Beberapa alasan mereka tidak bisa berkarya disini karena 1) tidak ada dukungan pemerintah  (read: eksekutif dan legislatif) terhadap riset (read: anggaran dan dana riset yang minim), 2) tidak ada penghargaan bagi para peneliti (read: benefits), 3) kurangnya/tidak adanya dukungan industri, dan 4) tidak tersedianya peralatan/fasilitas yang dibutuhkan di dalam negeri.

Pertama, dukungan pemerintah untuk saat ini memang belum maksimal. Meski secara fair ada peningkatan melalui program dana penelitian dari kemenristek atau dana penelitian lokal dari universitas, tetapi masih dalam jumlah terbatas (dari sisi amount maupun number). Aturan dan birokrasi yang berbelit-belit juga menambah pelik perkara mendapatkan dana riset ini (have been there), belum lagi kalo dananya di-khitan. Ya bagaimanapun saya hargai usaha pemerintah, meski belanja DPR yang kudunya dikhitan :p

Aturan yang berbelit-belit juga berdampak pada alasan kedua, kurangnya apresiasi terhadap para peneliti. Reward berupa honor penelitian maksimal adalah 30% dari dana penelitian. Nah, ini kudu diliat skala,beban, kualitas penelitian, dan output yang dijanjikan oleh penelitian tersebut. Menurut pengalaman, dana penelitian lokal berkisar antara Rp. 25-30 juta (waktu penelitian 6 bulan). Kalau ada yang cukup besar (karena skala penelitian) mungkin bisa sampai Rp. 100-200 juta (waktu penelitian setahun). Ya masih cukup kecil memang (dibandingkan dana kampanye dan jatah partai wakakak), karena kalau dihitung-hitung buat peralatan, transport, survei, dkk cuman mentok dalam kota :p (untung bukan yang mesti beli alat2 lab yang mahal bagian saya ). Honor kalo maksimal 30% trus ada 3 peneliti, ya tinggal bagi aja 3 (0.1×30=3juta/6bln=Rp.500rb/bln). Can you imagine that? bisa dibayangkan kualitas penelitiannya nanti seperti apa yaaa. Jadi kayaknya kalo mau jadi peneliti, mendingan kaya dulu deh, baru neliti biar fokus dan hasilnya excellent. Kasus ini bisa diterapkan kalau seseorang pengen jadi staf pengajar (dosen) haha.

Ketiga dukungan industri yang masih cekak. Memang harus disadari masyarakat kita adalah masyarakat yang pragmatis (read: tidak punya visi jangka panjang :p). It means perusahaan tidak punya minat untuk menanam saham di bidang penelitian. Mereka cukup happy dengan R&D perusahaan saja. Kolaborasi dengan universitas dipandang sebagai menyiakan anggaran dan lebih baik dipakai untuk CSR yang dipandang lebih bermanfaat (improving corporate image).  Kalau mau jujur pandangan ini ga bisa disalahkan  karena terkadang mereka juga menghadapi kurangnya profesionalitas dari universitas. So they both have to work out on their issues supaya industri dapat manfaat, universitas dapat dana riset. Solusinya? Well, can you suggest any

Terakhir adalah juga dampak dari kurang concern-nya pemerintah terhadap riset plus cekaknya dana penelitian (semakin kelihatan pragmatis kan pemerintah hehe, abis buat belanja DPR kali ya). Kalau dibiarkan demikian, semua berlian akan terkuras habis ke LN, dan Indonesia ends up as a market only which relies heavily on ngutang hihi. Well, Indonesia whatever happens to you, I still love you. Cepet sadar yaaa

Comment terakhir ini tentang prestasi para scientists sm professors yang diwawancarai di kickandy. Well, they are truly professional and extraordinary. I really want to be like them, yet sometimes I think myself as  ‘ilmuwan tanggung’ hahaha. Nonetheless, lets keep the positive energy in here. So, next research?

nice quotes: ‘se berlusconi ha i capelli, dovrebbe grazie alla ricerca’ (LOL)

Ma’asyiral Muslimin rahimakumullah,

Marilah kita meningkatkan iman dan takwa kepada Allah s.w.t. dengan menjalankan segala perintah-Nya dan menjauhi segala larangan-Nya. Semoga bulan Ramadhan yang telah berlalu menginspirasi kita untuk terus melaksanakan ibadah dan amalan yang mulia sepanjang tahun sampai berjumpa dengan Ramadhan tahun depan, Insyallah.

