...Electrical Engineering University of Queensland St Lucia, Australia {michelle,marcusg}@itee.uq.edu.au Abstract This paper demonstrates the applicability of reinforcement learning for first person shooter bot artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique where an agent learns a problem through interaction with the environment. The Sarsa( ) algorithm will be applied to a first person shooter bot controller to learn the tasks of (1) navigation and item collection, and (2) combat. The results will show the validity and diversity of reinforcement learning in a first person shooter environment. Introduction Over the past decade substantial research has been performed on reinforcement learning (RL) for the robotics and multi-agent systems (MAS) fields. In addition, many researchers have successfully used RL to teach a computer how to play classic strategy games such as backgammon (Tesauro 1995) and go (Silver, Sutton, and Muller 2007). However, there has been little research in the application of RL to modern computer games. First person shooter (FPS) games have common features to the fields of robotics and MAS, such as agents equipped to sense and act in their environment, and complex continuous movement spaces. Therefore, investigating the affects of RL in an FPS environment is an applicable and interesting area to research. FPS bot artificial intelligence (AI) generally consists of pathfinding, picking up and using objects in the environment,...
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...Journal of Case Research in Business and Economics Application of Six-Sigma in finance: a case study A. Ansari Seattle University Diane Lockwood Seattle University Emil Thies Zayed University Batoul Modarress Zayed University Jessie Nino Seattle University ABSTRACT In recent years, companies have begun using Six Sigma Methodology to reduce errors, excessive cycle times, inefficient processes, and cost overruns related to financial reporting systems. This paper presents a case study to illustrate the application of Six Sigma Methodology within a finance department. Specifically, the case relates to the Continuing Account Reconciliation Enhancement project undertaken by the finance department of a major U.S. defense contractor. The goal of the project was to streamline and standardize the establishment and maintenance of costing and planning for all business activities within the current financial management process. The Six Sigma implementation resulted in a significant reduction in the average cycle time and cost, per unit of activity, needed to produce the required financial reports. Key Words: Six Sigma, Process Management, Quality Management, Finance Application of Six-Sigma, Page 1 Journal of Case Research in Business and Economics INTRODUCTION In 1987, Motorola developed and organized the Six Sigma process improvement Methodology to achieve “world-class” performance, quality, and total customer satisfaction. Since that time, at least 25% of the Fortune 200, including...
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...OCCUOPOTIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION (OSHA) PRACTICES AND OSHA PERFORMANCE IN MALAYSIAN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY GHANIM Mohmed Adeil University Putra Malaysia, Faculty of Engineering, Malaysia Mohamedadil88@yahoo.com Keywords: OSHAP; OSHAPM; Safety Performances; Financial Performances; Malaysian Automotive Industry. Summary This paper review the issues of the occupational safety and health administration practices (OSHAP) and occupational safety and health administration performances (OSHAPM) that affect the practices in Malaysian Automotive Industry. In addition, this paper discusses the OSHAP which are safety, culture, employee involvement, employee attitude, leadership style, safety and health training and last the effective communication. Not only that but to examine its impact on OSHAPM which are safety and financial performance in the automotive industry. However, this paper explores prior literatures and findings that were found by other researchers in the Malaysian automotive industry regarding these issues. Introduction Actually, the history of automotive industry in Malaysia has started at the early age of the second half of the 20th century. Several factors had played a main role in the reason behind this industry rise or in fact birth. The main reason was to strengthen this industry and decrease dependency on the agriculture sector. Not to say that agriculture is not profitable or important, but this industry will pull up the whole economic together...
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...The salesperson’s role in CRM success: Exploring the value of salespersons’ mapping of buying centre structure Prabakar Kothandaraman, William Paterson University, NJ, USA Raj Agnihotri, William Paterson University, NJ, USA* Rolph E. Anderson, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA Perhaps the most important, yet underutilised resources in customer relationship management are salespeople. Drawing upon literature from social network theory, personal selling, sales management, and industrial buying behaviour, buying centre mapping is proposed as a tool for salespeople to improve customer relationship management (CRM). A framework linking a salesperson’s systematic mapping of buying centre structure to the CRM strategy development and implementation is outlined. Implications for theory and practice are discussed in detail. Keywords Industrial buying, Salespeople, CRM, Social network keywords Introduction The man who correctly understands how a particular structure works can prevent it from working or make it work differently with much less effort than a man who does not know these things. Bailey (1969, p. 108) Development of marketing strategies and tactics relies heavily on the ability of salespeople to understand buying organisations that they deal with and to bring that knowledge back to disseminate throughout the selling organisation for better customer relationship management (CRM). Managing customer relationships is the focus of successful business-tobusiness marketing...
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...among the records. Within the research several popular MDSS’s are analysed in order to determine the most common data mining algorithms utilized by them. Three algorithms have been identified: Naïve Bayes, Multilayer Perceptron and C4.5. Prior to the very analyses the algorithms are calibrated. Several testing configurations are tested in order to determine the best setting for the algorithms. Afterwards, an ultimate comparison of the algorithms orders them with respect to their performance. The evaluation is based on a set of performance metrics. The analyses are conducted in WEKA on five UCI medical datasets: breast cancer, hepatitis, heart disease, dermatology disease, diabetes. The analyses have shown that it is very difficult to name a single data mining algorithm to be the most suitable for the medical data. The results gained for the algorithms were very similar. However, the final evaluation of the outcomes allowed singling out the Naïve Bayes to be the best classifier for the given domain. It was followed by the Multilayer Perceptron and the C4.5. Keywords: Naïve Bayes, Multilayer Perceptron, C4.5, medical data mining, medical decision support Chapter 1: Introduction to the Study Introduction Thesis Structure Study Overview Background of the research Focus Area & Motivation Aims and Objectives Research Problems Motivation and Challenges Thesis Outline Intellectual Challenge Justification for the Research Methodology Conclusion Chapter...
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...RESEARCH PAPER ON DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH IN BANGLADESH Introduction: Bangladesh is a developing country with a population of 152,518,015 (approx.) Since our war of independence we have face numerous amount of health and nutrition issues in our country. Although Bangladesh has seen impressive progress in health and nutrition in the last few decades. Despite still low social indicators and continuing prevalence of poverty (40% of the population lives below the poverty line), the health sector in Bangladesh has shown impressive progress. We improved in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, increasing number of doctors, increasing number of hospitals and medical colleges. ICDDR’B etc. The government of Bangladesh has shown policy continuity and commitment to improving health conditions, placing particular emphasis on improving the health conditions of its citizens and targeting the poor, women and children. Where as many of the problems still remains unsolved. The ministry of health and family planning is responsible for the health service of the country should take necessary steps to solve those problems. Objective: The main objective of this whole research is to evaluate the health condition of Bangladesh. From 1971 to 2013 health condition of Bangladesh has radically changed. We are here to present that the number of health centers, hospitals, medicals colleges and other institutions related to health development of our country. We have also seen numerous amount of development...
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...like this some of us are sophisticated and have lives rather than not talking to anyone. What people say about the gaming industry and about gamers are wrong most of the time. Some of these are just plain wrong. Gamers and violence: Ever since a violent game has been around there have been people who are trying to put them down and cause controversy over the amount of violence in the video games. The papers have blamed many accidents caused by children or teenagers on them being able to play violent games. Many of these include, anger from call of duty competitiveness as well as more dangerous ones like shooting and robbing shops due to some effects of gta (grand theft auto) .These are of course due to speculation the papers have no proof that this is the case they say that games are the problem when they are not the problem it is mostly due to the fact that the children have access to a gun in the first place or their parents our bringing them up in a rough way or getting peer pressured into doing theses certain acts. This is a prime example of the papers speculating: The study is called “violent video games do not cause teens to become aggressive” ‘An 8-year-old in Louisiana shot and killed his grandmother. The incident has sparked new flames in the ongoing U.S. gun control debate, but the familiar scapegoat of violence in video games is also being connected to the murder.’ ‘With the release of Grand Theft Auto V, discussions of the impact of video games...
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...FOREWORD In a span of only five years, the population of the Philippines grew by 7.7 million – from 68.8 million in 1995 to 76.5 million in 2000. During this period, the population growth rate (PGR) was 2.36 percent per year, which means the population doubling time will be within 29 years if the rate does not decline (NSO, 2001). Side by side with rapid population growth is poverty, which still grips about a third of the country's 15.3 million households (NSO, 2001a). This Country Report is timely in that it revisits the link between population/development and poverty, environment, and resources. The Report has two purposes. First, it intends to review the Philippine population/development situation, including issues of reproductive health and gender equity, from the perspective of goals affirmed in the Bali Declaration, the ICPD Program of Action and other related documents. The report's second purpose is to highlight priority population issues in the context of alleviating poverty and improving the quality of life of Filipinos. To reduce poverty significantly within the coming decade, the Philippines must face the challenge of building the capacities of its vast human capital. Only in this way can Filipino families, especially the poor, meaningfully, responsibly, and productively participate in the development process. CONTENTS |FOREWORD ...
