Recently, many full-sized keyboards have been designed to fold in various ways in an attempt to make them more transportable. The flexible membrane keyboard, one type of full sized keyboard, is unique because it is made from silicon rubber, thus it is fully flexible and water resistant. Although a number of flexible keyboard characteristics are the same as standard keyboards (i.e. key size, sha...

Although there have been recent efforts to characterize the important structural characteristics of fish scales and fish skin (e.g., the tensile strength [9] , puncture strength [19], bending rigidity [10]), attempts to fabricate materials that mimic natural fish skins have remained limited. This thesis presents a synthetic fish skin material designed to replicate the structural, dimensional, m...

In recent years there has been growing interest in recognition models using local image features for applications ranging from long range motion matching to object class recognition systems. Currently, many state-of-the-art approaches have models involving very restrictive priors in terms of the number of local features and their spatial relations. The adoption of such priors in those models ar...

One of the main objectives in setting up wireless services is to provide feasible content for the mobile users wherever and whenever they might need it. The dream of having services with meaningful content available at the right place, at the right time and with lowest possible cost is coming true with local wireless services. Local service development has its unique set of problems, like the d...

The nearest neighbor technique is a simple and appealing method to address classification problems. It relies on the assumption of locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions with a finite number of examples due to the curse of dimensionality. Severe bias can be introduced under these conditions when using the nearest neighbor rule. The e...

A nanogenerator (NG) is a device that converts vibration energy into electricity. Here, a flexible, small size and lightweight NG is successfully demonstrated as an active sensor for detecting the vibration spectrum of a drum membrane without the use of an external power source. The output current/voltage signal of the NG is a direct measure of the strain of the local vibrating drum membrane th...

Feature extraction is a very important preprocessing step for classification of hyperspectral images. The linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method fails to work in small sample size situations. Moreover, LDA has poor efficiency for non-Gaussian data. LDA is optimized by a global criterion. Thus, it is not sufficiently flexible to cope with the multi-modal distributed data. We propose a new fea...

due to business and environmental issues, the efficient design of an integrated forward/reverse logistics network has recently attracted more attention from researchers. the significance of transportation cost and customer satisfaction spurs an interest in developing a flexible network design model with different delivery paths. this paper proposes a flexible mixed-integer programming model to ...

All children who underwent flexible bronchoscopy in the respiratory unit at Paediatric Institute, Hospital Kuala Lumpur from June 1997 to June 2002 were reviewed. A hundred and ten children underwent the procedure under sedation or general anaesthesia. The median age of these children was eight months. (Q1 3, Q3 30) The commonest indication for performing flexible bronchoscopy was for chronic s...