Monitoring urban growth and land use land cover change in Al Ain, UAE using remote sensing and GIS techniques

Urbanization and industrialization cause a serious land degradation problem, including an increased pressure on natural resources such as deforestation, rise in temperature and management of water resources. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects of urbanization are widely acknowledged. Increase of impervious surface is a surrogate measure of urbanization and their effects on local hydrology is well reported in literature. This study investigates the spatial-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover changes in Al Ain, UAE, from 2006 to 2016. The Landsat images of two different periods, i.e., Landsat ETM of 2006 and Landsat 8 for 2016 were acquired from earth explorer site. Semi-supervised known as the hybrid classification method was used for image classification. The change detection was carried out through post-classification techniques. The study area was categorized into five major classes. These are agriculture, gardens, urban, sandy areas and mixed urban/sandy areas. It was observed that agricultural and urban land increases from 42,560 ha to 45,950 ha (8%) and 8150 ha to 9105 ha (12%), respectively. Consequently, the natural sandy area was reduced. It was also found that the urban area was expanded dramatically in the west and southwest directions. The outcomes of this study would help concerning authorities for a sustainable land and water resources management in the Al Ain region

A Software Design Pattern Based Approach to Auto Dynamic Difficulty in Video Games

From the point of view of skill levels, reflex speeds, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for frustration, and motivations, video game players may vary drastically. Auto dynamic difficulty (ADD) in video games refers to the technique of automatically adjusting different aspects of a video game in real time, based on the player’s ability and emergence factors in order to provide the optimal experience to users from such a large demography and increase replay value. In this thesis, we describe a collection of software design patterns for enabling auto dynamic difficulty in video games. We also discuss the benefits of a design pattern based approach in terms of software quality factors and process improvements based on our experience of applying it in three different video games. Additionally, we present a semi-automatic framework to assist in applying our design pattern based approach in video games. Finally, we conducted a preliminary user study where a Post-Degree Diploma student at the University of Western Ontario applied the design pattern based approach to create ADD in two arcade style games

Deterrence, Rational Choice, and White-Collar Crime: Occupational Health and Safety in Bangladesh RMG Sector

The objective of this research is, firstly to investigate the managerial perception of administering occupational health and safety (OHS) provisions to reduce workplace accidents and, secondly, to explore the managerial interpretation of the idea of white-collar crime in relation to the avoidance of, or negligence in administering, the OHS provisions. This research particularly focuses on the readymade garment (RMG) sector in Bangladesh. It is qualitative in nature and follows an interpretivist and constructivist philosophical paradigm. Data were collected from two deviant cases (e.g. Tazreen Fashions Limited and Rana Plaza) and from the questionnaire responses of 24 participants from 12 RMG factories (6 outsourced and 6 subcontracted) located in Dhaka. All of the participants were top-level, male, full-time executives at the RMG factories (i.e. owners and manages). Despite its limitations, the research finds that all of the factory owners believe in the appropriateness of the OHS provisions for reducing workplace accidents effectively. It also discovers that the application of OHS as a deterrent factor to accidents exists among the outsourced factory owners and but is absent from the subcontracted factory owners. The research also unfolds the different interpretations of white-collar crime between the outsourced and subcontracted factory owners. Based on the further analysis of the empirical evidence, however, it is suggested that the evasion of OHS practices can be labelled white-collar crime

CHARACTERISTICS AND IMPACT ON REWORK OF INFORMATION LOST DUE TO LACK OF DOCUMENTATION DURING REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING AND SOFTWARE ARCHITECTING

Requirements engineering (RE) and software architecting (SA) are two front end activities in the software development lifecycle which have great impact on the overall success of a software project. Because of the highly communication intensive nature of these activities, different types of communication channel from face to face discussions to email, chat, video conferencing etc., are used for these activities. All types of information discussed during these activities are not possible to document. Information lost during this time might cause problems in later stages. We conducted an industrial survey on 32 software professionals from a total of 23 different companies with 1 to 15 years of industrial experience to investigate the characteristics and impact in terms of introduced rework of information lost during RE and SA due to lack of documentation. Our result shows that the types of information that are lost most frequently during RE and SA due to lack of documentation are: “Issues”, “Rationale, priority, source and assumptions behind requirements” and “Tactics”. Information lost during RE introduces rework in “RE” and “SA” most frequently whereas information lost during SA introduces rework in “Design and coding” and “System integration” most frequently. Also the mediums that have the propensity of losing information if used for communication during RE and SA were identified. This knowledge could help software practitioners to decide which medium to avoid or to use it with caution in the RE and SA processes and could motivate researchers to venture into other areas of software engineering (such as design, coding, testing, maintenance, etc.) from the point of view of information lost due to lack of documentation. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first work which focuses on characteristics and impact of information lost during RE and SA

