Curriculum development for distance education (DE) practitioners is more and more focusing on practical requirements and competence development. Delphi and DACUM methods have been used at some universities. However, in the competency-based development area, these methods have been taken over by professional-task-based development in the last decade, which has not been applied in the open and di...

Computer vision methods need to deal with shadows explicitly because shadows often have a negative effect on the results computed. A new shadow detection method is proposed. The new method is based on a shadow model. The model is constructed by features robust to illumination changes. The method uses four features: (1) the difference of the UV components of the YUV color space between the backg...

Simplex type algorithms perform successive pivoting operations (or iterations) in order to reach the optimal solution. The choice of the pivot element at each iteration is one of the most critical step in simplex type algorithms. The flexibility of the entering and leaving variable selection allows to develop various pivoting rules. In this paper, we have proposed some of the most well-known pi...

Pricing is a significant step in the simplex algorithm where an improving nonbasic variable is selected in order to enter the basis. This step is crucial and can dictate the total execution time. In this paper, we perform a computational study in which the pricing operation is computed with eight different pivoting rules: (i) Bland’s Rule, (ii) Dantzig’s Rule, (iii) Greatest Increment Method, (...

PURPOSE This paper describes a novel method to automatically segment the human brainstem into midbrain and pons, called labs: Landmark-based Automated Brainstem Segmentation. LABS processes high-resolution structural magnetic resonance images (MRIs) according to a revised landmark-based approach integrated with a thresholding method, without manual interaction. METHODS This method was first t...

in this paper, we present a revised similarity measure based onchen-and-chen's similarity measure for fuzzy risk analysis. the revisedsimilarity measure uses the corrected formulae to calculate the centre ofgravity points, therefore it is more  effective than the chen-and-chen'smethod. the revised similarity measure can overcome the drawbacks of theexisting methods. we have also proposed a new ...

We discuss the use of preconditioned conjugate gradients method for solving the reduced KKT systems arising in interior point algorithms for linear programming. The (indefinite) augmented system form of this linear system has a number of advantages, notably a higher degree of sparsity than the (positive definite) normal equations form. Therefore we use the conjugate gradients method to solve th...