517 research outputs found
The Effects of Electronic Banking on Financial Services in Ghana
Electronic banking has redefined the way banking is conducted across the globe and Ghana was not left out. Electronic banking has created a financial supermarket where many different financial services like insurance, investment, loans and current and savings accounts could be provided. Over the last three decades banks have designed and rolled out many different electronic banking products and services in Ghana. In this study an attempt is made to examine the effects of electronic banking products and services on financial services delivery in Ghana. The study was conducted using the case study approach. Data was collected from the administration of open ended questionnaires to customers and staff of banks in Ghana. Additional data was also collected through interviews conducted with customers and staff of case study institutions. A purposive and simple sampling technique was used to select the case study banks, customers and staff who participated in the study.Results of the study revealed that electronic banking has successfully transformed banking in Ghana. Banks now provide a one stop-shop for various financial services thereby creating what can be termed as financial shopping mall. Electronic banking has made banking easier and convenient. Customers can now transact banking business from the comfort of their homes and offices. Other benefits of electronic banking include; increased customer base, reduced cost in accessing and using the banking services, increased comfort and time saving-transactions can be made 24-hours a day, without requiring the physical interaction with the bank, quick and continuous access to information. Customers have easier access to information as they can check their accounts at the click of a button.Despite these benefits electronic banking also creates its own problems including; additional cost to acquire computer, internet connectivity and absence of human touch, Keywords:Electronic-business, electronic commerce, electronic banking, and electronic banking products and services
GEMINI: A Generic Multi-Modal Natural Interface Framework for Videogames
In recent years videogame companies have recognized the role of player
engagement as a major factor in user experience and enjoyment. This encouraged
a greater investment in new types of game controllers such as the WiiMote, Rock
Band instruments and the Kinect. However, the native software of these
controllers was not originally designed to be used in other game applications.
This work addresses this issue by building a middleware framework, which maps
body poses or voice commands to actions in any game. This not only warrants a
more natural and customized user-experience but it also defines an
interoperable virtual controller. In this version of the framework, body poses
and voice commands are respectively recognized through the Kinect's built-in
cameras and microphones. The acquired data is then translated into the native
interaction scheme in real time using a lightweight method based on spatial
restrictions. The system is also prepared to use Nintendo's Wiimote as an
auxiliary and unobtrusive gamepad for physically or verbally impractical
commands. System validation was performed by analyzing the performance of
certain tasks and examining user reports. Both confirmed this approach as a
practical and alluring alternative to the game's native interaction scheme. In
sum, this framework provides a game-controlling tool that is totally
customizable and very flexible, thus expanding the market of game consumers.Comment: WorldCIST'13 Internacional Conferenc
DancingLines: An Analytical Scheme to Depict Cross-Platform Event Popularity
Nowadays, events usually burst and are propagated online through multiple
modern media like social networks and search engines. There exists various
research discussing the event dissemination trends on individual medium, while
few studies focus on event popularity analysis from a cross-platform
perspective. Challenges come from the vast diversity of events and media,
limited access to aligned datasets across different media and a great deal of
noise in the datasets. In this paper, we design DancingLines, an innovative
scheme that captures and quantitatively analyzes event popularity between
pairwise text media. It contains two models: TF-SW, a semantic-aware popularity
quantification model, based on an integrated weight coefficient leveraging
Word2Vec and TextRank; and wDTW-CD, a pairwise event popularity time series
alignment model matching different event phases adapted from Dynamic Time
Warping. We also propose three metrics to interpret event popularity trends
between pairwise social platforms. Experimental results on eighteen real-world
event datasets from an influential social network and a popular search engine
validate the effectiveness and applicability of our scheme. DancingLines is
demonstrated to possess broad application potentials for discovering the
knowledge of various aspects related to events and different media
Generic Subsequence Matching Framework: Modularity, Flexibility, Efficiency
Subsequence matching has appeared to be an ideal approach for solving many
problems related to the fields of data mining and similarity retrieval. It has
been shown that almost any data class (audio, image, biometrics, signals) is or
can be represented by some kind of time series or string of symbols, which can
be seen as an input for various subsequence matching approaches. The variety of
data types, specific tasks and their partial or full solutions is so wide that
the choice, implementation and parametrization of a suitable solution for a
given task might be complicated and time-consuming; a possibly fruitful
combination of fragments from different research areas may not be obvious nor
easy to realize. The leading authors of this field also mention the
implementation bias that makes difficult a proper comparison of competing
approaches. Therefore we present a new generic Subsequence Matching Framework
(SMF) that tries to overcome the aforementioned problems by a uniform frame
that simplifies and speeds up the design, development and evaluation of
subsequence matching related systems. We identify several relatively separate
subtasks solved differently over the literature and SMF enables to combine them
in straightforward manner achieving new quality and efficiency. This framework
can be used in many application domains and its components can be reused
effectively. Its strictly modular architecture and openness enables also
involvement of efficient solutions from different fields, for instance
efficient metric-based indexes. This is an extended version of a paper
published on DEXA 2012.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper published on DEXA 201
Hybrid Method for Digits Recognition using Fixed-Frame Scores and Derived Pitch
This paper presents a procedure of frame normalization based on the traditional dynamic time warping (DTW) using the LPC coefficients. The redefined method is called as the DTW frame-fixing method (DTW-FF), it works by normalizing the word frames of the input against the
reference frames. The enthusiasm to this study is due to neural network limitation that entails a fix number of input nodes for when processing multiple inputs in parallel. Due to this problem, this research is initiated to reduce the amount of computation and complexity in a neural network by reducing the number of inputs into the network. In this study, dynamic warping process is used, in which local distance scores of the warping path are fixed and collected so that their scores are of equal number of frames. Also studied in this paper is the
consideration of pitch as a contributing feature to the speech recognition. Results showed a good performance and
improvement when using pitch along with DTW-FF feature.
