Abstract: The continuous decline of petroleum and natural gas
reserves and non linear rise of oil price has brought about a
realisation of the need for a change in our perpetual dependence on
the fossil fuel. A day to day increased consumption of crude and
petroleum products has made a considerable impact on our foreign
exchange reserves. Hence, an alternate resource for the conversion of
energy (both liquid and gas) is essential for the substitution of
conventional fuels. Biomass is the alternate solution for the present
scenario. Biomass can be converted into both liquid as well as
gaseous fuels and other feedstocks for the industries.
Abstract: In this paper a new design of a broadband microwave
power limiter is presented and validated into simulation by using
ADS software (Advanced Design System) from Agilent technologies.
The final circuit is built on microstrip lines by using identical Zero
Bias Schottky diodes. The power limiter is designed by Associating 3
stages Schottky diodes. The obtained simulation results permit to
validate this circuit with a threshold input power level of 0 dBm until
a maximum input power of 30 dBm.
Abstract: The exact theoretical expression describing the
probability distribution of nonlinear sea-surface elevations derived
from the second-order narrowband model has a cumbersome form
that requires numerical computations, not well-disposed to theoretical
or practical applications. Here, the same narrowband model is reexamined
to develop a simpler closed-form approximation suitable
for theoretical and practical applications. The salient features of the
approximate form are explored, and its relative validity is verified
with comparisons to other readily available approximations, and
oceanic data.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a robust algorithm to recognize extracted text from grocery product images captured by mobile phone cameras. Recognition of such text is challenging since text in grocery product images varies in its size, orientation,
style, illumination, and can suffer from perspective distortion.
Pre-processing is performed to make the characters scale and
rotation invariant. Since text degradations can not be appropriately
defined using well-known geometric transformations such
as translation, rotation, affine transformation and shearing, we
use the whole character black pixels as our feature vector.
Classification is performed with minimum distance classifier
using the maximum likelihood criterion, which delivers very
promising Character Recognition Rate (CRR) of 89%. We
achieve considerably higher Word Recognition Rate (WRR) of
99% when using lower level linguistic knowledge about product
words during the recognition process.
Abstract: In recent years, the compression of date (Phoenix
dactylifera L.) fruit powders (DP) to obtain date tablets (DT) has
been suggested as a promising form of valorization of non
commercial valuable date fruit (DF) varieties. To further improve
and characterize DT, the present study aims to investigate the
influence of the DP particle size and compression force on some
physical properties of DT. The results show that independently of
particle size, the hardness (y) of tablets increases with the increase of
the compression force (x) following a logarithmic law (y = a ln (bx)
where a and b are the constants of model). Further, a full factorial
design (FFD) at two levels, applied to investigate the erosion %,
reveals that the effects of time and particle size are the same in
absolute value and they are beyond the effect of the compression.
Regarding the disintegration time, the obtained results also by means
of a FFD show that the effect of the compression force exceeds 4
times that of the DP particle size. As final stage, the color parameters
in the CIELab system of DT immediately after their obtaining are
differently influenced by the size of the initial powder.
Abstract: Taking the design tolerance into account, this paper
presents a novel efficient approach to generate iso-scallop tool path for
five-axis strip machining with a barrel cutter. The cutter location is
first determined on the scallop surface instead of the design surface,
and then the cutter is adjusted to locate the optimal tool position based
on the differential rotation of the tool axis and satisfies the design
tolerance simultaneously. The machining strip width and error are
calculated with the aid of the grazing curve of the cutter. Based on the
proposed tool positioning algorithm, the tool paths are generated by
keeping the scallop height formed by adjacent tool paths constant. An
example is conducted to confirm the validity of the proposed method.
Abstract: In this study, we are interested in a species of the
family of Asteraceae (Tagetes erecta). This family is considered as a
source of antimicrobial extracts with strong capacity. The extraction
of the flavonoids is carried out by the method of liquid/liquid with the
use of successive solvents. Afterwards, we evaluated the biological
activity of the flavonoids on five pathogenic bacterial stocks such as
Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Klebsiella pneumoniae,
Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus and two stocks
of yeasts to knowing Candida albicans) and Saccharomyces
cerevisiae, by employing the method of the aromatogramme starting
from a solid disc. The result of the antimicrobial activity shows an
action and a variable degree of sensitivity according to bacterial
stocks tested. It will be noted that the flavonoids have an inhibiting
effect on E. coli, B. subtilis, K. pneumoniae and S. aureus. But a
resistance with respect to the extract by P. aeruginosa, C. albicans
and S. cerevisiae is to be mentioned.
Abstract: The paper focus on robotic telepresence system build
around humanoid robot operated with controller-less Wizard of Oz
technique. Proposed solution gives possibility to quick start acting as
a operator with short, if any, initial training.
Abstract: The use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) in
web, business and scientific databases lead to the development of
methods, techniques and systems to manage and analyze XML data.
Semi-structured documents suffer due to its heterogeneity and
dimensionality. XML structure and content mining represent
convergence for research in semi-structured data and text mining. As
the information available on the internet grows drastically, extracting
knowledge from XML documents becomes a harder task. Certainly,
documents are often so large that the data set returned as answer to a
query may also be very big to convey the required information. To
improve the query answering, a Semantic Tree Based Association
Rule (STAR) mining method is proposed. This method provides
intentional information by considering the structure, content and the
semantics of the content. The method is applied on Reuter’s dataset
and the results show that the proposed method outperforms well.
Abstract: A field experiment was carried out at Arab El-
Awammer Research Station, Agric. Res. Center. Assiut Governorate
during summer seasons of 2013 and 2014. The present study assessed
the effect of cowpea with maize intercropping on yield and its
components. The experiment comprised of three treatments (sole
cowpea, sole maize and cowpea-maize intercrop). The experimental
design was a randomized complete block with four replications.
Results indicated that intercropped maize plants with cowpea,
exhibited greater potentiality and resulted in higher values of most of
the studied criteria viz., plant height, number of ears/plant, number of
rows/ear, number of grains/row, grains weight/ear, 100–grain weight
and straw and grain yields. Fresh and dry forage yields of cowpea
were lower in intercropping with maize than sole. Furthermore, the
combined of the two seasons revealed that the total Land Equivalent
Ratio (LER) between cowpea and maize was 1.65. The Aggressivity
(A) maize was 0.45 and cowpea was -0.45. This showed that maize
was the dominant crop, whereas cowpea was the dominated. The
Competitive Ratio (CR) indicated that maize more competitive than
cowpea, maize was 1.75 and cowpea was 0.57. The Actual Yield
Loss (AYL) maize was 0.05 and cowpea was -0.40. The Monetary
Advantage Index (MAI) was 2360.80.
Abstract: Endowed of renewable energy sources (RES) are the
advantages of ASEAN, but they are using a low amount of RES only
to generate electricity because their primary energy sources are fossil
and coal. The cost of purchasing fossil and coal is cheaper now, but it
might be expensive soon, as it will be depleted sooner and after.
ASEAN showed that the RES are convenient to be implemented.
Some country in ASEAN has huge renewable energy sources
potential and use. The primary aim of this project is to assist ASEAN
countries in preparing the renewable energy and to guide the policies
for RES in the more upright direction. The Green-Y model will help
ASEAN government to study and forecast the economic concept,
including feed-in tariff.
Abstract: E-learning has become an efficient and widespread
means of education at all levels of human activities. Statistics is no
exception. Unfortunately the main focus in statistics teaching is
usually paid to the substitution in formulas. Suitable websites can
simplify and automate calculations and provide more attention and
time to the basic principles of statistics, mathematization of real-life
situations and following interpretation of results. We now introduce
our own web-site for hypothesis testing. Its didactic aspects, the
technical possibilities of the individual tools, the experience of use
and the advantages or disadvantages are discussed in this paper. This
web-site is not a substitute for common statistical software but should
significantly improve the teaching of statistics at universities.
Abstract: Femtocells are regarded as a milestone for next
generation cellular networks. As femtocells are deployed in an
unplanned manner, there is a chance of assigning same resource to
neighboring femtocells. This scenario may induce co-channel
interference and may seriously affect the service quality of
neighboring femtocells. In addition, the dominant transmit power of a
femtocell will induce co-tier interference to neighboring femtocells.
Thus to jointly handle co-tier and co-channel interference, we
propose an interference-free power and resource block allocation
(IFPRBA) algorithm for closely located, closed access femtocells.
Based on neighboring list, inter-femto-base station distance and
uplink noise power, the IFPRBA algorithm assigns non-interfering
power and resource to femtocells. The IFPRBA algorithm also
guarantees the quality of service to femtouser based on the
knowledge of resource requirement, connection type, and the
tolerable delay budget. Simulation result shows that the interference
power experienced in IFPRBA algorithm is below the tolerable
interference power and hence the overall service success ratio, PRB
efficiency and network throughput are maximum when compared to
conventional resource allocation framework for femtocell (RAFF)
algorithm.
Abstract: In this research, waterglass based aerogel powder was
prepared by sol–gel process and ambient pressure drying. Inspired by
limited dust releasing, aerogel powder was introduced to the PET
electrospinning solution in an attempt to create required bulk and
surface structure for the nanofibers to improve their hydrophobic and
insulation properties. The samples evaluation was carried out by
measuring density, porosity, contact angle, heat transfer, FTIR, BET,
and SEM. According to the results, porous silica aerogel powder was
fabricated with mean pore diameter of 24 nm and contact angle of
145.9º. The results indicated the usefulness of the aerogel powder
confined into nanofibers to control surface roughness for
manipulating superhydrophobic nanowebs with water contact angle
of 147º. It can be due to a multi-scale surface roughness which was
created by nanowebs structure itself and nanofibers surface
irregularity in presence of the aerogels while a layer of fluorocarbon
created low surface energy. The wettability of a solid substrate is an
important property that is controlled by both the chemical
composition and geometry of the surface. Also, a decreasing trend in
the heat transfer was observed from 22% for the nanofibers without
any aerogel powder to 8% for the nanofibers with 4% aerogel
powder. The development of thermal insulating materials has become
increasingly more important than ever in view of the fossil energy
depletion and global warming that call for more demanding energysaving
practices.
Abstract: Real time image and video processing is a demand in
many computer vision applications, e.g. video surveillance, traffic
management and medical imaging. The processing of those video
applications requires high computational power. Thus, the optimal
solution is the collaboration of CPU and hardware accelerators. In
this paper, a Canny edge detection hardware accelerator is proposed.
Edge detection is one of the basic building blocks of video and image
processing applications. It is a common block in the pre-processing
phase of image and video processing pipeline. Our presented
approach targets offloading the Canny edge detection algorithm from
processing system (PS) to programmable logic (PL) taking the
advantage of High Level Synthesis (HLS) tool flow to accelerate the
implementation on Zynq platform. The resulting implementation
enables up to a 100x performance improvement through hardware
acceleration. The CPU utilization drops down and the frame rate
jumps to 60 fps of 1080p full HD input video stream.
Abstract: The tomato is a very important crop, whose
cultivation in the Mediterranean basin is severely affected by the
phytoparasitic weed Phelipanche ramosa. The semiarid regions of
the world are considered the main areas where this parasitic weed is
established causing heavy infestation as it is able to produce high
numbers of seeds (up to 500,000 per plant), which remain viable for
extended period (more than 20 years). In this paper the results
obtained from eleven treatments in order to control this parasitic
weed including chemical, agronomic, biological and biotechnological
methods compared with the untreated test under two plowing depths
(30 and 50 cm) are reported. The split-plot design with 3 replicates
was adopted. In 2014 a trial was performed in Foggia province
(southern Italy) on processing tomato (cv Docet) grown in the field
infested by Phelipanche ramosa. Tomato seedlings were transplant
on May 5, on a clay-loam soil. During the growing cycle of the
tomato crop, at 56-78 and 92 days after transplantation, the number
of parasitic shoots emerged in each plot was detected. At tomato
harvesting, on August 18, the major quantity-quality yield parameters
were determined (marketable yield, mean weight, dry matter, pH,
soluble solids and color of fruits). All data were subjected to analysis
of variance (ANOVA) and the means were compared by Tukey's test.
Each treatment studied did not provide complete control against
Phelipanche ramosa. However, among the different methods tested,
some of them which Fusarium, gliphosate, radicon biostimulant and
Red Setter tomato cv (improved genotypes obtained by Tilling
technology) under deeper plowing (50 cm depth) proved to mitigate
the virulence of the Phelipanche ramose attacks. It is assumed that
these effects can be improved combining some of these treatments
each other, especially for a gradual and continuing reduction of the
“seed bank” of the parasite in the soil.
Abstract: Cloud computing has provided the impetus for change
in the demand, sourcing, and consumption of IT-enabled services.
The technology developed from an emerging trend towards a ‘musthave’.
Many organizations harnessed on the quick-wins of cloud
computing within the last five years but nowadays reach a plateau
when it comes to sustainable savings and performance. This study
aims to investigate what is needed from an organizational perspective
to make cloud computing a sustainable success. The study was
carried out in Germany among senior IT professionals, both in
management and delivery positions. Our research shows that IT
executives must be prepared to realign their IT workforce to sustain
the advantage of cloud computing for today and the near future.
While new roles will undoubtedly emerge, roles alone cannot ensure
the success of cloud deployments. What is needed is a change in the
IT workforce’s business behaviour, or put more simply, the ways in
which the IT personnel works. It gives clear guidance on which
dimensions of an employees’ working behaviour need to be adapted.
The practical implications are drawn from a series of semi-structured
interviews, resulting in a high-level workforce enablement plan.
Lastly, it elaborates on tools and gives clear guidance on which
pitfalls might arise along the proposed workforce enablement
process.
Abstract: Cavitation in cryogenic liquids is widely present in
contemporary science. In the current study, we re-examine a
previously validated acoustic cavitation model which was developed
for a gas bubble in liquid water. Furthermore, simulations of
cryogenic fluids including the thermal effect, the effect of acoustic
pressure amplitude and the frequency of sound field on the bubble
dynamics are presented. A gas bubble (Helium) in liquids Nitrogen,
Oxygen and Hydrogen in an acoustic field at ambient pressure and
low temperature is investigated numerically. The results reveal that
the oscillation of the bubble in liquid Hydrogen fluctuates more than
in liquids Oxygen and Nitrogen. The oscillation of the bubble in
liquids Oxygen and Nitrogen is approximately similar.
Abstract: Software Architecture is the basic structure of
software that states the development and advancement of a software
system. Software architecture is also considered as a significant tool
for the construction of high quality software systems. A clean design
leads to the control, value and beauty of software resulting in its
longer life while a bad design is the cause of architectural erosion
where a software evolution completely fails. This paper discusses the
occurrence of software architecture erosion and presents a set of
methods for the detection, declaration and prevention of architecture
erosion. The causes and symptoms of architecture erosion are
observed with the examples of prescriptive and descriptive
architectures and the practices used to stop this erosion are also
discussed by considering different types of software erosion and their
affects. Consequently finding and devising the most suitable
approach for fighting software architecture erosion and in some way
reducing its affect is evaluated and tested on different scenarios.
Abstract: This work presents a new planar multiband antenna
based on fractal geometry. This structure is optimized and validated
into simulation by using CST-MW Studio. To feed this antenna we
have used a CPW line which makes it easy to be incorporated with
integrated circuits. The simulation results presents a good matching
input impedance and radiation pattern in the GSM band at 900 MHz
and ISM band at 2.4 GHz. The final structure is a dual band fractal
antenna with 70 x 70 mm² as a total area by using an FR4 substrate.