Abstract: There are two common methodologies to verify
signatures: the functional approach and the parametric approach. This
paper presents a new approach for dynamic handwritten signature
verification (HSV) using the Neural Network with verification by the
Conjugate Gradient Neural Network (NN). It is yet another avenue in
the approach to HSV that is found to produce excellent results when
compared with other methods of dynamic. Experimental results show
the system is insensitive to the order of base-classifiers and gets a
high verification ratio.
Abstract: Bones are dynamic and responsive organs, they
regulate their strength and mass according to the loads which they are subjected. Because, the Wnt/β-catenin pathway has profound
effects on the regulation of bone mass, we hypothesized that mechanical loading of bone cells stimulates Wnt/β-catenin signaling, which results in the generation of new bone mass.
Mechanical loading triggers the secretion of the Wnt molecule, which after binding to transmembrane proteins, causes GSK-3β (Glycogen synthase kinase 3 beta) to cease the phosphorylation of β-catenin. β-catenin accumulation in the cytoplasm, followed by its
transport into the nucleus, binding to transcription factors (TCF/LEF)
that initiate transcription of genes related to bone formation. To test this hypothesis, we used TOPGAL (Tcf Optimal Promoter
β-galactosidase) mice in an experiment in which cyclic loads were
applied to the forearm. TOPGAL mice are reporters for cells effected
by the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. TOPGAL mice are genetically engineered mice in which transcriptional activation of β-
catenin, results in the production of an enzyme, β-galactosidase. The
presence of this enzyme allows us to localize transcriptional
activation of β-catenin to individual cells, thereby, allowing us to quantify the effects that mechanical loading has on the Wnt/β-catenin pathway and new bone formation. The ulnae of loaded TOPGAL
mice were excised and transverse slices along different parts of the
ulnar shaft were assayed for the presence of β-galactosidase.
Our results indicate that loading increases β-catenin transcriptional
activity in regions where this pathway is already primed (i.e. where basal activity is already higher) in a load magnitude dependent
manner. Further experiments are needed to determine the temporal and spatial activation of this signaling in relation to bone formation.
Abstract: Fatigue cracking continues to be the main challenges in
improving the performance of bituminous mixture pavements. The
purpose of this paper is to look at some aspects of the effects of fine
aggregate properties on the fatigue behaviour of hot mixture asphalt.
Two types of sand (quarry and mining sand) with two conventional
bitumen (PEN 50/60 & PEN 80/100) and four polymers modified
bitumen PMB (PM1_82, PM1_76, PM2_82 and PM2_76) were used.
Physical, chemical and mechanical tests were performed on the sands
to determine their effect when incorporated with a bituminous
mixture. According to the beam fatigue results, quarry sand that has
more angularity, rougher, higher shear strength and a higher
percentage of Aluminium oxide presented higher resistance to
fatigue. Also a PMB mixture gives better fatigue results than
conventional mixtures, this is due to the PMB having better viscosity
property than that of the conventional bitumen.
Abstract: This paper presents a hybrid fuzzy-PD plus PID
(HFPP) controller and its application to steam distillation process for
essential oil extraction system. Steam temperature is one of the most
significant parameters that can influence the composition of essential
oil yield. Due to parameter variations and changes in operation
conditions during distillation, a robust steam temperature controller becomes nontrivial to avoid the degradation of essential oil quality.
Initially, the PRBS input is triggered to the system and output of steam temperature is modeled using ARX model structure. The
parameter estimation and tuning method is adopted by simulation
using HFPP controller scheme. The effectiveness and robustness of
proposed controller technique is validated by real time
implementation to the system. The performance of HFPP using 25 and 49 fuzzy rules is compared. The experimental result demonstrates the proposed HFPP using 49 fuzzy rules achieves a
better, consistent and robust controller compared to PID when considering the test on tracking the set point and the effects due to disturbance.
Abstract: The possibility of using cassava residue containing
49.66% starch, 21.47% cellulose, 12.97% hemicellulose, and 21.86%
lignin as a raw material to produce glucose using enzymatic
hydrolysis was investigated. In the experiment, each reactor
contained the cassava residue, bacteria cells, and production medium.