The convergence rate between using the steepest gradient
descent is also compared to another method namely conjugate
gradient method. Convergence rate is also improved when
conjugate gradient method is introduced in the back-propagation algorithm
Handwritten Character Recognition Using Elastic Matching Based On Class-Dependent Deformation Model
For handwritten character recognition, a new elastic image matching (EM) technique based on a class-dependent deformation model is proposed. In the deformation model, any deformation of a class is described by a linear combination of eigen-deformations, which are intrinsic deformation directions of the class. The eigen-deformations can be estimated statistically from the actual deformations of handwritten characters. Experimental results show that the proposed technique can attain higher recognition rates than conventional EM techniques based on class-independent deformation models. The results also show the superiority of the proposed technique over those conventional EM techniques in computational efficiency
Mining users' significant driving routes with low-power sensors
While there is significant work on sensing and recognition of significant
places for users, little attention has been given to users' significant routes.
Recognizing these routine journeys, opens doors to the development of novel
applications, like personalized travel alerts, and enhancement of user's travel
experience. However, the high energy consumption of traditional location
sensing technologies, such as GPS or WiFi based localization, is a barrier to
passive and ubiquitous route sensing through smartphones.
In this paper, we present a passive route sensing framework that continuously
monitors a vehicle user solely through a phone's gyroscope and accelerometer.
This approach can differentiate and recognize various routes taken by the user
by time warping angular speeds experienced by the phone while in transit and is
independent of phone orientation and location within the vehicle, small detours
and traffic conditions. We compare the route learning and recognition
capabilities of this approach with GPS trajectory analysis and show that it
achieves similar performance. Moreover, with an embedded co-processor, common
to most new generation phones, it achieves energy savings of an order of
magnitude over the GPS sensor.This research has been funded by the EPSRC Innovation
and Knowledge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction
project (EP/K000314).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2668332.266834
Speeding up Simplification of Polygonal Curves using Nested Approximations
We develop a multiresolution approach to the problem of polygonal curve
approximation. We show theoretically and experimentally that, if the
simplification algorithm A used between any two successive levels of resolution
satisfies some conditions, the multiresolution algorithm MR will have a
complexity lower than the complexity of A. In particular, we show that if A has
a O(N2/K) complexity (the complexity of a reduced search dynamic solution
approach), where N and K are respectively the initial and the final number of
segments, the complexity of MR is in O(N).We experimentally compare the
outcomes of MR with those of the optimal "full search" dynamic programming
solution and of classical merge and split approaches. The experimental
evaluations confirm the theoretical derivations and show that the proposed
approach evaluated on 2D coastal maps either shows a lower complexity or
provides polygonal approximations closer to the initial curves.Comment: 12 pages + figure
Automatic alignment of surgical videos using kinematic data
Over the past one hundred years, the classic teaching methodology of "see
one, do one, teach one" has governed the surgical education systems worldwide.
With the advent of Operation Room 2.0, recording video, kinematic and many
other types of data during the surgery became an easy task, thus allowing
artificial intelligence systems to be deployed and used in surgical and medical
practice. Recently, surgical videos has been shown to provide a structure for
peer coaching enabling novice trainees to learn from experienced surgeons by
replaying those videos. However, the high inter-operator variability in
surgical gesture duration and execution renders learning from comparing novice
to expert surgical videos a very difficult task. In this paper, we propose a
novel technique to align multiple videos based on the alignment of their
corresponding kinematic multivariate time series data. By leveraging the
Dynamic Time Warping measure, our algorithm synchronizes a set of videos in
order to show the same gesture being performed at different speed. We believe
that the proposed approach is a valuable addition to the existing learning
tools for surgery.Comment: Accepted at AIME 201
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