrocarbon compositions and their pure components of Tetrtahydronaphtalenene (THN), Isobutylbenzen (IBB), and Dodecane (C12), used mainly in gasoline, were experimentally measured using both the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer and a multi-wavelength Abbemat refractometer. Temperature and concentration coefficients of refractive indices, or contrast factors, as well as their individual correlation to calculate refractive indices have been presented in this research. The experimental measurements were correlated with a wide range of temperatures and wavelengths over a broad range of compositions. The experimental measurements of the refractive indices were compared with those estimated by applying several mixing rules: Lorentz-Lorenz, Gladstone-Dale, Arago-Biot, Eykman, Wiener, Newton, and Oster predictive equations. The experimental values of refractive indices are in substantial agreement with the values obtained by L-L, G-D, and A-B equations, and excepting values obtained by Oster and Newton equations. The temperature, concentration and wavelength dependence of refractive index in mixtures agrees with published data. A comparison with available literature and mixing rules shows that new correlations can predict the experimental data with deviations of less than 0.001.
Utility of a comprehensive Personal Health Record (PHR) strategy
Authors: Rizk Stephanie
Published: November 2013

A fundamental component of improving health care quality is to include the patient as a participant in achieving their health goals and making decisions about their care. While many may see clinical information systems as a way to improve communication and track health information for clinicians, the role played by personal health records (PHRs) should not be overlooked in developing a modernized Integrated Health Management system. This presentation will outline the positives and negatives of sharing clinical data between providers and their patients, outline a few PHR functionalities that can support care coordination and health outcomes, and describe the components of a national strategy to support the development of PHRs. A PHR, also referred to as a patient portal, is a system that allows an individual to keep track of their health information. While access to information is important for patients, doctors may feel uncomfortable with the idea of sharing information with their patients in this manner. Alternatively, patients may worry about sharing information they would like to keep private. These concerns can often be controlled with the right policies to prevent unexpected use and sharing of the information such as: * providing data segmentation functionalities that allow patients to share only selected data with certain providers, * sharing items such as medications and test results, but not sharing other information that providers might like to keep private such as "notes". Many PHRs draw information out of an existing clinical information system maintained by the physician. If a patient sees providers over multiple systems, the information can still be difficult to track. The most effective PHR allows data from any system to be included. To increase usefulness, a PHR may also store information that the patient adds themselves and provide tools such as medication reminders. Ideally, if a patient is seeing different doctors, those doctors will have information from everyone on the care team, but this does not always happen. If the patient has access to the information, they can share it with a range of providers- improving care coordination at the point of care, where it matters most. A PHR can be useful to all members of a population, and should be considered when planning a clinical information system implementation strategy. However, because different hospitals may provide different systems, it is helpful to have a government-wide strategy. For example, in the United States the government has developed a lightweight standard technical infrastructure based on secure messaging which is being used to populate PHRs. The government also supports development of governance to outline standard policies that ensure all stakeholders can trust the information in the system. A strategy to coordinate the use of PHRs is envisioned to have potential in a number of areas, from improvements in individual health to leveraging these systems to improve research on quality and health behaviors.
Summarizing machine translation text: An English-Arabic case study
Authors: Bouamor Houda , Mohit Behrang , Oflazer Kemal
Published: November 2013