The effects of particles size (40 mesh and 60 mesh) and strains of
bacteria (A002 and M015) isolated from Thai higher termites,
Microcerotermes sp., on the glucose concentration at 37°C were
focused. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with a
refractive index detector was used to determine the quantity of
glucose. The maximum glucose concentration obtained at 37°C using
strain A002 and 60 mesh of the cassava residue was 1.51 g/L at 10 h.
Abstract: Studies on Simultaneous Saccharification and Fermentation (SSF) of corn flour, a major agricultural product as the substrate using starch digesting glucoamylase enzyme derived from Aspergillus niger and non starch digesting and sugar fermenting Saccharomyces cerevisiae in a batch fermentation. Experiments based on Central Composite Design (CCD) were conducted to study the effect of substrate concentration, pH, temperature, enzyme concentration on Ethanol Concentration and the above parameters were optimized using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The optimum values of substrate concentration, pH, temperature and enzyme concentration were found to be 160 g/l, 5.5, 30°C and 50 IU respectively. The effect of inoculums age on ethanol concentration was also investigated. The corn flour solution equivalent to 16% initial starch concentration gave the highest ethanol concentration of 63.04 g/l after 48 h of fermentation at optimum conditions of pH and temperature. Monod model and Logistic model were used for growth kinetics and Leudeking – Piret model was used for product formation kinetics.
Abstract: Recently, a great amount of interest has been shown
in the field of modeling and controlling hybrid systems. One of the
efficient and common methods in this area utilizes the mixed logicaldynamical
(MLD) systems in the modeling. In this method, the
system constraints are transformed into mixed-integer inequalities by
defining some logic statements. In this paper, a system containing
three tanks is modeled as a nonlinear switched system by using the
MLD framework. Comparing the model size of the three-tank system
with that of a two-tank system, it is deduced that the number of
binary variables, the size of the system and its complexity
tremendously increases with the number of tanks, which makes the
control of the system more difficult. Therefore, methods should be
found which result in fewer mixed-integer inequalities.
Abstract: Role of acoustic driving pressure on the
translational-radial dynamics of a moving single bubble
sonoluminescence (m-SBSL) has been numerically
investigated. The results indicate that increase in the
amplitude of the driving pressure leads to increase in the
bubble peak temperature. The length and the shape of the
trajectory of the bubble depends on the acoustic pressure and
because of the spatially dependence of the radial dynamics of
the moving bubble, its peak temperature varies during the
acoustical pulses. The results are in good agreement with the
experimental reports on m-SBSL.
Abstract: Air pollution is a major environmental health
problem, affecting developed and developing countries around the
world. Increasing amounts of potentially harmful gases and
particulate matter are being emitted into the atmosphere on a global
scale, resulting in damage to human health and the environment.
Petroleum-related air pollutants can have a wide variety of adverse
environmental impacts. In the crude oil production sectors, there is a
strong need for a thorough knowledge of gaseous emissions resulting
from the flaring of associated gas of known composition on daily
basis through combustion activities under several operating
conditions. This can help in the control of gaseous emission from
flares and thus in the protection of their immediate and distant
surrounding against environmental degradation.
The impacts of methane and non-methane hydrocarbons emissions
from flaring activities at oil production facilities at Kuwait Oilfields
have been assessed through a screening study using records of flaring
operations taken at the gas and oil production sites, and by analyzing
available meteorological and air quality data measured at stations
located near anthropogenic sources. In the present study the
Industrial Source Complex (ISCST3) Dispersion Model is used to
calculate the ground level concentrations of methane and nonmethane
hydrocarbons emitted due to flaring in all over Kuwait
Oilfields.
The simulation of real hourly air quality in and around oil
production facilities in the State of Kuwait for the year 2006,
inserting the respective source emission data into the ISCST3
software indicates that the levels of non-methane hydrocarbons from
the flaring activities exceed the allowable ambient air standard set by
Kuwait EPA. So, there is a strong need to address this acute problem
to minimize the impact of methane and non-methane hydrocarbons
released from flaring activities over the urban area of Kuwait.
Abstract: The data exchanged on the Web are of different nature
from those treated by the classical database management systems;
these data are called semi-structured data since they do not have a
regular and static structure like data found in a relational database;
their schema is dynamic and may contain missing data or types.