Dan semoga dengan kehadiran bulan Syawal ini, memotivasi kita untuk terus mematuhi Allah s.w.t. dan tetap istiqamah melaksanakan ibadah dan amalan terpuji yang telak kita laksanakan selama bulan Ramadhan. Semoga amal baik kita ini memperkokoh keimanan dan ketakwaan kita dan pada akhirnya memimpin kita meraih sukses di dunia dan akhirat. Ameen.

Allah s.w.t. berfirman dalam surah Al-Taghaabun ayat 9:

Yang artinya: “(Ingatlah) hari (dimana) Allah mengumpulkan kamu pada hari pengumpulan, itulah hari dinampakkan kesalahan-kesalahan. Dan barangsiapa yang beriman kepada Allah dan beramal saleh, niscaya Allah akan menutupi kesalahan-kesalahannya dan memasukkannya ke dalam jannah yang mengalir di bawahnya sungai-sungai, mereka kekal di dalamnya. Itulah keberuntungan yang besar.”

Saudara Muslim Rahimakumullah,

Hari ini adalah hari dimana umat Muslim merayakan kesuksesan dan kemenangan. Ini adalah hari dimana Allah telah menjanjikan kesenangan dan kebahagian kepada setiap Muslim yang telah berpuasa selama bulan Ramadan. Rasulullah s.a.w. bersabda:

Yang artinya: “Seseorang yang berpuasa akan mengalami dua jenis kebahagian. Kebahagiaan ketika dia berbuka dan kebahagiaan ketika dia bertemu Tuhannya.” Hadith Imam Muslim

Hari ini adalah hari dimana kita mengekspresikan rasa terima kasih yang mendalam atas segala karunia yang kita terima dari Allah s.w.t. dengan membaca takbir dan tahmid. Hal ini sesuai dengan surah Al-Baqarah ayat 185, dimana Allah berfirman:

Yang artinya: “Dan hendaklah kamu mencukupkan bilangannya (berpuasa) dan hendaklah kamu mengagungkan Allah atas petunjuk-Nya yang diberikan kepadamu, supaya kamu bersyukur.”

Jamaah Jumuah yang berbahagia,

Sembari kita merayakan kedatangan hari raya Eidul Fitri, marilah kita sejenak merefleksikan pandangan kita terhadap bulan Ramadhan sebagai bulan yang penuh dengan kebaikan dan kemuliaan.

Pada umumnya, Pandangan Muslim terhadap nilai peribadahan di bulan Ramadhan, dapat dibagi menjadi dua kategori.

Pertama – Mereka yang memosisikan bulan Ramadhan sebagai berakhirnya musim kebaikan dan peribadahan dalam setahun. Untuk golongan pertama ini, beberapa hari terakhir bulan Ramadhan dipandang sebagai garis akhir dari perlombaan untuk mendapatkan ganjaran dari Allah SWT.

Semakin dekat dengan garis akhir, mereka semakin bersemangat untuk meningkatkan kualitas dan kuantitas amal baik mereka. Tetapi, saat Ramadan telah usai, musim untuk berlomba-lomba mengejar kebaikan berakhir dengan datangnya perayaan hari Eidul Fitri.

Kedua – Mereka yang melihat bulan Ramadhan sebagai tahapan dari sebuah proses yang berkesinambungan untuk meningkatkan kualitas diri (continuous self-improvement). Untuk golongan kedua ini, bulan Ramadhan adalah sebuah periode untuk membersihkan jiwa dan memperkuat keimanan, sebelum melanjutkan perjalanan hidup.

Setiap pencapaian selama bulan Ramadhan menjadi katalis untuk lebih banyak berbuat baik selama setahun penuh, sampai mereka berjumpa dengan Ramadhan berikutnya.

Golongan kedua ini, saudaraku muslim, adalah apa yang dipraktekkan oleh junjungan kita, Rasulullah s.a.w. Beliau tidak pernah menghentikan aktivitas amal terbaik dan mengabdikan seluruh waktunya untuk kebaikan bahkan setelah Ramadhan telah usai.

