Nomination Committee, Gender Diverse Board and Organisational Outcomes: An Australian Perspective

The thesis is structured around a three-paper format. These papers examine three distinct but interrelated aspects of corporate gender diversity. It provides; (1) a comprehensive review of corporate gender diversity (theories, studies, and regulation); (2) examines impact of nomination committee existence and attributes on corporate board gender diversity; and (3) the impact of gender diverse board on earnings quality. All three papers of the thesis highlight diverse aspects and the significance of corporate female leadership

Ultrasound-guided Optical Techniques for Cancer Diagnosis: System and Algorithm Development

Worldwide, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. In the United States alone, the American cancer society has estimated there will be 271,270 new breast cancer cases in 2019, and 42,260 lives will be lost to the disease. Ultrasound (US), mammography, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are regularly used for breast cancer diagnosis and therapy monitoring. However, they sometimes fail to diagnose breast cancer effectively. These shortcomings have motivated researchers to explore new modalities. One of these modalities, diffuse optical tomography (DOT), utilizes near-infrared (NIR) light to reveal the optical properties of tissue. NIR-based DOT images the contrast between a suspected lesion’s location and the background tissue, caused by the higher NIR absorption of the hemoglobin which characterizes tumors. The limitation of high light scattering inside tissue is minimized by using ultrasound image to find the tumor location. This thesis focuses on developing a compact, low-cost ultrasound guided diffuse optical tomography imaging system and on improving optical image reconstruction by extracting the tumor’s location and size from co-registered ultrasound images. Several electronic components have been redesigned and optimized to save space and cost and to improve the user experience. In terms of software and algorithm development, manual extraction of tumor information from ultrasound images has been replaced by using a semi-automated ultrasound image segmentation algorithm that reduces the optical image reconstruction time and operator dependency. This system and algorithm have been validated with phantom and clinical data and have demonstrated their efficacy. An ongoing clinical trial will continue to gather more patient data to improve the robustness of the imaging algorithm. Another part of this research focuses on ovarian cancer diagnosis. Ovarian cancer is the most deadly of all gynecological cancers, with a less than 50% five-year survival rate. This cancer can evolve without any noticeable symptom, which makes it difficult to diagnose in an early stage. Although ultrasound-guided photoacoustic tomography (PAT) has demonstrated potential for early detection of ovarian cancer, clinical studies have been very limited due to the lack of robust PAT systems. In this research, we have customized a commercial ultrasound system to obtain real-time co-registered PAT and US images. This system was validated with several phantom studies before use in a clinical trial. PAT and US raw data from 30 ovarian cancer patients was used to extract spectral and statistical features for training and testing classifiers for automatic diagnosis. For some challenging cases, the region of interest selection was improved by reconstructing co-registered Doppler images. This study will be continued in order to obtain quantitative tissue properties using US-guided PAT

Subsurface investigation in the Gulf of Corinth (GoC), Greece

Master's thesis in Petroleum Geosciences EngineeringCorinth Rift is an excellent rift laboratory to study the rift processes occurring during the early and late stages of continental extension due to exposure of a series of half-graben structures at the southern margin. Segmentation and lateral variation along the strike in the rift were observed in several studies, where the lateral correlation is hard to obtain as the W-E faults terminated in the valleys and became difficult to trace. The boundaries between the segments were less emphasized and developed as the main focus of the previous studies was the N-S direction of the rift. The structure geometry is still an going debate and has been interpreted in several ways with some of the studies proposed it to be a relay ramp, and others suggested a transfer zone. 2D seismic, bathymetry, earthquake, and onshore data was used to investigate if the segmentation continues offshore. Furthermore, to reveal the structures the boundaries between the segments, where W-E lines were the main focus throughout this study. The evidence of the segmentation of the Gulf was substantial as several NNE-SSW faults were traced in W-E seismic lines, some of those faults were correlatable with proposed previous studies boundaries. In total ten transfer faults are proposed; four major, three minor and three sub-minor. The basement structure varies along the strike and today's structures are inherited structure where the stepping of the W-E faults could be related to the structural variation of the basement. The geometry of today structure of the gulf seems to correlate with the proposed transfer faults model by Lister et al. (1986), where seismic line presented each segment of the model.submittedVersio

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EFFICIENT IMAGE COMPRESSOR FOR WIRELESS CAPSULE ENDOSCOPY

Capsule endoscope (CE) is a diagnosis tool for gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. Area and power are the two important parameters for the components used in CE. To optimize these two parameters, an efficient image compressor is desired. The mage compressor should be able to sufficiently compress the captured images to save transmission power, retain reconstruction quality for accurate diagnosis and consumes small physical area. To meet all of the above mentioned conditions, we have studied several transform coding based lossy compression algorithms in this thesis. The core computation tool of these compressors is the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) kernel. The DCT accumulates the distributed energy of an image in a small centralized area and supports more compression with non-significant quality degradation. The conventional DCT requires complex floating point multiplication, which is not feasible for wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) application because of its high implementation cost. So, an integer version of the DCT, known as iDCT, is used in this work. Several low complexity iDCTs along with different color space converters (such as, YUV, YEF, YCgCo) were combined to obtain the desired compression level. At the end a quantization stage is used in the proposed algorithm to achieve further compression. We have analyzed the endoscopic images and based on their properties, three quantization matrix sets have been proposed for three color planes. The algorithms are verified at both software (using MATLAB) and hardware (using HDL Verilog coding) levels. In the end, the performance of all the proposed schemes has been evaluated for optimal operation in WCE application

