Improving the indoor air quality (IAQ) through application of the air cleaning technologies for offices building simulated in environmental chamber

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is very important issue in residential and commercial buildings, because human spend almost 90% of their life indoor. IAQ problems effect on the health of the occupants, and lead to reduction of the efficiency and output in workplaces. The main objective of this study is to improving the (IAQ) and to reduce energy consumption in offices building, through experimental and simulation investigation. The method used in this study was by using environmental chamber to represent the real office. The results of the experimental were validated the simulation. The chamber was modified by installing two mechanical filters with low pressure drop; minimum efficiency reporting value rate 13 (MERV 13) and activated carbon filter (ACF) on the air handling unit. The IAQ parameters which include temperature, relative humidity, air velocity, air flow rate, pressure drop, CO2 concentration and particle matters PM 10 and PM 2.5 concentration for upstream and downstream were considered in this study. These variables were measured inside the chamber using IAQ devices and these data were used as an input data for simulation by using ANSYS 16.1 software. The simulation generated the air distribution via air velocity, temperature, CO2 concentration and the particle distribution in the room. The results from experiment showed good agreement for combining filters efficiency value from 86.20% to 84.60% and from 86% to 82.35% for PM 10 and PM 2.5 particle removal respectively during occupied period. The CO2 concentration decreased during the measurement period from 816 ppm to 700 ppm and the distribution was in the acceptable range compare with ASHRAE standard 55-2004 and Malaysian industry code of practice on IAQ. Also, the validation with simulation showed below 10% error ratio compare with experiment results. The significance of study is to balance between enhancing thermal comfort inside workplace and (IAQ) for occupants, leading to reduction of energy consumption

Effect of Feeding Frequency and Stocking Density on Tilapia Oreochromis Niloticus and Lettuce Lactuca Sativa Production in Aquaponics System under the UAE Condition and Business Enterprise Analysis

This thesis was carried out to investigate the impact of various Tilapia (Oreochromisniloticus) feeding frequency and stocking density on quality and quantity of organic lettuce that is produced in an aquaponic system, knowing that they affect the nutrient content in water. Business analysis through enterprise budget was developed considering different feeding frequency and stocking density of the fish to predict the business efficiency of the system, and the net incomes were as high as AED 34,394 and AED 46,637, respectively. On the other hand, lettuce was seeded in a culture raceway. The duration of the experiments was decided to be six months, which was divided into two parts to study each parameter, i.e. feeding frequency (Once, twice and three times per day) and stocking density (100,120,140 fishes per cubic meter). In parallel, the aquaponic system water quality (pH, temperature, total dissolved solids, dissolved Oxygen, total ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate) and water consumption were analyzed at specified intervals. Furthermore, fish and cultivated plant growth rate and total yield were analyzed at the first and last days of the experimental period. The purpose of that was to optimize the system feeding system and stocking from different approaches both agriculturally and economically. It was found that highest used feeding frequency and stocking density are recommended to achieve high profitabilit

Productivity Measurement of Call Centre Agents using a Multimodal Classification Approach

Call centre channels play a cornerstone role in business communications and transactions, especially in challenging business situations. Operations’ efficiency, service quality, and resource productivity are core aspects of call centres’ competitive advantage in rapid market competition. Performance evaluation in call centres is challenging due to human subjective evaluation, manual assortment to massive calls, and inequality in evaluations because of different raters. These challenges impact these operations' efficiency and lead to frustrated customers. This study aims to automate performance evaluation in call centres using various deep learning approaches. Calls recorded in a call centre are modelled and classified into high- or low-performance evaluations categorised as productive or nonproductive calls. The proposed conceptual model considers a deep learning network approach to model the recorded calls as text and speech. It is based on the following: 1) focus on the technical part of agent performance, 2) objective evaluation of the corpus, 3) extension of features for both text and speech, and 4) combination of the best accuracy from text and speech data using a multimodal structure. Accordingly, the diarisation algorithm extracts that part of the call where the agent is talking from which the customer is doing so. Manual annotation is also necessary to divide the modelling corpus into productive and nonproductive (supervised training). Krippendorff’s alpha was applied to avoid subjectivity in the manual annotation. Arabic speech recognition is then developed to transcribe the speech into text. The text features are the words embedded using the embedding layer. The speech features make several attempts to use the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) upgraded with Low-Level Descriptors (LLD) to improve classification accuracy. The data modelling architectures for speech and text are based on CNNs, BiLSTMs, and the attention layer. The multimodal approach follows the generated models to improve performance accuracy by concatenating the text and speech models using the joint representation methodology. The main contributions of this thesis are: • Developing an Arabic Speech recognition method for automatic transcription of speech into text. • Drawing several DNN architectures to improve performance evaluation using speech features based on MFCC and LLD. • Developing a Max Weight Similarity (MWS) function to outperform the SoftMax function used in the attention layer. • Proposing a multimodal approach for combining the text and speech models for best performance evaluation