Kontribusi mulia yang dilakukan oleh Nabi Muhammad s.a.w. terhadap umat tidak pernah berhenti dengan kedatangan bulan Syawal dan tetap dilaksanakan dengan banyak kemurahan hati. Rasulullah s.a.w. tetap melanjutkan perjuangan dengan sungguh-sungguh untuk lebih mendekatkan dan menjaga kedekatan kepada Allah s.w.t. Dengan demikian, perbuatan baik tidak berhenti saat adzan Maghrib prayer berkumandang pada hari terakhir bulan Ramadhan. Hal ini karena, Nabi s.a.w. dan sahabat-nya r.a. tidak pernah menganggap berakhirnya bulan Ramadhan sebagai akhir dari perlombanan singkat menuju Allah s.w.t. Bahkan, bulan Ramadhan dipersepsikan sebagai pit-stop bagi mereka untuk mengumpulkan energi dan me-refresh semangat mereka untuk tetap menjalankan kebaikan di bulan-bulan mendatang dengan lebih baik dan istiqamah.

Jamaah Jumuah yang berbahagia,

Dengan festival Eidul Fitri yang tengah berlangsung dan kita rayakan dengan iman dan takwa, dengan kebahagian dan rasa syukur, marilah kita secara jujur mengevaluasi diri.

Di antara dua golongan orang tersebut, dimanakah kita termasuk/berada?

Karakter seperti apa yang kita perlu bangun dan bentuk sebagai bagian dari identitas kita?

Bentuk spiritualitas apa yang seharusnya telah kita bangun dari Ramadhan sebelumnya?

Saudaraku muslim,

Tentunya, jauh didalam lubuk hati kita, kita tidak ingin setiap kebaikan yang kita lakukan berhenti dengan selesainya bulan Ramadhan yang mulia. Oleh karena itu, kita harus melanjutkan perjuangan kita untuk memupuk dan merawat jiwa kita dengan iman dan kecintaan untuk melaksanakan amal baik. Marilah kita jaga antusiasme ibadah kita di bulan Ramadhan sepanjang tahun, dengan menularkan semangat tersebut ke dalam komunitas kita dan keluarga kita.

Bulan Ramadhan mendemostrasikan potensi komunitas kita untuk menjadi komunitas yang penuh dengan kesadaran dan kepedulian akan kesukaran yang dihadapi oleh orang lain. Hal ini telah dapat dilihat dari berbagai aktivitas sukarela yang diorganisir selama bulan Ramadhan.

Bulan Ramadhan juga telah menunjukkan kemampuan kita untuk meningkatkan ibadah kita, amal baik kita, dan kerja keras kita sembari berjuang untuk tetap survive didunia yang fana ini. Hal ini menunjukkan kepada kita, bahwa kita mampu untuk melanjutkan amalan yang terbaik bahkan setelah berakhirnya bulan Ramadhan. Marilah kita jaga sholat malam kita, marilah kita jaga lidah dan hati kita untuk tetap basah dengan dzikir, marilah kita isi dan asah otak kita dengan pengetahuan dan ilmu tentang agama dan pelajaran dari Quran yang mulia, dan marilah kita tetap berjuang mempertahankan hidup dengan tetap bekerja keras dan kejujuran karena Allah s.wt.

Lanjutkanlah perjuangan ini bahkan dalam kuantitas yang sangat kecil sekalipun. Nabi Muhammad s.a.w. bersabda: “Amalan yang paling baik adalah amalan yang konsisten/istiqamah” Hadith Imam Bukhari dan Imam Muslim.

Semoga kita diberikan kekuatan oleh Allah untuk melanjutkan pengabdian kita dan mematuhi Allah secara konsisten dan menjadi hamba yang pandai bersukur bahkan setelah bulan Ramadhan telah berlalu. Menjadi hamba yang menjadikan bulan Ramadhan sebagai sarana untuk mendekat dan menjaga keterdekatan dengan Allah s.wt. Dan semoga kita semua termasuk diantara hamba-hamba-Nya yang sukses didunia dan di akhirat. Ameen.

