Automated Vehicles Risk Assessment and Evaluation

Statistics show that the number of passenger cars is increasing significantly, which will have a negative impact on social, economic and environmental sustainability, and it will cause severe problems for the next generations. Automated Vehicles represent an innovation in automotive technology. They have become a global concern because of their importance in smart traffic systems as well as their significant impact on safety, supposing that traffic will be more efficient and longer travel distance will not be a problem. They will become more acceptable since they will encourage living in suburbs and leaving noisy and polluted cities behind. Drivers will be more relaxed and in comfort while enjoying travel time and some extra privileges that they may have, for example, the chance for spending time more productively and efficiently at non-driving times inside the vehicle. Automated Vehicles are also beneficial for the environment. In fact, it is expected that in the next few years these cars in general will provide a solution for many problems. Researchers and planners of transportation systems are facing many challenges in the field of autonomous vehicles, as the level of safety and mobility involves such elements and circumstances which may cause that the operated travel will be less efficient than expected. The aim of the article is to discuss the challenges, threats, vulnerability, impacts and likelihood of failure faced in the development of Automated Vehicles by studying information security risk management standard process, and explaining how to apply the process of International Organization for Standardization. The concept of applying ISO to Automated Vehicles will be discussed here through certain processes

A New Multi-threaded and Interleaving Approach to Enhance String Matching for Intrusion Detection Systems

String matching algorithms are computationally intensive operations in computer science. The algorithms find the occurrences of one or more strings patterns in a larger string or text. String matching algorithms are important for network security, biomedical applications, Web search, and social networks. Nowadays, the high network speeds and large storage capacity put a high requirement on string matching methods to perform the task in a short time. Traditionally, Aho-Corasick algorithm, which is used to find the string matches, is executed sequentially. In this paper, a new multi-threaded and interleaving approach of Aho-Corasick using graphics processing units (GPUs) is designed and implemented to achieve high-speed string matching. Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming language is used to implement the proposed parallel version. Experimental results show that our approach achieves more than 5X speedup over the sequential and other parallel implementations. Hence, a wide range of applications can benefit from our solution to perform string matching faster than ever before

Effect of different concentrations of carbon source, salinity and gelling agent on in vitro growth of fig (Ficus carica L.)

Three in vitro experiments were conducted to study the effect of different concentrations of carbon source, salinity and gelling agent on number of new shoots, shoot length, fresh weight, and dry weight of fig (Ficus carica L.) to develop an efficient in vitro propagation method. The results show that there were no significant differences between the three carbon sources regarding number of newly formed shoots and their shoot lengths. However, there were some differences regarding fresh and dry weights. On the other hand, increased salinity concentrations reduced the number of the newly formed shoots, as well as, their shoot lengths. In addition, liquid media produced more shoots compared with the three solidifying agents used. However, there were significant differences among the concentrations of solidifying agents used.Keywords: Carbon source, salinity, gelling agent, fig (Ficus carica L.).African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(9), pp. 936-940

Assessment of Air Pollutants Emissions from a Cement Plant: A Case Study in Jordan

This paper presents predictions of air pollutants (dust, SO2, NOx and CO) emitted from a cement plant that will be constructed in Wadi Alabyad area located about 100 km south of Amman, Jordan. The Gaussian air pollution model is used and the predicted concentrations of the air pollutants are compared with the Jordanian air quality standards (JS 1140/2006). It is found that the month of September represents the worst-case scenario where the atmospheric stability condition is classified as A and the average wind speed is 1.7 m/s. The predicted SO2 hourly and the 24-hour concentrations -when using fuel oil- reached 0.8 ppm and 0.42 ppm, consequently, at a distance of 750 m from the plant, which exceed the standard values of 0.3 ppm and 0.14 pmm, consequently. In case of natural gas as source of energy, the SO2 concentration is predicted to be negligible. The hourly concentration of NOx is 0.32 ppm at a distance of 750 m from the plant exceeding the standard limit of 0.21 ppm. It is found that the maximum TSP 24-hour concentration will be expected to reach 359.61 μg/m3 exceeding the standard value of 260 μg/m3. The TSP, PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations exceeded the values set by the standard near the vicinity of the cement plant at a distance closer than 300 m. The proposed mitigation measures should limit the ambient air pollutant concentrations to be in compliance with the standard values

Transient Mixed Convection Flow of A Second-Grade Visco-Elastic Fluid over a Vertical Surface

The viscoelastic boundary layer flow and mixed convection heat transfer near a vertical isothermal surface have been examined in this paper. The governing equations are formulated and solved numerically using an explicit finite difference technique. The velocity and temperature profiles, boundary layer thicknesses, Nusselt numbers and the local skin friction coefficients are shown graphically for different values of the viscoelsatic parameter. In general, it is found that the velocity decreases inside the boundary layer as the viscoelsatic parameter is increased and consequently, the local Nusselt number decreases. This is due to higher tensile stresses between viscoelsatic fluid layers which has a retardation effects on the motion of these layers and consequently, on the heat transfer rates for the mixed convection heat transfer problem under investigation. A Comparison with available published results on special cases of the problem shows excellent agreement

Non-Linear Seismic Response of Base-Isolated Frame Structures Using Rubber Bearings

Over the past two decades, much progress has been made in research and application of the base isolation of structures as means of providing earthquake resistance to a structure. However, the trade-off between the extent of acceleration reduction and the response of a base-isolation system has not been given a serious consideration. This work uses a new material constitutive model for rubber bearing base-isolation system, which adopts the technique of real-time structural parameter modification. To achieve this, a finite element modeling and analysis are performed as a comparative study between a conventional totally fixed-base steel frame structure and similar base-isolated structures using rubber-steel bearings. The structures are subjected to the El-Centro, N-S earthquake. In order to include nonlinearity effects, a non-linear hyperviscoelastic material model has been used and linked to ABAQUS software as a user defined material subroutine (i.e., UMAT). Special connector elements are selected from ABAQUS library to connect the rubber bearings to the frame structure and the foundations in order to achieve the required kinematical constraints at the connection points. The model is validated by carrying out a comparative study of the results obtained from the analysis of the presented material model with those obtained by using the existing ABAQUS material models (e.g., Ogden material model). The results show a significance efficiency of using the rubber bearing isolation in order to uncouple the structure from the seismic ground motion. Moreover, it has been proved that the used material model is more effective to capture the behavior of the base-isolated structures expressing a notable reduction in acceleration and an increase in the structural resistance to earthquake excitations

Some fixed point results based on contractions of new types for extended b-metric spaces

The construction of contraction conditions plays an important role in science for formulating new findings in fixed point theories of mappings under a set of specific conditions. The aim of this work is to take advantage of the idea of extended b-metric spaces in the sense introduced by Kamran et al. [A generalization of b-metric space and some fixed point theorems, Mathematics, 5 (2017), 1–7] to construct new contraction conditions to obtain new results related to fixed points. Our results enrich and extend some known results from b-metric spaces to extended b-metric spaces. We construct some examples to show the usefulness of our results. Also, we provide some applications to support our results

The Effectiveness of a Program Based on Psychosocial Support in Raising the Level of Family Empowerment among Refugees in Jordan

