Automatic Classification of Bright Retinal Lesions via Deep Network Features

The diabetic retinopathy is timely diagonalized through color eye fundus images by experienced ophthalmologists, in order to recognize potential retinal features and identify early-blindness cases. In this paper, it is proposed to extract deep features from the last fully-connected layer of, four different, pre-trained convolutional neural networks. These features are then feeded into a non-linear classifier to discriminate three-class diabetic cases, i.e., normal, exudates, and drusen. Averaged across 1113 color retinal images collected from six publicly available annotated datasets, the deep features approach perform better than the classical bag-of-words approach. The proposed approaches have an average accuracy between 91.23% and 92.00% with more than 13% improvement over the traditional state of art methods.Comment: Preprint submitted to Journal of Medical Imaging | SPIE (Tue, Jul 28, 2017

Features affecting the quality of Sustainability Reporting: Theoretically informed insights and empirical evidence from the Global Fortune 100 (2011-2015)

Sound Corporate Governance (CG) requires business entities to take responsible regard for the equitable interests of all stakeholders and appropriately align their individual concerns. Given that society generally is one significant stakeholder, it then becomes relevant to determine how such entities take regard for and report upon the social and environmental issues that currently threaten the sustainability of our globe. Accordingly, this research focuses on such sustainability issues and how they are reported, through Sustainability Reporting (SR). Verifying corporate social and environmental activities to stakeholders through Sustainability Reporting (SR) tends to gain and maintain corporate social Legitimacy and continuity in the market. This is because, SR is an effective and efficient tool for measuring and communicating the corporate social and environmental performance, in conjunction with its economic performance to stakeholders. Despite the critical importance of Sustainability Reporting, academics and professionals claim that the Quality of Sustainability Reporting is poor. Given this poor quality, it is recognized that several Sustainability Reports do not fulfill the needs of stakeholders. Consequently, based on the theoretical foundation of Legitimacy Theory and relevant literature, this research aims at hypothesizing and testing the effect of four features on the Quality of Sustainability Reporting (QSR). These features are Adherence to Regulation (ATR), External Assurance of Report (ASR), Independence of Board (IOB) and Type of Information (TOI). QSR is determined via the Index of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI). The GRI is regarded as the international proxy for Sustainability Reporting. Its Index identifies the performance indicators that should be included within the Sustainability Report, in order to fulfill the needs of stakeholders. The relationship between these features and QSR are tested/evaluated within 500 reports. These 500 are the Sustainability Reports of the Global Fortune 100 (G100) companies over the five-year period 2011-2015. Employing an ordinal dependent variable (QSR), the research applies an Ordinal, Logistic Regression (OLS) to statistically test hypothesized relationships. The SPSS statistical software package is used to implement that regression and to statistically analyze the collected data. The research concludes that Adherence To Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board and Type of Information significantly affect, (representing 37.1% - 41% of the change in) the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. It also concludes that, Adherence to Regulations and External Assurance of Report have an Extremely Significant and Positive, relationship with the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Moreover; there is a Significant and Positive, relationship between the Type of Information and Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Regarding the Independence of Board, two main phenomena are identified from the empirical results. The results identify that, there is a Non-significant relationship between Independence of Board Members and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. However; there is a Significant, Positive, relationship between the Independence of Board Chair and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Therefore, Adherence to Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board Chair and Type of Information are significant influencing factors that should be seriously considered by reporting firms in order to improve the Quality of Sustainability Reporting

Features Affecting the Quality of Sustainability Reporting: Theoretically-Informed Insights and Empirical Evidence from the Global Fortune 100 (2011-2015)