—————————————— Doa (cut)———————————————————————————————-

Eid Al Adha is about sacrifice and Muslims who are capable of doing sacrifice should sacrifice their beloved possessions to be offered to God. In Indonesia, we call Eid Al Adha festival as hari raya kurban. Kurban or qurban derived from Arabic word qurb/qoroba means getting near or close. It means by doing sacrifice, Muslims will be able to get closer to God and reduce their loves toward this deceptive world. However, there are three different perspectives that can be observed regarding the festival as follows.

Firstly, from the viewpoint of Human-God relation, Eid Al Adha means a total submission to the commands and the will of God. We have to take example set by prophet Abraham in obeying the God’s command to sacrifice his precious son. Also, it means that people have to redeem themselves in order to be close to God by giving up their love of possessions and their love of the world. By getting closer to God, our behaviors/values will  be affected by God’s values such as just, forgiving, merciful, and clean. Thus, we can purify our heart which always lead us to remember God in the whole aspects of our daily lives. If we are truly having such personal integrity and values, I believe that the problems of corruption and collusion in our country will never occur.

Secondly, from the viewpoint of Human-Human relationship, by doing sacrifice means that we will find our humanity and values tailoring it. It will deprive our egos, encourage togetherness, and promote empathy and  sense of caring towards others  since we are sacrificing what we have to be given to others who are in need. Hence, the bond of brotherhood between us  will be strengthened and create a healthy social relationship.

Thirdly, from the standpoint of Human-Cosmos relationship, we have to realize our role in cosmic balance and our existence within. God creates human(us) to be caliph in this world so that we manage the world in harmonious order. Therefore, we  have to respect nature and treat nature in a good manner by sacrificing our comfort, possessions, etc that will keep the natural balance. Bike to work is one of good example in reducing CO emission to fight against global warming .

In sum, sacrifice does not mean that it has to be cattle or money, but it is more about the willingness to sacrifice our most precious thing in our life such as time, comfort, life style, etc. Therefore, in this holy festival, let us sacrifice something valuable in our life to make us a better man in front of God, humanity, and environment.

1. Step 1 (Data collection): The data to be used for the training and testing of the network are collected. The important considerations in this step are that the particular problem is amenable to neural network solution and that adequate data exist and can be obtained.
2. Step 2 (Training and testing data separation): Training data must be identified, and a plan must be made for testing the networks’ performance. In this step, the available data set is divided into training and testing data sets. For a moderately sized data set, 80% of the data are randomly selected for training, 10% for testing, and 10% secondary testing.
3. Step 3 (Network architecture): A network architecture and a learning method are selected. The important considerations are the exact number of nodes and the number of layers.
4. Step 4 (Parameter tuning and weight initialization): There are parameters for tuning the network to the desired learning performance level. Part of this step is initialization of the network weights and parameters, followed by modification of the parameters as training performance feedback is received. Often, the initial values are important in determining the effectiveness and length of training (related to convergence and local minima problem).
5. Step 5 (Data transformation): Transforms the application data into the type and format required by the ANN. For example, transform sex attribute values from Male/Female into 0/1.
6. Step 6 (Training): Training is conducted iteratively by presenting input and desired or known output data to the ANN. The ANN computes the outputs and adjusts the weights until the computed outputs are within an acceptable tolerance of the known outputs for the input cases.
7. Step 7 (Testing): Once the training has been completed, it is necessary to test the network. The testing examines the performance of the network using the derived weights by measuring the ability  (accuracy) of the network to classify the testing data correctly.
8. Step 8 (Implementation): Now a stable set of weights are obtained. The network is ready to use as a stand-alone system or as part of another software system where new input data will be presented to it and its output will be a recommended decision.

Next, lets take one practical application of ANN i.e. bankruptcy prediction (taken from R.L. Wilson and R. Sharda, “Bankruptcy Prediction Using Neural Networks,” Decision Support Systems, Vol. 11, No. 5, June 1994, pp. 545-557). The bankruptcy prediction system can be described below.

Application Design

The system has five inputs which correspond to five well-known financial ratios i.e.

