Abstract-Social networking media are becoming popular among students and teachers in higher education. Researchers have also started to explore the use of social networking media for teaching and learning in higher education. Social networking media have offered new opportunities for sharing, creating and interacting between students and teachers. However, to implement and adopt such technology, there is a need to investigate the factors that influence the acceptance of the students and the teachers using such technologies as a tool for learning and teaching. In this paper, a study based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which emphasizes on Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness together with Behavior Intention to use new technologies, is used to test the factors of using social networking media for e-learning in Libyan higher education. A quantitative research method was employed utilizing survey method. Research data was collected from a sample of teachers and students from four universities in the Libyan higher educational sector. Structural Equation Modeling was carried out to examine the predictive behaviour of the proposed factors of the research model. It was discovered from the study that the Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness are important factors for predicting a student's and teachers' behavioral intention to use social networking media for e-learning in Libyan higher education.Index Terms-Libyan higher education, social networking media, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, e-learning. I. INTRODUCTIONThe impact of the Internet on the education sector has taken both teachers' and students' attention in recent years. New generations of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 have added more enthusiasm and excitement for people to spend many hours on internet based applications, especially social networking media [1]. A big portion of the social networking media users are youths who are mostly university students [2]. Many studies have reported that Facebook is the most common social networking tool used where 85-99% of the university students use it for all aspects of life, including for educational purposes [3]. A recent study of about 3000 college students, from USA, indicated that 90% of students utilize Facebook and 37% of them use Twitter to share information [4].Social networking media (e.g Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter) received a lot of attention due to the high take up rate across the world. Social networking media have made communication, collaboration and interaction possible and Manuscript received September 2, 2014; revised November 2, 2014. The authors are with Murdoch University, Australia (e-mail: a.elkaseh@murdoch.edu.au). more efficiently. Consequently, they have been introduced to support educational activities [5]. Social networking media have been able to create a revolution in the communication fields for information and knowledge sharing [5]. This revolution has changed the manner of how people interact and communicate with each other, including how they exchange,...

This paper develops an economic dispatch algorithm for the determination of the global or near global optimum dispatch solution. The algorithm is based on the simulated annealing technique. In the algorithm, the load balance constraint and the operating limit constraints of the generators are fully accounted for. In the develop ment of the algorithm, transmission losses are first discounted and they are subsequently incorporated in the algorithm through the use of the Bmatrix loss formula. The algorithm is demonstrated by its application to a test system. The results determined by the new algorithm are compared to those found by dynamic programming with a zoom feature.

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Abstractrequires a greater transit time compared to continuous paths. The continuous techniques typically require increased calculation time, but they integrate the iniiiial and final orientations into the path.In this paper, first, the spline method algorithm will be discussed briefly with particular emphasis on the practical implementation. Then, a typical optimal path calculation will be introduced supporting the software architecture of the entire system. The comparison of t h e algorithm with other techniques with emphasis to the advantages and disadvantages will also be given, based on the experience obtained during the implementation process.

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This paper describes the development of an Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA) which was designed to acquire online news and document from the internet for the establishment of a knowledge based crisis communication portal. It was recognized that in times of crisis, an effective communication mechanism is essential to maintain peace and calmness in the community by providing timely and appropriate information. It is proposed that the incorporation of software agents into the crisis communication portal will be capable to send alert news to subscribed users via internet and mobile services. The proposed system consists of crawler, wrapper, name-entity tagger, AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup language) and an animated character is used in the front-end for human computer communication.

International audienceAncient manuscripts have been preserved by many organizations so as to protect these documents and retrieve traditional knowledge. With the advanced computer technology, digitized media is now commonly used to record these documents. One objective of such work is to develop an efficient image processing system that could be used to retrieve knowledge and information automatically from these ancient manuscripts. Binarization is a preprocessing technique used to extract text and characters from the manuscripts. The output is then used for further processes such as character recognition and knowledge extraction. This paper compares different binarization techniques that could be used for processing of ancient manuscripts. The aim is to improve the binarization techniques with the main objective of developing an automated preprocessing technique for ancient manuscript recognition and knowledge extraction

This paper reports an optimisation algorithm based upon the simulated annealing technique for a hybrid energy system. The hybrid energy system is an integrated diesel-generatorhatteryinverter system developed for remote communities where the supply of the main electrical power is unavailable. The developed algorithm provides optimal generator setting and battery chargddischarge schedules for a given daily load cycle. It has been applied to ii test example and the simulation results are presented.