Computational Finance, an exciting new cross-disciplinary research area, depends extensively on the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, information systems and financial economics for educating the next generation of financial researchers, analysts, risk managers, and financial information technology professionals. This new discipline, sometimes also referred to as “Financial Engineering” or “Quantitative Finance” needs professionals with extensive skills both in finance and mathematics along with specialization in computer science. Soft-Computing in Capital Market hopes to fulfill the need of applications of this offshoot of the technology by providing a diverse collection of cross-disciplinary research. This edited volume covers most of the recent, advanced r...

Information Technology for Small Business provides a comprehensive guide of applications of end user computing, social media, cloud computing, and open source software to business process, decision making, and outreaching for small businesses. It is designed for students in business programs and small business owners. The e-book highlights the most important concepts of information technology for small business, including information technology solution services and end user computing development. To maintain a well-rounded approach to the topics, both fundamental knowledge about information technology for small business and hands-on material are presented. Succinct tutorials for implementation of end user decision support systems and end user business intelligence in the end user computi...

Computer Aided State Estimation of Electric Power Networks is a fundamental introduction to the topic of state estimation at an advanced textbook level for teaching a course at either the graduate or undergraduate level, as well as for Post Graduate students and Research Scholars who want to review of the latest techniques and best mathematical approaches for estimating the state of a general system. Theory as well as practice of Distribution System State Estimation (DSSE) is covered with imperative rigidity. The authors present the theory of state estimation clearly providing the right amount of essential information and linked reports in order to enable the researchers and graduate students to apply state estimation techniques across a variety of fields in power systems engineering. A pr...

Introduction to Quantum Computation is an introduction to a new rapidly developing theory of quantum computing. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the main ideas and techniques of quantum computation. It begins with the basics of classical theory of computation: NP-complete problems, Boolean circuits, Finite state machine, Turing machine and the idea of complexity of an algorithm. The general quantum formalism (pure states, qubit, superposition, evolution of quantum system, entanglement, multi-qubit system ...) and complex algorithm examples are also presented. Matlab is a well known in engineer academia as matrix computing environment, which makes it well suited for simulating quantum algorithms. The (Quantum Computer Toolbox) QCT is written entirely in the Matlab and m-files ar...

The Information Systems Department of the College of Economics and Political Science at Sultan Qaboos University organized an international conference on Information Systems (iiSC) in October 2011. The conference proceedings contain written versions of selected contributions presented during the conference. The conference theme was 'information systems for sustainable business development.' The conference provided a forum for discussion on current issues and challenges as well as recent and future developments across a wide range of areas in information systems including. - Trends in Information Systems - E-commerce and E-business Challenges - Knowledge Management and IS industrial applications - Trends in Web technologies - IS Security and Mobile Computing - E-Governmen...

Comprehensive global garbage detection (GGD) in object-oriented distributed systems, i.e., GGD intrinsically able to detect distributed cycles of garbage, has mostly been addressed via graph tracing algorithms. Graph tracing algorithms must account for every live object in the system before any resource can actually be reclaimed which compromises both their scalability and robustness in a distributed environment. Alternative non-comprehensive approaches trade-off comprehensiveness for scalability and robustness under the assumptions that distributed cycles of garbage are rare and that all comprehensive algorithms are necessarily unscalable. This thesis contends instead that distributed cycles of garbage are as likely to occur as local cycles and that a comprehensive alternative to g...

One of the major problems encountered in qualitative and quantitative determination of residual pesticides by gas chromatography is the matrix effects. Matrix components have a considerable effect on the way analysis is conducted and the quality of results obtained, introducing problems such as inaccurate quantification, low analyte detectability and reporting of false positive or even false negative results. It was aimed to develop and validate a suitable method for counteracting the matrix effects so as to improve the detection and quantification of selected organochlorine pesticide residues from real water samples. The real water samples used were sampled from three points along the Jukskei River catchment area in Gauteng, South Africa for a period of 7 months from January to July 2010 ...

The aim of this study was to determine if there were gender differences in the performance of Chemistry practical skills among senior six girls and boys in selected mixed secondary schools in Kampala District from February to March 2004. The study participants were drawn from five mixed secondary schools in the district. A total of fifty students participated, half of them girls and the other half boys. A cross sectional descriptive research design was used involving both quantitative and qualitative research strategies. The instruments of data collection were a Chemistry practical test (Quantitative analysis), student questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Questionnaires were filled out by all students and forty randomly selected students were interviewed by the researcher. The follow...

The phenomena of superconductivity has enormous industrial potential, but the penetration of superconductor-based products has, thus far, been slow. An indisputable fact is that there are prizes, and profits, for the teams that solve the critical problems in understanding and processing these complex materials. The continuous processing of superconducting tapes and wires is a necessary stage that will open up the industrial market to the designers of a diverse range of time and energy saving devices, particularly in ultra-fast computing and lossless power transmission. The aim of the research reported herein was to investigate the fabrication of superconducting tapes and films via two different processes, namely: the established PIT technique, and a less well known electrochemical route...

This study is a theoretical investigation of the electronic and optical properties of intrinsic semiconductors using the orthogonal empirical tight binding model. An analysis of the bulk properties of semiconductors with the zincblende, diamond and rocksalt structures has been carried out. We have extended the work of others to higher order in the interaction integrals and derived new parameter sets for certain semiconductors which better fit the experimental data over the Brillouin zone. The Hamiltonian of the heterostructures is built up layer by layer from the parameters of the bulk constituents. The second part of this work examines a number of applications of the theory. We present a new microscopic derivation of the intervalley deformation potentials within the tight bindin...

The modern FPGAs enable system designers to develop high-performance computing (HPC) applications with a large amount of parallelism. Real-time image processing is such a requirement that demands much more processing power than a conventional processor can deliver. In this research, we implemented software and hardware based architectures on FPGA to achieve real-time image processing. Furthermore, we benchmark and compare our implemented architectures with existing architectures. The operational structures of those systems consist of on-chip processors or custom vision coprocessors implemented in a parallel manner with efficient memory and bus architectures. The performance properties such as the accuracy, throughput and efficiency are measured and presented. According to results, FPGA ...

The problem of automatic toponym resolution, or computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to an unambiguous spatial footprint of the location referred to, such as a geographic latitude/longitude centroid is difficult to automate due to insufficient and error-prone geographic databases, and a large degree of place name ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty other Londons on earth). This thesis investigates how referentially ambiguous spatial named entities can be grounded, or resolved, with respect to an extensional coordinate model robustly on open-domain...

This ebook contains the proceedings of the First Forum on International Collaborative Programmes, held at Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 8-9 August, 2012. The forum was presented in association with: Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; Global Academic Partnerships (Singapore) Pte. Ltd; Uppsala Computing Education Research Group, Uppsala University, Sweden; China Jiliang University, Zhejiang Provice, China; and Keuka College, NY, USA.

Researchers and data analysts are increasingly relying on graphical tools to assist them in modeling their data, generating their hypotheses, and gaining deeper insights on their experimentally acquired data. Recent advances in technology have made available more improved and novel modeling and analysis media that facilitate intuitive, task-driven exploratory analysis and manipulation of the displayed graphical representations. In order to utilize these emerging technologies researchers must be able to transform experimentally acquired data vectors into a visual form or secondary representation that has a simple structure and, is easily transferable into the media. As well, it is essential that it can be modified or manipulated within the display environment. This thesis presents a da...