Objective(s): The cutting-edge assessment of voice disorders includes objective and subjective methods in the daily clinical practice. The latter assessment is usually performed through the administration of self-repo...Objective(s): The cutting-edge assessment of voice disorders includes objective and subjective methods in the daily clinical practice. The latter assessment is usually performed through the administration of self-reported questionnaires. Voice Handicap Index (VHI) is one of the most widely used tools both in clinical practice and in research level. This tool-questionnaire was employed in this research along with the Voice Evaluation Template (VEF). In turn, the aim of this study was to analyse and produce the cut-off points of VHI for voice-disordered patients in Greece by using Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves (ROC Curves). Methods: Sixty-three participants (40 non-dysphonic and 23 with different types of dysphonia) were classified by ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) doctors and SLPs (Speech-Language Pathologists). The Hellenic VHI along with the translated Greek version of the VEF was administered to the subjects of this research. Results: The voice-disordered subjects exhibited higher overall VHI scores (in total and in its 3 subdomains) compared to the control group. Statistical significant differences were found between dysphonic and non-dysphonic participants for all VHI’s construct domains. The cut-off point of VHI total score was estimated at the value of 14.50 (sensitivity: 0.870, 1-specificity: 0.000). Moreover, the cut-off points of the three subdomains were computed as 7.50 for functional (sensitivity: 0.783, 1-specificity: 0.000), 8.50 for physical (sensitivity: 0.739, 1-specificity: 0.000) and 8.50 for emotional domain (sensitivity: 0.783, 1-specificity: 0.050). Conclusion: The preliminary statistical and ROC data analysis of VHI concluded that by using this type of assessment method, populations with or without voice disorders (in Greece) can be distinguished. Albeit this tool is a non-interventional method it could consequently offer an adequate screening and monitoring capability.展开更多
The necessity of lowering the mean power consumption of various facilities, due to the lack of their enormous future energy needs, led to an ongoing advance of various technologies. These technologies have been orient...The necessity of lowering the mean power consumption of various facilities, due to the lack of their enormous future energy needs, led to an ongoing advance of various technologies. These technologies have been oriented towards the concept of a Reduced Ecological Footprint. Massive structures (such as building complexes and hospitals) have been redesigned and upgraded;many interior designs have been dramatically altered while new electronic devices are constantly being produced in order to revolutionize a long term perspective towards a “Green Planet” while they exhibit astonishing signal processing. Consequently, an enormous technology already exists which needs to be properly combined to a proposed methodology and to new ideas relevant to systems’ administration through automatic wireless control. This paper intends to reduce the gap between design and realization of the aforementioned research. Consequently, the primary contribution of this research is the proposal of a complete design protocol with minimized defects relevant to Reduced Ecological Footprints of Facilities (REFF) along with its beneficial advantages relevant to providing a healthy and productive work environment. This protocol consists of four main parts which are 1) the main key points-guidelines, 2) its objectives, 3) the know-how methodology for implementation in existing installations and 4) the description of the imminent benefits in workforce/human resources.展开更多
Vendor lock-in can occur at any layer of the cloud stack-Infrastructure,Platform,and Software-as-a-service.This paper covers the vendor lock-in issue at Platform as a Service(PaaS)level where applications can be creat...Vendor lock-in can occur at any layer of the cloud stack-Infrastructure,Platform,and Software-as-a-service.This paper covers the vendor lock-in issue at Platform as a Service(PaaS)level where applications can be created,deployed,and managed without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.These applications and their persisted data on one PaaS provider are not easy to port to another provider.To overcome this issue,we propose a middleware to abstract and make the database services as cloud-agnostic.The middleware supports several SQL and NoSQL data stores that can be hosted and ported among disparate PaaS providers.It facilitates the developers with data portability and data migration among relational and NoSQL-based cloud databases.NoSQL databases are fundamental to endure Big Data applications as they support the handling of an enormous volume of highly variable data while assuring fault tolerance,availability,and scalability.The implementation of the middleware depicts that using it alleviates the efforts of rewriting the application code while changing the backend database system.A working protocol of a migration tool has been developed using this middleware to facilitate the migration of the database(move existing data from a database on one cloud to a new database even on a different cloud).Although the middleware adds some overhead compared to the native code for the cloud services being used,the experimental evaluation on Twitter(a Big Data application)data set,proves this overhead is negligible.展开更多
In order to investigate of cobalt-doped interracial polyvinyl alcohol （PVA） layer and interface trap （Dit） effects, A1/p- Si Schottky barrier diodes （SBDs） are fabricated, and their electrical and dielectric pro...In order to investigate of cobalt-doped interracial polyvinyl alcohol （PVA） layer and interface trap （Dit） effects, A1/p- Si Schottky barrier diodes （SBDs） are fabricated, and their electrical and dielectric properties are investigated at room temperature. The forward and reverse admittance measurements are carded out in the frequency and voltage ranges of 30 kHz-300 kHz and -5 V-6 V, respectively. C-V or er-V plots exhibit two distinct peaks corresponding to inversion and accumulation regions. The first peak is attributed to the existence of Dit, the other to the series resistance （Rs）, and interfacial layer. Both the real and imaginary parts of dielectric constant （er and err） and electric modulus （Mr and Mrr）, loss tangent （tan~）, and AC electrical conductivity （aac） are investigated, each as a function of frequency and applied bias voltage. Each of the M~ versus V and Mrr versus V plots shows a peak and the magnitude of peak increases with the increasing of frequency. Especially due to the Dit and interfacial PVA layer, both capacitance （C） and conductance （G/w） values are strongly affected, which consequently contributes to deviation from both the electrical and dielectric properties of A1/Co-doped PVA/p-Si （MPS） type SBD. In addition, the voltage-dependent profile of Dit is obtained from the low-high frequency capacitance （CLF-CHF） method.展开更多
The increasing use of digital video everyday in a multitude of electronic devices, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops, poses the need for quick development of cross-platform video software. However current a...The increasing use of digital video everyday in a multitude of electronic devices, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops, poses the need for quick development of cross-platform video software. However current approaches to this direction usually require a long learning curve, and their development lacks standardization. This results in software components that are difficult to reuse, and hard to maintain or extend. In order to overcome such issues, we propose a novel object-oriented framework for efficient development of software systems for video analysis. It consists of a set of four abstract components, suitable for the implementation of independent plug-in modules for video acquisition, preprocessing, analysis and output handling. The extensibility of each module can be facilitated by sub-modules specifying additional functionalities. This architecture enables quick responses to changes and re-configurability;thus conforming to the requirements of agile software development practices. Considering the need for platform independency, the proposed Java Video Analysis (JVA) framework is implemented in Java. It is publicly available through the web as open-access software, supported by a growing collection of implemented modules. Its efficiency is empirically validated for the development of a representative video analysis system.展开更多
Objective(s): Laryngeal inflammations lead to voice disorders. Medical conditions such as chronic laryngitis, gastroesophageal reflux, laryngopharyngeal reflux, Reinke edema and/or vocal folds hemorrhage, result in di...Objective(s): Laryngeal inflammations lead to voice disorders. Medical conditions such as chronic laryngitis, gastroesophageal reflux, laryngopharyngeal reflux, Reinke edema and/or vocal folds hemorrhage, result in diverse symptoms including chronic cough, throat cleaning and dysphonia (e.g. hoarseness). In turn, the dysphonic symptoms can be evaluated via subjective and objective procedures. The objective procedures usually include self-perceived questionnaires like the Voice Handicap Index (VHI). Studies reported that VHI can distinguish objectively dysphonic and non-dysphonic populations using the cut-off points of Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves. The purpose of this study was to calculate the cut-off points for individuals exhibiting voice symptoms which had been developed from laryngeal inflammatory diseases in Greece. Methods: One hundred and twelve participants (90 non-dysphonic and 22 dysphonic) filled in the Hellenic Voice Handicap Index (VHI) and the Greek translated version of Voice Evaluation Template (VEF) were administrated. All subjects were evaluated by an Otolaryngologist and a Speech-Language Pathologist. Results: The group with voice disorders exhibited higher VHI scores (in total and in its 3 subdomains) compared to non-dysphonic subgroup. Statistical significant differences were found for all VHI’s total cut-off point of 19.50 (sensitivity: 0.882, 1-specificity: 0.011) and for its three subdomains [functional 6.50 (sensitivity = 0.636, and 1-specificity = 0.022);physical 9.50 (sensitivity = 0.636, and 1-specificity = 0.000);emotional 6.50 (sensitivity = 0.455, and 1-specificity = 0.133)]. Conclusion: The preliminary results showed that VHI could discriminate individuals having voice disorders from laryngeal inflammations. The Voice Handicap Index can be used as a primary health care tool and a self-monitoring procedure in acute and sub-acute phases of the laryngeal inflammation.展开更多
Currently,the major problem of all existing commercial capsule devices is the lack of control of movement.In the future,with an interface application,the clinician will be able to stop and direct the device into point...Currently,the major problem of all existing commercial capsule devices is the lack of control of movement.In the future,with an interface application,the clinician will be able to stop and direct the device into points of interest for detailed inspection/diagnosis,and therapy delivery.This editorial presents current commerciallyavailable new designs,European projects and delivery capsule and gives an overview of the progress required and progress that will be achieved-according to the opinion of the authors- in the next 5 year leading to 2020.展开更多
The continuous development of cyberattacks is threatening digital transformation endeavors worldwide and leadsto wide losses for various organizations. These dangers have proven that signature-based approaches are ins...The continuous development of cyberattacks is threatening digital transformation endeavors worldwide and leadsto wide losses for various organizations. These dangers have proven that signature-based approaches are insufficientto prevent emerging and polymorphic attacks. Therefore, this paper is proposing a Robust Malicious ExecutableDetection (RMED) using Host-based Machine Learning Classifier to discover malicious Portable Executable (PE)files in hosts using Windows operating systems through collecting PE headers and applying machine learningmechanisms to detect unknown infected files. The authors have collected a novel reliable dataset containing 116,031benign files and 179,071 malware samples from diverse sources to ensure the efficiency of RMED approach.The most effective PE headers that can highly differentiate between benign and malware files were selected totrain the model on 15 PE features to speed up the classification process and achieve real-time detection formalicious executables. The evaluation results showed that RMED succeeded in shrinking the classification timeto 91 milliseconds for each file while reaching an accuracy of 98.42% with a false positive rate equal to 1.58. Inconclusion, this paper contributes to the field of cybersecurity by presenting a comprehensive framework thatleverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to proactively detect and prevent cyber-attacks.展开更多
This paper presents a Web-based Decision Support System (Web-DSS) that was designed and developed to support and provide suggestions on the procedures taking place between a port and a dry port, which have to collabor...This paper presents a Web-based Decision Support System (Web-DSS) that was designed and developed to support and provide suggestions on the procedures taking place between a port and a dry port, which have to collaborate, work concurrently and optimize their joint operation. The system operates at the highest hierarchical level supervising a number of different components dealing with three different time scale horizons so as to provide assistance at operational, tactical and strategic level. The Web-based DSS coordinates and integrates the subsystems operating at lower levels and it interfaces with all the involved actors: customers, suppliers, relevant authorities so as to receive all the necessary information to come up with “optimal” suggestions and decisions. In this paper, the overall architecture is presented and the individual modules are described.展开更多
As IoT devices become more ubiquitous, the security of IoT-based networks becomes paramount. Machine Learning-based cybersecurity enables autonomous threat detection and prevention. However, one of the challenges of a...As IoT devices become more ubiquitous, the security of IoT-based networks becomes paramount. Machine Learning-based cybersecurity enables autonomous threat detection and prevention. However, one of the challenges of applying Machine Learning-based cybersecurity in IoT devices is feature selection as most IoT devices are resource-constrained. This paper studies two feature selection algorithms: Information Gain and PSO-based, to select a minimum number of attack features, and Decision Tree and SVM are utilized for performance comparison. The consistent use of the same metrics in feature selection and detection algorithms substantially enhances the classification accuracy compared to the non-consistent use in feature selection by Information Gain (entropy) and Tree detection algorithm by classification. Furthermore, the Tree with consistent feature selection is comparable to the ensemble that provides excellent performance at the cost of computation complexity.展开更多
One of the problems that many engineering graduates face when looking for their first job is： Do you have experience？ Employers prefer graduates with relevant experience to those without. Why is experience so import...One of the problems that many engineering graduates face when looking for their first job is： Do you have experience？ Employers prefer graduates with relevant experience to those without. Why is experience so important to employers？ Can students accumulate ＂working＂ experience while studying in college？ This paper discusses the use of design projects inside and outside of classrooms to help students gain ＂working＂ experience and skills through hands-on design activities that simulate the actual design activities that occur in the industry. Faculty members from the Mechanical Engineering Technology and Computer Engineering Technology departments were involved in creating multidisciplinary design projects. The design projects give students new insights into what they learn in their coursework and pro.vide students the valuable experiences in analytical skills, concurrent engineering approach, people skills, and management skills needed for the students when looking for employment.展开更多