Machine Translation (MT) which has been championed as an effective technology for knowledge transfer from English to languages with less digital content. An example of such efforts is the automatic translation of English Wikipedia to languages with smaller collections, such as Arabic. However, MT quality is still far from ideal for many of the languages and text genres. While translating a document, many sentences are poorly translated which can provide an incorrect text, and confuse the reader. Moreover, some of these sentences are not as informative and could be summarized to make a more cohesive document. Thus, for tasks in which complete translation is not mandatory, MT can be effective if the system can provide an informative subset of the content with higher translation quality. For this scenario, text summarization can provide effective support for MT by keeping only the most important and informative parts of a given document to translate. In this work, we demonstrate a framework of MT and text summarization which replaces the baseline translation with a proper summary that has higher translation quality than the full translation. For this, we combine the state of the art English summarization system and a novel framework for prediction of MT quality without references. Our framework is composed of the following major components: (a) a standard machine translation system, (b) a reference-free MT quality estimation system, (c) an MT-aware summarization system, and (d) an English-Arabic sentence matcher. More specifically, our English-Arabic system reads in an English document along with its baseline Arabic translation and outputs, as a summary, a subset of the Arabic sentences based on their informativeness and their translation quality. We demonstrate the utility of our system by evaluating it with respect to its translation and summarization quality and demonstrate that we can balance between improving MT quality and maintaining a decent summarization quality. For summarization, we conduct both reference-based and reference-free evaluations and observe a performance in the range of the state of the art system. Moreover, the translation quality of the summaries shows an important improvement against the baseline translation of the entire documents. This MT-aware summarization approach can be applied to translation of texts such as Wikipedia articles. For such domain-rich articles, there is a large variation of translation quality across different sections. An intelligent reduction of the translation tasks results in improved final outcome. Finally, the framework is mostly language independent and can be easily customized for different target languages and domains.
Silicon radio-frequency integrated-circuits for advanced wireless communications and sensing
Authors: Nguyen Cam
Published: November 2013

Silicon-based Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) hardware is the backbone of advanced wireless communication and sensing systems, enabling low-cost, small-size, and high-performance single-chip solution. Advanced RF wireless systems and in turn, silicon RFICs, are relevant not only to commercial and military applications, but also to national infrastructures. This importance is even more pronounced as the development of civilian technologies becomes increasingly important to the national economic growth. New applications utilizing silicon RFIC technologies continue to emerge - spanning across spectrums - from ultra-wideband to millimeter-wave and submillimeter-wave ultra-high-capacity wireless communications; from sensing for airport security and inventory for gas and oil; and from detection and inspection of buried underground oil and gas pipes to wireless power transmission and data communications for smart wells. In this talk, we will present some of our recent developments of silicon RFICs for advanced wireless communications and sensing.
Mental task discrimination: Digital signal processing
Authors: Yehia Mohammed
Published: November 2013

Abstract Objectives in this research is to increase the accuracy of the distinction between functions of various Kulaip through a careful analysis of brain electrical signals and electrical signals are out of the brain and can be received from sensors, especially in plants and solid enlarge and stored. It is characteristic of brain signals Abbaas Electrical signals are weak force and the Pacific area affected by humans, so it is also loaded with signal noise changed from its true value. Of my goals in this research is to arrive to delete possible from the noise signal from the brain signals Electrical and represented in a precise manner by factors and components unique to each signal and then train the system to these signals and it means the function of certain mental, and after the training system signals available for training begin the testing phase where the system will signal a new mentality, including the system by comparing the store to his posts, and then classified into one of mental functions that are stored for him. I have in this research to distinguish between five mental functions are: Baseline task1-when a person is completely relaxed in the case of Multiplication task2-mind when it calculates the multiplication operation is not simple Letter composing task3-imagine when the person writing and the formation of a character in his mind Rotation task4-When the person imagine a three-dimensional model of rotation around the axis Counting task 5 - when you imagine the person that writes numbers in sequence This means that one of the 83.7813% and thank God I was able to distinguish the origin of the five functions correctly by the health 100 electrical signal to the brain can identify correctly the 84 signal and we determine the brain function that she made this reference. There are high hopes might build on this research where possible to increase the number of functions of the mind which distinguishes them we reach the distinction between all functions of the mind and know what to think of human, and also the feelings, and also of the objectives of this research is to try to help people with special needs through know what is going on in their minds and meet their needs. I hope to benefit from this research all interested in this area and reach a new height in the analysis and understanding of the functions of the human mind and offer all support to fellow human with special needs.
Macro-small handover in LTE under energy constraints
Authors: Zorba Nizar
Published: November 2013

Green communications have emerged as one of the most important trends in wireless communications because of its several advantages of interference reduction, battery life increase and electrical bill cut. Its application to handover mechanisms is a crucial operation for its integration in practical systems, as handover is one of the most resource-consuming operations in the system, and it has to be optimized under the objective of green communications. On the other hand, a decrease in the energy consumption should not mean lower performance for the operator and customers. Therefore, this work will present a hybrid handover mechanism where two conflict objectives of load balancing and energy consumption are tackled, where the operator's objective is to balance the data load among its macro and small-cells, while the user equipment objective is to decrease the consumed energy in order to guarantee a larger battery life.
A concurrent tri-band low-noise amplifier for multiband communications and sensing
Authors: Nguyen Cam
Published: November 2013

Concurrent multiband receivers receive and process multiple frequency bands simultaneously. They are thus capable of providing multitask or multifunction to meet consumer needs in modern wireless communications. Concurrent multiband receivers require at least some of their components to operate concurrently at different frequency bands which results in substantial reduction of cost and power dissipation. Fig. 1 shows a simplified concurrent multiband receiver, typically consisting of an off-chip antenna and on-chip low-noise amplifier (LNA) and mixer. While the mixer can be designed as a multiband or wideband component, the LNA should perform as a concurrent multiband device and hence requires proper input matching to the antenna, low noise figure (NF), high gain and high linearity to handle multiple input signals simultaneously. Therefore, the design of concurrent multiband LNA's is the most critical issue for implementation of fully integrated low-cost and low-power concurrent multi-band receivers. In this talk, we present a 13/24/35-GHz concurrent tri-band LNA implementing a novel tri-band load composed of two feedback notch filters. The tri-band load is composed of two passive LC notch filters with feedback. The tri-band LNA fabricated on a 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS process achieves power gain of 22.3/24.6/22.2 dB at 13.5/24.5/34.5 GHz, respectively. It has the best noise figure of 3.7/3.3/4.3 dB and IIP3 of -17.5/-18.5/-15.6 dBm in the 13.5/24.5/34.5 GHz pass-band, respectively. The tri-band LNA consumes 36 mW from a 1.8 V supply, and occupies 920 μm × 500 μm.
Grand Challenges For Sustainable Growth: Irish Presidency Of The Eu Council 2013 In Review
Authors: Maad Soha
Published: November 2013

The presetation will overview the outcomes of the Irish Presidency of the EU Council for 2013 in addressing grand challenges for sustainable Growth with special emphasis on the digital (IT) agenda for Europe. The Irish Presidency of the EU council for 2013 made great achievements including the agreement of the 7 years EU Budget (including the budget to tackle youth unemploymen, the â‚¬70 billions Horizon 2020 program for research and innovation; the â‚¬30 billions budget for connecting Europe facility targeting enhancement in transport, energy and telecoms; and the â‚¬16 billions budget for the Erasmus programme), the reform of Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) and Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), and the brokerage of various partnerships and trade agreements (the most important ones are the EU-US agreement of â‚¬8 billions, and the EU-Japan agreement). An estimated number of 200 policy commitments were achieved including more than 80 in legislative form. The presentation will put a particular emphasis on the digital agenda for Europe and the horizon for international collaboration to tackle grand challenges for sustainable growth and the application of ICT to address these challenges. A brief overview of key related events held during the Irish Presidency of the EU council will be covered and the announcement of a book launch event elaborating on the topic and content of the presentation will be made.
PhosphoSiteAnalyzer: Analyzing complex cell signalling networks
Authors: Bennetzen Martin
Published: November 2013

Phosphoproteomic experiments are routinely conducted in laboratories worldwide, and because of the fast development of mass spectrometric techniques and efficient phosphopeptide enrichment methods, life-science researchers frequently end up having lists with tens of thousands of phosphorylation sites for further interrogation. To answer biologically relevant questions from these complex data sets, it becomes essential to apply computational, statistical, and predictive analytical methods. Recently we have provided an advanced bioinformatic platform termed “PhosphoSiteAnalyzer” to the scientific community to explore large phosphoproteomic data sets that have been subjected to kinase prediction using the previously published NetworKIN algorithm. NetworKIN applies sophisticated linear motif analysis and contextual network modeling to obtain kinase-substrate associations with high accuracy and sensitivity. PhosphoSiteAnalyzer provides an algorithm for retrieval of kinase predictions from the public NetworKIN webpage in a semi-automated way and applies hereafter advanced statistics to facilitate a user-tailored in-depth analysis of the phosphoproteomic data sets. The interface of the software provides a high degree of analytical flexibility and is designed to be intuitive for most users. Network biology and in particular kinase-substrate network biology provides an adequate conceptual framework to describe and understand diseases and for designing targeted biomedicine for personalized medicine. Hence network biology and network analysis are absolutely essential to translational medical research. PhosphoSiteAnalyzer is a versatile bioinformatics tool to decipher such complex networks and can be used in the fight against serious diseases such as psychological disorders, cancer and diabetes that arise as a result of dysfunctional cell signalling networks.
The Gas Electron Multiplier For Charged Particle Detection
Authors: Abi Akl Maya
Published: November 2013

The Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) has emerged as a promising tool for charged particle detection. It is being developed as a candidate detection system for muon particles for the future upgrade of Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It consists of a thin polymer foil, metal coated on each side and pierced by a high density of holes (see figure). The potential difference between the electrodes and the high electric field generated by the holes will further amplify the electrons released in the gas of the detector by the ionizing radiation or the charged particle crossing the detector. In this work, we will report on the results of the performance of the GEM prototype at the tests conducted at the CERN acceleration facilities using pion and muon beams. The main issues under study are efficiency, gain uniformity, and spatial resolution of the detector.
Quantum Imaging: Fundamentals And Promises
Authors: Kolobov Mikhail
Published: November 2013

Quantum imaging can be defined as an area of quantum optics that investigates the ultimate performance limits of optical imaging allowed by the quantum nature of light. Quantum Imaging techniques possess a high potential for improving the performance in recording, storage, and readout of optical images beyond the limits set by the standard quantum level of fluctuations known as the shot noise. This talk aims at giving an overview of the fundamentals of Quantum Imaging as well as its most important directions. We shall discuss generation of the spatially multimode squeezed states of light be means of a travelling-wave optical parametric amplifier. We shall demonstrate that this kind of light allows us to reduce the spatial fluctuations of the photocurrent in a properly chosen homodyne detection scheme with a highly efficient CCD camera. It will be shown that using the amplified quadrature of the light wave in a travelling-wave optical parametric amplifier, one can perform noiseless amplification of optical images. We shall provide recent experimental results demonstrating a single-shot noiseless image amplification by a pulsed optical parametric amplifier. One of important experimental achievements of Quantum Imaging, coined in the literature as quantum laser pointer, is a precise measurement of position and transverse displacement of a laser beam with resolution beyond the limit imposed by the shot noise. We shall describe briefly the idea of the experiment in which the transverse displacement of a laser beam was measured with resolution of the order of Angstrom. The problem of precise measurement of transverse displacement of a light beam brings us to a more general question about the quantum limits of optical resolution. The classical resolution criterion, derived in the nineteen century by Abbe and Rayleigh, states that the resolution of an optical instrument is limited by diffraction and is related to the wavelength of the light used in the imaging scheme. However, it was for a long time recognised in the literature that in some cases when one has some a priori information about the object, one can improve the resolution beyond the Rayleigh limit using the so-called super-resolution techniques. As a final topic in this talk, we shall discuss the quantum limits of optical super-resolution. In particular, we shall formulate the standard quantum limit of super-resolution and demonstrate how one can go beyond this limit using specially designed multimode squeezed light.
Middleware architecture for cloud-based services using software defined networking (SDN)
Authors: Jain Raj
Published: November 2013

In modern enterprise and Internet-based application environments, a separate middlebox infrastructure for providing application delivery services such as security (e.g., firewalls, intrusion detection), performance (e.g., SSL off loaders), and scaling (e.g., load balancers) is deployed. However, there is no explicit support for middleboxes in the original Internet design; forcing datacenter administrators to accommodate middleboxes through ad-hoc and error-prone network configuration techniques. Given their importance and yet the ad-hoc nature of their deployment, we plan to study application delivery (in general) in the context of cloud-based application deployment environments. To fully leverage these opportunities, ASPs need to deploy a globally distributed application-level routing infrastructure to intelligently route application traffic to the right instance. But, since such an infrastructure would be extremely hard to own and mange, it is best to design a shared solution where application-level routing could be provided as a service by a third party provider having a globally distributed presence, such as an ISP. Although these requirements seem separate, they can be converged into a single abstraction for supporting application delivery in the cloud context.
A proposed transportation tracking system for mega construction projects using passive RFID technology
Authors: Shaaban Khaled
Published: November 2013

