Insights from computational modelling and simulation towards promoting public health among African countries

One of the problems associated with some African countries is the increasing trend of road mortality as a result of road fatalities. This has been a major concern. The negative impacts of these on public health cannot be underestimated. An issue of concern is the high record of casualties being recorded on an annual basis as a result of over-speeding, overtaking at dangerous bends, alcohol influence and non-chalant attitude of drivers to driving. The aim of this research is to explore and adapt the knowledge of finite state algorithm, modeling and simulation to design and implement a novel prototype of an advanced traffic light system towards promoting public health among African countries. Here, we specify and built a model of an advanced wireless traffic control system, which will help complement existing traffic control systems among African countries. This prototype is named Advanced Wireless Traffic Control System (WPDTCS). We developed this model using an event-driven programming approach. The technical details of the model were based on knowledge adapted from the Finite State Automation Transition algorithm. It is expected that the AWTCS will promote the evolution of teaching in modeling, simulation, public safety by offering trainees an advanced pedagogical product. It will also permit to strengthen the collaboration of knowledge from the fields of Computer Science, Public health, and Electrical Engineering. Keywords: public health, public safety, modelling , simulation, pr

Fast Color Quantization Using Weighted Sort-Means Clustering

Color quantization is an important operation with numerous applications in graphics and image processing. Most quantization methods are essentially based on data clustering algorithms. However, despite its popularity as a general purpose clustering algorithm, k-means has not received much respect in the color quantization literature because of its high computational requirements and sensitivity to initialization. In this paper, a fast color quantization method based on k-means is presented. The method involves several modifications to the conventional (batch) k-means algorithm including data reduction, sample weighting, and the use of triangle inequality to speed up the nearest neighbor search. Experiments on a diverse set of images demonstrate that, with the proposed modifications, k-means becomes very competitive with state-of-the-art color quantization methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

On the definition of non-player character behaviour for real-time simulated virtual environments.

Computer games with complex virtual worlds, which are populated by artificial characters and creatures, are the most visible application of artificial intelligence techniques. In recent years game development has been fuelled by dramatic advances in computer graphics hardware which have led to a rise in the quality of real-time computer graphics and increased realism in computer games. As a result of these developments video games are gaining acceptance and cultural significance as a form of art and popular culture. An important factor for the attainment of realism in games is the artificially intelligent behaviour displayed by the virtual entities that populate the games' virtual worlds. It is our firm belief that to further improve the behaviour of virtual entities, game AI development will have to mirror the advances achieved in game graphics. A major contributing factor for these advancements has been the advent of programmable shaders for real-time graphics, which in turn has been significantly simplified by the introduction of higher level programming languages for the creation of shaders. This has demonstrated that a good system can be vastly improved by the addition of a programming language. This thesis presents a similar (syntactic) approach to the definition of the behaviour of virtual entities in computer games. We introduce the term behaviour definition language (BDL), describing a programming language for the definition of game entity behaviour. We specify the requirements for this type of programming language, which are applied to the development and implementation of several behaviour definition languages, culminating in the design of a new game-genre independent behaviour definition (scripting) language. This extension programming language includes several game AI techniques within a single unified system, allowing the use of different methods of behaviour definition. A subset of the language (itself a BDL) was implemented as a proof of concept of this design, providing a framework for the syntactic definition of the behaviour of virtual entities in computer games