文摘Objective(s): The cutting-edge assessment of voice disorders includes objective and subjective methods in the daily clinical practice. The latter assessment is usually performed through the administration of self-reported questionnaires. Voice Handicap Index (VHI) is one of the most widely used tools both in clinical practice and in research level. This tool-questionnaire was employed in this research along with the Voice Evaluation Template (VEF). In turn, the aim of this study was to analyse and produce the cut-off points of VHI for voice-disordered patients in Greece by using Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves (ROC Curves). Methods: Sixty-three participants (40 non-dysphonic and 23 with different types of dysphonia) were classified by ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) doctors and SLPs (Speech-Language Pathologists). The Hellenic VHI along with the translated Greek version of the VEF was administered to the subjects of this research. Results: The voice-disordered subjects exhibited higher overall VHI scores (in total and in its 3 subdomains) compared to the control group. Statistical significant differences were found between dysphonic and non-dysphonic participants for all VHI’s construct domains. The cut-off point of VHI total score was estimated at the value of 14.50 (sensitivity: 0.870, 1-specificity: 0.000). Moreover, the cut-off points of the three subdomains were computed as 7.50 for functional (sensitivity: 0.783, 1-specificity: 0.000), 8.50 for physical (sensitivity: 0.739, 1-specificity: 0.000) and 8.50 for emotional domain (sensitivity: 0.783, 1-specificity: 0.050). Conclusion: The preliminary statistical and ROC data analysis of VHI concluded that by using this type of assessment method, populations with or without voice disorders (in Greece) can be distinguished. Albeit this tool is a non-interventional method it could consequently offer an adequate screening and monitoring capability.
文摘The necessity of lowering the mean power consumption of various facilities, due to the lack of their enormous future energy needs, led to an ongoing advance of various technologies. These technologies have been oriented towards the concept of a Reduced Ecological Footprint. Massive structures (such as building complexes and hospitals) have been redesigned and upgraded;many interior designs have been dramatically altered while new electronic devices are constantly being produced in order to revolutionize a long term perspective towards a “Green Planet” while they exhibit astonishing signal processing. Consequently, an enormous technology already exists which needs to be properly combined to a proposed methodology and to new ideas relevant to systems’ administration through automatic wireless control. This paper intends to reduce the gap between design and realization of the aforementioned research. Consequently, the primary contribution of this research is the proposal of a complete design protocol with minimized defects relevant to Reduced Ecological Footprints of Facilities (REFF) along with its beneficial advantages relevant to providing a healthy and productive work environment. This protocol consists of four main parts which are 1) the main key points-guidelines, 2) its objectives, 3) the know-how methodology for implementation in existing installations and 4) the description of the imminent benefits in workforce/human resources.
文摘Vendor lock-in can occur at any layer of the cloud stack-Infrastructure,Platform,and Software-as-a-service.This paper covers the vendor lock-in issue at Platform as a Service(PaaS)level where applications can be created,deployed,and managed without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.These applications and their persisted data on one PaaS provider are not easy to port to another provider.To overcome this issue,we propose a middleware to abstract and make the database services as cloud-agnostic.The middleware supports several SQL and NoSQL data stores that can be hosted and ported among disparate PaaS providers.It facilitates the developers with data portability and data migration among relational and NoSQL-based cloud databases.NoSQL databases are fundamental to endure Big Data applications as they support the handling of an enormous volume of highly variable data while assuring fault tolerance,availability,and scalability.The implementation of the middleware depicts that using it alleviates the efforts of rewriting the application code while changing the backend database system.A working protocol of a migration tool has been developed using this middleware to facilitate the migration of the database(move existing data from a database on one cloud to a new database even on a different cloud).Although the middleware adds some overhead compared to the native code for the cloud services being used,the experimental evaluation on Twitter(a Big Data application)data set,proves this overhead is negligible.
