610 research outputs found
Situating Learning for Digital Inclusion in the Social Context of Communities
An approach to digital and social inclusion has been developed which situates learning for digital inclusion in the social context of communities. The approach follows views of learning that emphasise the role of the context in learning and the importance of learning in authentic situations. While digital inclusion programs tend to focus more on teaching people how to use computers and the internet, the approach presented takes a different perspective, in which learning for digital inclusion is situated in the social context of the learners and is based on authentic activities. The approach is being applied in Brazilian rural communities
Quality of media traffic over Lossy internet protocol networks: Measurement and improvement.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an active area of research in the world of
communication. The high revenue made by the telecommunication companies is a
motivation to develop solutions that transmit voice over other media rather than
the traditional, circuit switching network.
However, while IP networks can carry data traffic very well due to their besteffort
nature, they are not designed to carry real-time applications such as voice.
As such several degradations can happen to the speech signal before it reaches its
destination. Therefore, it is important for legal, commercial, and technical reasons
to measure the quality of VoIP applications accurately and non-intrusively.
Several methods were proposed to measure the speech quality: some of these
methods are subjective, others are intrusive-based while others are non-intrusive.
One of the non-intrusive methods for measuring the speech quality is the E-model
standardised by the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardisation
Sector (ITU-T).
Although the E-model is a non-intrusive method for measuring the speech quality,
but it depends on the time-consuming, expensive and hard to conduct subjective
tests to calibrate its parameters, consequently it is applicable to a limited number
of conditions and speech coders. Also, it is less accurate than the intrusive methods
such as Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) because it does not consider
the contents of the received signal.
In this thesis an approach to extend the E-model based on PESQ is proposed.
Using this method the E-model can be extended to new network conditions and
applied to new speech coders without the need for the subjective tests. The modified
E-model calibrated using PESQ is compared with the E-model calibrated using
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subjective tests to prove its effectiveness.
During the above extension the relation between quality estimation using the
E-model and PESQ is investigated and a correction formula is proposed to correct
the deviation in speech quality estimation.
Another extension to the E-model to improve its accuracy in comparison with
the PESQ looks into the content of the degraded signal and classifies packet loss
into either Voiced or Unvoiced based on the received surrounding packets. The accuracy
of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing the estimation of the new
method that takes packet class into consideration with the measurement provided
by PESQ as a more accurate, intrusive method for measuring the speech quality.
The above two extensions for quality estimation of the E-model are combined
to offer a method for estimating the quality of VoIP applications accurately, nonintrusively
without the need for the time-consuming, expensive, and hard to conduct
subjective tests.
Finally, the applicability of the E-model or the modified E-model in measuring
the quality of services in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is illustrated
On the Verification of a WiMax Design Using Symbolic Simulation
In top-down multi-level design methodologies, design descriptions at higher
levels of abstraction are incrementally refined to the final realizations.
Simulation based techniques have traditionally been used to verify that such
model refinements do not change the design functionality. Unfortunately, with
computer simulations it is not possible to completely check that a design
transformation is correct in a reasonable amount of time, as the number of test
patterns required to do so increase exponentially with the number of system
state variables. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the verification
of conformance of models generated at higher levels of abstraction in the
design process to the design specifications. We model the system behavior using
sequence of recurrence equations. We then use symbolic simulation together with
equivalence checking and property checking techniques for design verification.
Using our proposed method, we have verified the equivalence of three WiMax
system models at different levels of design abstraction, and the correctness of
various system properties on those models. Our symbolic modeling and
verification experiments show that the proposed verification methodology
provides performance advantage over its numerical counterpart.Comment: In Proceedings SCSS 2012, arXiv:1307.802
Tales from the Levant: The Judeo-Arabic Demonic ‘Other’ and John Milton’s Paradise Lost
This thesis revisits Milton’s employment of mythology and the demonic, by shedding a light on a neglected, yet intriguing possible presence of Middle-Eastern mythology – or as identified in this thesis – Judeo-Arabic mythology in Paradise Lost. The mythographic reception of Milton’s work has been rightly discussed within a Greco-Roman frame. However, this thesis offers for a consideration an analysis of the unique role of Judeo-Arabic mythology. By doing so, the thesis not only aims to enrich the dualistic analyses of ‘East-West’, ‘Christian-Muslim’ and ‘Anglo-Ottoman’ relations, when tackling this angle of Early Modern studies, but also to generally demonstrate the way seventeenth-century literature encompassed multifaceted and interchangeable allusions to both Islam and Judaism in Catholic and Protestant writing.