The city of Doha has witnessed a rapid change in its demographics over the past decade. The city has been thoroughly modernized, a massive change in its inhabitants culture and behavior has occurred and the need to re-develop its infrastructure has arose creating multiple mega construction projects such as the New Doha International Airport, the Doha Metro Network, and the Lusail City. A mega-project such as the new airport in Doha requires 30,000 workers on average to be on site every day. This research tested the applicability of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in tracking and monitoring construction workers during their trip from their housing to the construction site or between construction sites. The workers tracking system developed in this research utilized the passive RFID tracking technology due to its efficient tracking capabilities, low cost, and easy maintenance. The system will be designed to monitor construction workers ridership in a safe and non-intrusive way. It will use a combination of RFID, GPS (Global Positioning System), and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) technologies. It will enable the workers to receive instant SMS alerts when bus is within 10 minutes of the designated pick up and drop off points reducing the time the workers spend on the street. This is very critical especially in a country like Qatar where temperatures can reach 50º degrees Celsius during summer time. The system will also notify management via SMS when the workers board and alight from the bus or enters/leaves the construction site. In addition, the system will display the real-time location of the bus and the workers inside the bus at any point in time. Each construction worker is issued one or more unique RFID card(s) to carry. The card will be embedded in the cloth for each worker. As the worker's tag is detected by the reader installed in the bus upon entering or leaving the bus, the time, date and location is logged and transmitted to a secure database. It will require no action on the part of drivers or workers, other than to carry the card and will deliver the required performance without impeding the normal loading and unloading process. To explore the technical feasibility of the proposed system, a set of tests were performed in the lab. These experiments showed that the RFID tags were effective and stable enough to be used for successfully tracking and monitoring construction workers using the bus.
Optimization Model For Modern Retail Industry
Authors: Kharbeche Mohamed
Published: November 2013

In a growing market with demanding consumers, the retail industry needs decision support tools that reflect emerging practices and integrate key decisions cutting across several of its departments (e.g. marketing and operations). The current tools may not be adequate to sufficiently tackle this kind of integration complexity in relation to pricing in order to satisfy the retailing experience of the customers. Of course, it has to be understood that the retailing experience can differ from one country to another and from one culture to another. Therefore, the off-the-shelve models may not be able to capture the behavior of customers in a particular region. This research aims at developing novel optimization mixed-integer linear/nonlinear formulations with extensive analytical and computational studies based on the experience of a large retailer in Qatar. The model addresses a product lines of substitutable items serving the same customer need but differ by secondary attributes. The research done in this project demonstrates that there is added value in identifying the shopping characteristics of the consumer base and well studying the consumer behavior in order to develop the appropriate retail analytics solution. The research is supported by a grant obtained through the NPRP project of Qatar Foundation.
Enhancement of multispectral face recognition in unconstrained environment using regularized linear discriminant analysis (LDA)
Authors: Bouchech Hamdi
Published: November 2013

In this paper, Face recognition in unconstrained illumination conditions is investigated. A two manifold contribution is proposed: 1) Firstly, Three sate of the art algorithms, namely Multiblock local Binary pattern (MBLBP), Histogram of Gabor Phase Patterns (HGPP) and Local Gabor binary pattern histogram sequence (LGBPHS) are challenged against The IRIS-M3 multispectral face data base. 2) Secondly, The Performance of the three mentioned algorithms, being drastically decreased due to the non monotonic illumination variation that distinguish the IRIS-M3 face database, This performance is enhanced using multispectral images (MI) captured in the visible spectrum. The use of MI images like near infrared images(NIR), short wave infrared images images (SWIR) or even visible images captured at different wavelengths rather then the usual RGB spectrum, is getting more and more the trust of researcher to solve problems related to uncontrolled imaging conditions that usually affect real world application like securing areas with valuable assets, controlling high traffic borders or law enforcement. However, one weakness of MI is that they may significantly increase the system processing time due to the huge quantity of data to mine (in some cases thousands of MI are captured for each subject). To solve this issue, we proposed to select the optimal spectral bands (channels) for face recognition. Best spectral bands selection will be achieved using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to increase data variance between images of different subjects(between class variance) while decreasing the variance between images of the same subject(within class variance). To avoid the problem of data overfitting that generally characterize LDA technique, we propose to include a regularization constraints that reduce the solution space of the chosen best spectral bands. Obtained results highlighted further the still challenging problem of face recognition in conditions with high illumination variation, as well as proven the effectiveness of our multispectral images based approach to increase the accuracy of the studied algorithms namely MBLBP, HGPP and LGBPHS of at least 9% upon the proposed database.
Towards socially-interactive telepresence robots for the 2022 world cup
Authors: Cabibihan John-John
Published: November 2013

