Terrorism can be described as the use of violence against persons or properties to intimidate or coerce a government or its citizens to some certain political or social objectives. It is a global problem which has led to loss of lives and properties and known to have negative impacts on tourism and global economy. Terrorism has also been associated with high level of insecurity and most nations of the world are interested in any research efforts that can reduce its menace. Most of the research efforts on terrorism have focused on measures to fight terrorism or how to reduce the activities of terrorists but there are limited efforts on terrorism prediction. The aim of this work is to develop an ensemble machine learning model which combines Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbor for prediction of continents susceptible to terrorism. Data was obtained from Global Terrorism Database and data preprocessing included data cleaning and dimensionality reduction. Two feature selection techniques, Chi-squared, Information Gain and a hybrid of both were applied to the dataset before modeling. Ensemble machine learning models were then constructed and applied on the selected features. Chi-squared, Information Gain and the hybrid-based features produced an accuracy of 94.17%, 97.34% and 97.81% respectively at predicting danger zones with respective sensitivity scores of 82.3%, 88.7% and 92.2% and specificity scores of 98%, 90.5% and 99.67% respectively. These imply that the hybrid-based selected features produced the best results among the feature selection techniques at predicting terrorism locations. Our results show that ensemble machine learning model can accurately predict terrorism locations.

Speech recognition systems have made tremendous progress since the last few decades. They have developed significantly in identifying the speech of the speaker. However, there is a scope of improvement in speech recognition systems in identifying the nuances and accents of a speaker. It is known that any specific natural language may possess at least one accent. Despite the identical word phonemic composition, if it is pronounced in different accents, we will have sound waves, which are different from each other. Differences in pronunciation, in accent and intonation of speech in general, create one of the most common problems of speech recognition. If there are a lot of accents in language we should create the acoustic model for each separately. We carry out a systematic analysis of the problem in the accurate classification of accents. We use traditional machine learning techniques and convolutional neural networks, and show that the classical techniques are not sufficiently efficient to solve this problem. Using spectrograms of speech signals, we propose a multi-class classification framework for accent recognition. In this paper, we focus our attention on the French accent. We also identify its limitation by understanding the impact of French idiosyncrasies on its spectrograms.

Selecting a team for executing a project is not an easy task. As any project involves monetary implications, management of a company employs a careful approach in choosing a project team. Several variations of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Models are available in the literature and practice. We propose a modified intutionistic fuzzy approach to project team selection. We have combined the MCDM with dynamic weightage for each parameter. The main design parameters in this model are the conversion of input data into the fuzzified form, design of non - membership grade and the calculation of indeterministic values from membership and non- membership grades. Finally, the fuzzified output is converted into a crisp set, known as defuzzification. This method helps in determining the most skilled candidates in the order of their ability from a group of applicants.