Online education often deals with the problem related to the high students’ dropout rate during a course in many areas. There is huge amount of historical data about students in online courses. Hence, a relevant problem on this context is to examine those data, aiming at finding effective mechanisms to understand student profiles, identifying those students with characteristics to drop out at e...

DEDICATION I would be leaving out too many people if I were to dedicate this dissertation to anyone in particular. Instead, I want to dedicate this work to everyone that encouraged me to take this journey and to those who supported me over the past four years. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A tremendous number of people have provided me with guidance and assistance throughout my time as a doctoral student...

To investigate the potential of conventional and deep learning techniques to recognize the species and distribution of mould in unhulled paddy, samples were inoculated and cultivated with five species of mould, and sample images were captured. The mould recognition methods were built using support vector machine (SVM), back-propagation neural network (BPNN), convolutional neural network (CNN), ...

A-scans from ultrasonic testing of long shafts are complex signals, thus the discrimination of different types of echoes is of importance for non-destructive testing and equipment maintenance. Research has focused on selecting features of physical significance or exploring classifier like Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines. This paper summarizes and reports on our comprehens...

Dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration plays a very important role in fish life and aquaculture, but DO prediction is very difficult. So a decision support system for DO prediction based on fuzzy model and neural network was attempted. The paper was based on vast monitored data, every day detecting for two years, in aquaculture pond in North China for two years. This is a preliminary attempt towar...

Today, people are more and more active in social networks and communicate via text massages, images or “likes”. Especially images are used to assist a person to provide their opinion. Images show the daily life or things that interest people (e.g. van House 2011). Thereby a huge amount of information is provided. The evaluation of images would enable a comprehensive classification of the consum...

The paper investigates the sensitivity of safe ship control to inaccurate data from the ARPA anti-collision radar system and to changes in the process control parameters. The system structure of safe ship control in collision situations and computer support programmes exploring information from the ARPA anti-collision radar are presented. Sensitivity characteristics of the multistage positional...

The supplier's cooperative design enables the enterprise to use supplier's technical ability fully, reduce the time of product coming into the market, improve quality, and reduce cost. In order to evaluate the supplier cooperative design ability (SCDA) scientifically and accurately, this paper overcomes the shortcoming of traditional linear SCDA evaluation method, proposes an improved support v...

Background: Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions and become one the most important public health issues globally. One of the significant determinants of childhood obesity-related behaviors such as poor dietary habits relates to role of friends and peers. This study aimed toexplore the role of interaction within the social network of friends on unhealthy eating behaviors of overwei...