The World Cup is the most widely viewed sporting event. The total attendance is in the hundreds of thousands. The first-ever World Cup in an Arab nation will be hosted by Qatar in 2022. As the country prepares for this event, the current paper proposes telepresence robots for the World Cup. Telepresence robots refer to robots that allow a person to work remotely in another place as he or she is physically present there. For such a big event like the World Cup, we can envision that organizers need to monitor the minute-by-minute events as they occur in multiple venues. Likewise, soccer fans who will not be able to attend the events can be present even if they are not physically present there and without the need to travel. Telepresence robots can make the organizers and participants to “be there”. This work describes some of the author's findings involving the interactions of humans and robots. Specifically, the works describe the user's perceptions and physiological data when touch and gestures are passed over the internet. The results show that there is much potential for telepresence robots to enhance the utility and the organizers' and participants' overall experience of the 2022 World Cup.
Unsupervised Arabic word segmentation and statistical machine translation
Authors: Alshikhabobakr Hanan
Published: November 2013

Word segmentation is a necessary step for natural language processing applications, such as machine translation and parsing. In this research we focus on Arabic word segmentation to study its impact on Arabic to English translation. There are accurate word segmentation systems for Arabic, such as MADA (Habash, 2007). However, such systems usually need manually-built data and rules of the Arabic language. In this work, we look at unsupervised word segmentation systems to see how well they perform on Arabic, without relying on any linguistic information about the language. The methodology of this research can be applied to many other morphologically complex languages. We focus on three leading unsupervised word segmentation systems proposed in the literature: Morfessor (Creutz and Lagus, 2002), ParaMor (Monson, 2007), and Demberg's system (Demberg, 2007). We also use two different segmentation schemes of the state of the art MADA and compare their precision with the unsupervised systems. After training the three unsupervised segmentation systems, we apply their resulting models to segment the Arabic part of the parallel data for Arabic to English statistical machine translation (SMT) and measure its impact on translation quality. We also build segmentation models using the two schemes of MADA on SMT to compare against the baseline system. The 10-fold cross validation results indicate that unsupervised segmentation systems turn out to be usually inaccurate with a precision that is less than 40%, and hence do not help with improving SMT quality. We also observe both segmentation schemes of MADA have very high precision. We experimented with two MADA schemes. A scheme with a measured segmentation framework improved the translation accuracy. A second scheme which performs more aggressive segmentation, failed to improve SMT quality. We also provide some rule-based supervision to correct some of the errors in our best unsupervised models. While this framework performs better than the baseline unsupervised systems, it still does not outperform the baseline MT quality. We conclude that in our unsupervised framework, the noise by the unsupervised segmentation offsets the potential gains that segmentation could provide to MT. We conclude that a measured supervised word segmentation improves Arabic to English quality. In contrast aggressive and exhaustive segmentation introduces new noise to the MT framework and actually harms its quality. This publication was made possible by the generous support of the Qatar Foundation through Carnegie Mellon University's Seed Research program provided to Kemal Oflazer. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
Dynamic Simulation Of Internal Logistics In Aluminum Production Processes
Authors: Winkelmann Anton
Published: November 2013