Managing Information and Communication Technology in Sudanese Secondary School

This research article is based on a larger study whose purpose was to investigate the current status and implementation of ICT in Khartoum State secondary schools. The study, adopted a descriptive survey design. Two instruments questionnaires’ and a structured interview schedule were used to collect data. The target population comprised of 320 secondary schools in Khartoum State at the time of data collection. Stratified sampling was used to select 48 secondary schools for the study. Data collected by questionnaires from 48 principals and 5 administrators were analyzed using descriptive statistic and chi square with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings of the analysis of data revealed that the school principals have positive attitudes regarding the use of ICT in their schools. The results also indicated that, although a significant number of schools have a policy goal to use ICT for administration and for keeping track of student data, very few schools realized these goals. Out of this study recommendations were made to the secondary schools in Khartoum State and the Sudanese Ministry of Education in general. Keywords: Computer coordinator, Khartoum State, ICT implementation, ICT management, School Principal

Safety Evaluation of Innovative Intersection Designs: Diverging Diamond Interchanges and Displaced Left-turn Intersections

Diverging diamond interchanges (DDIs) and Displaced left-turn intersections (DLTs) are designed to enhance the operational performance of conventional intersections that are congested due to heavy left-turn traffic volumes. Since drivers are not familiar with these types of intersections, there is a need to evaluate their safety performance to validate their effect, and to estimate reliable and representative Crash Modification Factors (CMFs). The safety evaluation was conducted based on three common safety assessment methods, which are before-and-after study with comparison group, Empirical Bayes before-and-after method, and cross-sectional analysis. Furthermore, since DLTs showed poor safety performance, the study also investigated the operational performance of DLTs using a general linear model describing the relationship between traffic delay and other operational and geometric characteristics based on high-resolution traffic data. The DDI analysis included a sample size of 80 DDIs and 240 conventional diamond interchanges in 24 states, while the DLT analysis included 13 DLTs and 26 conventional intersections in 4 states. The analysis results indicated that converting conventional diamond interchanges to diverging diamond interchanges could significantly decrease the total, fatal-and-injury, rear-end and angle/left-turn crashes by 26%, 49%, 18%, and 68%, respectively. On the other hand, converting conventional intersections to displaced left-turn intersections could significantly increase the total number of crashes as well injury crashes and some other crash types (i.e., single vehicle, angle). However, the operational analysis implied that they have the potential to reduce the delay at intersections by 3.567 sec/veh. Consequently, the study quantified the costs and benefits associated with implementing DLTs. The results showed that this alternative design could provide much benefits in terms of its operational performance. However, its poor safety performance could result in losses much higher than its benefits. The study concludes that DDIs could significantly decrease crash frequency, while DLTs could not provide safety benefits. However, DLTs might be more efficient for operational performance. It is recommended that appropriate safety countermeasures should be developed and implemented to enhance traffic safety at DLTs

Investigating the Effectiveness of Digital-Based Concept Mapping on Teaching Educational Technology for Undergraduate Students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using digital-based concept mapping as strategy on students’ achievements and attitudes. Data was collected from 58 students enrolled in the course of ”Introduction to Educational Technology” in Instructional and Teaching Technologies Department at Sultan Qaboos University. Two sections out of four sections were selected randomly as the sample of the study. One of the sections was randomly chosen as experimental group (n = 27) and the other was control group (n = 31). Both pre- and post- achievement tests were used. The results of the study revealed that students who were taught with digital-based concept mapping strategy performed better than those who were taught with the conventional method. There was a significant difference between male and female students in the post test scores of the experimental group in favor of females. In addition, no interaction effect for the independent variables was found. The study also showed that students in the experimental group had positive attitude towards using digital-based concept mapping in learning edu- cational technology

A research study into beginning German students\u27 individual and group processing of written texts

This work examines the effect of rereading a text as a group effort and individually on beginning German students. The study included eleven participants, all in their second semester of learning German. All participants read a text written in German. The text selected is from the textbook (Kontakte-4th edition) used at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After reading the text once and writing an individual recall, the participants were divided into two main groups: One group individually reread the text while the other group was divided into two subgroups where the text was discussed instead of rereading it individually. All participants then had to write a second recallBoth recalls were scored. The scores were then normalized, since the study focused on determining the percentages of improvement in the students\u27 performance. The scores were then analyzed by running a t-test on the normalized scores of the two main groups. The t-test indicated that statistically there was no significant difference between the individual rereading group and the discussion group. The results showed however that rereading, both in groups and individually improved the students\u27 reading comprehension