Penguasaan kemahiran generik di kalangan graduan hospitaliti di politeknik : satu kajian berkenaan keperluan industri perhotelan, persepsi pensyarah dan pelajar

Kajian yang dijalankan ini bertujuan untuk mengenal pasti kepentingan kemahiran generik mengikut keperluan industri perhotelan di Malaysia dengan persepsi pensyarah dan persepsi pelajar Jabatan Hospitaliti. Oleh kerana matlamat kurikulum pendidikan kini adalah untuk melahirkan graduan yang dapat memenuhi keperluan pihak industri, maka kajian ini dijalankan untuk menilai hubungan di antara keperluan industri perhotelan di Malaysia dengan persepsi pensyarah dan pelajar Jabatan Hospitaliti di Politeknik. Terdapat 13 kemahiran generik yang diperolehi daripada Kementerian Pelajaran dan Latihan Ontario (1997) dijadikan sebagai skop kepada instrumen kajian. Responden kajian terdiri daripada tiga pihak utama iaitu industri perhotelan di Malaysia yang melibatkan 40 buah hotel yang diwakili oleh MAH Chapter dan jawatankuasa dalam Malaysian Associated of Hotel (MAH), pensyarah Unit Hotel dan Katering dan pelajar semester akhir Diploma Hotel dan Katering di Politeknik Johor Bahru, Johor dan Politeknik Merlimau, Melaka. Kajian rintis yang dijalankan menunjukkan nilai Alpha Cronbach pada 0.8781. Data yang diperolehi dianalisis secara deskriptif dan inferensi dengan menggunakan perisian Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) versi 11.5. Melalui dapatan kajian, satu senarai berkenaan kemahiran generik yang diperlukan oleh industri perhotelan telah dapat dihasilkan. Selain itu, senarai kemahiran generik menurut persepsi pensyarah dan juga persepsi pelajar turut dihasilkan. Hasil statistik dan graf garis yang diperolehi menunjukkan terdapat perbezaan di antara kemahiran generik yang diperlukan oleh industri perhotelan di Malaysia dengan kemahiran generik menurut persepsi pensyarah dan persepsi pelajar Politeknik. Dapatan analisis menggunakan korelasi Pearson mendapati bahawa tidak terdapat perhubungan yang signifikan di antara kemahiran generik yang diperlukan oleh industri perhotelan dengan persepsi pensyarah dan persepsi pelajar. Namun begitu, terdapat hubungan yang signifikan di antara persepsi pensyarah dengan persepsi pelajar berkenaan dengan amalan kemahiran generik di Politeknik

A framework for Thinking about Distributed Cognition

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for different a reason: due its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and (re)visit famous landmarks

A new approach for designing self-organizing systems and application to adaptive control

There is tremendous interest in the design of intelligent machines capable of autonomous learning and skillful performance under complex environments. A major task in designing such systems is to make the system plastic and adaptive when presented with new and useful information and stable in response to irrelevant events. A great body of knowledge, based on neuro-physiological concepts, has evolved as a possible solution to this problem. Adaptive resonance theory (ART) is a classical example under this category. The system dynamics of an ART network is described by a set of differential equations with nonlinear functions. An approach for designing self-organizing networks characterized by nonlinear differential equations is proposed

Meta-heuristic algorithms in car engine design: a literature survey

Meta-heuristic algorithms are often inspired by natural phenomena, including the evolution of species in Darwinian natural selection theory, ant behaviors in biology, flock behaviors of some birds, and annealing in metallurgy. Due to their great potential in solving difficult optimization problems, meta-heuristic algorithms have found their way into automobile engine design. There are different optimization problems arising in different areas of car engine management including calibration, control system, fault diagnosis, and modeling. In this paper we review the state-of-the-art applications of different meta-heuristic algorithms in engine management systems. The review covers a wide range of research, including the application of meta-heuristic algorithms in engine calibration, optimizing engine control systems, engine fault diagnosis, and optimizing different parts of engines and modeling. The meta-heuristic algorithms reviewed in this paper include evolutionary algorithms, evolution strategy, evolutionary programming, genetic programming, differential evolution, estimation of distribution algorithm, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, memetic algorithms, and artificial immune system

A neuro-fuzzy architecture for real-time applications

Neural networks and fuzzy expert systems perform the same task of functional mapping using entirely different approaches. Each approach has certain unique features. The ability to learn specific input-output mappings from large input/output data possibly corrupted by noise and the ability to adapt or continue learning are some important features of neural networks. Fuzzy expert systems are known for their ability to deal with fuzzy information and incomplete/imprecise data in a structured, logical way. Since both of these techniques implement the same task (that of functional mapping--we regard 'inferencing' as one specific category under this class), a fusion of the two concepts that retains their unique features while overcoming their individual drawbacks will have excellent applications in the real world. In this paper, we arrive at a new architecture by fusing the two concepts. The architecture has the trainability/adaptibility (based on input/output observations) property of the neural networks and the architectural features that are unique to fuzzy expert systems. It also does not require specific information such as fuzzy rules, defuzzification procedure used, etc., though any such information can be integrated into the architecture. We show that this architecture can provide better performance than is possible from a single two or three layer feedforward neural network. Further, we show that this new architecture can be used as an efficient vehicle for hardware implementation of complex fuzzy expert systems for real-time applications. A numerical example is provided to show the potential of this approach

Designing fuzzy rule based classifier using self-organizing feature map for analysis of multispectral satellite images

We propose a novel scheme for designing fuzzy rule based classifier. An SOFM based method is used for generating a set of prototypes which is used to generate a set of fuzzy rules. Each rule represents a region in the feature space that we call the context of the rule. The rules are tuned with respect to their context. We justified that the reasoning scheme may be different in different context leading to context sensitive inferencing. To realize context sensitive inferencing we used a softmin operator with a tunable parameter. The proposed scheme is tested on several multispectral satellite image data sets and the performance is found to be much better than the results reported in the literature.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure