Abstract: In Southeast Asia, during the dry season (August to
October) forest fires in Indonesia emit pollutants into the atmosphere.
For two years during this period, a total of 67 samples of 2.5 μm
particulate matters were collected and analyzed for total mass and
elemental composition with ICP - MS after microwave digestion. A
study of 60 elements measured during these periods suggest that the
concentration of most of elements, even those usually related to
crustal source, are extremely high and unpredictable during the haze
period. In By contrast, trace element concentration in non - haze
months is more stable and covers a lower range. Other unexpected
events and their effects on the findings are discussed.
Abstract: In this study, hydroxyapatite (HA) composites are
prepared on addition of 30%CaO-30%P2O5-40%Na2 O based glass to
pure HA, in proportion of 2, 5, and 10 wt %. Each composition was
sintered over a range of temperatures. The quantitative phase
analysis was carried out using XRD and the microstructures were
studied using SEM. The density, microhardness, and compressive
strength have shown increase with the increasing amount of glass
addition. The resulting composites have chemical compositions that
are similar to the inorganic constituent of the mineral part of bone,
and constitutes trace elements like Na. X-ray diffraction showed no
decomposition of HA to secondary phases, however, the glass
reinforced-HA composites contained a HA phase and variable
amounts of tricalcium phosphate phase, depending on the amount of
bioglass added. The HA-composite material exhibited higher
compressive strength compared to sintered HA. The HA composite
reinforced with 10 wt % bioglass showed highest bioactivity level.
Abstract: Based on experimental data using accelerometry technology there was developed an analytical model that approximates human induced ground reaction forces in vertical, longitudinal and lateral directions ascending and descending the stairs. Proposed dynamic loading factors and corresponding phase shifts for the first five harmonics of continuous walking force history in case of stair ascend and descend. Into account is taken imperfectness of individual footfall forcing functions, differences between continuous walking force histories among individuals. There is proposed mean synthetic continuous walking force history that can be used in numerical simulations of human movement on the stairs.
Abstract: In this paper, a Cooperative Multi-robot for Carrying
Targets (CMCT) algorithm is proposed. The multi-robot team
consists of three robots, one is a supervisor and the others are
workers for carrying boxes in a store of 100×100 m2. Each robot has
a self recharging mechanism. The CMCT minimizes robot-s worked
time for carrying many boxes during day by working in parallel. That
is, the supervisor detects the required variables in the same time
another robots work with previous variables. It works with
straightforward mechanical models by using simple cosine laws. It
detects the robot-s shortest path for reaching the target position
avoiding obstacles by using a proposed CMCT path planning
(CMCT-PP) algorithm. It prevents the collision between robots
during moving. The robots interact in an ad hoc wireless network.
Simulation results show that the proposed system that consists of
CMCT algorithm and its accomplished CMCT-PP algorithm
achieves a high improvement in time and distance while performing
the required tasks over the already existed algorithms.
Abstract: Economic dispatch (ED) has been considered to be one of the key functions in electric power system operation which can help to build up effective generating management plans. The practical ED problem has non-smooth cost function with nonlinear constraints which make it difficult to be effectively solved. This paper presents a novel heuristic and efficient optimization approach based on the new Bat algorithm (BA) to solve the practical non-smooth economic dispatch problem. The proposed algorithm easily takes care of different constraints. In addition, two newly introduced modifications method is developed to improve the variety of the bat population when increasing the convergence speed simultaneously. The simulation results obtained by the proposed algorithms are compared with the results obtained using other recently develop methods available in the literature.
Abstract: pH-sensitive drug targeting using nanoparticles for
cancer chemotherapy have been spotlighted in recent decades. Graft
copolymer composed of poly (L-histidine) (PHS) and dextran
(DexPHS) was synthesized and pH-sensitive nanoparticles were
fabricated for pH-responsive drug delivery of doxorubicin (DOX).
Nanoparticles of DexPHS showed pH-sensitive changes in particle
sizes and drug release behavior, i.e. particle sizes and drug release rate
were increased at acidic pH, indicating that DexPHS nanoparticles
have pH-sensitive drug delivery potentials. Antitumor activity of
DOX-incorporated DexPHS nanoparticles were studied using CT26
colorectal carcinoma cells. Results indicated that fluorescence
intensity was higher at acidic pH than basic pH. These results
indicated that DexPHS nanoparticles have pH-responsive drug
targeting.
Abstract: The presence of heavy metals in the environment
could constitute a hazard to food security and public health. These
can be accumulated in aquatic animals such as fish. Samples of four
popular brands of canned fish in the Iranian market (yellowfin tuna,
common Kilka, Kawakawa and longtail tuna) were analyzed for level
of Cr after wet digestion with acids using graphite furnace atomic
absorption spectrophotometry. The mean concentrations for Cr in the
different brands were: 2.57, 3.24, 3.16 and 1.65 μg/g for brands A, B,
C and D respectively. Significant differences were observed in the Cr
levels between all of the different brands of canned fish evaluated in
this study. The Cr concentrations for the varieties of canned fishes
were generally within the FAO/WHO, U.S. FDA and U.S. EPA
recommended limits for fish.
Abstract: In this paper, we present optimal control for
movement and trajectory planning for four degrees-of-freedom robot
using Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We have
evaluated using Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs)
for four degree-of-freedom (4 DOF) robotics arm, Uncertainties like;
Movement, Friction and Settling Time in robotic arm movement
have been compensated using Fuzzy logic and Genetic Algorithms.
The development of a fuzzy genetic optimization algorithm is
presented and discussed. The result are compared only GA and
Fuzzy GA. This paper describes genetic algorithms, which is
designed to optimize robot movement and trajectory. Though the
model represents is a general model for redundant structures and
could represent any n-link structures. The result is a complete
trajectory planning with Fuzzy logic and Genetic algorithms
demonstrating the flexibility of this technique of artificial
intelligence.
Abstract: This article addresses feature selection for breast
cancer diagnosis. The present process contains a wrapper approach
based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and case-based reasoning (CBR).
GA is used for searching the problem space to find all of the possible
subsets of features and CBR is employed to estimate the evaluation
result of each subset. The results of experiment show that the
proposed model is comparable to the other models on Wisconsin
breast cancer (WDBC) dataset.
Abstract: A way of generating millimeter wave I/Q signal using inductive resonator matched poly-phase filter is suggested. Normally the poly-phase filter generates quite accurate I/Q phase and magnitude but the loss of the filter is considerable due to series connection of passive RC components. This loss term directly increases system noise figure when the poly-phase filter is used in RF Front-end. The proposed matching method eliminates above mentioned loss and in addition provides gain on the passive filter. The working algorithm is illustrated by mathematical analysis. The generated I/Q signal is used in implementing millimeter wave phase shifter for the 60 GHz communication system to verify its effectiveness. The circuit is fabricated in 90 nm TSMC RF CMOS process under 1.2 V supply voltage. The measurement results showed that the suggested method improved gain by 6.5 dB and noise by 2.3 dB. The summary of the proposed I/Q generation is compared with previous works.
Abstract: With the rapid growth in business size, today's businesses orient towards electronic technologies. Amazon.com and e-bay.com are some of the major stakeholders in this regard. Unfortunately the enormous size and hugely unstructured data on the web, even for a single commodity, has become a cause of ambiguity for consumers. Extracting valuable information from such an everincreasing data is an extremely tedious task and is fast becoming critical towards the success of businesses. Web content mining can play a major role in solving these issues. It involves using efficient algorithmic techniques to search and retrieve the desired information from a seemingly impossible to search unstructured data on the Internet. Application of web content mining can be very encouraging in the areas of Customer Relations Modeling, billing records, logistics investigations, product cataloguing and quality management. In this paper we present a review of some very interesting, efficient yet implementable techniques from the field of web content mining and study their impact in the area specific to business user needs focusing both on the customer as well as the producer. The techniques we would be reviewing include, mining by developing a knowledge-base repository of the domain, iterative refinement of user queries for personalized search, using a graphbased approach for the development of a web-crawler and filtering information for personalized search using website captions. These techniques have been analyzed and compared on the basis of their execution time and relevance of the result they produced against a particular search.
Abstract: Cognizant of the fact that enterprise systems involve
organizational change and their implementation is over shadowed by a
high failure rate, it is argued that there is the need to focus attention on
employees- perceptions of such organizational change when
explaining adoption behavior of enterprise systems. For this purpose,
the research incorporates a conceptual constructo fattitude toward
change that captures views about the need for organizational change.
Centered on this conceptual construct, the research model includes
beliefs regarding the system and behavioral intention as its
consequences, and the personal characteristics of organizational
commitment and perceived personal competence as its antecedents.
Structural equation analysis using LISREL provides significant
support for the proposed relationships. Theoretical and practical
implications are discussed along with limitations.
Abstract: Initial values of reference vectors have significant influence on recognition accuracy in LVQ. There are several existing techniques, such as SOM and k-means, for setting initial values of reference vectors, each of which has provided some positive results. However, those results are not sufficient for the improvement of recognition accuracy. This study proposes an ACO-used method for initializing reference vectors with an aim to achieve recognition accuracy higher than those obtained through conventional methods. Moreover, we will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by applying it to the wine data and English vowel data and comparing its results with those of conventional methods.
Abstract: A mathematical model of the surface roughness
has been developed by using response surface methodology
(RSM) in grinding of AISI D2 cold work tool steels. Analysis
of variance (ANOVA) was used to check the validity of the
model. Low and high value for work speed and feed rate are
decided from design of experiment. The influences of all
machining parameters on surface roughness have been
analyzed based on the developed mathematical model. The
developed prediction equation shows that both the feed rate
and work speed are the most important factor that influences
the surface roughness. The surface roughness was found to be
the lowers with the used of low feed rate and low work speed.
Accuracy of the best model was proved with the testing data.
Abstract: This paper was aimed at developing a computer aided
design and manufacturing system for spatial cylindrical cams. In the
proposed system, a milling tool with a diameter smaller than that of the
roller, instead of the standard cutter for traditional machining process,
was used to generate the tool path for spatial cams. To verify the
feasibility of the proposed method, a multi-axis machining simulation
software was further used to simulate the practical milling operation of
spatial cams. It was observed from computer simulation that the tool
path of small-sized cutter were within the motion range of a standard
cutter, no occurrence of overcutting. Examination of a finished cam
component clearly verifies the accuracy of the tool path generated for
small-sized milling tool. It is believed that the use of small-sized cutter
for the machining of the spatial cylindrical cams can generate a better
surface morphology with higher accuracy. The improvement in
efficiency and cost for the manufacturing of the spatial cylindrical cam
can be expected through the proposed method.
Abstract: Pairwise testing, which requires that every
combination of valid values of each pair of system factors be covered
by at lease one test case, plays an important role in software testing
since many faults are caused by unexpected 2-way interactions among
system factors. Although meta-heuristic strategies like simulated
annealing can generally discover smaller pairwise test suite, they may
cost more time to perform search, compared with greedy algorithms.
We propose a new method, improved Extremal Optimization (EO)
based on the Bak-Sneppen (BS) model of biological evolution, for
constructing pairwise test suites and define fitness function according
to the requirement of improved EO. Experimental results show that
improved EO gives similar size of resulting pairwise test suite and
yields an 85% reduction in solution time over SA.
Abstract: In modern literary criticism the problem of genre is one of discussion. Genre is a phenomenon, located in the intersection of the synchronous and diachronic processes in the development of literature, and this is due to the complexity of its solutions. It defines the place of contact between literary works and literary process.
Abstract: Both software applications and their development environment are becoming more and more distributed. This trend impacts not only the way software computes, but also how it looks. This article proposes a Human Computer Interface (HCI) template from three representative applications we have developed. These applications include a Multi-Agent System based software, a 3D Internet computer game with distributed game world logic, and a programming language environment used in constructing distributed neural network and its visualizations. HCI concepts that are common to these applications are described in abstract terms in the template. These include off-line presentation of global entities, entities inside a hierarchical namespace, communication and languages, reconfiguration of entity references in a graph, impersonation and access right, etc. We believe the metaphor that underlies an HCI concept as well as the relationships between a bunch of HCI concepts are crucial to the design of software systems and vice versa.
Abstract: Sputter deposition processes, especially for sputtering
from metal targets, are well investigated. For practical reasons, i.e.
for industrial processes, energetic considerations for sputter
deposition are useful in order to optimize the sputtering process. In
particular, for substrates at floating conditions it is required to obtain
energetic conditions during film growth that enables sufficient dense
metal films of good quality. The influence of ion energies, energy
density and momentum transfer is thus examined both for sputtering
at the target as well as during film growth. Different regimes
dominated by ion energy, energy density and momentum transfer
were identified by using different plasma sources and by varying
power input, pressure and bias voltage.
Abstract: Continuous-time delta-sigma analog digital converter (ADC) for radio frequency identification (RFID) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) biosensor has been reported. This delta-sigma ADC is suitable for digital conversion of biosensor signal because of small process variation, and variable input range. As the input range of continuous-time switched current delta-sigma ADC (Dynamic range : 50 dB) can be limited by using current reference, amplification of biosensor signal is unnecessary. The input range is switched to wide input range mode or narrow input range mode by command of current reference. When the narrow input range mode, the input range becomes ± 0.8 V. The measured power consumption is 5 mW and chip area is 0.31 mm^2 using 1.2 um standard CMOS process. Additionally, automatic input range detecting system is proposed because of RFID biosensor applications.