1. X1:  Working capital/total assets
2. X2: Retained earnings/total assets
3. X3: Earnings before interest and taxes/total assets
4. X4: Market value of equity/total debt
5. X5: Sales/total assets

In the output, the system has one output node that gives the final classification showing whether the input data for a given firm indicated a potential bankruptcy (0) or nonbankruptcy (1). The data source consists of financial ratios for firms that did or did not go bankrupt between 1975 and 1982.

The ANN Architecture

The ANN architecture can be shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. ANN Architecture for Bankruptcy Prediction

Training

The data set, consisting of 129 firms, was partitioned into a training set and a test set. The training set of 74 firms consisted of 38 that went bankrupt and 36 that did not. The needed ratios were computed and stored in the input file to the neural network and in a file for a conventional discriminant analysis program for comparison of the two techniques. In addition, the neural network has three important parameters to be set: learning threshold, learning rate, and momentum.

Testing

The neural network was tested in two ways: by using the test data set and by comparison with discriminant analysis. The test set consisted of 27 bankrupt and 28 non-bankrupt firms. The neural network was able to correctly predict 81.5% of the bankrupt cases and 82.1% of the non-bankrupt cases i.e.

1. Overall, the ANN did much better predicting 22 out of the 27 actual cases (the discriminant analysis predicted only 16 cases correctly).
2. An analysis of the errors showed that 5 of the bankrupt firms classified as non-bankrupt were also misclassified by the discriminant analysis method. A similar situation occurred for the non-bankrupt cases.

The paper explained that the result of the testing showed that neural network implementation is at least as good as the conventional approach. An accuracy of about 80% is usually acceptable for ANN applications. At this level, a system is useful because it automatically identifies problem situations for further analysis by a human expert.

This writing  concludes the series of Neural Network in Business Intelligence. Hopefully it will be beneficial for you in learning the neural networks and its application in real life.

Figure 1. Biological vs Artificial NN

In processing information, there are five important parts in Artificial Neural Network (ANN):

1. Input which each input node corresponds to a single attribute e.g. for loan application, some applicant attributes can be age, income level, and home ownership. Some available data need to be preprocessed into meaningful inputted data with symbolic representation or scaling e.g. transform non numerical attributes into numerical attributes
2. Output which is solution to the problem e.g. in load application, the output can be yes or no with numeric values. Output needs to be post-processed. For instance, rounding output values into 0 or 1.
3. Connection weights which is the key elements of ANN. It express relative strength (importance) of input data or many connections that transfer data from layer to layer. In here, weights store learned patterns of information through repeated adjustments of weights.
4. Summation function which computes the weighted sums of all the input elements entering each Processing Element (Node), see Figure 2.
5. Transformation (transfer) function which is in form of activation level function. It can be linear or linear function. For a linearly separable data, a linear or discrete function may be applicable. However, linearly inseparable data should use non-linear function such as Sigmoid function or Tangential function (see Figure 3). This transfer function will normalize output values into reasonable values.

Training the networks can be through supervised learning and unsupervised learning. For the differences between those learning, please read my previous post: Introduction to Machine Learning. In here, we will only discuss about training the networks through supervised learning. The most prominence algorithm in training ANN is Back-Propagation (BP) algorithm based on Iterative Gradient Descent that wants to find the best weights combination that minimizes certain error function  (function of weights) by rolling down the error slope (Figure 4). The summarized algorithm can be shown in Figure 5 below.

Figure 4. Gradient Descent by Rolling Down The Error Slope

Figure 5. Summarized Iterative Gradient Descent Algorithm

In training the weights using BP algorithm, we want to minimize an error function which is the sum of squared error between the desired output and the actual output using non-linear transfer function. The weight update rule can be shown below.

Given

1. delta (error) = (DO(j) – AO(j))(df/dx), where DO(j) and AO(j) denotes desired output and actual output of node number j in output layer, respectively, and f is a transfer function.
2. f=[1+exp(-∑WiXi)]-1, where Xi and Wi denote input node number and weight of from input-i to the hidden layer, respectively.
3. df/dx=f(1-f) which is called logistic function to keep the error correction bounded.

The weights update rule is Wi(next) = Wi(prev) + alpha . (DO(j) – AO(j)) . f(1-f) . Xi,where alpha is learning rate that control the learning speed.

