Today, communication is main part of everybody’s life. Security is the most important issue in any communication. So we need a secured system to exchange data securely between users. For this purpose of security there are various techniques like cryptography, watermarking and steganography. Steganography is used to transmit information in covered form. In steganography we hide the presence of d...

Health informatics is a relatively new research area. Over the last decade or so, research in health information has been growing at a very rapid rate, as evidenced by the large number of publications. While this growth has been beneficial to the field, it has also made understanding the scope of the field more difficult. Consequently, it is difficult to answer questions such as how the researc...

Many sensors/meters are deployed in commercial buildings to monitor and optimize their performance. However, because sensor metadata is inconsistent across buildings, softwarebased solutions are tightly coupled to the sensor metadata conventions (i.e. schemas and naming) for each building. Running the same software across buildings requires significant integration effort. Metadata normalization...

Privacy protection on user context is one of the most important issues in ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This paper describes a new privacy protection approach that not only filters and reduces the granularity of context information to correct access level granularity, but also intelligently replace the filtered-out context information with the artificial context information considered app...

This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at the EDEN conference, Vienna, June 2006. It expands the model of learner engagement in the e-portfolio process and defines types of engagement experienced by the user. The factors which impact on the type of engagement enjoyed by the user are numerous and the paper will argue that feedback provision and relevance are the two most importan...

The buildings fire safety is currently an important subject for researchers and practitioners due to probable incidents that can happen inside industrial plants, large public buildings or transport facilities: fires, explosions, toxic releases, etc. Even minor events can seriously endanger life, goods and environment. Particularly, fire spreading in large buildings represents a major threat tha...

Energy consumption is a very important topic these days especially regarding air conditioning in residential buildings, since this takes the biggest amount of energy in buildings total consumption, residential buildings constitute the biggest percentage of energy consumption in Bahrain. This research reflects on the effects of shading percentage in different solar orientations on the energy con...

Received Jul 18, 2007; Accepted Dec 7, 2007 Correspondence to: T. Nakao, Department of Health Policy and Management, Institute of Industrial Ecological Sciences, University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan, 1–1 Iseigaoka, Yahatanishi-ku, Kitakyushu 807-8555, Japan (e-mail: [email protected]) Earplug-Type Earphone with Built-in Microphone Improves Monosyl lable Intelligibil...

In future planning of the city, it is very important to consider the proper intelligent integration of renewable energy sources into the built environment for developing smart cities. Analysis of the wind velocity profile in the built environment is very important for finding out the energy content in the wind and also to analyze the performance of wind turbines in the built environment. In thi...

The seismic risk of the buildings of Barcelona, Spain, is analyzed by using a method based on the capacity spectrum. The seismic hazard in the area of the city is described by means of the reduced 5% damped elastic response spectrum. Obtaining fragility curves for the most important building types of an urban center requires an important amount of information about the structures and the use of...