The doctoral research abstracts. Vol:6 2014 / Institute of Graduate Studies, UiTM

Congratulations to Institute of Graduate Studies on the continuous efforts to publish the 6th issue of the Doctoral Research Abstracts which ranged from the discipline of science and technology, business and administration to social science and humanities. This issue captures the novelty of research from 52 PhD doctorates receiving their scrolls in the UiTM’s 81st Convocation. This convocation is very significant especially for UiTM since we are celebrating the success of 52 PhD graduands – the highest number ever conferred at any one time. To the 52 doctorates, I would like it to be known that you have most certainly done UiTM proud by journeying through the scholastic path with its endless challenges and impediments, and by persevering right till the very end. This convocation should not be regarded as the end of your highest scholarly achievement and contribution to the body of knowledge but rather as the beginning of embarking into more innovative research from knowledge gained during this academic journey, for the community and country. As alumni of UiTM, we hold you dear to our hearts. The relationship that was once between a student and supervisor has now matured into comrades, forging and exploring together beyond the frontier of knowledge. We wish you all the best in your endeavour and may I offer my congratulations to all the graduands. ‘UiTM sentiasa dihati ku’ Tan Sri Dato’ Sri Prof Ir Dr Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar , FASc, PEng Vice Chancellor Universiti Teknologi MAR

都市の持続可能性に向けた旅行行動と知的移動データ統合に関する包括的研究

過去数十年にわたり世界中で都市の持続可能性がトレンドとなり研究対象となっている．人々は，非効率な天然資源の消費や社会経済活動による環境破壊など，地球環境に有害な活動を行い，これには都市計画や交通計画を始め，多くの分野が密接に関係している．現在では，これらを解決する新技術の開発や応用が広範囲な研究分野で日々取り組まれている．本研究では観光に関する問題を，交通と都市の研究の観点からさまざまなビックデータを使用し，持続可能な都市開発を目標とした具体的な解決策を示した．本研究では都市や地域の持続可能性に資するデータの活用方法として，Wi-Fiパケットセンサーを使用した旅行者にとって魅力的な観光目的地マネジメントに関する研究，およびETCプローブデータを使用した旅行時間の信頼性の観測における天候の影響に関する分析を組み合わせて示した．本論文では，都市の移動性の認知に対して以下に示す3つの研究から，特徴的な結果と有効な分析手法を確立した．1）Wi-Fiパッケージセンシング調査を使用した，広域観光エリアでの周遊パターンのマイニングベースの関連法則の調査，2）Wi-Fi追跡データでの大規模な観光地の持続可能な開発に向けた魅力的な目的地の抽出，3）ETC2.0プローブデータを使用して，様々な道路タイプを考慮した旅行の信頼性に対する降雪の影響の評価．以上の研究から，複数視点の考察を積み重ね，包括的な評価と提案を行い，いくつかの重要な結果が得られた．この論文の貢献は，より良い社会への問題解決への糸口となり，今後の政策立案者にとって有意義な内容となるだろう．According to sustainability, the trend is spreading out around the world for past decades. There are many area subjects involved, such as city planning, transportation planning, and so on, because people realized human activities harmful to the environment by consuming natural resources with less efficiency process or damage environment by social and economic movements. Currently, emerging technologies considered for the proactive procedure in extensive study areas regarding new technology application and knowledge based. In term of transport and urban study, including tourism concerns, we used intelligent data from deferent sources to be demonstrating the possible solutions which involve sustainable urban development concept. In this study, as a method of utilizing data that contributes to the sustainability of cities and regions, consideration of attractive destination management for tourists by using wireless probe data, and the weather impact on travel time reliability observation by using electronic toll collection probe data, it represented as combination experiments throughout comprehensive study. This dissertation addressed three contribution studies to the composed acknowledgment of urban mobility, and it obtained the intelligent data and specific method of research-based. It consists of; 1) an association rule mining-based exploration of travel patterns in wide tourism areas using a Wi-Fi package sensing survey, 2) Attractive destinations mining towards massive tourism area sustainable development on Wi-Fi tracking data, and 3) Assessment of the impact of snowfall on travel reliability considering different road types using ETC2.0 probe data. Hence, a stack of varying viewpoints researches provided a comprehensive review and suggestion throughout significant results. The contribution of this dissertation could be an advantage substance for strategy and policies planner to recognize alternative solutions leading to a better society.室蘭工業大学 (Muroran Institute of Technology)博士（工学

Predicting halal cosmetics purchase intention among consumers in Johor Darul Takzim

Although there is a vast and growing number of literature reviews towards the consumer purchase intention, most of these empirical studies were focused more on the conventional purposes rather than purchase intentions for halal cosmetic products. Thus, the objectives of this research are: (1) to identify the influence of attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, knowledge, safety, and purity towards the intention to purchase halal cosmetic product among consumers, (2) to examine the moderating role of education level between the selected variables (attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control) and the intention to purchase halal cosmetic product among consumers, and (3) to propose a framework for halal cosmetic products. In this quantitative research study, a structured questionnaire using a 5-point Likert Scale was used as an instrument for the data collection. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed to consumers in Johor with a response rate of 99.5%. The data was analysed using Partial Least Squares Model Analysis (PLS-SEM). The findings indicated that attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, knowledge, and purity were found to be positively associated with, and being an influential predictor of purchase intention of halal cosmetic products. Education level was found to be a significant moderator of association between attitude and purchase intention of halal cosmetic products. This study also provides further insights of potential marketing strategies by halal cosmetic product manufacturers, as well as the prospective halal cosmetic industry in Malaysia as a whole

Intelligent maintenance management in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment using multi-agent systems