Nickel-based Catalysts for Gasification of Glucose in Supercritical Water

Gasification of waste biomass to form hydrogen, H2, is a promising new source of green energy; while providing the additional benefit of treating challenging and hazardous waste streams that pollute the environment. Gasification of biomass in supercritical water (SCW) offers an attractive alternative to avoid the energy intensive drying process. In this approach, biomass is hydrolyzed by water into smaller molecules in the presence of a suitable catalyst. This study was aimed at developing an alumina supported nickel based non-noble metal catalyst suitable for biomass gasification in SCW. A lack of detailed characterization on fresh and spent catalysts in SCW has held back progress in this field and is critical due to the highly unusual properties of SCW at high pressure and temperature compared to ambient water. Typically hydrogen rich gaseous product from gasification of biomass in SCW requires temperatures higher than 700 °C, while low temperature processes (300-500 °C) produce methane rich gases. Use of suitable catalysts can lower the activation energy of the reaction, and hydrogen rich gaseous products can be achieved at low temperatures thus lower the operating cost. Use of suitable catalysts also can reduce the formation of chars and tars formed during the gasification process in SCW. Moreover, non-noble catalysts could be beneficial in terms of availability and cost. A kinetic study of SCW gasification is still under development due to the numerous intermediate and final products and complex reaction pathways. In this research, supercritical water gasification (SCWG) and partial oxidation (SCWPO) of a model biomass compound was studied to produce hydrogen rich syngas at lower temperatures (400-500 °C). In this respect non-noble nickel catalysts were synthesized, evaluated and characterized (fresh and spent) to study the catalyst role in SCWG. The catalysts studied were synthesized via incipient wetness impregnation of metal salts on synthesized θ-alumina nanofibers and commercial gamma alumina (converted to theta) pellets (3mm average diameter) as catalyst supports. To synthesize nano structured catalyst supports (alumina nanofibers); a one-pot sol-gel route in scCO2 was adopted without using any hazardous organic solvents, surfactants or other additives for the first time. Aerogel nano catalysts were also directly synthesized via a sol-gel technique using isopropanol as solvent and supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) as the drying agent. In this research, it was found that introduction of oxidant after gasification is beneficial in terms of gaseous products and reducing the chemical oxygen demand (COD) in the liquid effluents. Another finding is that nickel (Ni) loading on alumina above 11 wt% consumed carbon dioxide with a simultaneous increase in methane attributed to hydrogen consumption by the methanation reaction. However, lanthanum (La) modified Ni/θ-Al2O3 enhanced production of hydrogen by retarding the methanation reaction and promoting the water gas shift (WGS) reaction. In addition, adsorption of CO2, one of the main products, by La was attributed to shifting the reaction equilibrium to the products and thus contributed to enhance hydrogen production. Nano catalysts showed higher activity towards hydrogen production, carbon gasification efficiency and total organic carbon (TOC) destruction in the liquid effluent compared to coarser heterogeneous catalysts. However, hydrogen production using aerogel catalysts where metals were loaded directly through sol-gel reaction was found comparatively less than nanofiber catalysts where metals were impregnated on the nano support. This phenomenon was attributed to the formation of Ni-La-Al-O nano structure complex by direct addition of metals during sol-gel reaction. Unlike impregnated catalysts, incorporation of La to the main structure of the sol-gel derived catalysts could not contribute to enhance the WGS reaction. The fresh and spent catalysts were characterized using different physicochemical techniques which revealed that the catalysts were active in SCW even though the metallic sites of nickel agglomerated when exposed to SCW conditions, oxidized and reacted with the support alumina. It was found that lanthanum retards the formation of graphitic coke, and adsorbed carbon dioxide during supercritical water gasification. To our knowledge, hydrogen yield, total organic carbon destruction and gasification efficiency were significantly higher using La modified Ni/θ-Al2O3 nano catalyst fibers than that of any other reported results of SCWG of any biomass compound at moderate temperatures (~500 °C) and pressures (~28 MPa). However, exposing the nanofiber catalysts to the SCW environment led to disintegration of the fibrous structure. A global kinetic model for TOC destruction in supercritical water was developed using non-linear regression, which convincingly fit with the experimental results