The thesis directs its attention towards examining the possible presence of two Judeo-Arabic demonic figures in Paradise Lost: the Islamic devil, Iblis, and his consort in the Jewish tradition, Lilith. The argument demonstrates the way Milton’s deployment of the Judeo-Arabic demonic not only mirrors the Biblical story of the Fall, but also connects with the political and religious upheavals of his age, including the emergence of the first English translation of the Qur’an in 1649. Furthermore, by examining the two Judeo-Arabic demonic figures in Paradise Lost not only the treatment of the demonic in Milton’s work is revisited in a way that allows for a wider scope of literary analysis, but the complex treatment of gender, identity and ‘the Other’ are similarly understood within a more pluralistic context. The thesis then concludes with the first discussion of the contemporary reception of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the writings of Arab women specifically, exploring the way the very same demonic, discussed throughout the thesis, is deployed by these female Arab authors while resisting and redefining the role of gender in religion, society and politics
WSN-DS: A Dataset for Intrusion Detection Systems in Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have become increasingly one of the hottest research areas in computer science due to their wide range of applications including critical military and civilian applications. Such applications have created various security threats, especially in unattended environments. To ensure the security and dependability of WSN services, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) should be in place. This IDS has to be compatible with the characteristics of WSNs and capable of detecting the largest possible number of security threats. In this paper a specialized dataset for WSN is developed to help better detect and classify four types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: Blackhole, Grayhole, Flooding, and Scheduling attacks. This paper considers the use of LEACH protocol which is one of the most popular hierarchical routing protocols in WSNs. A scheme has been defined to collect data from Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) and then processed to produce 23 features. The collected dataset is called WSN-DS. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been trained on the dataset to detect and classify different DoS attacks. The results show that WSN-DS improved the ability of IDS to achieve higher classification accuracy rate. WEKA toolbox was used with holdout and 10-Fold Cross Validation methods. The best results were achieved with 10-Fold Cross Validation with one hidden layer. The classification accuracies of attacks were 92.8%, 99.4%, 92.2%, 75.6%, and 99.8% for Blackhole, Flooding, Scheduling, and Grayhole attacks, in addition to the normal case (without attacks), respectively
Rapid single- and multiple-scattering EXAFS Debye-Waller factor calculations on active sites of metalloproteins
This paper describes recent results using our approach to calculating self-consistently single (SS) and multiple-scattering (MS) Debye- Waller factors (DWF) on active sites of metalloproteins. The calculation of MS DWF, together with the Feff7 program allows us to simulate ab-initio EXAFS spectra for a given temperature systems with no adjustable parameters. In our latest report (Dimakis N., and Bunker G., 1998) we calculate, using density functional and semiempirical approaches, the SS and MS DWF for small molecules and compared them to Raman, infrared and EXAFS spectra. In this report calculation of DWFs is done for tetrahedral Zn imidazole, a complex containing thirty two atoms that is similar in certain respects to active sites of many metalloproteins. Ab-initio calculation, although it is a more accurate and reliable scheme, it is not at present practical on desktop computers; computation times are weeks. Therefore as an alternative we have tried the semiempirical MNDO Hamiltonian, which is at least three orders of magnitude faster than ab-initio, and can be expected to be of reasonable accuracy because it is parameterized for organic compounds. Our approaches take advantage of commercially available molecular orbital programs. We have written additional programs which, using normal mode calculations, calculate the MS paths, and transparently interface with Fef-f\u27/to produce the EXAFS spectra. Results are in very good agreement with experimental data tested
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