This paper reports the developed mobile application through the use of advanced technologies such as mobile computing, cloud computing and Global Positioning System (GPS) in order to solve the challenges. The purpose of this study is find out how the recent advances and mass adoption of ICT by the public can best be leveraged to enhance the performance of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in East Africa. The data collection techniques used are through questionnaires, observations and conducting interviews with different stakeholders in the civil society arena i.e., the donors, the CSOs and the people in society that are given a voice by civil societies. In the system development phase, agile development methodology was used. Analysis of the data collected showed that there is a gap in the availability of a single or a centralized platform which can be easily accessed, user-friendly and reliable where different actors can readily get reliable and up-to-date information about the available CSOs they are interested in. To address this problem, an interactive online directory of CSOs has been developed. The platform is mobile based and enables CSOs to register and fill up their current details, thus ensuring that there is always correct and updated information. The platform is equipped with, among other features, a geo-mapping facility which enables users of the system to correctly geo-locate their civil societies of interest on a map view. The results of system evaluation showed that 88.125% of users were satisfied with the system basing on the evaluation criteria.

We first recall the sufficient conditions for the existence of a periodic output of a modified Elman neural network with a periodic input found by using Mawhin’s continuation theorem of coincidence degree theory. Using this result, we obtain sufficient conditions for the existence of a periodic output for an output hidden feedback Elman neural network with a periodic input. Examples illustrating these sufficient conditions are given.

The purpose of this research is to develop an immersive virtual fitness center as an intervention to promote physical activity and examine its impacts on users’ exercise plans and exercise behaviors. The virtual reality (VR)-based intervention includes three main features: enabling the users to control their avatar, personalizing the avatar to look the same as the user, and visualizing the positive consequences of exercising. We conducted an experiment to randomly assign participants to two treatment groups: experiencing either the self or another person losing weight because of exercising in the virtual environment. The findings demonstrated that the self-avatar group exercised more in the voluntary section than the other-avatar group. However, participants in the self-avatar condition perceived a lower level of sense of presence compared to participants in the other-avatar condition. Compared to people in the control condition who watched and followed the exercise from a workout video, those who exercised in the virtual fitness center, regardless of whether the avatar was based on the self’s image or another person’s image, planned to spend more time on exercising in the following week. Theoretical and practical implications for using VR technology to promote health-related behavioral change, and why personalization decreases perceived sense of presence in the virtual environment are discussed.

In this paper, a method to initiate, develop and visualize an abstract syntax tree (AST) in C++ source code is presented. The approach is in chronological order starting with collection of program codes as a string and split into individual characters using regular expression. This will be followed by separating the token grammar using best first search (BFS) algorithm to determine node having lowest value, lastly followed by graph presentation of intermediate representation achieved with the help of graph visualization software (GraphViz) while former is implemented using python programming language version 3. The efficacy of our approach is used in analyzing C++ code and yielded a satisfactory result.

The main objective of this research is to discuss the current legal and methodological issues in the field of software Re-Usability. Though there are enormous online forums discussing such issues via Q&A but this paper is an attempt to raise the awareness about the legal issues, which a software engineer may trap into. The paper discussed the current issues with software reusability within the legal and methodological context. This paper applied an extensive literature review to critically appraise the past studies to come to a collective conclusion. Prior to discussing the issues, the benefits of reuse were mentioned, including the saving of time and cost for users. But legally the reuse of software assets creates complexities for the user in relation to meeting all the licensing requirements and dealing with the liability in case of a breach. Methodologically, there are major barriers to reused software when it comes to technical competence and managerial issues such as a lack of resources. Even when reusing software to save time, and leverage off the specialization of other authors, the end-user must also have the technical expertise to search, adapt and merge these reusable assets into the larger software infrastructure. The review ultimately shows the high barriers still remain to software reuse which could mean that smaller developers and businesses will still be reluctant to fully utilize open-source components to the best advantage.

