Energy efficiency is a significant aspect in designing robust routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A reliable routing protocol has to be energy efficient and adaptive to the network size. To achieve high energy conservation and data aggregation, there are two major techniques, clusters and chains. In clustering technique, sensor networks are often divided into non-overlapping subsets called clusters. In chain technique, sensor nodes will be connected with the closest two neighbors, starting with the farthest node from the base station till the closest node to the base station. Each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages which motivate some researchers to come up with a hybrid routing algorit

Among the metaheuristic algorithms, population-based algorithms are an explorative search algorithm superior to the local search algorithm in terms of exploring the search space to find globally optimal solutions. However, the primary downside of such algorithms is their low exploitative capability, which prevents the expansion of the search space neighborhood for more optimal solutions. The firefly algorithm (FA) is a population-based algorithm that has been widely used in clustering problems. However, FA is limited in terms of its premature convergence when no neighborhood search strategies are employed to improve the quality of clustering solutions in the neighborhood region and exploring the global regions in the search space. On the

Human skin detection, which usually performed before image processing, is the method of discovering skin-colored pixels and regions that may be of human faces or limbs in videos or photos. Many computer vision approaches have been developed for skin detection. A skin detector usually transforms a given pixel into a suitable color space and then uses a skin classifier to mark the pixel as a skin or a non-skin pixel. A skin classifier explains the decision boundary of the class of a skin color in the color space based on skin-colored pixels. The purpose of this research is to build a skin detection system that will distinguish between skin and non-skin pixels in colored still pictures. This performed by introducing a metric that measu

This article studies a comprehensive methods of edge detection and algorithms in digital images which is reflected a basic process in the field of image processing and analysis. The purpose of edge detection technique is discovering the borders that distinct diverse areas of an image, which donates to refining the understanding of the image contents and extracting structural information. The article starts by clarifying the idea of an edge and its importance in image analysis and studying the most noticeable edge detection methods utilized in this field, (e.g. Sobel, Prewitt, and Canny filters), besides other schemes based on distinguishing unexpected modifications in light intensity and color gradation. The research as well discuss

An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most ‎significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become ‎challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the ‎traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the ‎accuracy of sentence feature ‎functions, weighting schemes, ‎and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha

Flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is one of the instances in flexible manufacturing systems. It is considered as a very complex to control. Hence generating a control system for this problem domain is difficult. FJSP inherits the job-shop scheduling problem characteristics. It has an additional decision level to the sequencing one which allows the operations to be processed on any machine among a set of available machines at a facility. In this article, we present Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm with Harmony Search for solving the flexible job shop scheduling problem. It is based on the new harmony improvised from results obtained by artificial fish swarm algorithm. This improvised solution is sent to comparison to an overall best

This work is concerned with the vibration attenuation of a smart beam interacting with fluid using proportional-derivative PD control and adaptive approximation compensator AAC. The role of the AAC is to improve the PD performance by compensating for unmodelled dynamics using the concept of function approximation technique FAT. The key idea is to represent the unknown parameters using the weighting coefficient and basis function matrices/vectors. The weighting coefficient vector is updated using Lyapunov theory. This controller is applied to a flexible beam provided with surface bonded piezo-patches while the vibrating beam system is submerged in a fluid. Two main effects are considered: 1) axial stretching of the vibrating beam that leads

The Asphalt cement is produced as a by-product from the oil industry; the asphalt must practice further processing to control the percentage of its different ingredients so that it will be suitable for paving process. The objective of this work is to prepare different types of modified Asphalt cement using locally available additives, and subjecting the prepared modified Asphalt cement to testing procedures usually adopted for Asphalt cement, and compare the test results with the specification requirements for the modified Asphalt cement to fulfill the paving process requirements. An attempt was made to prepare the modified Asphalt cement for pavement construction in the laboratory by digesting each of the two penetration grade Asphalt c

Background: Chronic hyperplastic candidiasis is the least common type of oral candidiasis. The diagnosis, long-term treatment, and prognosis of this potentially malignant oral condition are still currently unclear. Objective: the aim of this study is to analyze the demographic features and clinical characteristics of oral chronic hyperplastic candidiasis. Materials and Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed on blocks and case sheets of patients who were diagnosed with chronic hyperplastic candidiasis in the archives of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology at the College of Dentistry/University of Baghdad. Demographic and clinical characteristics were analyzed. Results: twenty-one cases with chronic hyperplastic candidiasis were coll