Note that too large alpha will lead to much correction results in going back & forth among possible weights values, never reaching the optimal point, whereas too small alpha may slow down the learning process.

The BP steps can be detailed as follows.

1. Initialize weights with random values and set other parameter
2. Read in the input vector & the desired output
3. Compute the actual output by working forward through the layers
4. Computer the error
5. Change the weights by working backward from the output layer through the hidden layers

Now, what is the problem of BP algorithm? BP algorithm does not guarantee that the weights will converge into global minima. In other word, it may be trapped in local minima (local best solution), especially if we have more than one minima. It depends on the initial weights that we assign. We are luckily enough if we give a good initial weights that corverging to global minima. There are several solution that can be adapted to cope with this problem:

1. Adding momentum. This will keep the ball rolling on the slope.
2. Using stochastic gradient descent rather than true gradient descent. Thus, weights are updated on each training data.
3. Training multiple networks with different initial weights using the same data and then selecting the best one out of trained networks.

In the next part, we will discuss about how to develop an ANN application and its application example.

]]> http://danupranantha.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/neural-network-in-business-intelligence-part-2/feed/ 0 danupranantha Neuron Neuron 2 Neuron 3 Neuron 5 Neuron 4 http://danupranantha.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/project-1-sharing-with-international-standard-high-school-teachers/ http://danupranantha.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/project-1-sharing-with-international-standard-high-school-teachers/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:01:23 +0000 danupranantha http://danupranantha.wordpress.com/?p=140 ]]> Starting from October, I will be a consultant for a public International Standard High School (ISHS) in Pacitan i.e. SMAN 1 Pacitan. As you know, Pacitan is the city where  the incumbent president of Republic of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) was born and raised during his childhood. Pacitan is also known for its beautiful caves in which there are hundreds of them all over Pacitan region. Thus, Pacitan is also called as ‘city of 1001 caves’. In addition, Pacitan  has many beaches which several of them are quite popular and also  beautiful. Back to the topic, my first visit to SMAN 1 Pacitan is to share my knowledge about how to teach math using English as the instructional language. Basically, there are three important things that I discussed with teachers of SMAN 1 Pacitan i.e. content and delivery, language, and computer.

In term of the content, I emphasized on its clarity, organization, and usage in real life. For example, introducing statistics, we should first go with the definition of statistics (WHAT) followed by the reasons we need statistic (WHY),  stages in statistics and detail in each stage (HOW). Also, the content has to be concise and the appropriate learning media has to be chosen. Learning media can be audio, video, conventional board, etc. Regarding the delivery, since we adopt Student Centered Learning (SCL) method, after the concept has been delivered, we should make students to learn by experience through case study, group discussion, presentation, and practicum. The objective is to make students grasping the insights related to the delivered concept. More valuable benefits can be listed as follows.

1. Making students active (cognitive, affective, psycomotoric)
2. Students able to enhance their soft skills e.g. teamwork; presentation skills; communication skills
3. Training the analytical thinking of the students

Next is the language. Since it is an International Standard High School, we have to use English as instructional language. Nonetheless, we can not be very strict in term of language. Thus, bilingual (English and bahasa Indonesia) is more suitable for students level 10 and 11 since most of the students do not have adequate skill in English. It will be able to avoid mis-perception and misinterpretation during the material delivery. Also, the transliteration and translation should be well managed, especially in introducing new terminologies.

Lastly, we should utilize IT applications in conjunction with the material that we have delivered if it is applicable/necessary. In my example e.g. statistics, we may use MS Excel to solve a given case study or problems. For instance, we can use MS Excel to create frequency table, present results using graph, calculate properties of averages (mean, median, mode), etc. By doing this, students will be familiar with computer and software.

During the discussion with the teachers, I withdrew some skills that they want to improve which mostly related to the utilization of IT applications in order to do the following.

1. creating attractive media e.g. flash, video, screen activity capture, etc
2. choosing suitable tools for practical experience for certain topics
3. finding reference in the Internet such as ebook

Moreover, some teachers wanted to be tutored in programming using PASCAL to support them in teaching programming to the students. This is one of the school program to promote their students in high school level programming olimpics. Now, it is my job to fulfill the teachers’ requests. Hopefully, I will be able to do the job with excellent results.