文摘In order to investigate of cobalt-doped interracial polyvinyl alcohol （PVA） layer and interface trap （Dit） effects, A1/p- Si Schottky barrier diodes （SBDs） are fabricated, and their electrical and dielectric properties are investigated at room temperature. The forward and reverse admittance measurements are carded out in the frequency and voltage ranges of 30 kHz-300 kHz and -5 V-6 V, respectively. C-V or er-V plots exhibit two distinct peaks corresponding to inversion and accumulation regions. The first peak is attributed to the existence of Dit, the other to the series resistance （Rs）, and interfacial layer. Both the real and imaginary parts of dielectric constant （er and err） and electric modulus （Mr and Mrr）, loss tangent （tan~）, and AC electrical conductivity （aac） are investigated, each as a function of frequency and applied bias voltage. Each of the M~ versus V and Mrr versus V plots shows a peak and the magnitude of peak increases with the increasing of frequency. Especially due to the Dit and interfacial PVA layer, both capacitance （C） and conductance （G/w） values are strongly affected, which consequently contributes to deviation from both the electrical and dielectric properties of A1/Co-doped PVA/p-Si （MPS） type SBD. In addition, the voltage-dependent profile of Dit is obtained from the low-high frequency capacitance （CLF-CHF） method.
文摘The increasing use of digital video everyday in a multitude of electronic devices, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops, poses the need for quick development of cross-platform video software. However current approaches to this direction usually require a long learning curve, and their development lacks standardization. This results in software components that are difficult to reuse, and hard to maintain or extend. In order to overcome such issues, we propose a novel object-oriented framework for efficient development of software systems for video analysis. It consists of a set of four abstract components, suitable for the implementation of independent plug-in modules for video acquisition, preprocessing, analysis and output handling. The extensibility of each module can be facilitated by sub-modules specifying additional functionalities. This architecture enables quick responses to changes and re-configurability;thus conforming to the requirements of agile software development practices. Considering the need for platform independency, the proposed Java Video Analysis (JVA) framework is implemented in Java. It is publicly available through the web as open-access software, supported by a growing collection of implemented modules. Its efficiency is empirically validated for the development of a representative video analysis system.
文摘Objective(s): Laryngeal inflammations lead to voice disorders. Medical conditions such as chronic laryngitis, gastroesophageal reflux, laryngopharyngeal reflux, Reinke edema and/or vocal folds hemorrhage, result in diverse symptoms including chronic cough, throat cleaning and dysphonia (e.g. hoarseness). In turn, the dysphonic symptoms can be evaluated via subjective and objective procedures. The objective procedures usually include self-perceived questionnaires like the Voice Handicap Index (VHI). Studies reported that VHI can distinguish objectively dysphonic and non-dysphonic populations using the cut-off points of Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves. The purpose of this study was to calculate the cut-off points for individuals exhibiting voice symptoms which had been developed from laryngeal inflammatory diseases in Greece. Methods: One hundred and twelve participants (90 non-dysphonic and 22 dysphonic) filled in the Hellenic Voice Handicap Index (VHI) and the Greek translated version of Voice Evaluation Template (VEF) were administrated. All subjects were evaluated by an Otolaryngologist and a Speech-Language Pathologist. Results: The group with voice disorders exhibited higher VHI scores (in total and in its 3 subdomains) compared to non-dysphonic subgroup. Statistical significant differences were found for all VHI’s total cut-off point of 19.50 (sensitivity: 0.882, 1-specificity: 0.011) and for its three subdomains [functional 6.50 (sensitivity = 0.636, and 1-specificity = 0.022);physical 9.50 (sensitivity = 0.636, and 1-specificity = 0.000);emotional 6.50 (sensitivity = 0.455, and 1-specificity = 0.133)]. Conclusion: The preliminary results showed that VHI could discriminate individuals having voice disorders from laryngeal inflammations. The Voice Handicap Index can be used as a primary health care tool and a self-monitoring procedure in acute and sub-acute phases of the laryngeal inflammation.
