Search

Many algorithms have been proposed so far for pruning and sparse approximation of feedforward neural networks with random weights in order to obtain compact networks which are fast and robust on various datasets. One drawback of the randomization process is that the resulted weight vectors might be highly correlated. It has been shown that ensemble classifiers’ error depends on the amount of error correlation between them. Thus, decrease in correlation between output vectors must lead to generation of more efficient hidden nodes. In this research a new learning algorithm called New Sparse Learning Machine (NSLM) for single-hidden layer feedforward networks is proposed for regression and classification. In the first phase, the algorithm creates hidden layer with small correlation among nodes by orthogonalizing the columns of the output matrix. Then in the second phase, using $$L_1$$ -norm minimization problem, NSLM makes the components of the solution vector become zero as many as possible. The resulted network has higher degree of sparsity while the accuracy is maintained or improved. Therefore, the method leads to a new network with a better generalization performance. Numerical comparisons on several classification and regression datasets confirm the expected improvement in comparison to the basic network.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) for secondary (acquired, combined) dystonia does not reach the high degree of efficacy achieved in primary (genetic, isolated) dystonia. We hypothesize that this may be due to variability in the underlying injury, so that different children may require placement of electrodes in different regions of basal ganglia and thalamus. We describe a new targeting procedure in which temporary depth electrodes are placed at multiple possible targets in basal ganglia and thalamus, and probing for efficacy is performed using test stimulation and recording while children remain for one week in an inpatient Neuromodulation Monitoring Unit (NMU). Nine Children with severe secondary dystonia underwent the NMU targeting procedure. In all cases, 4 electrodes were implanted. We compared the results to 6 children who had previously had 4 electrodes implanted using standard intraoperative microelectrode targeting techniques. Results showed a significant benefit, with 80% of children with NMU targeting achieving greater than 5-point improvement on the Burke&ndash, Fahn&ndash, Marsden Dystonia Rating Scale (BFMDRS), compared with 50% of children using intraoperative targeting. NMU targeting improved BFMDRS by an average of 17.1 whereas intraoperative targeting improved by an average of 10.3. These preliminary results support the use of test stimulation and recording in a Neuromodulation Monitoring Unit (NMU) as a new technique with the potential to improve outcomes following DBS in children with secondary (acquired) dystonia. A larger sample size will be needed to confirm these results.

Energy is scarce in mobile computing devices including wearable and implantable devices in a wireless body area network. In this paper, an adaptive routing protocol is developed and analyzed which minimizes the energy cost per bit of information by using the channel information to choose the best strategy to route data. In this approach, the source node will switch between direct and relayed communication based on the quality of the link and will use the relay only if the channel quality is below a certain threshold. The mathematical model is then validated through simulations which shows that the adaptive routing strategy can improve energy efficiency significantly compared with existing methods.

Cleaning effects of ultrasound and alkaline solution of EDTA individually and together on spiralwound ultrafiltration membrane were studied. Several frequencies of 28, 45 and 100 kHz and alternative waveforms of ultrasound, alkaline solutions of EDTA (pH 11, 1 mM and 3 mM) as well as their interaction effects were used as cleaning agents of spiralwound membranes that fouled using 1% solution of skim milk. The flux recovery and hydrodynamic resistance of each treated membrane were measured during and after cleaning process and cleaning efficiency of each factor was also calculated during various time intervals on treated membranes. The obtained data statistically analyzed in ANOVA table using multifactor design. The overall results showed that the cleaning efficiency of each treatment including different frequencies of ultrasound and alkaline solutions of EDTA individually is relatively low. However, the cleaning efficiency of ultrasound and EDTA increased when applied altogether. The maximum cleaning effects were obtained in the first seconds and after 5 min and additional cleaning process were not necessary. The best results were obtained when mixed waveform of ultrasound and 3 mM EDTA were used together. This effect may be due to a synergistic sonochemical effect of ultrasound and EDTA as cleaning factors.

Connected and automated vehicle applications are facilitated by Enhanced Digital Maps (EDMs) of the roadway environment. Due to the high numbers of roadway miles and signalized intersections, there is significant research interest in the automatic extraction of such maps from georectified LiDAR data. Most existing methods convert the LiDAR point cloud to a set of images for feature extraction and mapping. This rasterization step loses information that could be retained if new methods were developed that work directly on the LiDAR point could for feature extraction and mapping, without rasterization. This article presents one such approach that operates on a road surface point cloud, processing small patches at a time using a locally adaptive version of Otsu's method to discard low intensity reflections while retaining reflections from roadway markings. The main new aspect of the approach is a graph-based clustering algorithm implemented directly on the point cloud. A cluster growing method is used to group similar road markings into the same group to enable detection of the stop bars and lane edges. Finally, a SAE-J2735 map message is created from the extracted roadway features.