Figure 1. Structure of Neuron

However, neural networks (NN) only represent a brain metaphor for information processing, not the exact structure and actual functions of the brain.

The earliest model of neural network is perceptron where there is no hidden layer introduced in this model (see Figure 2). For more detail regarding perceptron, please visit homepages.gold.ac.uk/nikolaev/311perc.htm.

Figure 2. Perceptron

From Figure 2, we can see that there are three important parts in Perceptron i.e. input layer, (a set of nodes), sigmoid function, and output (a node or set of nodes depends on the design of the network). Basically, the training in perceptron as well as in NN is to train/adjust the network weight towards given input and classification output  of the training data. In addition to perceptron, NN adds one more layer called the hidden layer. Figure 3 exhibits the structure of NN.

Figure 3. NN

As we can see in Figure 3, each node in each layer in perceptron and NN is connected with all nodes in the next layer. In designing an NN learning, there is no definitive rule that should be followed. Thus, it depends on the problem domain that we want to solve, the characteristics of the data, and the desired output. The most notable abilities of NN is its ability to solve complex non linear decision boundary very well.The common algorithm used in NN is back progagation algorithm (gradient descent). Other such as evoluationary algorithm (simulated annealing, EM) also can be employed in NN learning.

NN has been successfully applied to broad range of data-intensive applications, such as:

1. Industrial application such as process modeling and control, inventory management, targeted marketing (finding the set of demographics which have the highest response rate for a particular marketing campaign), and quality control.
2. Financial application such as portfolio management. For example, someone wants to plan his assets allocation in a portfolio in a way that maximises return and minimises risk. Another example is financial forecasting application to predict the future movement of security, stocks, bonds, etc.
3. Military application e.g. target recognition application which uses video and/or infrared image data to determine if an enemy target is present.
4. Medical application such as diagnosis application to assist doctors with their diagnosis by analysing the reported symptoms and/or image data such as MRIs or X-rays.
5. Banking application e.g. credit rating that automatically assign someone’s credit rating based on his/her financial condition. Other potential application is fraud detection to detect fraudulent credit card transactions and automatically decline the charge.
6. Linguistic/security application e.g. voice recognition to transcribe spoken words into ASCII text or to authenticate user to  access a system.
7. Information retrieval (IR) application e.g. intelligent searching by providing an Internet search engine that provides the most relevant content based on the users’ past behaviour.

In relation with business intelligence, NN is usually utilized for industrial, financial, banking, and IR applications. There are several database application products provide data mining algorithm using NN as one of optimization techniques for further business analysis and decision making e.g. MSSQL Server 2008 and Oracle BI. In addition, there is a data mining open source project that also employed NN i.e. WEKA software. In the next chapter, we will discuss about NN algorithm in detail and also software that employed NN for data mining.

Exploiting Information Technology in Enhancing Electoral Process through Biometrics Based SSN and e-Voting Application

Danu Pranantha, Faizal Mahananto

E-Business Research Group

Department of Information System

Faculty of Information Technology

Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS)