In deduplication, index-lookup disk bottleneck is a major obstacle which limits the throughput of backup processes. One way to minimize the effect of this issue and boost speed is to use very high course-grained chunks for deduplication at a cost of low storage saving and limited scalability. Another way is to distribute the deduplication process among multiple nodes but this approach introduces storage node island effect and also incurs high communication cost. In this paper, we explore dCACH, a content-aware clustered and hierarchical deduplication system, which implements a hybrid of inline course grained and offline fine-grained distributed deduplication where routing decisions are made for a set of files instead of single files. It utilizes bloom filters for detecting similarity between a data stream and previous data streams and performs stateful routing which solves the storage node island problem. Moreover, it exploits the negligibly small amount of content shared among chunks from different file types to create groups of files and deduplicate each group in their own fingerprint index space. It implements hierarchical deduplication to reduce the size of fingerprint indexes at the global level, where only files and big sized segments are deduplicated. Locality is created and exploited first using the big sized segments deduplicated at the global level and second by routing a set of consecutive files together to one storage node. Furthermore, the use of bloom filter for similarity detection between streams has low communication and computation cost while it enables to achieve duplicate elimination performance comparable to single node deduplication. dCACH is evaluated using a prototype deployed on a server environment distributed over four separate machines. It is shown to have 10× the speed of Extreme_Binn with a minimal communication overhead, while its duplicate elimination effectiveness is on a par with a single node deduplication system.

This study presents a parameter selection strategy developed for the Stretch-Blow Molding (SBM) process to minimize the weight of preforms used. The method is based on a predictive model developed using Neural Networks. The temperature distribution model of the preform was predicted using a 3-layer NN model with supervised backpropagation learning. In addition, the model was used to predict the uniform air pressure applied inside the preform, taking into account the relationship between the internal air pressure and the volume of the preform. Parameters were validated using in situ tests and measurements performed on several weights and lengths of a 0.330 Liter Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottles. Tests showed that the model adequately predicts both the blowing kinematics, mainly zone temperatures and blowing and stretching pressures along the walls of the bottle while maintaining the bottle strength and top load requirements. In the second step, the model was combined to automatically compute the lowest preform weight that can be used for a particular 330 ml bottle design providing a uniform wall thickness distribution.

We have considered a method called Enhanced Rollback Migration Protocol, which potentially has the effects of compressing the period of compensations in a long-lived transaction, since before. In general, a compensation transaction can recover an irregular status of a long-lived transaction into the original status without holding unnecessary resources by making its consistency tentatively loose. However, it has also been pointed out that there is a difficulty of maintaining the isolation between a pair of transactions when executed in parallel. In particular, this could be more prominent under modernized scalable cloud environments. Thus, there is a proposal for concurrency control for the service level. However, there is still another risk that more computer resources will be consumed than actually necessary and an unnecessary stagnation of the processing will be caused if concurrency control is naively applied without careful consideration. Therefore, we need to implement a functionality which can optimize the processing of a long-lived transaction by selecting a suitable method between concurrency control and compensation transactions. In this paper, we propose a method in which optimistic concurrency control is applied for long-lived transactions. Furthermore, a pair of verification phases is carried out. At the beginning from a safe point, an attempt of verification is done. Then if the difficulty of isolation on a long-lived transaction executed under a competitive situation is estimated, concurrency control for the service level is applied. Alternatively, a long-lived transaction without any concurrency control is executed. At the next reachable safe point, another attempt of verification is performed. Then if a failure of serialization is detected, a set of compensation transactions is invoked to recover the original long-lived transaction by returning to the first safe point. We evaluated this approach by using numerical simulations and confirmed the basic features. This approach can realize optimizing and enhancing the performance of a long-lived transaction. We regard this approach applicable even to the modernized scalable cloud environments.

In semiconductor and electronics factories, large multi-chiller systems are needed to satisfy strict cooling load requirements. In order to save energy, it is worthwhile to design the chilled water system operation. In this paper, an optimal flexible operation scheme is developed based on a two-dimensional time-series model to forecast the cooling load of multi-chiller systems with chiller units of different cooling capacities running in parallel. The optimal integrity scheme can be obtained using the Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming method, which minimizes the energy consumption of the system within a future time period. In order to better adapt the change of cooling load, the operation strategy of regulating the chilled water flowrates is employed. The chilled water flowrates are set as a design variable. When the chillers are running, their chilled water flowrates can vary within limits, whereas the flowrates are zero when the chillers are unloaded. This forecasting method provides integral optimization within a future time period and offers the operating reference for operators. The power and advantages of the proposed method are presented using an industrial case to help readers delve into this matter.

We describe four fundamental challenges that complex real-life Virtual Reality (VR) productions are facing today (such as multi-camera management, quality control, automatic annotation with cinematography and 360˚ depth estimation) and describe an integrated solution, called Hyper 360, to address them. We demonstrate our solution and its evaluation in the context of practical productions and present related results.