The Effectiveness of Chants and Short Stories on Primary Stage Pupils’ Communication

The aim of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of using chants and short stories in developing the third primary graders’ English communicative skills in Damietta governmental schools. In order to answer the questions of the study, the researcher adopted the quasi-experimental approach. The sample of the study consisted of 50 pupils from Dr Ahmed Zwail primary school in New Damietta city. The chants/songs and short stories were used with the study group in the second term of the academic school year (2014-2015). An oral communication test of six questions with 30 items was designed to be used as a pre-post test. The study indicated that there are statistically significant differences in mean scores of communicative skills test in favor of the post application. It also showed that there were statistically significant differences in mean scores of each of the communication skills in favor of the post application. In light of these results, the study recommended the necessity of using children chants/songs and short stories in teaching and learning. It also suggested that further researches should be conducted on the effect of songs and stories on the four skills of English language

Digital Storytelling or Traditional Storytelling to develop EFL Students’ Oral Communication?

The present study investigated the effect of storytelling versus digital storytelling on developing fifth year EFL primary school pupils’ oral communication performance. The study adopted the quasi-experimental design. Sixty pupils of Dr. Ahmed Zewail primary School were distributed into two experimental groups. One group served as the first experimental group (n=30) who was taught in digital storytelling, whereas the second experimental group (n=30) was taught in traditional storytelling. The experiment lasted for six weeks. The instruments of the study included an oral communication skills test, an oral communication checklist, a semi-structured interview and a reflective log. They were approved by a panel of jury. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the first experimental group and that of the second one on the post-administration of the oral communication test for the first experimental group. Moreover, results revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the responses of the first experimental group and that of the second one on the post-administration of the semi-structured interview favoring the first experimental group. As such, it was concluded that storytelling versus digital storytelling had a positive effect on developing fifth year EFL primary pupils’ oral communication performance

Public-Private Partnerships in Housing: Empirical Study on Bangladesh as an Emerging Country

The concept of PPP in Bangladesh has been widely recognized as a natural response to meet the colossal demand for housing, government’s dwindling budgetary capacity, massive demand coming from a section of the society for better quality of services and a need for a catalyst to boost macro-economic conditions. The city has been in the forefront of housing market revival and prime government agencies have, under the PPP framework, assumed a unique facilitating role without undermining the pervasive influence of the regulatory ideology. As the influential partner in implementation, the government is able to revise regulations related to land supply, building materials, target groups, affordability, building bye laws and regulatory framework as and when necessary. This paper investigates the dynamics of the public private interplay that has resulted from the Bangladesh Government’s Public Private Partnership policy in supplying affordable housing in all over Bangladesh. Overall, its considerable success in the city paints a rosy picture as the joint approach brings together the technical and managerial expertise of the private sector with the accountability and fair pricing (obligation) of the public sector to improve the delivery of good quality housing. It is interesting to observe how two opposite forces have blended and are growing in the midst of prospect and constraints, conflict and cooperation, that are, oddly enough, set within the socialist institutional context. However, housing production under the PPP model is impressive in terms of costs and quality but is miniscule in terms of numbers. KEY WORDS: Bangladesh; Public Private Partnership; Legal and Regulatory Framework; Urban Poor; Affordable Housing;

Customers’ Intention towards Purchasing Apartment in Dhaka City, Bangladesh: Offering an Alternative Buying Intention Model

Various models and theories have been proposed to explain customers’ buying attitude, buying intention and behavior. Taking a new approach this study has applied the theory of planned behavior to explain buying intention in context of Real Estate especially on apartment buying behavior. This study has aimed at exploring the antecedents of customers’ buying attitude and investigating the impact of customers’ buying attitude on buying intention. A questionnaire survey method has been used with 275 customers and response rate of 86.18 percent. Initially an Exploratory Factor Analysis has been directed using SPSS (Version 21).We have explored six factors project facilities, environmental issues, location and communication, physical quality, promotion and prices that act as antecedents of customers’ buying attitude. After that, CFA has been carried out to confirm the factors. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) has been used to test both the proposed model and hypothesized relationships among the constructs. It is found that project facilities, location and communication, physical quality and prices have significant impact on customers’ buying attitude except the environmental issues and promotion. It is also found that buying intention is strongly influenced by buying attitude of the customers. The proposed model also has an acceptable fit to the data. Real Estate developers, marketers, policy makers can use the findings to better understand, segment and satisfy the customers. Therefore the findings of the study will definitely help in building customer based brand equity and customer loyalty particularly in Real Estate (Apartment Market)  to gain competitive advantages as well as achieve sustainable development of the sector. The study may be limited by its focus on a geographic section of the Bangladeshi Real Estate market.  Keywords: Buyers’ attitude, Buying intention, Buying intention model, Real estate, Real estate marketing

A novel license plate character segmentation method for different types of vehicle license plates.

License plate character segmentation (LPCS) is a very important part of vehicle license plate recognition (LPR) system. The accuracy of LPR system widely depends on two parts; namely license plate detection (LPD) and LPCS. Different country has different types and shapes of LPs are available. Based on character position on LP, we can find two types of LPs over the world, single row (SR) and double rows (DR) LP. Most of the LPCS methods are generally used for SRLP. This paper proposed a novel LPCS method for SR and DR types of LPs. Experimental results shows the real-time effectiveness of our proposed method. The accuracy of our proposed LPCS method is 99.05% and the average computational time is 27ms which is higher than other existing methods