danu_pt@*******.edu, faizal@**.***.ac.id

Abstract

Indonesia’s general election 2009 to elect parliamentary members has passed. Although government claimed that the election was successfully held, it left the General Election Commission with several issues to be solved. The first issue is the duplication of voters’ registration that put the credibility of the electoral result in question. The second issue is the openness and pace of the manual vote counting process. Many complained that the pace of collecting the voting data nationally was quite slow, despite billion of rupiahs investment on IT infrastructure for general election. This is due to the inefficiency of paper based voting which consumed a lot of time for counting process. The third issue is the human error in distributing paper ballots that caused the ballots were switched over two regions. The fourth issue is the illegal increase on the number of collected votes compared to number of the registered voters. In this paper, we proposed an enhancement of the current general election system to cope with the issues mentioned above by exploiting information technology. Firstly, the duplication of voters’ registration can be tackled by biometrics based social security number (SSN). Biometrics based SSN acts as citizenship identification which also stores unique biological characteristic information of each Indonesian citizen such as fingerprint, iris, palm of the hand, etc. Hence, the list of voters can be drawn from this biometrics based SSN database. Moreover, the biometrics information will be used to identify voters that visit voting venue to collect their vote through an e-voting application. This identification results serve as voting evidence that recorded in biometrics based attendance application. This will enable voters to visit any voting venue that located closest to them. Secondly, in order to speed up the counting process, e-voting application can be used in the voting venue to electronically count the collected votes. This will reduce the time needed to count votes significantly. Also, e-voting will remove the necessity to create paper ballots. This aligns with go green environment and global warming issues. The e-voting application will automatically eliminate the third issue i.e. human error in voting paper distribution, since e-voting application is paperless. Nevertheless, we have to be aware about the data security in e-voting application. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate an encryption method to secure the collected voting data in term of its storage and transmission. The general election system that we proposed will consist of three main applications: biometrics based SSN registration, biometrics based attendance application, and e-voting application with encryption. Our proposed system still requires voting venue since biometrics based attendance application and e-voting application are available and accessible only in the voting venue. The objectives of not removing voting venue from the system can be described as follows. Firstly, biometrics based attendance application and e-voting application are located in the voting venue in order to check the consistency between the number of voters with the number of collected votes in a particular voting venue. Secondly, voting venue is necessary to prevent illegal voters and system crackers since e-voting application only available and accessible in the voting venue. The enhanced general election system described in the paper requires reliable and mature IT infrastructure. Therefore, the system needs to be developed on step by step basis. However, it provides a well solution to cope with the abovementioned issues.

Keyword: e-voting, biometrics based SSN, biometrics based identification, general election

‘When the night has come,

and the land is dark,

and the moon is the only light we’ll see

No, I won’t be afraid (2x)

Just as long as you stand,

Stand by me..’

This song was written and performed by Neil Diamond (CMIIW), and it is used for theme song of a product advertisement. What is the connection of this song with above title? None! hahaha.

As you know, people of our beloved country, Republic of Indonesia, are going to celebrate democracy by holding general election in 2009. The election will be conducted twice. The first is the legislative general election (April 9, 2009), and the second is presidential election (July 5, 2009). The schedules are subject to change without prior notice hihihi. It’s been three weeks of political parties campaign conducted in cities all over Indonesia. If you walk along the street in any city, you will find so many posters advertising legislative candidates. Frankly, the posters are quite annoying since they are put anywhere they like without considering advertising ethic and aesthetic.  Also, most  of political campaigns mean breaking the traffic regulations, mass fights, erotic ‘dangdut’ dance and music, and a bunch of stupid young men driving bikes carelessly :p. Nevertheless, rather than complaining these matters, I would like to raise questions regarding those posters and political advertisements displayed on the streets and television as following.

a. Have you ever met the candidates?

b. Do you know the candidates well?

c. What improvement programs are they offering or in other words, what will they contribute for Indonesia?

d. What were their contributions towards people so that they are confident enough to nominate themselves as legislative candidates?

e. What are their capability?

f.  Do they have pure intention to fix this country?

and so on.

Logically, if we select someone to represent us in the noble chair (read: The House of People’s Representative i.e. DPR), we should really know who will represent us (read: all Indonesian citizens), what did he/she do for us, what will he/she do for us, will he/she fight for our sake, what is his/her program, what will he/she contribute for us, and other considerations. However, many people in Indonesia prefer short term reward like money worth IDR 5000 (USD 0.45), than long term result i.e. prosperity. It is quite understandable, since many politicians did not keep their promise  during campaign i.e. bringing prosperity to the people. Hence, rather than waiting prosperity that never come, it’s better to have tangible thing that can be attained immediately i.e. small amount of money that only enough to buy 2 liters of gasoline. It means people tend to select someone who are willing to give them small amount of money regardless the quality of the elected representatives.

To be honest, I am not in to politics. Moreover, you may say that I am one of so many Indonesian citizens who is not well educated in politics. You know, I skipped two general elections (1999 and 2004), and it will continue for  the upcoming 2009 general election. I am telling you this not because I’m proud of it. In my case, the time was never right which made me not listed as a registered voter. This is also the case for the upcoming election. But, I truly hope that the elected representative will genuinely fight for the people, not for their own pleasures and stomaches. Also, one more thing that I want to say..

Please wear helmet and obey the regulations during campaign! Children are not allowed!

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