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1 – 10 of 85AKM Ahsan Ullah, Noor Azam Haji-Othman and Kathrina Mohd Daud
How prevalent is COVID-19 in Southeast Asia (SEA), and when will the region open its doors to foreign visitors? Following more than a year of global travel restrictions, these are…
Abstract
How prevalent is COVID-19 in Southeast Asia (SEA), and when will the region open its doors to foreign visitors? Following more than a year of global travel restrictions, these are the major concerns of potential visitors. The article examines border relations in SEA in the face of border restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2020, the region had been successful in sustaining low COVID-19 rates. This began to change with the emergence of the delta strain, which forced numerous countries in the region to deal with large outbreaks. For this paper, we relied heavily on secondary data, including the most recent relevant literature and credible and reliable publications from reputable organizations, to ensure the data sources' validity, reliability, and quality.
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Ahsan Mahmood and Hikmat Ullah Khan
The purpose of this paper is to apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for assessing the quality of the restaurants using restaurant inspection data. The machine…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for assessing the quality of the restaurants using restaurant inspection data. The machine learning techniques are applied to solve the real-world problems in all sphere of life. Health and food departments pay regular visits to restaurants for inspection and mark the condition of the restaurant on the basis of the inspection. These inspections consider many factors that determine the condition of the restaurants and make it possible for the authorities to classify the restaurants.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, standard machine learning techniques, support vector machines, naïve Bayes and random forest classifiers are applied to classify the critical level of the restaurants on the basis of features identified during the inspection. The importance of different factors of inspection is determined by using feature selection through the help of the minimum-redundancy-maximum-relevance and linear vector quantization feature importance methods.
Findings
The experiments are accomplished on the real-world New York City restaurant inspection data set that contains diverse inspection features. The results show that the nonlinear support vector machine achieves better accuracy than other techniques. Moreover, this research study investigates the importance of different factors of restaurant inspection and finds that inspection score and grade are significant features. The performance of the classifiers is measured by using the standard performance evaluation measures of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.
Originality/value
This research uses a real-world data set of restaurant inspection that has, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, never been used previously by researchers. The findings are helpful in identifying the best restaurants and help finding the factors that are considered important in restaurant inspection. The results are also important in identifying possible biases in restaurant inspections by the authorities.
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AKM Ahsan Ullah, Asiyah Az-Zahra Ahmad Kumpoh and Noor Azam Haji-Othman
The initial policy of the countries that developed vaccines has been to lock the vaccine by patent. This has been due to the fact that domestic demand for vaccine was mounting…
Abstract
The initial policy of the countries that developed vaccines has been to lock the vaccine by patent. This has been due to the fact that domestic demand for vaccine was mounting. Since only a few countries could invest in it, manufacturing and export remained at the behest of those few resulting in deep inequity in the global rollout. Pandemics are global health crises. Hence, calls for the patent waiver for the COVID-19 vaccine are growing to access the vaccine. The vaccine and its production, marketing and distribution have been politicized driven by the hegemonic aspiration. Both manufacturing and import-dependent countries are racing to win the diplomatic battle: the former has to win to gain hegemony and the latter to get the vaccine. Hence, the vaccine distribution has been marked with deep discrimination, and as a result, the migrant community is less likely to get their vaccine on time. This article engages in the decades-long debate over intellectual property rights and patenting life-saving vaccines. We argue that exemption of COVID-19 vaccines from intellectual property rights would improve global access and equity.
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A.K.M. Ahsan Ullah, Siti Mazidah Mohamad, Noor Hasharina Hassan and Diotima Chattoraj
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it intends to engage in skill gain–lose debate in the contemporary global skill mobility context; and second, it looks into whether…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it intends to engage in skill gain–lose debate in the contemporary global skill mobility context; and second, it looks into whether Southeast Asia (SEA) is losing by experiencing skill deficiency due to over outflow of talents.
Design/methodology/approach
Primary data were collected through interviews with policy makers, stakeholder and migrant professionals from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Findings
The paper comes up with the brain drain dynamics to better understand the trajectory of skill mobility in and from SEA. Within the skill mobility discourse, it is undoubtedly difficult to conclude who are the losers and the gainers in the long run.
Originality/value
This research is based on relatively small sample. However, this offers a fresh insight into the skill deficiency dynamics in Southeast Asia.
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Migration of skilled workers to other countries remains a highly contentious issue. Skill drain does not take place based on skill surplus and deficient equation. Skilled migrants…
Abstract
Purpose
Migration of skilled workers to other countries remains a highly contentious issue. Skill drain does not take place based on skill surplus and deficient equation. Skilled migrants can make their choice to migrate on their own with minimal control of the Government. This paper aims to argue that sending countries lose skill which cannot be offset or justified by the remittances inflow.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on a research conducted on skill migration from the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. In this study, skilled migrants are engineers, medical doctors, nurses and academics. The author interviewed 12 engineers (four from the Philippines; two from Malaysia; four from Singapore and two from Thailand); nine medical doctors (four from the Philippines; three from Singapore, one from Malaysia and one from Thailand); eight nurses (six from the Philippines and two from Thailand); and 14 academics (six from the Philippines; five from Singapore and three from Malaysia) who were working abroad.
Findings
Skill migration continues to grow because of the growing demand, wage differentials, glorifications of the contribution of remittances to development and failure of the origin countries to retain them. The question remains whether the respective sending country is producing more of them so that they can send after their own demand is met. This paper investigates whether the sending end can afford exporting such skills.
Originality/value
This is an important contribution to the scholarship.
