to identify and describe factors relating to quality of life (qol) for subjects with low vision and blindness in iran's sistan-baluchestan province, this research designed. this cross sectional study was done on subjects with vision disability who randomly selected and covered by the zahedan welfare organization, zahedan, iran. evaluations were made for the following factors related to visual i...

this study proposes a modified version of cultural algorithms (cas) which benefits from rule-based system for influence function. this rule-based system selects and applies the suitable knowledge source according to the distribution of the solutions. this is important to use appropriate influence function to apply to a specific individual, regarding to its role in the search process. this rule ...

Expressing spatial information with iconic gestures is abundant in human communication and requires to transform a referent representation into resembling gestural form. This task is challenging as the mapping is determined by the visuo-spatial features of the referent, the overall discourse context as well as concomitant speech, and its outcome varies considerably across different speakers. We...

English intonation can be difficult for L2 speakers to learn, particularly for those whose L1 intonation system works differently from English. This study investigates whether Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers whose L1 is Cantonese have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in specific contexts. Results from an intonation pattern selection tasks indicate that HKE speakers (n =...

This paper proposes a systems approach to tackling alcohol misuse based on System Dynamics modelling. The problem of binge drinking in the UK is first described along with its negative impact on health, society and the economy. A review of the current literature follows, and the systemic nature of the problem explained. System dynamics is proposed as a holistic approach to investigate the probl...

We investigate robustness properties for a broad class of support vector machines with non-smooth loss functions. These kernel methods are inspired by convex risk minimization in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Leading examples are the support vector machine based on the ε-insensitive loss function, and kernel based quantile regression based on the pinball loss function. Firstly, we propos...

In this paper we describe novel representations for precomputed heuristics based on Level-Ordered Edge Sequence (LOES) encodings. We introduce compressed LOES, an extension to LOES that enables more aggressive compression of the state-set representation. We evaluate the novel representations against the respective perfect-hash and binary decision diagram (BDD) representations of pattern databas...