In this paper, a new method for measuring and monitoring human body joint angles, which uses wearable ultrawideband (UWB) transceivers mounted on body segments, is proposed and investigated. The model is based on providing a high ranging accuracy (intersensor distance) between a pair of transceivers placed on the adjacent segments of the joint center of rotation. The measured distance is then used to compute the joint angles based on the law of cosines. The performance of the method was compared with a flexible goniometer by simultaneously measuring joint flexion-extension angles at different angular velocities, ranging between 8 and 90(°) /s. The measurement errors were evaluated by the average differences between two sets of data (ranging from 0.8(°) for slow movement to 2.8(°) for fast movement), by standard deviation (ranging from 1.2(°) to 4.2(°) for various movement speeds) and by the Pearson correlation coefficient (greater than 0.99) which demonstrates the very good performance of the UWB-based approach. The experimental results have shown that the system has sufficient accuracy for clinical applications, such as rehabilitation.

The ability of low frequency ultrasound for cleaning fouled membrane has been proved. In this investigation, various frequencies and mixed wave ultrasound were used separately and together with two concentrations of EDTA as chelating agent in forward flush cleaning of MF membranes which was fouled by milk solution 1%. A statistical multifactor design was employed to obtain more precise results. The main factors involving several frequencies of 28, 45, 100 kHz and mixed wave ultrasound as well as two concentrations of 1 mMole and 3 mMole of EDTA and their interaction effects were evaluated on flux recovery, cleaned membrane resistance and cleaning efficiency. The results showed that mixed wave ultrasound individually and together with EDTA 1 mMole had higher cleaning efficiency than other treatments and there is a synergistic effect when ultrasound was used with EDTA as a cleaning factor. Also polynomial regression of flux as a function of time showed that only 5 min forward flushing under irradiation of effective frequency of ultrasound and a low concentration of EDTA are enough to approach the cleaning of fouled MF membranes.

Data classification is one of the fundamental issues in data mining and machine learning. A great deal of effort has been done for reducing the time required to learn a classification model. In this research, a new model and algorithm is proposed to improve the work of Xu and Papageorgiou (2009). Computational comparisons on real and simulated patterns with different characteristics (including dimension, high overlap or heterogeneity in the attributes) confirm that, the improved method considerably reduces the training time in comparison to the primary model, whereas it generally maintains the accuracy. Particularly, this speed-increase is significant in the case of high overlap. In addition, the rate of increase in training time of the proposed model is much less than that of the primary model, as the set-size or the number of overlapping samples is increased.

In the present paper, a three factor, three-level response surface design based on Box–Behnken design (BBD) was developed for maximizing lead removal from aqueous solution using micellar-enhanced ultrafiltration (MEUF). Due to extremely complexity and nonlinearity of membrane separation processes, fuzzy logic (FL) models have been driven to simulate MEUF process under a wide range of initial and hydrodynamic conditions. Instead of using mathematical model, fuzzy logic approach provides a simpler and easier approach to describe the relationships between the processing variables and the metal rejection and permeation flux. Statistical values, which quantify the degree of agreement between experimental observations and numerically calculated values, were found greater than 91% for all cases. The results show that predicted values obtained from the fuzzy model were in very good agreement with the reported experimental data.

International audience; Exponential growth in demand for high bandwidth applications such as multimedia in cellular networks has triggered the need for development of new technologies capable of providing the required high bandwidth, reliable links in wireless environments. However, the available spectrum is a limited natural resource and the current technologies have been shown to have low spectrumefficiency. To improve the spectrum efficiency, heterogeneous networks are considered as a viable solution. They are composed of a mix of macro, pico, femto and relay base-stations that improve the spectrum efficiency and throughput performance of the system. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of these emerging technologies. This chapter describes the main characteristics and performance requirements that the next generation networks must fulfill. Particularly, the focus is on Long Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE-Advanced technologies where some possible improvements and challenges are explained. Subsequently, the analytical methods and simulations techniques to evaluate the performance of the next generation heterogeneous networks are discussed. Finally, the simulation results for some example scenarios are provided and discussed.

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency to establish closer ties among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates) in economies and financial institutions. As a result, there is an increasing need for the harmonization of accounting regulations in order to improve cooperation and enhance the efficiency of the financial institutions among GCC countries. This study is an investigation of the accounting standards followed by the financial institutions in five GCC countries with some policy prescriptions for harmonization of the accounting regulations in GCC countries. This paper deals with accounting policies and practices, including loans and provisions, assets, investments, taxation, liabilities, foreign exchange, revenue recognization, and consolidation of GCC countries’ banking and other financial institutions.

In response to mounting concern about the gap between academe and business practice, the AACSB recently formed a faculty leadership task force. The task force report highlighted specific activities to be assigned greater weight in faculty evaluations. This article reports on the weights assigned, in faculty evaluations at finance departments of AACSB-accredited schools, to the activities identified by the AACSB task force. Our results indicate that these activities are currently given low weights in faculty evaluations for tenure, promotion, and annual salary raises. The weights that the respondents believed should be assigned for these activities also are low. This suggests that the AACSB needs to be more effective in selling the recommendations to faculty and administrators.

