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The work on bridge resilience assessment includes quantitative and qualitative approaches to compare the multiple bridges based on their resilience. But still, the bridge resilience obtained by these assessment approaches is inefficient when prioritising multiple bridges to improve their resilience. Therefore, this study aims to develop a methodology for prioritising the bridges to improve their resilience.

The research methodology follows three sequential phases. In the first phase, criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) technique is used to compute the criteria weights. The criteria considered are age, area, design high flood level, finish road level FRL and resilience index of bridges. While 12 river-crossing bridges maintained by one bridge owner are considered as alternatives. Then, in the second phase, the prioritisation of each bridge is evaluated using five techniques, including technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, VIKOR (in Serbian, Visekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje), additive ratio assessment, complex proportional assessment and multi-objective optimisation method by ratio analysis. Finally, in the third phase, the results of all five techniques are integrated using CRITIC and the weighted sum method.

The result of the study enables bridge owners to deal with the particular bridge that requires resilience improvement. The study concluded that it is not enough to consider only the bridge resilience index to improve its resilience. The prioritisation exercise should consider various other criteria that are not preferred during the bridge resilience assessment process.

The proposed methodology is a novel framework based on the existing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for contributing knowledge in the domain of bridge resilience management. It can efficiently overcome the pitfall of decision-making when two bridges have the same resilience index score.

The purpose of this paper is to design and develop half-mode substrate-integrated waveguide (HMSIW)- and quarter-mode substrate-integrated waveguide (QMSIW)-based antennas for wireless communication application. The developed antennas offer advantages in terms of compactness, high gain and better isolation between the ports.

Initially, the tri-band substrate-integrated waveguide-based antenna is designed using a slot on the ground plane. Then, the same structure has been bisected into two parts for the development of the HMSIW structure. Again the concept of the slot is used for the realization of a dual-band antenna. QMSIW-based structure is designed with further dividing HMSIW structure into two parts. Simulation has been carried out with the use of a high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS) software, which used a finite element-based solver for the full-wave analysis.

The proposed HMSIW-based dual-band antenna resonates at two different frequencies, namely, 5.81 GHz with 4.5 dBi gain and at 6.19 GHz with 6.8 dBi gain. Isolation between two ports is 20 dB. The overall dimensions of the proposed model are 0.39 λ × 0.39 λ. Similarly, QMSIW-based antenna is resonated at 5.66 GHz of the frequency with the 3 dBi gain. Frequency tuning is also carried out with the change in the slot dimension to use the proposed antenna in various C (4–8 GHz) band applications.

The proposed antennas can use C band wireless frequency application. The proposed structure provides better performance in terms of isolation between the ports, small size, high front-to-back ratio and higher gain. It is fabricated for the proof of concept with the RT Duroid 5880 substrate material having a 2.2 permittivity. Measured results show a similar kind of performance as a simulated one.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is the most computational intensive algorithm and this makes its implementation challenging for real-time application. This paper aims to present the chirp-scaling algorithm (CSA) for real-time SAR applications, using advanced field programmable gate array (FPGA) processor.

A chirp signal is generated and compressed using range Doppler algorithm in MATAB for validation. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and multiplication operations with complex data types are the major units requiring heavy computation. Therefore, hardware acceleration is proposed and implemented on NEON-FPGA processor using NE10 and CEPHES library.

The heuristic analysis of the algorithm using timing analysis and resource usage is presented. It has been observed that FFT execution time is reduced by 61% by boosting the performance of the algorithm and speed of multiplication operation has been doubled because of the optimization.

Very few literatures have presented the FPGA-based SAR imaging implementation, where analysis of windowing technique was a major interest. This is a unique approach to implement the SAR CSA using a hybrid approach of hardware–software integration on Zynq FPGA. The timing analysis propagates that it is suitable to use this model for real-time SAR applications.

The purpose of this paper is to validate the technology acceptance model (TAM) and its extended form to understand the factors influencing internet banking adoption in Gujarat.

Extended TAM incorporates perceived security and social influence, important variables in internet banking literature. Using a questionnaire survey, data relating to the variables are collected from 284 individuals who are/were using internet banking services and subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to establish validity and structural equation modeling (SEM) to identify important factors influencing internet banking adoption.

The empirical results of SEM showed that the extended TAM has higher predictability than the TAM in internet banking settings. The results highlighted that the intention to use internet banking is positively influenced mainly by perceived security, followed by other significant factors, namely, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and social influence.

The findings of this paper enable internet banking service providers to develop/modify new/existing internet banking services in order to achieve higher adoption rates of internet banking.

Additional incorporated variables in a new model considerably contribute to improving the understanding of internet banking adoption in Gujarat.

This chapter explores the yield curve movements in the interest rate swap markets of four major currencies, the Japanese yen (JPY), the US dollar (USD), the pound sterling (GBP), and the Swiss franc (CHF), by principal component analysis (PCA), focusing on the explanatory power of each driver. Comparing the cumulative proportions of the first three principal components, the “level” changes seem to explain the yield curve movements far better than the “ratio” changes in the case of the JPY (96.1% vs. 38.3%) and CHF (97.2% vs. 41.9%), and they are only marginally worse for the USD (97.7% vs. 98.5%) and GBP (96.5% vs. 98.3%). In all markets, the explanatory power (proportion) of the first PC (PC1) is over 82%, and most of the movements can be explained by it. Furthermore, the explanatory power (cumulative proportion) from PC1 up to the third PC (PC3) is over 96%. Thus, it can be considered that most of the movements can be explained by the first three PCs. In addition, we investigate whether there is a structural change in yield curve movements before and after the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 (GFC). If we use daily “level” changes for the PCA, the GFC has no impact on the yield curve movements for all major currencies. The three PCs retain good explanatory power.