Thesis (M. Tech.) -- Central University of Technology, Free State, 2010Traditional corrective maintenance is both costly and ineffective. In some situations it is more cost effective to replace a device than to maintain it; however it is far more likely that the cost of the device far outweighs the cost of performing routine maintenance. These device related costs coupled with the profit loss due to reduced production levels, makes this reactive maintenance approach unacceptably inefficient in many situations. Blind predictive maintenance without considering the actual physical state of the hardware is an improvement, but is still far from ideal. Simply maintaining devices on a schedule without taking into account the operational hours and workload can be a costly mistake. The inefficiencies associated with these approaches have contributed to the development of proactive maintenance strategies. These approaches take the device health state into account. For this reason, proactive maintenance strategies are inherently more efficient compared to the aforementioned traditional approaches. Predicting the health degradation of devices allows for easier anticipation of the required maintenance resources and costs. Maintenance can also be scheduled to accommodate production needs. This work represents the design and simulation of an intelligent maintenance management system that incorporates device health prognosis with maintenance schedule generation. The simulation scenario provided prognostic data to be used to schedule devices for maintenance. A production rule engine was provided with a feasible starting schedule. This schedule was then improved and the process was determined by adhering to a set of criteria. Benchmarks were conducted to show the benefit of optimising the starting schedule and the results were presented as proof. Improving on existing maintenance approaches will result in several benefits for an organisation. Eliminating the need to address unexpected failures or perform maintenance prematurely will ensure that the relevant resources are available when they are required. This will in turn reduce the expenditure related to wasted maintenance resources without compromising the health of devices or systems in the organisation

ATHENA Research Book

The ATHENA European University is an alliance of nine Higher Education Institutions with the mission of fostering excellence in research and innovation by facilitating international cooperation. The ATHENA acronym stands for Advanced Technologies in Higher Education Alliance. The partner institutions are from France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, and Slovenia: the University of Orléans, the University of Siegen, the Hellenic Mediterranean University, the Niccolò Cusano University, the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, and the University of Maribor. In 2022 institutions from Poland and Spain joined the alliance: the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University and the University of Vigo. This research book presents a selection of the ATHENA university partners' research activities. It incorporates peer-reviewed original articles, reprints and student contributions. The ATHENA Research Book provides a platform that promotes joint and interdisciplinary research projects of both advanced and early-career researchers

Preference mining techniques for customer behavior analysis

The thesis has studied a number of critical problems in data mining for customer behavior analysis and has proposed novel techniques for better modeling of the customers’ decision making process, more efficient analysis of their travel behavior, and more effective identification of their emerging preference

Term Association Modelling in Information Retrieval

Many traditional Information Retrieval (IR) models assume that query terms are independent of each other. For those models, a document is normally represented as a bag of words/terms and their frequencies. Although traditional retrieval models can achieve reasonably good performance in many applications, the corresponding independence assumption has limitations. There are some recent studies that investigate how to model term associations/dependencies by proximity measures. However, the modeling of term associations theoretically under the probabilistic retrieval framework is still largely unexplored. In this thesis, I propose a new concept named Cross Term, to model term proximity, with the aim of boosting retrieval performance. With Cross Terms, the association of multiple query terms can be modeled in the same way as a simple unigram term. In particular, an occurrence of a query term is assumed to have an impact on its neighboring text. The degree of the query term impact gradually weakens with increasing distance from the place of occurrence. Shape functions are used to characterize such impacts. Based on this assumption, I first propose a bigram CRoss TErm Retrieval (CRTER2) model for probabilistic IR and a Language model based model CRTER2LM. Specifically, a bigram Cross Term occurs when the corresponding query terms appear close to each other, and its impact can be modeled by the intersection of the respective shape functions of the query terms. Second, I propose a generalized n-gram CRoss TErm Retrieval (CRTERn) model recursively for n query terms where n>2. For n-gram Cross Term, I develop several distance metrics with different properties and employ them in the proposed models for ranking. Third, an enhanced context-sensitive proximity model is proposed to boost the CRTER models, where the contextual relevance of term proximity is studied. The models are validated on several large standard data sets, and show improved performance over other state-of-art approaches. I also discusse the practical impact of the proposed models. The approaches in this thesis can also provide helpful benefit for term association modeling in other domains

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on ASEAN (IC-ASEAN) "Towards a better ASEAN", September 5-6, 2019; Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia

Since the establishment of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) as a regional organization in 1967, it has played a significant role most importantly related to regional affairs and has also given notable contribution to the international arena. Undisputedly, ASEAN has been successfully fostering good relations among its members since its foundation. After completing the first period of its vision of an integrated regional community (ASEAN Community 2015), ASEAN is now preparing for the launch of ASEAN Community Vision 2025, supported by ASEAN Connectivity 2025. As a study center focusing primarily and solely on ASEAN, in collaboration with the Directorate General of ASEAN Cooperation, Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Center of ASEAN Studies Andalas University, will be hosting the International Conference on ASEAN (IC-ASEAN) as a platform to evaluate past actions, to discuss present issues, and to provide an outlook for the future of ASEAN. Aims and Scope The International Conference on ASEAN (IC-ASEAN) is a multidisciplinary conference which covers a broad range of area. The sub theme will be divided into two large categories focusing on ASEAN Community 2015 and 2025 also ASEAN Connectivity 2025. The sub theme related to ASEAN Community will cover issues related to the three pillars (Political-security Community, Economic Community and Social-cultural Community). Meanwhile the ASEAN Connectivity sub theme will include issues within the key areas (Physical Connectivity, Institutional Connectivity and People-to-people Connectivity