Therefore, the needs for developing further techniques and
algorithms to exploit and integrate such data, and extract relevant
information for the user have been raised. In this paper we present
the system OSIX (Osiris based System for Integration of XML
Sources). This system has a Data Warehouse model designed for the
integration of semi-structured data and more precisely for the
integration of XML documents. The architecture of OSIX relies on
the Osiris system, a DL-based model designed for the representation
and management of databases and knowledge bases. Osiris is a viewbased
data model whose indexing system supports semantic query
optimization. We show that the problem of query processing on a
XML source is optimized by the indexing approach proposed by
Osiris.
Abstract: With the rapid development in the field of life
sciences and the flooding of genomic information, the need for faster
and scalable searching methods has become urgent. One of the
approaches that were investigated is indexing. The indexing methods
have been categorized into three categories which are the lengthbased
index algorithms, transformation-based algorithms and mixed
techniques-based algorithms. In this research, we focused on the
transformation based methods. We embedded the N-gram method
into the transformation-based method to build an inverted index
table. We then applied the parallel methods to speed up the index
building time and to reduce the overall retrieval time when querying
the genomic database. Our experiments show that the use of N-Gram
transformation algorithm is an economical solution; it saves time and
space too. The result shows that the size of the index is smaller than
the size of the dataset when the size of N-Gram is 5 and 6. The
parallel N-Gram transformation algorithm-s results indicate that the
uses of parallel programming with large dataset are promising which
can be improved further.
Abstract: Recurrent event data is a special type of multivariate
survival data. Dynamic and frailty models are one of the approaches
that dealt with this kind of data. A comparison between these two
models is studied using the empirical standard deviation of the
standardized martingale residual processes as a way of assessing the
fit of the two models based on the Aalen additive regression model.
Here we found both approaches took heterogeneity into account and
produce residual standard deviations close to each other both in the
simulation study and in the real data set.
Abstract: The influence of viscosity on droplet diameter for
water-in-crude oil (w/o) emulsion with two different ratios; 20-80 %
and 50-50 % w/o emulsion was examined in the Brookfield
Rotational Digital Rheometer. The emulsion was prepared with
sorbitan sesquiolate (Span 83) act as emulsifier at varied temperature
and stirring speed in rotation per minute (rpm). Results showed that
the viscosity of w/o emulsion was strongly augmented by increasing
volume of water and decreased the temperature. The changing of
viscosity also altered the droplet size distribution. Changing of
droplet diameter was depends on the viscosity and the behavior of
emulsion either Newtonian or non-Newtonian.
Abstract: Exclusive breastfeeding is the feeding of a baby on no other milk apart from breast milk. Exclusive breastfeeding during the first 6 months of life is of fundamental importance because it supports optimal growth and development during infancy and reduces the risk of obliterating diseases and problems. Moreover, in developed countries, exclusive breastfeeding has decreased the incidence and/or severity of diarrhea, lower respiratory infection and urinary tract infection. In this paper, we study the factors that influence exclusive breastfeeding and use the Generalized Poisson regression model to analyze the practices of exclusive breastfeeding in Mauritius. We develop two sets of quasi-likelihood equations (QLE)to estimate the parameters.
Abstract: The present paper considers the steady free convection
boundary layer flow of a viscoelastic fluid on solid sphere with
Newtonian heating. The boundary layer equations are an order higher
than those for the Newtonian (viscous) fluid and the adherence
boundary conditions are insufficient to determine the solution of
these equations completely. Thus, the augmentation an extra
boundary condition is needed to perform the numerical
computational. The governing boundary layer equations are first
transformed into non-dimensional form by using special
dimensionless group and then solved by using an implicit finite
difference scheme. The results are displayed graphically to illustrate
the influence of viscoelastic K and Prandtl Number Pr parameters on
skin friction, heat transfer, velocity profiles and temperature profiles.
Present results are compared with the published papers and are found
to concur very well.