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...CIO - Nike Rebounds Page 1 of 8 Features Nike Rebounds Christopher Koch 12 July, 2004 10:54:58 How (and Why) Nike Recovered from Its Supply Chain Diaster Too many Air Garnetts. Too few Air Jordans. Nike lost money, time and a measure of pride when its demand-planning software led it astray. How did it recover? Patience, perseverance and, most important, an understanding of what it was trying to accomplish in the first place READER ROI The limitations of demand-planning software How a robust business plan can insulate tech execs from blame Single-instance strategies in a global environment "I thought we weren't going to talk about i2," growls Roland Wolfram, Nike's vice president of global operations and technology, his eyes flashing at his PR manager with ill-concealed ire. Wolfram, who was promoted in April to vice president and general manager of the Asia-Pacific division, is all Nike. His complexion is ruddy, his lips cracked from working out or working hard, or both. He's casually dressed, but with a typical Nike sharpness to his turtleneck and slacks, a sharpness reflected also in his urgent, aggressive defence of his company - a Nike pride that would seem arrogant were not the company so dominant in its industry. Wolfram calls the i2 problem - a software glitch that cost Nike more than $US100 million in lost sales, depressed its stock price by 20 percent, triggered a flurry of class-action lawsuits, and caused its chairman, president and CEO,...
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...interests has been a critical topic in recommender system research. In this paper, we propose a new personalized recommendation framework by leveraging and enhancing overlapping community concepts from complex network analysis literature and developing a time-weighted association rule mining method. Experiment results show that our proposed approach outperforms several existing methods in recommendation precision and diversity. Keywords: personalized recommendation; overlapping community; time-weighted association rules; user interests 1. Introduction Recommender systems have been implemented by many commercial websites, such as Amazon and eBay, to help users discover products of their interests. High-quality recommender algorithms and strategies can greatly increase profits and improve user loyalty. One of the most important aspects in personalized recommendation is the user interest modeling. Most of the conventional user interest models are static models, such as the user-based collaborative filter model, assuming that the users’ interests do not change over time. However, users’ interests are rather dynamic, e.g., users may prefer different styles of clothes at different ages. Users’ interests for products like music and movie are even easier to change. Therefore, it is critical to capture user interest change over time in order for the recommender system to predict users’ preferences more accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation model based on overlapping...
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...method, NcPred is described, for predicting nuclear proteins with higher accuracy exploiting n-mer statistics with different classification algorithms namely Alternating Decision (AD) Tree, Best First (BF) Tree, Random Tree and Adaptive (Ada) Boost. On BaCello dataset [1], NcPred improves about 20% accuracy with Random Tree and about 10% sensitivity with Ada Boost for Animal proteins compared to existing techniques. It also increases the accuracy of Fungal protein prediction by 20% and recall by 4% with AD Tree. In case of Human protein, the accuracy is improved by about 25% and sensitivity about 10% with BF Tree. Performance analysis of NcPred clearly demonstrates its suitability over the contemporary in-silico nuclear protein classification research. 1 Introduction Nucleus, popularly known as the control center of a cell, is the central unit of eukaryotic cells [2]. Unlike other organelles, its function is regulated by two genomes due to the presence of an explicit nuclear genome. It performs a plethora of biochemical reactions like oxidative phosphorylation, Krebs cycle, DNA replication, transcription, translation, etc. In addition nuclei are also involved in apoptosis and ionic homeostasis [3]. Because of their multidimensional utility, nuclear proteins are associated with several diseases, including Xeroderma pigmentosum, Fanconis anaemia, Bloom syndrome, Ataxia telangiectasia and Retinoblastoma [4] etc. Md. S. Islam · A. Kabir Institute of Information Technology, University...