文摘Currently,the major problem of all existing commercial capsule devices is the lack of control of movement.In the future,with an interface application,the clinician will be able to stop and direct the device into points of interest for detailed inspection/diagnosis,and therapy delivery.This editorial presents current commerciallyavailable new designs,European projects and delivery capsule and gives an overview of the progress required and progress that will be achieved-according to the opinion of the authors- in the next 5 year leading to 2020.
文摘The continuous development of cyberattacks is threatening digital transformation endeavors worldwide and leadsto wide losses for various organizations. These dangers have proven that signature-based approaches are insufficientto prevent emerging and polymorphic attacks. Therefore, this paper is proposing a Robust Malicious ExecutableDetection (RMED) using Host-based Machine Learning Classifier to discover malicious Portable Executable (PE)files in hosts using Windows operating systems through collecting PE headers and applying machine learningmechanisms to detect unknown infected files. The authors have collected a novel reliable dataset containing 116,031benign files and 179,071 malware samples from diverse sources to ensure the efficiency of RMED approach.The most effective PE headers that can highly differentiate between benign and malware files were selected totrain the model on 15 PE features to speed up the classification process and achieve real-time detection formalicious executables. The evaluation results showed that RMED succeeded in shrinking the classification timeto 91 milliseconds for each file while reaching an accuracy of 98.42% with a false positive rate equal to 1.58. Inconclusion, this paper contributes to the field of cybersecurity by presenting a comprehensive framework thatleverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to proactively detect and prevent cyber-attacks.
文摘This paper presents a Web-based Decision Support System (Web-DSS) that was designed and developed to support and provide suggestions on the procedures taking place between a port and a dry port, which have to collaborate, work concurrently and optimize their joint operation. The system operates at the highest hierarchical level supervising a number of different components dealing with three different time scale horizons so as to provide assistance at operational, tactical and strategic level. The Web-based DSS coordinates and integrates the subsystems operating at lower levels and it interfaces with all the involved actors: customers, suppliers, relevant authorities so as to receive all the necessary information to come up with “optimal” suggestions and decisions. In this paper, the overall architecture is presented and the individual modules are described.
文摘As IoT devices become more ubiquitous, the security of IoT-based networks becomes paramount. Machine Learning-based cybersecurity enables autonomous threat detection and prevention. However, one of the challenges of applying Machine Learning-based cybersecurity in IoT devices is feature selection as most IoT devices are resource-constrained. This paper studies two feature selection algorithms: Information Gain and PSO-based, to select a minimum number of attack features, and Decision Tree and SVM are utilized for performance comparison. The consistent use of the same metrics in feature selection and detection algorithms substantially enhances the classification accuracy compared to the non-consistent use in feature selection by Information Gain (entropy) and Tree detection algorithm by classification. Furthermore, the Tree with consistent feature selection is comparable to the ensemble that provides excellent performance at the cost of computation complexity.
基金Acknowledgments The work is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Education Division. The award number is NSF ATE No 1003712. The authors greatly appreciate the support from the NSF. In addition, the authors also would like to thank all students who are involved in this project.
文摘One of the problems that many engineering graduates face when looking for their first job is： Do you have experience？ Employers prefer graduates with relevant experience to those without. Why is experience so important to employers？ Can students accumulate ＂working＂ experience while studying in college？ This paper discusses the use of design projects inside and outside of classrooms to help students gain ＂working＂ experience and skills through hands-on design activities that simulate the actual design activities that occur in the industry. Faculty members from the Mechanical Engineering Technology and Computer Engineering Technology departments were involved in creating multidisciplinary design projects. The design projects give students new insights into what they learn in their coursework and pro.vide students the valuable experiences in analytical skills, concurrent engineering approach, people skills, and management skills needed for the students when looking for employment.