Abstract: This paper discuss the separation of the miscible
liquids by means of fractional distillation. For complete separation of
liquids, the process of heating, condensation, separation and storage
is done automatically to achieve the objective. PIC micro-controller
has been used to control each and every process of the work. The
controller also controls the storage process by activating and deactivating
the conveyors. The liquids are heated which on reaching
their respective boiling points evaporate and enter the condensation
chamber where they convert into liquid. The liquids are then directed
to their respective tanks by means of stepper motor which moves in
three directions, each movement into different tank. The tank on
filling sends the signal to controller which then opens the solenoid
valves. The tank is emptied into the beakers below the nozzle. As the
beaker filled, the nozzle closes and the conveyors come into
operation. The filled beaker is replaced by an empty beaker from
behind. The work can be used in oil industries, chemical industries
and paint industries.
Abstract: Dengue disease is an infectious vector-borne viral
disease that is commonly found in tropical and sub-tropical regions,
especially in urban and semi-urban areas, around the world and
including Malaysia. There is no currently available vaccine or
chemotherapy for the prevention or treatment of dengue disease.
Therefore prevention and treatment of the disease depend on vector
surveillance and control measures. Disease risk mapping has been
recognized as an important tool in the prevention and control
strategies for diseases. The choice of statistical model used for
relative risk estimation is important as a good model will
subsequently produce a good disease risk map. Therefore, the aim of
this study is to estimate the relative risk for dengue disease based
initially on the most common statistic used in disease mapping called
Standardized Morbidity Ratio (SMR) and one of the earliest
applications of Bayesian methodology called Poisson-gamma model.
This paper begins by providing a review of the SMR method, which
we then apply to dengue data of Perak, Malaysia. We then fit an
extension of the SMR method, which is the Poisson-gamma model.
Both results are displayed and compared using graph, tables and
maps. Results of the analysis shows that the latter method gives a
better relative risk estimates compared with using the SMR. The
Poisson-gamma model has been demonstrated can overcome the
problem of SMR when there is no observed dengue cases in certain
regions. However, covariate adjustment in this model is difficult and
there is no possibility for allowing spatial correlation between risks in
adjacent areas. The drawbacks of this model have motivated many
researchers to propose other alternative methods for estimating the
risk.
Abstract: The objective of this study is to propose an observer design for nonlinear systems by using an augmented linear system derived by application of a formal linearization method. A given nonlinear differential equation is linearized by the formal linearization method which is based on Taylor expansion considering up to the higher order terms, and a measurement equation is transformed into an augmented linear one. To this augmented dimensional linear system, a linear estimation theory is applied and a nonlinear observer is derived. As an application of this method, an estimation problem of transient state of electric power systems is studied, and its numerical experiments indicate that this observer design shows remarkable performances for nonlinear systems.
Abstract: In Multiple Sclerosis, pathological changes in the
brain results in deviations in signal intensity on Magnetic Resonance
Images (MRI). Quantitative analysis of these changes and their
correlation with clinical finding provides important information for
diagnosis. This constitutes the objective of our work. A new approach
is developed. After the enhancement of images contrast and the brain
extraction by mathematical morphology algorithm, we proceed to the
brain segmentation. Our approach is based on building statistical
model from data itself, for normal brain MRI and including clustering
tissue type. Then we detect signal abnormalities (MS lesions) as a
rejection class containing voxels that are not explained by the built
model. We validate the method on MR images of Multiple Sclerosis
patients by comparing its results with those of human expert
segmentation.
Abstract: This study investigated the relationship between
exercise imagery use and level of physical activity within a wide
range of exercisers in Klang valley, Malaysia. One hundred and
twenty four respondents (Mage = 28.92, SD = 9.34) completed two
sets of questionnaires (Exercise Imagery Inventory and Leisure-Time
Exercise Questionnaire) that measure the use of imagery and exercise
frequency of participants. From the result obtained, exercise imagery
is found to be significantly correlated to level of physical activity.
Besides that, variables such as gender, age and ethnicity that may
affect the use of imagery and exercise frequency were also being
assessed in this study. Among all variables, only ethnicity showed
significant difference in level of physical activity (p < 0.05). Findings
in this study suggest that further investigation should be done on
other variables such as socioeconomic, educational level, and selfefficacy
that may affect the imagery use and frequency of physical
activity among exercisers.