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...Abstract This article examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) on organizational performance. The objective of this study is to determine the relationship between corporate social responsibility and organizational performance. Base on the literature reviews, the studies support that there is a positive relationship between corporate social responsibility and organizational performance in terms of financial or management. Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, organizational performance, 1.0 – Introduction The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is being discuss and debate over the decade. The discussion of CSR started since 1950s and it continued to grow in importance and significance. In spite of the seeming endless discussion about it, it has seen a lot of development in both academic and practitioner communities all over the world (Carroll and Shabana, 2010). According to Nolan et. al (2009), CSR is use to build up good rapport with the public. Corporates always use it as a strategy to save their skin from unforeseen risks and corporate scandals, brand differentiation, governmental rules and regulations, possible environmental accidents, protect eye-catching profits, and better relationship with employees based on volunteerism terms. Corporation like Gardenia, Nestle and YTL corporation always publish their CSR activities on their websites, sustainability reports and their advertising campaigns...
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...money because it does not require IT infrastructure, servers, and it is very scalable. On the other hand, it might lead to financial loss due to security risks, possible data access problems, data privacy policies, etc. Therefore, cloud computing evaluation based on financial metrics is proposed in this article. This paper consists of four major sections. The first section is a literature review of cloud computing and its types. The next section describes some common financial metrics such as CBA, ROI and TCO and describes how they might be applied to evaluate cloud computing. The third section proposes evaluation strategies, and the last section contains the evaluation of a series of cloud computing projects based on chosen evaluation strategies, and results are verified based on expert opinion. Keywords – cloud computing, CBA, ROI, TCO, ROC computing as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configuration computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” [11] or in simple terms – “low cost flexible entry and exit”. According to Cisco IBSG research [12], in March 2011, at least 12 percent of all enterprise workloads will run on clouds (public, private, hybrid and community) with distribution based on different areas of enterprises shown in Fig. 1, and, as a result, the percentage of cloud users will grow. I. INTRODUCTION Cloud computing...
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...P.O. Box 1899, Dearborn, MI 48120-1899, USA Abstract The use of ergonomic principles in automobile assembly and manufacturing operations has become an important part of a comprehensive health and safety process as well as an integral part of the engineering systems. Ford Motor Company has developed an ergonomics process to manage issues related to injury and illness (e.g., musculoskeletal diseases) and to ensure the appropriate use of human resources on the plant floor. The ergonomics programme uses joint labour and management teams to identify and evaluate jobs and develop and implement solutions. This paper summarises the efforts of the Ford Motor Company in implementing and maintaining the programme. Key strategies are outlined that provide important links to internal organisational units that are critical to fully utilise the ergonomics process. In addition, the paper outlines differences between proactive and reactive efforts and shows the importance of using the information generated by the initiatives for process improvement. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Ergonomics process; Proactive; Reactive; International 1. Background Ford Motor Company is the largest producer of trucks and second largest producer of vehicles in the world. They produce 70 different vehicle types in over 30 countries including Jaguar, Lincoln, Volvo, Mercury, Aston Martin and Ford. Ford has over 300,000 employees world wide. In the United States, Ford has approximately...
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...Financial Management • •STRUCTURE • Management Information Systems • SUSTAINABLE • Impact • Assessment • Career Development • Strategic Planning • SYSTEMS • Supervision • Objectives • Program DEVELOPMENT Series 2 ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEMENT Monitoring and Evaluation • SUSTAINABILITY • Module 4 Monitoring and Evaluation and Management Information Systems (MIS) 2/ MIS, Monitoring & Evaluation Introduction Monitoring and Evaluation Process points: Types and levels of monitoring and evaluation activities Some monitoring and evaluation definitions What are indicators? Methods and tools for monitoring and evaluation Steps in planning and conducting monitoring and evaluation ❐ Tools and techniques: How to write your evaluation report Tips for improving monitoring and evaluation of your project Management Information Systems (MIS) ❐ What is on MIS? ❐ Why is an MIS important? Sources for decision making, monitoring, and evaluation ❐ Targets Designing an MIS Using data to inform your MIS: conducting a baseline study Performance information Key questions in designing an MIS Institutionalizing an MIS in an organization MIS: step-by-step Using MIS outputs for decision-making How is information used in the organization? ❐ How does information flow in your organization? A word about reporting ❐ Tips and Tools: Report preparation checklist A final word about evaluation ❐ Process evaluation ❐ Output evaluation ❐ Effects evaluation ...
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