Sound Corporate Governance (CG) requires business entities to take responsible regard for the equitable interests of all stakeholders and appropriately align their individual concerns. Given that society generally is one significant stakeholder, it then becomes relevant to determine how such entities take regard for and report upon the social and environmental issues that currently threaten the sustainability of our globe. Accordingly, this research focuses on such sustainability issues and how they are reported, through Sustainability Reporting (SR). Verifying corporate social and environmental activities to stakeholders through Sustainability Reporting (SR) tends to gain and maintain corporate social Legitimacy and continuity in the market. This is because, SR is an effective and efficient tool for measuring and communicating the corporate social and environmental performance, in conjunction with its economic performance to stakeholders. Despite the critical importance of Sustainability Reporting, academics and professionals claim that the Quality of Sustainability Reporting is poor. Given this poor quality, it is recognized that several Sustainability Reports do not fulfill the needs of stakeholders. Consequently, based on the theoretical foundation of Legitimacy Theory and relevant literature, this research aims at hypothesizing and testing the effect of four features on the Quality of Sustainability Reporting (QSR). These features are Adherence to Regulation (ATR), External Assurance of Report (ASR), Independence of Board (IOB) and Type of Information (TOI). QSR is determined via the Index of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI). The GRI is regarded as the international proxy for Sustainability Reporting. Its Index identifies the performance indicators that should be included within the Sustainability Report, in order to fulfill the needs of stakeholders. The relationship between these features and QSR are tested/evaluated within 500 reports. These 500 are the Sustainability Reports of the Global Fortune 100 (G100) companies over the five-year period 2011-2015. Employing an ordinal dependent variable (QSR), the research applies an Ordinal, Logistic Regression (OLS) to statistically test hypothesized relationships. The SPSS statistical software package is used to implement that regression and to statistically analyze the collected data. The research concludes that Adherence To Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board and Type of Information significantly affect, (representing 37.1% - 41% of the change in) the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. It also concludes that, Adherence to Regulations and External Assurance of Report have an Extremely Significant and Positive, relationship with the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Moreover; there is a Significant and Positive, relationship between the Type of Information and Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Regarding the Independence of Board, two main phenomena are identified from the empirical results. The results identify that, there is a Non-significant relationship between Independence of Board Members and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. However; there is a Significant, Positive, relationship between the Independence of Board Chair and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Therefore, Adherence to Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board Chair and Type of Information are significant influencing factors that should be seriously considered by reporting firms in order to improve the Quality of Sustainability Reporting

Membangun kemitraan antara bank syariah dan nasabah dengan pendekatan costumer relationship management (studi pada Bank Umum Syariah Kota Semarang)

Perkembangan perbankan syariah yang begitu cepat, tetapi belum diimbangi dengan peningkatan market sharenya. Oleh karena itu diperlukan staretgi peningkatkan market sahre bank syariah dengan mengimplementasikan Costumer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM merupakan staretgi pemasaran yang berfokus pada hubungan/kemitraan antara bank syariah dengan nasabah. CRM diharapkan dapat berpengaruh terhadap kepuasan, kepercayaan, komitmen dan loyalitas nasabah. Adapun tujuan penelitian adalah untuk mengetahui implementasi CRM pada bank syariah dan untuk mengetahui pengaruh CRM terhadap kepuasan, kepercayaan, komitmen dan loyalitas nasabah. Penelitian menggunakan pendekkan kuantitatif, objek penelitian adalah CRM, kepuasan, kepercayaan, komitmen dan loyalitas nasabah. Sedangkan unit yang dianalisis adalah nasabah bank syariah. Lokasi penelitian adalah Bank Umum Syariah Kota Semarang yaitu Bank Muamalat, Bank Syariah Mandiri dan Bank Mega Syariah. Adapun sampel penelitian adalah 180 nasabah yang menggunakan teknik convinence sampling. Adapun teknik analisis yang digunakan adalah deskriptif kuantitatif dan Analisis SEM yang menggunakan program AMOS 4.0. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa CRM berdasarkan syariah marketing dengan indikator Teistis (rabbaniyyah), Etis (akhlaqiyyah), realistis (al-waqi’iyyah) humanistis (insaniyyah) berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap kemitraan (kepuasan, kepercayaan, komitmen) antara nasabah dengan bank syariah. Sedangkan CRM berpengaruh tidak langsung dan signifikan terhadap loyalitas nasabah terhadap bank syaria

Implementasi Shariah Governance serta Implikasinya terhadap Reputasi dan Kepercayaan Bank Syariah