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Akm Ahsan Ullah and Faraha Nawaz
There is abundant research on surrogacy; however, migration scholars have not addressed surrogacy-driven migration. Policies related to surrogacy and surrogacy-led migration are…
Abstract
Purpose
There is abundant research on surrogacy; however, migration scholars have not addressed surrogacy-driven migration. Policies related to surrogacy and surrogacy-led migration are under-researched. The paper argues that surrogacy-led migration or fertility/reproductive migration constitutes a significant part of mainstream migration. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the policy dilemmas in various countries.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 9 surrogate mothers (4 from India; 2 from Thailand, 2 from Indonesia and 1 from Nepal) and 8 commissioning parents (2 from Japan; 4 from Europe; 1 from the USA; 1 from Australia) and 2 doctors (1 from India and 1 from Thailand) selected on snowball basis were interviewed between 2014 and 2016 by using a checklist.
Findings
The deficiency and inconsistency of laws regarding surrogacy facilitated the growth of the surrogacy market. Therefore, a uniform policy would help to define and improve the surrogacy and surrogacy-led migration management.
Originality/value
This paper demonstrates the interplay of surrogacy and mainstream migration. This is a fresh addition to the study of migration.
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Ahsan Mahmood, Hikmat Ullah Khan, Zahoor Ur Rehman, Khalid Iqbal and Ch. Muhmmad Shahzad Faisal
The purpose of this research study is to extract and identify named entities from Hadith literature. Named entity recognition (NER) refers to the identification of the named…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research study is to extract and identify named entities from Hadith literature. Named entity recognition (NER) refers to the identification of the named entities in a computer readable text having an annotation of categorization tags for information extraction. NER is an active research area in information management and information retrieval systems. NER serves as a baseline for machines to understand the context of a given content and helps in knowledge extraction. Although NER is considered as a solved task in major languages such as English, in languages such as Urdu, NER is still a challenging task. Moreover, NER depends on the language and domain of study; thus, it is gaining the attention of researchers in different domains.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a knowledge extraction framework using finite-state transducers (FSTs) – KEFST – to extract the named entities. KEFST consists of five steps: content extraction, tokenization, part of speech tagging, multi-word detection and NER. An extensive empirical analysis using the data corpus of Urdu translation of Sahih Al-Bukhari, a widely known hadith book, reveals that the proposed method effectively recognizes the entities to obtain better results.
Findings
The significant performance in terms of f-measure, precision and recall validates that the proposed model outperforms the existing methods for NER in the relevant literature.
Originality/value
This research is novel in this regard that no previous work is proposed in the Urdu language to extract named entities using FSTs and no previous work is proposed for Urdu hadith data NER.
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This article addresses some of the most pressing issues related to climate change and its potential consequences, namely population migration in Southeast Asia. It sheds light on…
Abstract
Purpose
This article addresses some of the most pressing issues related to climate change and its potential consequences, namely population migration in Southeast Asia. It sheds light on how slow-onset events interact with other variables to limit the ability of people to adapt to stressors through human mobility.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts an analytical methodology to evaluate the extent to which the planning policy framework addresses these issues within the context of achieving resilient development.
Findings
Climate stressors will force millions of people to move within their own countries, while others will be forced to cross international borders, leaving others stranded. Desertification, sea level rise, ocean acidification, air pollution, changing rainfall patterns and biodiversity loss are all examples of slow-onset processes that the author believes will be exacerbated by climate change.
Research limitations/implications
This will exacerbate many existing humanitarian issues, and more people may be forced to flee their homes as a result. This research helps improve the understanding of migration’s social, economic and environmental implications.
Originality/value
The research offers a novel perspective and analysis of the unique migration challenges arising from climate change in the Southeast Asian context.
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Muhammad Umar Farooq, Ahsan Ullah, Memoona Iqbal and Abid Hussain
The purpose of this paper is twofold: to find out the perception of university librarians about the current and required competencies and to identify the current rank and to point…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold: to find out the perception of university librarians about the current and required competencies and to identify the current rank and to point out the benchmark for competencies of library professionals at public universities in Pakistan.
Design/methodology/approach
Quantitative research design is used for the conduct of the current study. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The Special Libraries Association instrument “Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century” was used to design the questionnaire. A paired sample t-test is used to establish whether there is any noteworthy distinction between the current and required levels of skills. Inferential statistic was also used and independent sample t-test and ANOVA was used to identify the difference in perception on the basis of different demographic variables.
Findings
There is a significant gap between the perceptions of university librarians about their present skills and required skills. The present level of skills is lower than the desired level of competence. There is no significant relationship between the length of job (i.e. experience), grade and skills of academic librarians. But in the case of gender, male have a higher score on the current level of competencies while female have a higher score on the required level of skills.
Originality/value
The findings of this study are helpful for universities in the recruitment, management and training of their librarians on the basis of required skills. Furthermore, it will be useful for librarians in their career planning and continuing education and library schools to revise their curriculum in accordance with needs.
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The purpose of this study is to particularly define the usability regarding interface of digital library Web site. It discusses the multi-dimensional constructs of usability and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to particularly define the usability regarding interface of digital library Web site. It discusses the multi-dimensional constructs of usability and methods applied in the evaluation of the usability of digital library Web site interface. The Usability of HEC National Digital Library Web site interface is measured in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
For this purpose, a qualitative approach, that is, focus group technique, is used. This study includes eight members in the focus group. These members were MA students from the Department of Information Management, University of the Punjab Lahore.
Findings
Usability evaluation was made by using effectiveness, efficiency, learnability and satisfaction constructs. It also discovers the opinion of focus group members on the “ease of use”, “organization of information”, “terminology and labeling”, “visual attractiveness” and “mistake recovery”. “Click cost” is particularly examined.
Originality/value
No usability study has been conducted in Pakistan about the National Digital Library of HEC. This library is a very important source of electronic content for academic community. This study will explore the usability evaluation, problems faced by users and solutions to solve these problems.
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