End-users' personalization potentials and factors towards effective housing occupancy

Developing countries commonly incorporate strategies for growth involving smooth transformation agendas, particularly, with respect to housing occupancy. Occupancy issues among low and middle income earners posed challenges to housing development, despite huge investments and regulation by governments in providing quality housing for the citizens. Moreover, there still exist problems of effective housing occupancy with the low and middle income earners. Also, non-occupancy of developed houses in the Malaysian context further compounded these challenges. Therefore, this study investigated end-users‘ personalization potentials and factors contributing to efficient housing occupancy. These factors were sourced through literature review, policy documents along with experts‘ opinions till consensus was reached. Thereafter, an instrument based on Structural Equation Model (SEM) was designed and administered to a total of 247 respondents. Subsequently, the inter-relationships between and within these factors were fully investigated and validated towards developing an effective integrated Housing Occupancy Model (HOM). The five consensus factors are satisfaction, environmental condition, subjective norm to occupancy, attitude towards occupancy and personalization. The Goodness of Fit statistics from the SEM showed that four out of seven investigated inter-relationships were supported, directly and positively related. While one of them, is supported, but negatively related; whereas the remaining three were not supported. The validation of the integrated HOM was similarly achieved through these findings. Furthermore, the findings showed that both satisfaction and attitude towards occupancy were separately and directly related to housing occupancy. Consequently, personalization is directly related to satisfaction. However, personalization is indirectly related to housing occupancy through satisfaction. Additionally, environmental condition and subjective norm to occupancy were separately not related, whereas attitude towards occupancy is also not related to subjective norm to occupancy. The outcome of this HOM will help in effective public housing delivery and occupancy among the income earners. In addition, it would be beneficial to policy makers, academicians and professionals in arriving at sustainable housing decisions relating to occupancy issues in Malaysia. The integrated HOM provides better understanding of these occupancy issues to the stakeholder

Automatic design of analogue circuits

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Evolvable Hardware (EHW) is a promising area in electronics today. Evolutionary Algorithms (EA), together with a circuit simulation tool or real hardware, automatically designs a circuit for a given problem. The circuits evolved may have unconventional designs and be less dependent on the personal knowledge of a designer. Nowadays, EA are represented by Genetic Algorithms (GA), Genetic Programming (GP) and Evolutionary Strategy (ES). While GA is definitely the most popular tool, GP has rapidly developed in recent years and is notable by its outstanding results. However, to date the use of ES for analogue circuit synthesis has been limited to a few applications. This work is devoted to exploring the potential of ES to create novel analogue designs. The narrative of the thesis starts with a framework of an ES-based system generating simple circuits, such as low pass filters. Then it continues with a step-by-step progression to increasingly sophisticated designs that require additional strength from the system. Finally, it describes the modernization of the system using novel techniques that enable the synthesis of complex multi-pin circuits that are newly evolved. It has been discovered that ES has strong power to synthesize analogue circuits. The circuits evolved in the first part of the thesis exceed similar results made previously using other techniques in a component economy, in the better functioning of the evolved circuits and in the computing power spent to reach the results. The target circuits for evolution in the second half are chosen by the author to challenge the capability of the developed system. By functioning, they do not belong to the conventional analogue domain but to applications that are usually adopted by digital circuits. To solve the design tasks, the system has been gradually developed to support the ability of evolving increasingly complex circuits. As a final result, a state-of-the-art ES-based system has been developed that possesses a novel mutation paradigm, with an ability to create, store and reuse substructures, to adapt the mutation, selection parameters and population size, utilize automatic incremental evolution and use the power of parallel computing. It has been discovered that with the ability to synthesis the most up-to-date multi-pin complex analogue circuits that have ever been automatically synthesized before, the system is capable of synthesizing circuits that are problematic for conventional design with application domains that lay beyond the conventional application domain for analogue circuits

Anales del XIII Congreso Argentino de Ciencias de la Computación (CACIC)

Contenido: Arquitecturas de computadoras Sistemas embebidos Arquitecturas orientadas a servicios (SOA) Redes de comunicaciones Redes heterogéneas Redes de Avanzada Redes inalámbricas Redes móviles Redes activas Administración y monitoreo de redes y servicios Calidad de Servicio (QoS, SLAs) Seguridad informática y autenticación, privacidad Infraestructura para firma digital y certificados digitales Análisis y detección de vulnerabilidades Sistemas operativos Sistemas P2P Middleware Infraestructura para grid Servicios de integración (Web Services o .Net)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI