Evans K. Miriti

Web Application and GPS Integration in Motor Vehicle Accident Detection A Case of Nairobi, Kenya

accidents occur, help to the victims is delayed mostly due to lack of prompt detection and reporting. Further, an easily accessible electronic motor vehicle accident database does not exist in Kenya. In an attempt to tackle these problems, a technique for automatically detecting and reporting accidents to relevant authorities is presented. In this technique, several technologies have been integrated and they include; impact sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographical Information System (GIS), Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), Electronic Database System, the internet and web programming. In evaluating the technique, over fifty impacts were generated in experiments using a software and hardware prototype that was developed as part of this work. It is found that 98 percent of impacts were successfully transmitted and updated on the database as accidents, within an impressive average time of fifteen seconds. Additionally, authorized web clients could access this information immediately.

Comparing Action as Input and Action as Output in a Reinforcement Learning Task

Generalization techniques are useful for enabling an agent to be able to approximate the value of states it has not encountered so far in reinforcement learning. They are also useful as memory use minimization mechanisms in situations where the state space is too large such that is infeasible to represent every state in the state space in the computer memory. Artificial Neural Networks are one generalization technique that is usually employed. Various network structures have been proposed in literature. In this study, two of the structures that have been proposed were implemented in a robot navigation task and their performance compared. The results indicate that having a network structure where there is an output node for each of the possible actions, is superior to the structure in which the selected action is fed as an input to the network and its value output by the single network output node. General Terms

Adoption of Open Source Software by Organizations – A Framework for Kenya

Source Software (OSS) has emerged as an alternative to Closed Source Software in many fields of software usage. However, how and why OSS software is being adopted and implemented within organizations in Kenya is not well documented. This study attempts to advance this understanding. Survey and interview were used to explore and distinguish the types, level and factors determining adoption of OSS. The results obtained show that 60% of respondent organizations were adopting some form of OSS. OSS was preferred to CSS due to control over the software and the cost of acquiring and running the software. CSS was preferred due to quality of support from vendors, ease of use and fashion trend. Both were at par in terms of scalability, reliability, security features, functionality and integration with other systems.