Leadership capability of team leaders in construction industry

This research was conducted to identify the important leadership capabilities for Malaysia construction industry team leaders. This research used exploratory sequential mix-method research design which is qualitative followed by quantitative research method. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured in-depth interview was selected and purposive sampling was employed in selecting 15 research participants involving team leaders and Human Resource Managers. Qualitative data was analysed using content and thematic analyses. Quantitative data was collected using survey questionnaire involving 171 randomly selected team leaders as respondents. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics consisting of t-test, One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson Correlation, Multiple Regression and Structured Equation Modeling (SEM). This study found that personal integrity, working within industry, customer focus and quality, communication and interpersonal skill, developing and empowering people and working as a team were needed leadership capabilities among construction industry team leaders. The research was also able to prove that leadership skill is a key element to develop leadership capability. A framework was developed based on the results of this study, which can be used as a guide by employers and relevant agencies in enhancing leadership capability of Malaysia construction industry team leade

Effect of nano black rice husk ash on the chemical and physical properties of porous concrete pavement

Black rice husk is a waste from this agriculture industry. It has been found that majority inorganic element in rice husk is silica. In this study, the effect of Nano from black rice husk ash (BRHA) on the chemical and physical properties of concrete pavement was investigated. The BRHA produced from uncontrolled burning at rice factory was taken. It was then been ground using laboratory mill with steel balls and steel rods. Four different grinding grades of BRHA were examined. A rice husk ash dosage of 10% by weight of binder was used throughout the experiments. The chemical and physical properties of the Nano BRHA mixtures were evaluated using fineness test, X-ray Fluorescence spectrometer (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). In addition, the compressive strength test was used to evaluate the performance of porous concrete pavement. Generally, the results show that the optimum grinding time was 63 hours. The result also indicated that the use of Nano black rice husk ash ground for 63hours produced concrete with good strengt

Recognizing Patterns of Music Signals to Songs Classification Using Modified AIS-Based Classifier

Human capabilities of recognizing different type of music and grouping them into categories of genre are so remarkable that experts in music can perform such classification using their hearing senses and logical judgment. For decades now, the scientific community were involved in research to automate the human process of recognizing genre of songs. These efforts would normally imitate the human method of recognizing the music by considering every essential component of the songs from artist voice, melody of the music through to the type of instruments used. As a result, various approaches or mechanisms are introduced and developed to automate the classification process. The results of these studies so far have been remarkable yet can still be improved. The aim of this research is to investigate Artificial Immune System (AIS) domain by focusing on the modified AIS-based classifier to solve this problem where the focuses are the censoring and monitoring modules. In this highlight, stages of music recognition are emphasized where feature extraction, feature selection, and feature classification processes are explained. Comparison of performances between proposed classifier and WEKA application is discussed

Indonesian Music Classification on Folk and Dangdut Genre Based on Rolloff Spectral Feature Using Support Vector Machine (SVM) Algorithm

Music Genre Classification is one of the interesting digital music processing topics. Genre is a category of artistry, in this case, especially music, to characterize and categorize music is now available in various forms and sources. One of the applications is in determining the music genre classification on folk songs and dangdut songs.The main problem in the classification music genre is to find a combination of features and classifiers that can provide the best result in classifying music files into music genres. So we need to develop methods and algorithms that can classify genres appropriately. This problem can be solved by using the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The genre classification process begins by selecting the song file that will be classified by the genre, then the preprocessing process, the collection features by utilizing feature extraction, and the last process is Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification process to produce genre types from selected song files. The final result of this research is to classify Indonesian folk music genre and dangdut music genre along with the 83.3% accuracy values that indicate the level of system relevance to the results of music genre classification and to provide genre labels on music files as to facilitate the management and search of music files

An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Concatenative Sound Synthesis