Syariah banking is currently growing rapidly and become part of financial life in the Islamic world. However, there are two important realities to observe in the life of Islamic Banking in Indonesia. First, Islamic banks are faced with a market share that has not met the target by 5 percent. Second, compliance of Islamic banking to Islamic principles was decline. Therefore, it is needed a strategy of development through the implementation of syariah governance. Syariah Governance implementation is expected to have an impact on reputation and customer confidence which in turn can increase the market share of syariah banks. Based on this background, the research problem is how the implementation of syariah governance and its impact on the reputation and confidence in Islamic banks. This research object is Muamalat banks operating in Central Java (Semarang, Solo, Purwokerto). The research sample is 200 respondents using the techniques of analytical judgment. Measurement instrument using 1-5 Likert scale, from strongly disagree (STS) untill Strongly Agree (SS). Firth to know implementation of Shariah governance, it is used a quantitative descriptive analysis using the average (mean). Second, to examine the effect of the implementation of Shariah governance to reputation and customer confidence in Islamic banks, it uses Structur Equation Model (SEM) with program AMOS 4.0 Engineering Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) which consists of two kinds of technical analysis, the goodness of fit and regression weight on the SEM to assess the suitability of the model estimation based on measuring the level of significance of some of the goodness of fit good and bad in a model, so the degree of the model accuracy is determined by the cut-off value.This research concluded that calculations of total assessment on the implementation of Shariah Governance Islamic bank (Bank Muamalat) showed an average score of 3.42 7 in good categories. It shows that shariah compliance is a indicator giving biggest contribution in the implementation of Islamic governance. Compliance to sharia is the main factor to costumer in establishing partnership with syariah banks and deciding to retain syariah banks

STRATEGI PENINGKATAN MUTU PERGURUAN TINGGI AGAMA ISLAM SWASTA (PTAIS) DI LINGKUNGAN KOPERTAIS WILAYAH X JAWA TENGAH (Dalam Perspektif Stakeholders)

Penyelenggaraan PTAIS di Kopertasis X Jawa tengah terdapat 36 PTAIS yang telah melaksanakan kegiatan proses belajar mengajar, ada 11 PTAIS yang telah mengantongi Akreditasi. Dari sebelas PTAI dapat akreditasi A hanya satu yaitu FT. Unissula. 11 prodi mendapat akreditasi B dan 3 prodi mendapat akreditasi C. Sedangkan yang lain belum mengurus akreditasi Dari data tersebut dapat dilihat fenomena bahwa beberapa PTAIS tidak mempunyai ijin penyelenggaraan pendidikan dan akreditasi. Dari potret tersebut dapat dipahami bahwa kualitas PTAIS masih minim. Oleh karena itu dalam rangka meningkatkan mutu PTAIS diperlukan rumusan strategi peningkatan kinerja PTAIS untuk mencapai visi dan misi PTAI melalui meningkatkan kualitas pendidik dan tenaga. Oleh karena itu peneliti menawarkan konsep balanced scorecad yang bersifat teknis, taktis dan operasional dengan mengimplementasikan prinsisp-prinsip good governance sebagai bahan kebijakan strategi pengembangan PTAIS di masa yang akan datang.Peneliti mengembangkan model  balanced scorcard  dari Kaplan (1996) yang didasarkan pada perspektif pemangku kepentingan (stakeholders), Adapun tujuan penelitian adalah (1) untuk mengetahui implementasi  balanced scorecard pada PTAIS, (2) untuk strategi peningkatan mutu PTAIS berdasarkan pendekatan balanced scorecard kurang baik, hal ini disebabkan bebrapa keterbatasan antara lain : Mahasiswa Baru Sebagian besar PTAIS mengalami penurunan. Jumlah lulusan yang dapat bekerja, Jumlah Kerjasama dengan lembaga lain, Jumlah Penelitian dan publikasi Dosen

Spectral relationships of Carleman integral equation in some different domains

In this paper, the potential theory method (PTM) is used, in some different domains, to obtain the solution of Fredholm integral equation (FIE) of the first kind with Carleman kernel. The solution is obtained in the form of spectral relationships (SRs). Many new and important relationships are established and discussed from the work

Digital Marketing During the Pandemic Period; A Study of Islamic Perspective

The Covid 19 pandemic caused significant changes, especially those relating to marketing that led to digital usage. This article aims to determine the prospects and effects of digital marketing in the pandemic period and develop the concept of digital marketing from an Islamic perspective. The methodology of this article uses a descriptive qualitative approach by analyzing various literature on digital marketing. The results of this study found that advances in information technology played a role in the development of digital marketing, especially during the Covid-19 Pandemic. The characterization of digital marketing from an Islamic perspective will open new avenues for future research and will make researchers more theoretical. Sensitive to the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying Islamic marketing research. This article contributes to the development of digital marketing from an Islamic perspective by introducing and characterizing potential new fields of Islamic marketing research. In the future, business people must follow technological advancements as digital marketing media to increase their marketing