In clinical analysis, medical image segmentation is an important step to study the anatomical structure. This helps to diagnose and classify abnormality in the image. The wide variations in the image modality and limitations in the acquisition process of instruments make this segmentation challenging. This paper aims to propose a semi-automatic model to tackle these challenges and to segment medical images.

The authors propose Legendre polynomial-based active contour to segment region of interest (ROI) from the noisy, low-resolution and inhomogeneous medical images using the soft computing and multi-resolution framework. In the first phase, initial segmentation (i.e. prior clustering) is obtained from low-resolution medical images using fuzzy C-mean (FCM) clustering and noise is suppressed using wavelet energy-based multi-resolution approach. In the second phase, resultant segmentation is obtained using the Legendre polynomial-based level set approach.

The proposed model is tested on different medical images such as x-ray images for brain tumor identification, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), spine images, blood cells and blood vessels. The rigorous analysis of the model is carried out by calculating the improvement against noise, required processing time and accuracy of the segmentation. The comparative analysis concludes that the proposed model withstands the noise and succeeds to segment any type of medical modality achieving an average accuracy of 99.57%.

The proposed design is an improvement to the Legendre level set (L2S) model. The integration of FCM and wavelet transform in L2S makes model insensitive to noise and intensity inhomogeneity and hence it succeeds to segment ROI from a wide variety of medical images even for the images where L2S failed to segment them.

The chapter discusses Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with appropriate theoretical framings with the intent of creating a deeper understanding and application of CSR theories in Ibero-America’s hospitality industry. The research method is a qualitative research approach relying on critical review of scholarly articles on CSR theories. The sourced articles were critically discussed and analysed to fit the needs of the hospitality industry in Ibero-America. The shareholder/agency, stakeholder, legitimacy, instrumental, social contract, conflict, green and communication theories were identified as the eight dominant theories of CSR with diverse applications in the hospitality industry. The CSR theories discussed are not exhaustive, as there are emerging theories that explicate CSR in different contexts. The implication is that better understanding and application of CSR theories would strengthen conceptual, theoretical and empirical research in Ibero-America. The CSR theories are useful sources of information for practitioners for designing corporate CSR policies as well as providing scholars with sound theoretical framework for academic research. The chapter is a novel attempt at bridging theory and practice in the field of CSR, as well enriching the understanding of this concept among both practitioners and scholars in Ibero-America.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

The mechanical and tribological properties of polymers and polymer composites vary with different environmental conditions. This paper aims to review the influence of humidity/water conditions on various polymers and polymer composites' mechanical properties and tribological behaviors.

The influence of humidity and water absorption on mechanical and tribological properties of various polymers, fillers and composites has been discussed in this paper. Tensile strength, modulus, yield strength, impact strength, COF and wear rates of polymer composites are compared for different environmental conditions. The interaction between the water molecules and hydrophobic polymers is also represented.

Pure polymer matrices show somewhat mixed behavior in humid environments. Absorbed moisture generally plasticizes the epoxies and polyamides and lowers the tensile strength, yield strength and modulus. Wear rates of PVC generally decrease in humid environments, while for polyamides, it increases. Fillers like graphite and boron-based compounds exhibit low COF, while MoS2 particulate fillers exhibit higher COF at high humidity and water conditions. The mechanical properties of fiber-reinforced polymer composites tend to decrease as the rate of humidity increases while the wear rates of fiber-reinforced polymer composites show somewhat mixed behavior. Particulate fillers like metals and advanced ceramics reinforced polymer composites exhibit low COF and wear rates as the rate of humidity increases.

The mechanical and tribological properties of polymers and polymer composites vary with the humidity value present in the environment. In dry conditions, wear loss is determined by the hardness of the contacting surfaces, which may not effectively work for high humid environments. The tribological performance of composite constituents, i.e. matrix and fillers in humid environments, defines the overall performance of polymer composite in said environments.

This chapter adopts Porter’s ‘audit trinity’ approach comprising internal audit, external audit and audit committee to discuss the role auditing can play in the management of corporate fraud.

The chapter maps the historical background of and the developments in external audit as an assurance service, the internal audit function and the audit committee. Based on this, it explains the nature, types and possible causes of corporate fraud within the context of business risk with a view to establishing how auditing can help in managing such frauds.

The chapter highlights the relationships that should exist between the three audit types in order to support a sound internal control system as a tool for preventing and detecting corporate fraud.

The chapter identifies cost, opportunity, connivance and managerial override as factors that could limit the ability of auditing to manage corporate fraud. It also suggests ways of addressing these limitations.

As the current upward trend in IT adoption for corporate operations continue to open new sets of corporate fraud windows, this chapter examines how an entity’s internal controls can be used to prevent and detect these growing fraud schemes.

The chapter’s unique strength is its adoption of a holistic approach to auditing to suggest ways of managing corporate fraud – a novelty in the corporate fraud literature. It is hoped that future research in the area will bring empirical insights to the issues raised and perspectives covered in the chapter.