Application of Computer Algebra in List Decoding

The amount of data that we use in everyday life (social media, stock analysis, satellite communication etc.) are increasing day by day. As a result, the amount of data needs to be traverse through electronic media as well as to store are rapidly growing and there exist several environmental effects that can damage these important data during travelling or while in storage devices. To recover correct information from noisy data, we do use error correcting codes. The most challenging work in this area is to have a decoding algorithm that can decode the code quite fast, in addition with the existence of the code that can tolerate highest amount of noise, so that we can have it in practice. List decoding is an active research area for last two decades. This research popularise in coding theory after the breakthrough work by Madhu Sudan where he used list decoding technique to correct errors that exceeds half the minimum distance of Reed Solomon codes. Towards the direction of code development that can reach theoretical limit of error correction, Guruswami-Rudra introduced folded Reed Solomon codes that reached at $1 - R - \epsilon.$ To decode this codes, one has to first interpolate a multivariate polynomial first and then have to factor out all possible roots. The difficulties that lies here are efficient interpolation, dealing with multiplicities smartly and efficient factoring. This thesis deals with all these cases in order to have folded Reed Solomon codes in practice

Improved Study of Side-Channel Attacks Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Differential power analysis attacks are special kinds of side-channel attacks where power traces are considered as the side-channel information to launch the attack. These attacks are threatening and significant security issues for modern cryptographic devices such as smart cards, and Point of Sale (POS) machine; because after careful analysis of the power traces, the attacker can break any secured encryption algorithm and can steal sensitive information. In our work, we study differential power analysis attack using two popular neural networks: Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our work seeks to answer three research questions(RQs): RQ1: Is it possible to predict the unknown cryptographic algorithm using neural network models from different datasets? RQ2: Is it possible to map the key value for the specific plaintext-ciphertext pair with or without side-band information? RQ3: Using similar hyper-parameters, can we evaluate the performance of two neural network models (CNN vs. RNN)? In answering the questions, we have worked with two different datasets: one is a physical dataset (DPA contest v1 dataset), and the other one is simulated dataset (toggle count quantity) from Verilog HDL. We have evaluated the efficiency of CNN and RNN models in predicting the unknown cryptographic algorithms of the device under attack. We have mapped to 56 bits key for a specific plaintext-ciphertext pair with and without using side-band information. Finally, we have evaluated vi our neural network models using different metrics such as accuracy, loss, baselines, epochs, speed of operation, memory space consumed, and so on. We have shown the performance comparison between RNN and CNN on different datasets. We have done three experiments and shown our results on these three experiments. The first two experiments have shown the advantages of choosing CNN over RNN while working with side-channel datasets. In the third experiment, we have compared two RNN models on the same datasets but different dimensions of the datasets

Ground Improvement Methods Recently Practiced to Solve the Geotechnical Engineering Problems in Bangladesh

The field performance of the foundation systems recently practiced in the soft ground of Khulna region to solve the geotechnical engineering problems is described in this paper. The foundation systems adopted to construct the structures in Khulna Medical College, Khulna University, BIT Khulna and a Six-vent regulator on Passur River at Fakirhat are considered for study. In Khulna Medical College project, a shallow foundation system using Geotextilies at the foundation base was employed, while in Khulna University and BIT Khulna, a foundation system using replacing the soft compressible soil layer by compacted sand was used. The soft compressible soil at the site of the constructed six-vent regulator on Passur River at Fakirhat was improved by the installation of sand piles by drydisplacement method. The performance was measured in terms of the improvement of ground strength and the long-term settlement monitored in the field. It is observed that the performance of the adopted systems is quite satisfactory. However, in some cases the foundation systems do not work as per design and requirements

Exploring the effect of reporter-source relationship on reporting outcome

Quality of news story widely depends on the quality of the source. Avital part of the reporter’s job consists of cultivating sources, the lifelineof journalism. The present study attempts to study the impact of differentaspects of cultivating routine sources on their news related outcome inthe context of Bangladesh. For this study, data were collected throughstructured and self administered questionnaire from 105 reporters (N =105) working in different newspapers in the country’s second largestcity and commercial capital Chittagong. Chi-square (2) tests wereperformed between reporting outcome as the dependent variable anddifferent component of relationship as independent variables. Besides,Spearman’s correlation was employed to see the association betweenthe variables. The findings reveal that maintaining friendly relations,nurturing relationship in everyday life, showing respect to off the recordand concealing sources identity were appeared to be significant (p <0.01) predictor for high level of news outcome, while maintainingfriendly and good relationship and presenting gift were associated(p < 0.05) with outcome