هدفت الدراسة إلى فحص مدى فاعلية برنامج مستند للدعم النفسي الاجتماعي في رفع مستوى التمكين الأسري لدى اللاجئين في الأردن. وتكونت عينة الدراسة من (32) لاجئًا في محافظة إربد تم تعيينهم بشكل عشوائي لمجوعتين متساويتين: المجوعة التجريبية (ن= 16) التي شاركت في برنامج الدعم النفسي الاجتماعي، والمجموعة الضابطة (ن= 16) التي لم تشارك في أي برنامج تدخل. ولتحقيق أهداف الدراسة تم تطوير مقياس التمكين الأسري لجمع بيانات الدراسة في الاختبارات القبلية والبعدية لمجموعتي الدراسة، وفي الاختبار التتبعي مع أفراد المجموعة التجريبية فقط، وبرنامج الدعم النفسي الاجتماعي. أظهرت نتائج الدراسة وجود فروق دالة إحصائيًا بين المجموعتين التجريبية والضابطة في متوسطات الدرجات على مقياس التمكين الأسري في الاختبار البعدي لصالح المجموعة التجريبية، وعدم وجود فروق دالة إحصائيًا بين متوسطات القياسين البعدي والتتبعي في مقياس التمكين الأسري، مما يعكس ثبات تأثير البرنامج.The study aimed to examine the effectiveness of a program based on psychosocial support in raising the level of family empowerment among refugees in Jordan. The study sample consisted of (32) refugees in Irbid governorate who were randomly assigned to two equal groups: the experimental group (n = 16), who participated in the psychosocial support program, and the control group (n = 16), who did not participate in any intervention program. To achieve the study's objectives, the Family Empowerment Scale was developed to collect study data in the pre and posttests for the two study groups and the follow-up test with members of the experimental group only and the psychosocial support program. The results of the study showed that there were statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the mean scores on the family empowerment scale in the posttest in favor of the experimental group, and there were no statistically significant differences between the means of the post and follow-up measures in the family empowerment scale, which reflects the reliability of the program’s impact

MSAIndelFR: a scheme for multiple protein sequence alignment using information on indel flanking regions

Background The alignment of multiple protein sequences is one of the most commonly performed tasks in bioinformatics. In spite of considerable research and efforts that have been recently deployed for improving the performance of multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms, finding a highly accurate alignment between multiple protein sequences is still a challenging problem. Results We propose a novel and efficient algorithm called, MSAIndelFR, for multiple sequence alignment using the information on the predicted locations of IndelFRs and the computed average log–loss values obtained from IndelFR predictors, each of which is designed for a different protein fold. We demonstrate that the introduction of a new variable gap penalty function based on the predicted locations of the IndelFRs and the computed average log–loss values into the proposed algorithm substantially improves the protein alignment accuracy. This is illustrated by evaluating the performance of the algorithm in aligning sequences belonging to the protein folds for which the IndelFR predictors already exist and by using the reference alignments of the four popular benchmarks, BAliBASE 3.0, OXBENCH, PREFAB 4.0, and SABRE (SABmark 1.65). Conclusions We have proposed a novel and efficient algorithm, the MSAIndelFR algorithm, for multiple protein sequence alignment incorporating a new variable gap penalty function. It is shown that the performance of the proposed algorithm is superior to that of the most–widely used alignment algorithms, Clustal W2, Clustal Omega, Kalign2, MSAProbs, MAFFT, MUSCLE, ProbCons and Probalign, in terms of both the sum–of–pairs and total column metrics

Linearly scaling direct method for accurately inverting sparse banded matrices

In many problems in Computational Physics and Chemistry, one finds a special kind of sparse matrices, termed "banded matrices". These matrices, which are defined as having non-zero entries only within a given distance from the main diagonal, need often to be inverted in order to solve the associated linear system of equations. In this work, we introduce a new O(n) algorithm for solving such a system, being n X n the size of the matrix. We produce the analytical recursive expressions that allow to directly obtain the solution, as well as the pseudocode for its computer implementation. Moreover, we review the different options for possibly parallelizing the method, we describe the extension to deal with matrices that are banded plus a small number of non-zero entries outside the band, and we use the same ideas to produce a method for obtaining the full inverse matrix. Finally, we show that the New Algorithm is competitive, both in accuracy and in numerical efficiency, when compared to a standard method based in Gaussian elimination. We do this using sets of large random banded matrices, as well as the ones that appear when one tries to solve the 1D Poisson equation by finite differences.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, submitted to J. Comp. Phy