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.     

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.     

A model to measure QoE for virtual personal assistant

Until now the virtual assistants (like Siri, Google Now and Cortana) have primarily been confined to voice input and output only. Is there a justification for voice only confinement or can we enhance the user experience by adding a visual output? We hypothesized that providing a higher level of visual/auditory immersion would enhance the quality of user experience. In order to test this hypothesis, we first developed 4 variants of virtual assistant, each with a different audio/visual level of immersion. Developed virtual assistant systems were the following; audio only, audio and 2D visual display, audio and 3D visual display and audio and immersive 3D visual display. We developed a plan for usability testing of all 4 variants. The usability testing was conducted with 30 subjects against eight (8) dependent variables included presence, involvement, attention, reliability, dependency, easiness, satisfaction and expectations. Each subject rated these dependent variables based on a scale of 1–5, 5 being the highest value. The raw data collected from usability testing was then analyzed through several tools in order to determine the factors contributing towards the quality of experience for each of the 4 variants. The significant factors were then used develop a model that measures the quality of user experience. It was found that each variant had a different set of significant variables. Hence, in order to rate each system there is a need to develop a scale that is dependent upon the unique set of variables for the respective variant. Furthermore, it was found that variant 4 scored the highest rate for Quality of Experience (QoE). Lastly several other qualitative conclusions were also drawn from this research that will guide future work in the field of virtual assistants.     

Fuzzy based multi-criteria vertical handover decision modeling in heterogeneous wireless networks

Vertical handover gain significant importance due to the enhancements in mobility models by the Fourth Generation (4G) technologies. However, these enhancements are limited to specific scenarios and hence do not provide support for generic mobility. Similarly, various schemes are proposed based on these mobility models but most of them are suffered from the high packet loss, frequent handovers, too early and late handovers, inappropriate network selection, etc. To address these challenges, a generic vertical handover management scheme for heterogeneous wireless networks is proposed in this article. The proposed scheme works in three phases. In the first phase, a handover triggering approach is designed to identify the appropriate place for initiating handover based on the estimated coverage area of a WLAN access point or cellular base station. In the second phase, fuzzy rule based system is designed to eliminate the inappropriate networks before deciding an optimal network for handover. In the third phase, a network selection scheme is developed based on the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) decision mechanism. Various parameters such as delay, jitter, Bit Error Rate (BER), packet loss, communication cost, response time, and network load are considered for selecting an optimal network. The proposed scheme is tested in a mobility scenario with different speeds of a mobile node ranging from very low to very high. The simulation results are compared with the existing decision models used for network selection and handover triggering approaches. The proposed scheme outperforms these schemes in terms of energy consumption, handover delay and time, packet loss, good put, etc.