Sound examples are included with this thesisTechnological advancement such as the increase in processing power, hard disk capacity and network bandwidth has opened up many exciting new techniques to synthesise sounds, one of which is Concatenative Sound Synthesis (CSS). CSS uses data-driven method to synthesise new sounds from a large corpus of small sound snippets. This technique closely resembles the art of mosaicing, where small tiles are arranged together to create a larger image. A ‘target’ sound is often specified by users so that segments in the database that match those of the target sound can be identified and then concatenated together to generate the output sound. Whilst the practicality of CSS in synthesising sounds currently looks promising, there are still areas to be explored and improved, in particular the algorithm that is used to find the matching segments in the database. One of the main issues in CSS is the basis of similarity, as there are many perceptual attributes which sound similarity can be based on, for example it can be based on timbre, loudness, rhythm, and tempo and so on. An ideal CSS system needs to be able to decipher which of these perceptual attributes are anticipated by the users and then accommodate them by synthesising sounds that are similar with respect to the particular attribute. Failure to communicate the basis of sound similarity between the user and the CSS system generally results in output that mismatches the sound which has been envisioned by the user. In order to understand how humans perceive sound similarity, several elements that affected sound similarity judgment were first investigated. Of the four elements tested (timbre, melody, loudness, tempo), it was found that the basis of similarity is dependent on humans’ musical training where musicians based similarity on the timbral information, whilst non-musicians rely on melodic information. Thus, for the rest of the study, only features that represent the timbral information were included, as musicians are the target user for the findings of this study. Another issue with the current state of CSS systems is the user control flexibility, in particular during segment matching, where features can be assigned with different weights depending on their importance to the search. Typically, the weights (in some existing CSS systems that support the weight assigning mechanism) can only be assigned manually, resulting in a process that is both labour intensive and time consuming. Additionally, another problem was identified in this study, which is the lack of mechanism to handle homosonic and equidistant segments. These conditions arise when too few features are compared causing otherwise aurally different sounds to be represented by the same sonic values, or can also be a result of rounding off the values of the features extracted. This study addresses both of these problems through an extended use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Analysis Hierarchy Process (AHP) is employed to enable order dependent features selection, allowing weights to be assigned for each audio feature according to their relative importance. Concatenation distance is used to overcome the issues with homosonic and equidistant sound segments. The inclusion of AI results in a more intelligent system that can better handle tedious tasks and minimize human error, allowing users (composers) to worry less of the mundane tasks, and focusing more on the creative aspects of music making. In addition to the above, this study also aims to enhance user control flexibility in a CSS system and improve similarity result. The key factors that affect the synthesis results of CSS were first identified and then included as parametric options which users can control in order to communicate their intended creations to the system to synthesise. Comprehensive evaluations were carried out to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solutions (timbral-based features set, AHP, and concatenation distance). The final part of the study investigates the relationship between perceived sound similarity and perceived sound interestingness. A new framework that integrates all these solutions, the query-based CSS framework, was then proposed. The proof-of-concept of this study, ConQuer, was developed based on this framework. This study has critically analysed the problems in existing CSS systems. Novel solutions have been proposed to overcome them and their effectiveness has been tested and discussed, and these are also the main contributions of this study.Malaysian Minsitry of Higher Education, Universiti Putra Malaysi

A Bio-Inspired Music Genre Classification Framework using Modified AIS-Based Classifier

For decades now, scientific community are involved in various works to automate the human process of recognizing different types of music using different elements for example different instruments used. These efforts would imitate the human method of recognizing the music by considering every essential component of the songs from artist voice, melody of the music through to the type of instruments used. Various approaches or mechanisms are introduced and developed to automate the classification process since then. The results of these studies so far have been remarkable yet can still be improved. The aim of this research is to investigate Artificial Immune System (AIS) domain by focusing on the modified AIS-based classifier to solve this problem where the focuses are the censoring and monitoring modules. In this highlight, stages of music recognition are emphasized where feature extraction, feature selection, and feature classification processes are explained. Comparison of performances between proposed classifier and WEKA application is discussed. Almost 20 to 30 percent of classification accuracies are increased in this study

