Impaired speech recognition : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Sciences in Computer Science at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand.

The purpose of this thesis is to present a novel mobile health application that can recognize impaired speech (using audio signals) and turn it into understandable speech. The system is developed to help Dysarthria of Speech patients communicate better with others in their everyday life. It will provide some background information about motor speech disorders, Dysarthria of Speech and the technical aspects of this application. It will then explain and test the algorithms to recognize impaired speech using audio fingerprinting technology. Finally it will discuss the test results and recommends some future work to improve the current algorithms

Digital age: challenges for libraries

Information technology and globalization are the two most influential forces of the modern times. IT has given new meanings to the transmission, dissemination and storage of information; whereas globalisation is reducing the importance of geographical boundaries. Libraries as an important social institution have been affected by these changes. Information retrieval, information storage and information transmission are the core competencies of the libraries. Digital age characterized by efficient graphic user interface, digital imaging, efficient transfer and storage of texts, is presenting important challenges for the libraries. Information privacy, copyrights, and information security are some of the challenging issues faced by the libraries in digital age. This paper is an attempt to present as well as to discuss the implications of these issues so that strategies can be devised to address them effectively and efficiently

Techno-Economic Analysis of Using Solar PV System for Auxiliary Power in a Power Plant

Qatar considered among the countries with the largest per capita electricity consumption. Most of the electricity in Qatar generated in power plants, which use natural gas as the fuel. Qatar has initiated plans to utilize renewable energies to produce 20% of electricity needs by 2030. In this study, the feasibility of using electricity generated by a solar PV system in a power plant is studied through technical and economic analysis. The solar PV system is designed to produce about 15 MW of electricity to feed the power plant auxiliary systems. In this study, a collection of data on power consumption, gas consumption, irradiation and area available for installing solar PV was used to size the maximum capacity of the solar system. Then the cost of installing and utilizing the solar PV system is analyzed. This cost analysis was carried out by first calculating the investment cost of the proposed design and the net present value (NPV). The net present value calculations were done for different scenarios. The first scenario is increasing power plant power capacity. The second scenario is KAHARAMAA to invest 15%, and the third scenario is KAHRAMAA to introduce support initiatives by increasing the cost of electricity by 15 %. The fourth scenario is selling the gas surplus globally. The net present value of all scenarios was found as -$32,717,799, -$23,100,399, -$26,797,148, and$1,353,192 respectively. The study concludes that a solar PV system in Qatar is technically feasible, but a support initiative should be considered. This is due to the low current prices of natural gas and electricity tariffs. This project recommends increasing electricity prices to reflect its actual economic cost. Moreover, the government, along with the power plants, shall invest in utilizing a solar PV system in power plants to reduce gas consumption. So that the saved gas can be exported for income. Those recommendations are proposed to make renewable energy technology adoption in Qatar more feasible

Generating Nested XML Documents with Dtd from Relational Views

Converting relational database into XML is increasing daily for publishing and exchanging data on the web. Most of the current approaches and tools for generating XML documents from relational database generate flat XML documents that contain data redundancy which leads to produce a massive data on the web. Other approaches assume that the relational database for generating nested XML documents is normalized. In addition, these approaches have problem that lies in the difficult of how to specify the parent elements from the children elements in the nested XML document. Moreover, most of the current approaches and tools do not generate nested XML documents automatically. They require the user to specify the constraints and the schema of the target document. This research proposes an approach to automatically generate nested XML documents from flat relational database views that are unnormalized. The research aims to reduce data redundancy and storage sizes for the generated XML documents. The proposed approach consists of three steps. The first step is converting flat relational view into nested relational view. The second is generating DTD from the nested relational view. The third is generating nested XML document from the nested relational view. The proposed approach is evaluated and compared to other approaches such as NeT, CoT, and Cost-Based and tools such as Allora, Altova, and DbToXml with respect to two measurements: data redundancy and storage size of the document. The first measurement includes several parameters that are number of data values, elements, attributes, and tags. Based on the results of comparing the proposed approach to several other approaches and tools, the proposed approach is more efficient for reducing data redundancy and storage size of XML documents. It can reduce data redundancy and storage size by approximately 50% and 55%, respectively

" The Impact of Management Information Systems to Improve Management Performance" An Empirical Study on Managing Directors in the Jordanian Insurance Companies

This study aimed to identify the impact of management information systems (MIS) to improve the administrative performance of the staff of the administrative departments in the Jordanian insurance companies has been the study sample Managers administrators or Deputy Managing Director to identify, The researcher distributed (52) questionnaire by (2) a questionnaire to each company's number (26) Insurance Company, has been used as a researcher style simple to get to know the impact of management information systems to improve management performance in the Jordanian insurance companies decline, the study concluded that there is a positive impact of the resources of networks and communications and material resources to improve the administrative performance of the administrative staff in the insurance companies Jordan, was the most important recommendations that the insurance companies to make greater efforts in the infrastructure of management information systems development. Keywords: MIS, performance management, networking and communications

Ubiquitous Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for Developing Countries

Around the globe, Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) has been evolved either by governments or healthcare providers. The utilization of these technologies has resulted in the improvement of healthcare services all over the world. This evolution has been characterized by availability, reliability, serviceability to patients, and has been enhanced with increased cost and time efficiency. As such, new systems and terms have been established. Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which can also be used interchangeably with Electronic Health Record (EHR) is considered to be the main transformation in healthcare information technologies. EMR has been aimed to reduce and eliminate existing paper based approaches. Many countries have adopted the use of EMR systems all over the world. However, these systems differ from country to country even though they serve the same purpose. The differentiation of implementing the EMR system often leads to incompatibility, which complicates cooperation between healthcare providers, and also compromises the efficient use and analysis of data that can be gathered from different locations or systems. This thesis highlights and addresses the implementation of EMR on cloud-based systems to enable improvements in HIT. In particular, the scope of this research focuses on the use of EMR or EHR in Saudi Arabia, and establishes clinical information transaction standards that can be easily adopted by the different EMR application architectures available. Furthermore, the implementation of a cloud-based system is proposed for standard EMR to be used by both public and private healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia. The advantage that cloud technologies facilitate is the availability of data regardless of the patient, clinician, or physician’s location. Similarly, these technologies enable a linkage and utilization of the Health Information Exchange (HIE) by healthcare researchers and providers to invest in data through online and offline cooperation. Support for the standardization of the EMR system on cloud-based technology will minimize or at best prevent human’s errors, repetition or duplication of records, and reduce cost of operation and time