Problems, challenges and prospects of Indonesian Muslim community in Sydney for promoting tolerance

This paper elucidates a map of Indonesian Muslim communities around Sydney in order to observe the possibility to promote a moderate and tolerance of Indonesian Islam worldwide. Indonesian Muslims who live in Australia are relatively small if we consider that we are the closer neighbor of Australia and have the biggest Muslim populations in the world. Most Indonesian Muslim communities in Sydney are in a form of kelompok pengajian (Islamic study group), which is commonly based on ethnicity, regionalism (province and regency), and religious affiliation with Indonesian Islamic groups. The main problems of Indonesian Muslim communities in Sydney are an ambiguous identity, laziness integration, and dream to home country. Most Indonesian Muslim diaspora in Sydney only consider Australia as the land for making money. Therefore, their inclusion to Australian community is just being “Indonesian Muslim in Australia” and it seems hard for them to be “Australian Muslim”, especially in the case of those who already changed to be Australian citizens. This kind of diaspora attitude differs from Muslims Diasporas from the Middle East and South Asia countries who are mostly ready to be fully Australian Muslim. Naturally, most Indonesian Muslim communities put their emphasis to develop their community based on social needs and try to avoid political idea of Islamism. In this case, the Indonesian government, through the Indonesian Consulate in Sydney, has great resources to promote moderate and tolerant views of Indonesian Islam to other Muslim communities, as well as to Western media. In optimizing resources of Indonesian Muslim communities in Sydney to envoy Indonesian cultures and policies, it is necessary for Indonesian government to have a person with integrated knowledge on Islamic Studies who are working officially under the Indonesian consulate in Sydney. It is based on the fact that most Indonesian Muslim communities needs a patron from the government to manage and soften some differences among them, especially related to problems of identities, as well as to link them with the wider Australian communities

Vehicle detection for vision-based intelligent transportation systems using convolutional neural network algorithm

Vehicle detection in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is a key factor ensuring road safety, as it is necessary for the monitoring of vehicle flow, illegal vehicle type detection, incident detection, and vehicle speed estimation. Despite the growing popularity in research, it remains a challenging problem that must be solved. Hardware-based solutions such as radars and LIDAR are been proposed but are too expensive to be maintained and produce little valuable information to human operators at traffic monitoring systems. Software based solutions using traditional algorithms such as Histogram of Gradients (HOG) and Gaussian Mixed Model (GMM) are computationally slow and not suitable for real-time traffic detection. )erefore, the paper will review and evaluate different vehicle detection methods. In addition, a method of utilizing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for the detection of vehicles from roadway camera outputs to apply video processing techniques and extract the desired information. Specifically, the paper utilized the YOLOv5s architecture coupled with k-means algorithm to perform anchor box optimization under different illumination levels. Results from the simulated and evaluated algorithm showed that the proposed model was able to achieve a mAP of 97.8 in the daytime dataset and 95.1 in the nighttime dataset

What is Islamic microfinance?

Islamic microfinance is a specialized part in a growing and diverse body of microfinance literature. To date, there are quite a few papers on Islamic microfinance that are published in reputable journals, which fairly represent the size of Islamic microfinance industry compared to the overall microfinance sector. This chapter aims to provide an overview of Islamic microfinance in the context of mainstream microfinance sector and highlights some of the salient features that differentiate Islamic microfinance with conventional or overall microfinance. It will discuss the origin, different approaches in the development, and characteristics of Islamic microfinance. These will be followed by discussion on lending models, sources and uses of funds, and poverty impact of Islamic microfinance institutions. Finally, this chapter will conclude will some thoughts on possible opportunities for future Islamic microfinance research