Medical Data Classification Using Similarity Measure of Fuzzy Soft Set Based Distance Measure

Medical data classification plays a crucial role in many medical imaging applications by automating or facilitating the delineation of medical images. A considerable amount of literature has been published on medical images classification based on data mining techniques to develop intelligent medical decision support systems to help the physicians. This paper assesses the performance of a new classification algorithm using similarity measure fuzzy soft set based distance based for numerical medical datasets. The proposed modelling comprises of five phases explicitly: data acquisition, data pre-processing, data partitioning, classification using FussCyier and performance evaluation. The proposed classifier FussCyier is evaluated on five performance matrices’: accuracy, precision, recall, F-Micro and computational time. Experimental results indicate that the proposed classifier performed comparatively better with existing fuzzy soft classifiers

Automatic transcription of traditional Turkish art music recordings: A computational ethnomusicology appraoach

Thesis (Doctoral)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Izmir, 2012Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 96-109)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxi, 131 leavesMusic Information Retrieval (MIR) is a recent research field, as an outcome of the revolutionary change in the distribution of, and access to the music recordings. Although MIR research already covers a wide range of applications, MIR methods are primarily developed for western music. Since the most important dimensions of music are fundamentally different in western and non-western musics, developing MIR methods for non-western musics is a challenging task. On the other hand, the discipline of ethnomusicology supplies some useful insights for the computational studies on nonwestern musics. Therefore, this thesis overcomes this challenging task within the framework of computational ethnomusicology, a new emerging interdisciplinary research domain. As a result, the main contribution of this study is the development of an automatic transcription system for traditional Turkish art music (Turkish music) for the first time in the literature. In order to develop such system for Turkish music, several subjects are also studied for the first time in the literature which constitute other contributions of the thesis: Automatic music transcription problem is considered from the perspective of ethnomusicology, an automatic makam recognition system is developed and the scale theory of Turkish music is evaluated computationally for nine makamlar in order to understand whether it can be used for makam detection. Furthermore, there is a wide geographical region such as Middle-East, North Africa and Asia sharing similarities with Turkish music. Therefore our study would also provide more relevant techniques and methods than the MIR literature for the study of these non-western musics

An investigation into the influence of the "Cape Malay" child's cultural heritage upon his taste in appreciating music, with a proposed adaptation of the music curricula in South African schools to reflect a possible application of "Cape Malay" music therein

This investigation of a repertory of music, grew out of a need to find a link between the societal structures created, and the activity of a group of people for whom they are intended. Music is a universal phenomenon but has definite cultural boundaries. Ever since the author became a student at the University of Cape Town, he came under the deep impression of differing cultural activities. This dissertation is a result of cultural differences observed by him from childhood, concerning a group of people, who are termed 'Cape Malay', for the lack of a more appropriate term. 'Cape Ma lay' music, which refers to the who le repertory of moppies, ghommaliedjies, nederlandsliedere, ouliedere, £udjies and djiekers of the 'Cape Malay', was observed by him as a way of life of many South Africans. This is not always realised, and it is the hope of the author that educational authorities would try to recognise not only this 'Malay' musica l culture, but also make provision for its inclusion in the syllabus. The basic philosophy which the author has tried to convey, is that education should link up with the pupil's social environment. Allied with this, is an attempt by the author to develop and awareness of 'Malay' music amongst those South Africans who might not be aware of this repertory of music, which is unique in the world. The reading material is extensive, as may be ascerta ined from the lengthy bibliography at the end of this dissertation. Unfortunately, it is not nearly complete. Two very important sources are regrettably not included: A pre liminary thesis by Erica Mugglestone completed for a master's degree at Monash Un iversity in Australia, relating to the topic of this dissertation; and van Warmelo's work, which relates to 'Cape Malay ' music, and fro