Conversions to Islamic Banks: Jurisprudence; Economic and AAOIFI Requirements

       The major objective of this study is to investigate the conventional banks conversion to Islamic banks. Islamic banking industry has grown tremendously. Nearly, 1.6 billion Muslims believe that Islam is not only a religion, but also a guideline for the complete way of life. Thereby, the demand on Islamic product is increased day by day. Islamic banking assets with commercial banks globally are set to exceed US$1.7t in 2013, suggesting an annual growth of 17.6% (Arnest &Young 2013/2014). This huge growth of Islamic banks is attracting big financial institutions such as HSBC, Citibank, Deutshebank to keep up with this growth by providing Islamic financial services, opening an Islamic branch of the bank (or window within the banks), or even fully converting to Islamic banking (Saaid & Shafii, 2013). Islamic banks in the financial crisis (2008) were less adversely affected and have been much more resilient than conventional banks. These conversions present a challenge to Islamic banking sector and many are skeptical of these branches and consider just curious just to attract depositors' money savers. As well as that, these branches are not overseen by a Sharia supervisory board like Islamic banking and may employ external legitimate counsel, and this in truth is not enough (Al-Atyat,2007). Hence such branches become a serious challenge to the Islamic banking. The Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) issued standard number (6) which represents the conversion issue and identifies its requirements and how the banks deal and treat with it.This study, therefore, provides an important opportunity to advance the understanding of the Sharia requirement to conversion process and what the conventional bank have to do to be right converted to Islamic bank. In addition, it discusses the jurisprudential and financial reasons for why traditional banks turned towards Islamic banking. Moreover, it discusses the AAOIFI conversion standard. This paper, hence, provides a step further in understanding  the conventional banks conversion issue by highlighting four main areas (1) the main Jurisprudence reasons of conversion (2) the economic motives of conversion (3) explore the main conversion forms from jurisprudential point of view (4) AAOIFI conventional banks conversion to Islamic bank standard overview.Overall, the conversion process is turned from corrupted situation toward right way. There is religious and financial motivation to conventional banks conversion. The religious motivation must be supported by stable and good plan to grantee a successful conversion. The conventional banks conversion to Islamic banking is obligatory in Islam, and the gradually method is one of the most successful methods used in the implementation of the transformation. Independent Sharia supervisory board is a very important element in conversion to Islamic bank. Moreover, AAOIFI Sharia standard put explanatory procedures and illustrate how to treat the conversion process. The study suggested that the conventional banks must commitment with all conditions to finish the conversion successfully and to be full commitment to sharia law

Advancing Wireless Sensor Networks Performance over Radio Trigger Wake-up Capabilities

In this Paper, we enhance the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by optimizing the Wake-up capabilities within a passive radio-triggered wakeup circuit and then used its applications to manage the power consumption of the WSNs. The architecture of our proposed circuit manages the radio power consumption of WSN by harvesting energy from the radio signals and making the radio-triggered hardware sends a wake-up signal to the microcontroller (MCU) of the node. This harvest process takes only 15μs or less to produce wake-up signals within the wake-up circuit and prolongs the lifetime of the WSN nodes. In addition, the proposed circuit receives the RF signal of the network controller through the antenna node and produces an output voltage (VOLDC) by its rectifier module so that this voltage produces direct current DC of 250 mV with the received power of 0.85uW (-13.85dBm). Most importantly, the proposed circuit can produce an output triggered voltage (VOLTG) by its module of LTC1540 –Nano-power Comparator which works as an amplifier (VOLDC) and only needs 0.3μA of energy for the setting of the threshold detector value within the long distance of 100m or more and radiation source of 2W in free-space. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed circuit can produce VOLDC and VOLTG to trigger the wake-up signal of MCU within the long distance and low duty cycle as well as this circuit can identify the synchronization on WSNs

Gaussian mixture models design and applications

Ankara : Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent Univ., 2000.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2000.Includes bibliographical references leaves 49-52.Two new design algorithms for estimating the parameters of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMh-l) are developed. These algorithms are based on fitting a GMM on the histogram of the data. The first method uses Least Squares Error (LSE) estimation with Gaus,s-Newton optimization technique to provide more accurate GMM parameter estimates than the commonl}' used ExpectationMaximization (EM) algorithm based estimates. The second method employs the matching pursuit algorithm which is based on finding the Gaussian functions that best match the individual components of a GMM from an overcomplete set. This algorithm provides a fast method for obtaining GMM parameter estimates. The proposed methods can be used to model the distribution of a large set of arbitrary random variables. Application of GMMs in human skin color density modeling and speaker recognition is considered. For speaker recognition, a new set of speech fiiature jmrameters is developed. The suggested set is more appropriate for speaker recognition applications than the widely used Mel-scale based one.Ben Fatma, KhaledM.S

La représentation du bubale antique dans l’ouest des monts des Ksours (Algérie) : l’identification d’un nouveau faciès rupestre

Les monts des Ksours se distinguent clairement des autres régions de l’Atlas saharien par le nombre important des figurations du bubale antique et par des compositions originales, mettant en évidence plusieurs éléments de variabilité de formes, de techniques et de thèmes, qui témoignent que la proximité géographique n’est pas forcément synonyme d’unicité de conception. L’ouest des monts des Ksours, et celui d’Ain Safra en particulier, ont montré une tradition iconographique propre à cette région. Il s’agit d’un faciès culturel local, qui marque une faible extension géographique, s’étendant de l’extrême ouest des monts des Ksours à la région de Figuig au Maroc oriental

Nexus between corporate governance and FinTech disclosure: a comparative study between conventional and Islamic banks

PurposeThis study investigates the impact of corporate governance on FinTech disclosure levels in Jordanian conventional and Islamic banks. It aims to determine whether governance mechanisms affect disclosure practices in the FinTech sector, exploring the interplay between governance and transparency in financial innovations.Design/methodology/approachThe research methodology entails a thorough analysis of data from all 15 Jordanian conventional and Islamic banks listed on the Amman Stock Exchange, covering the period from 2015 to 2022. This study uses manual content analysis using a custom FinTech Disclosure Index (FDI) and quantitative analysis with a two-way clustered error regression model.FindingsThe findings show that corporate governance mechanisms, particularly board size, board meetings and “Big4” audit firms, are crucial in enhancing FinTech disclosure across conventional and Islamic banks. However, Islamic banks consistently show higher disclosure levels than their conventional counterparts, attributed to their distinct governance structures that emphasize ethical governance and transparency. These results indicate an awareness among decision-makers about the importance of business model transformation toward FinTech.Originality/valueThis study pioneers the introduction of FDI, using it for a novel comparative analysis of FinTech disclosure levels between Islamic and conventional banks. By exploring how various governance structures influence FinTech disclosure, this research provides fresh insights into the interplay between corporate governance and financial technologies in the banking sector

Arabic Documents classification method a Step towards Efficient Documents Summarization

The massive growth of online information obliged the availability of a thorough research in the domain of automatic text summarization within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. To reach this goal, different approaches should be integrated and collaborated. One of these approaches is the classification od documents. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a successful framework for agricultural documents classification as a step forward for a language independent automatic summarization approach. The main target of our serial research is to propose a complete novel framework which not only responses to the question, but also gives the user an opportunity to find additional information that is related to the question. We implemented the proposed method. As a case study, the implemented method is applied on Arabic text in the agriculture field. The implemented approach succeeded in classifying the documents submitted by the user. The approach results have been evaluated using Recall, Precision and F-score measures. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15017