Anti-periodic fractional boundary value problems

We study a class of anti-periodic boundary value problems of fractional differential equations. Some existence and uniqueness results are obtained by applying some standard fixed point principles. Several examples are given to illustrate the results.     

Numerical method using cubic B-spline for the heat and wave equation

In the present paper, the cubic B-splines method is considered for solving one-dimensional heat and wave equations. A typical finite difference approach had been used to discretize the time derivative while the cubic B-spline is applied as an interpolation function in the space dimension. The accuracy of the method for both equations is discussed. The efficiency of the method is illustrated by some test problems. The numerical results are found to be in good agreement with the exact solution.     

High responsivity silicon MOS phototransistors

We describe a metal-oxide silicon (MOS) phototransistor that relies on a novel lateral doping scheme that creates a p-i-n junction configuration for light detection. This is essentially a hybrid device with the horizontal structure of a p-i-n diode and the vertical structure of a MOS field-effect transistor. The lateral p-i-n diode detects light whereas the gate can be used to change the current flowing through the device; making it appear as a MOSFET. This feature makes it easy to integrate it with other conventional MOSFETs on a CMOS process flow. The device shows high optical responsivities that persist to wavelengths in the near-ultraviolet region. The fabrication of the device as well as its electrical and optical characteristics is described.     

Exploring the relationship between Internet ethics in university students and the big five model of personality

The widespread use of the Internet and the convenient mechanism it provides, such as easy access, easy downloads, and easy copy and paste functions have made many types of unethical behaviors easier, particularly those involving students in academic settings. Among the issues in ethics within the academic environment that can be triggered by the Internet are fraudulence, plagiarism, falsification, delinquency, unauthorized help, and facility misuse. Given these issues, the study seeks to investigate the extent to which students at a public university in Malaysia engage in such unethical behavior and their relationship with the big five personality model. This study was conducted using a survey method of 252 students in three different academic faculties. The results of factor analyses confirm and refine the reliability of the scales for both big five personality variables and unethical Internet behaviors as conceptualized through Internet triggered academic dishonesty (ITADS). The findings indicate that personality traits such as (1) agreeableness, (2) conscientiousness and (3) emotional stability are significantly and negatively correlated with unethical Internet behavior in university students. Significant differences in facility misuse are also observed between the three academic faculties investigated. This research should provide significant contributions to educators in designing the computer ethics curriculum and in allowing for educational institutions as well as other organizations in developing relevant policies and guidelines on matters pertaining to academic conduct, utilization of computers and Internet, and recruitment exercises.     

Mobility-Aware RSVP: A framework for improving the performance of multimedia services over wireless IP-based mobile networks

This paper proposes the Mobility-Aware Resource Reservation Protocol (MARSVP) in which mobility and QoS signaling are performed as a single functional block. The key concept of MARSVP is to convey mobility-specific information (binding updates and their associated acknowledgments) by using newly defined RSVP objects embedded in existing RSVP messages. An appealing feature of MARSVP is that it adheres to the current RSVP standard (RFC 2205) and thus requires minimal changes to end nodes without affecting any of the conventional RSVP routers in between. The proposed mechanism is evaluated using a simulation model for application-level performance and an analytical model for network-level signaling cost. Simulation results indicate a 27.9% improvement in QoS interruption when using Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), 12.5% when using Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), and no improvement when using Fast Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6). On the network-level, signaling cost savings of 9.4% and 11.9% are achieved for MIPv6 and HMIPv6, respectively, while FMIPv6 achieves savings of 17.9% when using Voice-over-IP traffic and 26.7% for Video-over-IP traffic. The results of the conducted studies indicate MARSVP’s superiority to conventional RSVP when deployed over wireless networks.     

Leader-follower consensus control of Lipschitz nonlinear systems by output feedback

This paper deals with the leader-follower consensus problem of Lipschitz nonlinear systems under fixed directed communication networks. Both state and output feedback control are proposed based on state and output measurements of neighbouring agents, respectively. Laplacian matrix features are explored for the stability analysis, and the sufficient conditions are derived to solve the consensus problem. Finally, simulation results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the output-based consensus controller.     

Formulating efficient software solution for digital image processing system

Digital image processing systems are complex, being usually composed of different computer vision libraries. Algorithm implementations cannot be directly used in conjunction with algorithms developed using other computer vision libraries. This paper formulates a software solution by proposing a processor with the capability of handling different types of image processing algorithms, which allow the end users to install new image processing algorithms from any library. This approach has other functionalities like capability to process one or more images, manage multiple processing jobs simultaneously and maintain the manner in which an image was processed for later use. It is a computational efficient and promising technique to handle variety of image processing algorithms. To promote the reusability and adaptation of the package for new types of analysis, a feature of sustainability is established. The framework is integrated and tested on a medical imaging application, and the software is made freely available for the reader. Future work involves introducing the capability to connect to another instance of processing service with better performance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

User Activities Outliers Detection; Integration of Statistical and Computational Intelligence Techniques

In this article, a hybrid technique for user activities outliers detection is introduced. The hybrid technique consists of a two‐stage integration of principal component analysis and fuzzy rule‐based systems. In the first stage, the Hamming distance is used to measure the differences between different activities. Principal component analysis is then applied to the distance measures to find two indices of Hotelling's T² and squared prediction error. In the second stage of the process, the calculated indices are provided as inputs to the fuzzy rule‐based systems to model them heuristically. The model is used to identify the outliers and classify them. The proposed system is tested in real home environments, equipped with appropriate sensory devices, to identify outliers in the activities of daily living of the user. Three case studies are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The proposed system successfully identifies the outliers in activities distinguishing between the normal and abnormal behavioral patterns.     

Blind digital watermarking in PDF documents using Spread Transform Dither Modulation

In this paper, a blind digital watermarking scheme for Portable Document Format (PDF) documents is proposed. The proposed method is based on a variant Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) method called Spread Transform Dither Modulation (STDM). Each bit of the secret message is embedded into a group of characters, more specifically in their x-coordinate values. The method exhibits experiments of two opposite objectives: transparency and robustness, and is motivated to present an acceptable distortion value that shows sufficient robustness under high density noises attacks while preserving sufficient transparency.