An accurate approach in locating a source based on the intersections of hyperboloids defined by the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of a signal received at a number of reference nodes is proposed and investigated. The demonstrated system consists of a UWB transmitter, irradiating a UWB Gaussian pulse, and eight coherent receivers where positions are known. Techniques like optimal template-based estimator used for time delay estimation are discussed. The effect of errors in range measurement on the accuracy of positioning is reduced by adopting Taylor-series-based minimization procedures. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method by comparing with traditional LSE minimization procedure in both simulation and experimental results. The experimental results show that the target positioning error is only about (0.7198±0.271)cm (mean±standard deviation), which is accurate for potential applications such as robot navigation, personal tracking and monitoring.

In wireless sensor networks, nodes can retransmit their neighbours' packets to provide redundancy and decrease packet error rate. However, this comes at the expense of increased energy consumption in the cooperating nodes. Cooperation between nodes in routing data is a necessity in sensor networks. This work exploits features of UWB-IR modulations to create redundancy in wireless sensor networks. We introduce a physical layer coding framework for UWB-IR and compare it with conventional UWB-IR modulation in terms of energy usage. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can decrease the energy usage of the nodes while enhancing packet error rate performance of the system.

This work is motivated by the challenges and shortcomings of the design and evaluation of wireless body area networks. Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an interesting application of sensor networks which can revolutionize our interaction with the outside world. Appealing applications of WBAN has attracted both academic and industrial attention. However there are some challenges that need to be addressed before such applications can come true. DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EEE)

Reliable on-body wireless network design needs to incorporate the natural body movements. However, existing models are static or pseudo-dynamic models. In this work, the lack of a comprehensive channel model for a moving body is addressed. A dynamic radio channel around the human body is statistically analyzed and modeled. Important parameters of the channel are estimated from measured data and compared with the model prediction. Simulations show that the model can predict the parameters of a system working in a dynamic body area network with 92% accuracy.

In this study, the effects of ultrasound (US) with carbonated feed were studied on ultrafiltration flux enhancement and membrane hydrodynamic resistances. A cross flow ultrafiltration of cherry concentrate was performed under US at 37 and 80 kHz with carbonated feed and noncarbonated feed, within the flat-sheet membrane module. Although, the US degassed the carbonated feed within the module, but no membrane cleaning effect was observed for the US with carbonated feed. Results showed that 37 kHz of US increases the permeation flux higher than 80 kHz, The lowest fouling resistance was obtained for gas bubbling by carbonated feed under 80 kHz, although there was no significant difference between 37 kHz and gas bubbling under 80 kHz. Practical Applications The most important limitation of ultrafiltration is flux decline during processing. Flux decline caused to higher operation cost and decrease the performance of separation. Using the ultrasound (US) treatment at low frequency (37 kHz) and carbonated feed with US at high frequency (80 kHz) can improve the flux permeation significantly. This technique can be applied to ultrafiltration to postpone the fouling and flux decline.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an interesting application of sensor networks which can revolutionize our interaction with the outside world. WBAN like any other sensor network suffers limited energy resources and hence preserving the energy of the nodes is of great importance. Unlike typical sensor networks WBANs have few and dissimilar sensors. In addition, the body medium has its own propagation characteristic which means that the existing solution for preserving energy in wireless sensor networks might not be efficient in WBANs. The quality of the links between the nodes in WBAN is changing frequently due to the moving nature of the body. This can pose a major problem especially in the energy efficiency merit. In this work we have proposed an opportunistic scheme to exploit the body movements during the walking to increase the life time of the network. The results show that comparing to the existing methods this work can increase the life time of the network.

There has been a growing tendency for cooperation among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the development of economic and financial institutions. This has led to an increasing need for the standardisation of accounting regulations in order to improve cooperation and enhance the efficiency of the financial institutions amongst these. In this paper, an attempt has been made to investigate the accounting standards followed by the financial institutions in five selected GCC countries (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) with some policy prescriptions for harmonisation of the accounting regulations. This paper provides a comparative analysis of various accounting policies and practices, including loans and provisions, assets, investments, taxation, liabilities, foreign exchange, revenue recognition, and consolidation of each GCC countries banking and other financial institutions.

Using ultra-wide band (UWB) microwave pulse for breast cancer detection has been greatly investigated recently since it does not expose the patient to any harmful radiation and the implementation is relatively cheaper than other methods such as MRI or X-ray. An issue in UWB imaging of breast cancer is the strong backscatter from the breast skin which is in orders of magnitude larger than the pulse backscattered from the tumor and should be eliminated before processing the signal for the tumor detection and imaging. At present no existing method can efiectively remove this artifact without introducing corruption to the tumor signature. In this paper, a novel method to eliminate this artifact is proposed which employs a frequency domain model to isolate and remove skin related information from the signal. This method is compared with the existing methods of the skin artifact removal in difierent scenarios. The results show that the new method can overcome the shortcomings of the previous methods and improve the detection of the tumor in the sense of the tumor to clutter response ratio.