AmIE: An Ambient Intelligent Environment for Assisted Living

In the modern world of technology Internet-of-things (IoT) systems strives to provide an extensive interconnected and automated solutions for almost every life aspect. This paper proposes an IoT context-aware system to present an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environment; such as an apartment, house, or a building; to assist blind, visually-impaired, and elderly people. The proposed system aims at providing an easy-to-utilize voice-controlled system to locate, navigate and assist users indoors. The main purpose of the system is to provide indoor positioning, assisted navigation, outside weather information, room temperature, people availability, phone calls and emergency evacuation when needed. The system enhances the user's awareness of the surrounding environment by feeding them with relevant information through a wearable device to assist them. In addition, the system is voice-controlled in both English and Arabic languages and the information are displayed as audio messages in both languages. The system design, implementation, and evaluation consider the constraints in common types of premises in Kuwait and in challenges, such as the training needed by the users. This paper presents cost-effective implementation options by the adoption of a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, Bluetooth Low Energy devices and an Android smart watch.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Content-Based Instruction and Corpus Linguistics Curriculum for Early Advanced EFL Saudi Students

For many years now EFL teaching and learning in Saudi Arabia has suffered from a lack of authentic life-related and meaningful materials. Most of the EFL books available, therefore, pay more attention to form and less attention to meaning. This has resulted in many Saudi EFL students having difficulty improving their L2 proficiency. For this reason, I developed a curriculum that incorporates content-based instruction and corpus linguistics. The curriculum is divided into six units. The units focus on the five basic language skills: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. Each unit focuses on different content and includes examples form several corpus sites. This project offers an opportunity for Saudi EFL students to learn and acquire authentic and life-related language that is at the same time transferable to real world context

Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time.

A book review of David Miliband's Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time

An investigation into interdental arch relationship outcomes of 5-Year-Olds born with a Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate using the Modified Huddart Bodenham Index following the centralisation of cleft services within the United Kingdom

Aim: To investigate the interdental arch relationship outcomes of 5-year-old children withunilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) before and after centralisation of cleft services in theUnited Kingdom (UK) using the Modified Huddart-Bodenham Index (MHBI).Design: Retrospective cross-sectional study.Setting: Evaluation of 3D orthodontic study models of children with a complete UCLP.Participants: All available 5-year-old orthodontic study models of participants with UCLP fromthe pre-centralisation (Clinical Standard Advisory Group CSAG n=107) and post-centralisation(Cleft Care UK CCUK n=195) studies.Outcome measure: Differences between the interdental arch relationship outcomes for theCSAG and CCUK cohorts were assessed using the Modified Huddart-Bodenham Index (MHBI).This index scored the buccal/palatal or labial/palatal relationships of 8 maxillary deciduousteeth with the opposing mandibular dentition. The anterior segment (deciduous centralincisors), buccal (deciduous canine, first and second deciduous molar) cleft segment and noncleft segment scores were calculated along with the sum of the three segments combined tocalculate the total arch MHBI scores.Results: The inter- and intra-examiner reliability had a high level of agreement. Statisticallysignificant differences in the anterior segment, buccal non cleft segment, and total arch MHBI3scores were found between CCUK and CSAG cohorts, with CCUK performing better. There wasno difference in the buccal cleft segment scores.Conclusions: There were improved transverse and anterior interdental arch relationshipspost centralisation (CCUK) of cleft services in the UK, suggestive of better primary surgicaloutcomes post CSAG

Reversible watermarking scheme with image-independent embedding capacity

Permanent distortion is one of the main drawbacks of all the irreversible watermarking schemes. Attempts to recover the original signal after the signal passing the authentication process are being made starting just a few years ago. Some common problems, such as salt-and-pepper artefacts owing to intensity wraparound and low embedding capacity, can now be resolved. However, some significant problems remain unsolved. First, the embedding capacity is signal-dependent, i.e., capacity varies significantly depending on the nature of the host signal. The direct impact of this is compromised security for signals with low capacity. Some signals may be even non-embeddable. Secondly, while seriously tackled in irreversible watermarking schemes, the well-known problem of block-wise dependence, which opens a security gap for the vector quantisation attack and transplantation attack, are not addressed by researchers of the reversible schemes. This work proposes a reversible watermarking scheme with near-constant signal-independent embedding capacity and immunity to the vector quantisation attack and transplantation attack

Spatial Patterns of Micromobility Ridership: A Multi-City Analysis

Lightweight, electricity-powered vehicles such as electric bicycles and scooters, known as micromobility, are expanding rapidly in urban areas worldwide. Micromobility holds a promising potential in improving transportation by a number of means, including filling public transportation gaps and reducing dependence upon the private car and thereby internal combustion engine emissions. As a result of the proliferation of micromobility sharing schemes around the world, ridership trajectories can be obtained. Through Ridereport (https://www.ridereport.com), datasets have been acquired from several cities (Santa Monica, California, USA; San Francisco, California, USA; Portland, Oregon, USA; Austin, Texas, USA; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), this work analyzes the spatial patterns of micromobility which can be obtained from these datasets using the open-sourced exploratory spatial data analysis software, GeoDa. Across all cities, micromobility ridership exhibits positive spatial dependence. Meaning places with high micromobility ridership tend to cluster spatially. This spatial dependence has been explored further using Local Indication of Spatial Association (LISA) coupled with aerial imagery for qualitative assessment. Five themes related to high micromobility ridership spatial clusters were able to be detected (i.e., major thoroughfares, bridges, trails and open spaces, transits, and Hubs). The study contributes methodologically to the field of geographic information systems (GIS) and operationally to the field of transportation

Modelling Cyclists Route Choice Using Strava and OSMnx : A Case Study of the City of Glasgow

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Accounting for Spatial Heterogeneity Using Crowdsourced Data

Acknowledgments The authors would like to acknowledge the following data source: Strava Inc. Economic and Social Research Council. Strava Metro data - Scotland, Glasgow, Manchester, Tyne and Wear [data collection]. University of Glasgow - Urban Big Data Centre.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A new block cipher algorithm that adopts the magic square of the fifth order with messages of different lengths and multi-function in GF(28)

This paper is considered as a development of encryption algorithms based on Magic Square of Order Five. Both GF(P) and GF(28) are used to encode both images and text. Where two different algorithms were used, the first using message length = 10 and the second message length = 14, and an unspecified number of rounds were added and a mask will be used in the even round will use the addition operation and in the odd round will used the multiplication operation so that the text resulting from the first round will be as input text for the next Round, and thus. The speed, complexity, NIST tests and histogram for the first ten rounds were calculated and compared with the results of the previous algorithm before the rounds were made, where the complexity in the first algorithm was = ((256)^ 15)^(r+1)× (256)^10 + or × (256)^25 and the complexity in the second algorithm = ((256)^11)^(r+1) ×(256)^14 + or × (256)^25 where r represents the number of round used