The production of aluminum products, like other metallurgical industries, comprehends of a large variety of material processing steps. These processes require a multitude of material handling operations, buffers and transports to interconnect single process steps within aluminum smelters or downstream manufacturing plants like rolling mills or extrusion plants. On the one hand, the electrolysis process as the core process of primary aluminum production requires an amount of material factors more than the volume of metal produced. On the other hand, downstream manufacturing processes are showing an enormous variation of mechanical properties and surface qualities and comprise many fabrication steps including forming, heat treatment and finishing that can appear in an arbitrary order. Therefore the internal logistics composing the entire internal material flow of one production facility is increasingly regarded as one key success factor for efficient production processes as part of the supply-chain management. Dynamic simulations based on discrete event simulation models can be effective tools to support planning processes along the entire value chain in aluminum production plants. Logistics simulation models ideally accompany also improvement and modernization measures and the design of new production facilities to quantify the resulting overall equipment effectiveness and the reduction of energy consumption and emissions. Hydro Aluminium has a long history in solving logistic challenges using simulation tools. Limitations of former models have been the starting point of a further development of simulation tools based on more flexible models. They address the streamlining of operations and transportation, in particular in aluminum smelters, and material flow problems as well as new plant concepts as support to investment decisions. This presentation is giving firstly a brief introduction into the main upstream and downstream processes of aluminum production to understand the different driving forces of material flow. Secondly the principles of mapping the specific material flow of aluminum smelters and in typical downstream manufacturing plants are outlined. Examples demonstrate the benefit of a systematic modeling approach.
A robust method for line and word segmentation in handwritten text
Authors: Hassaine Abdelaali
Published: November 2013

Line and word segmentation is a key-step in any document image analysis system. It can be used for instance in handwriting recognition when separating words before their recognition. Line segmentation can also serve as a prior step before extracting the geometric characteristics of lines which are unique to each writer. Text line and word segmentation is not an easy task because of the following problems: 1) text lines do not all have the same direction in the handwritten text; 2) text lines are not always horizontal which makes their separation more difficult; 3) characters may overlap between successive text lines; 4) it is often confusing to distinguish between inter and intra word distances. In our method, line segmentation is done by using a smoothed version of the handwritten document which makes it possible to detect the main line components using a subsequent thresholding algorithm. The connected components of the resulting image are then assigned to a separate label which represents a line component. Then, each text region which intersects only with one line component is assigned to the same label of that line component. The Voronoi diagram of the image thus obtained is then computed in order to label the remaining text pixels. Word segmentation is performed by computing a generalized Chamfer distance in which the horizontal distance is slightly favored. This distance is subsequently smoothed in order to reflect the distances between word components and neglect the distance to dots and diacritics. Word segmentation is then performed by thresholding the distance thus obtained. The threshold depends on the characteristics of the handwriting. We have therefore computed several features in order to predict it, including: the sum of maximum distances within each line component, the number of connected components within the document and the average width and height of lines. The optimal threshold is then obtained by training a linear regression of those features on a training set of about 100 documents. This method achieved the best performance on the ICFHR Handwriting Segmentation Contest dataset reaching a matching score of 97.4% on line segmentation and 91% on word segmentation. The method has also been tested on the QUWI Arabic dataset reaching 97.1% on line segmentation and 49.6% on word segmentation. The relatively low performance of word segmentation in Arabic script is due to the fact that words are very close to each other with respect to English script. The proposed method tackles most of the problems of line and word segmentation and achieves high segmentation results. It can however be improved by combining it with a handwriting recognizer which will eliminates words which are not recognized.
Optimizing Qatar steel supply chain management system
Authors: Alrefaei Mahmoud
Published: November 2013

We have developed a linear programming formulation to describe Qatar steel manufacturing supply chain from suppliers to consumers. The purpose of the model is to provide answers regarding the optimal amount of raw materials to be requested from suppliers, the optimal amount of finished products to be delivered to each customer and the optimal inventory level of raw materials. The model is validated and solved using GAMS software. Sensitivity analysis on the proposed model is conducted in order to draw useful conclusions regarding the factors that play the most important role in the efficiency of the supply chain. In the second part of the project, we have set a simulation model to produce a specific set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are developed to characterize the supply chain performance in terms of responsiveness, efficiency, and productivity/utilization. The model is programmed using WITNESS simulation software. The developed QS WITNESS simulation model aims to assess and validate the current status of the supply chain performance in terms of a set of KPIs, taking into consideration the key deterministic and stochastic factors, from suppliers and production plant processes, to distributors and consumers. Finally, a simulated annealing algorithm has been developed that will be used to set model variables to achieve a multi-criteria tradeoff of the defined supply chain KPIs.