Abstract: We apply a particle tracking technique to track the motion of individual pathogenic Leptospira. We observe and capture images of motile Leptospira by means of CCD and darkfield microscope. Image processing, statistical theories and simulations are used for data analysis. Based on trajectory patterns, mean square displacement, and power spectral density characteristics, we found that the motion modes are most likely to be directed motion mode (70%) and the rest are either normal diffusion or unidentified mode. Our findings may support the fact that why leptospires are very well efficient toward targeting internal tissues as a result of increase in virulence factor.
Abstract: A two-dimensional numerical simulation of crossflow
around four cylinders in an in-line rectangular configuration is
studied by using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). Special
attention is paid to the effect of the spacing between the cylinders.
The Reynolds number ( Re ) is chosen to be e 100 R = and the
spacing ratio L / D is set at 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0
and 10.0. Results show that, as in the case of four cylinders in an inline
rectangular configuration , flow fields show four different
features depending on the spacing (single square cylinder, stable
shielding flow, wiggling shielding flow and a vortex shedding flow)
are observed in this study. The effects of spacing ratio on physical
quantities such as mean drag coefficient, Strouhal number and rootmean-
square value of the drag and lift coefficients are also presented.
There is more than one shedding frequency at small spacing ratios.
The mean drag coefficients for downstream cylinders are less than
that of the single cylinder for all spacing ratios. The present results
using the LBM are compared with some existing experimental data
and numerical studies. The comparison shows that the LBM can
capture the characteristics of the bluff body flow reasonably well and
is a good tool for bluff body flow studies.
Abstract: In this study, we sought to investigate the mercury
removal efficiency of manganese oxides from natural gas. The
fundamental studies on mercury removal with manganese oxides
sorbents were carried out in a laboratory scale fixed bed reactor at 30
°C with a mixture of methane (20%) and nitrogen gas laden with 4.8
ppb of elemental mercury. Manganese oxides with varying surface
area and crystalline phase were prepared by conventional precipitation
method in this study. The effects of surface area, crystallinity and
other metal oxides on mercury removal efficiency were investigated.
Effect of Ag impregnation on mercury removal efficiency was also
investigated. Ag supported on metal oxide such titania and zirconia as
reference materials were also used in this study for comparison. The
characteristics of mercury removal reaction with manganese oxide
was investigated using a temperature programmed desorption (TPD)
technique.
Manganese oxides showed very high Hg removal activity (about
73-93% Hg removal) for first time use. Surface area of the manganese
oxide samples decreased after heat-treatment and resulted in complete
loss of Hg removal ability for repeated use after Hg desorption in the
case of amorphous MnO2, and 75% loss of the initial Hg removal
activity for the crystalline MnO2. Mercury desorption efficiency of
crystalline MnO2 was very low (37%) for first time use and high (98%)
after second time use. Residual potassium content in MnO2 may have
some effect on the thermal stability of the adsorbed Hg species.
Desorption of Hg from manganese oxides occurs at much higher
temperatures (with a peak at 400 °C) than Ag/TiO2 or Ag/ZrO2.
Mercury may be captured on manganese oxides in the form of mercury
manganese oxide.
Abstract: Least Development Countries (LDC) like
Bangladesh, whose 25% revenue earning is achieved from Textile
export, requires producing less defective textile for minimizing
production cost and time. Inspection processes done on these
industries are mostly manual and time consuming. To reduce error
on identifying fabric defects requires more automotive and
accurate inspection process. Considering this lacking, this research
implements a Textile Defect Recognizer which uses computer
vision methodology with the combination of multi-layer neural
networks to identify four classifications of textile defects. The
recognizer, suitable for LDC countries, identifies the fabric defects
within economical cost and produces less error prone inspection
system in real time. In order to generate input set for the neural
network, primarily the recognizer captures digital fabric images by
image acquisition device and converts the RGB images into binary
images by restoration process and local threshold techniques.
Later, the output of the processed image, the area of the faulty
portion, the number of objects of the image and the sharp factor of
the image, are feed backed as an input layer to the neural network
which uses back propagation algorithm to compute the weighted
factors and generates the desired classifications of defects as an
output.
Abstract: The development of biomimetic micro-aerial-vehicles
(MAVs) with flapping wings is the future trend in military/domestic
field. The successful flight of MAVs is strongly related to the
understanding of unsteady aerodynamic performance of low Reynolds
number airfoils under dynamic flapping motion. This study explored
the effects of flapping frequency, stroke amplitude, and the inclined
angle of stroke plane on lift force and thrust force of a bio-inspiration
corrugated airfoil with 33 full factorial design of experiment and
ANOVA analysis. Unsteady vorticity flows over a corrugated thin
airfoil executing flapping motion are computed with time-dependent
two-dimensional laminar incompressible Reynolds-averaged
Navier-Stokes equations with the conformal hybrid mesh. The tested
freestream Reynolds number based on the chord length of airfoil as
characteristic length is fixed of 103. The dynamic mesh technique is
applied to model the flapping motion of a corrugated airfoil. Instant
vorticity contours over a complete flapping cycle clearly reveals the
flow mechanisms for lift force generation are dynamic stall, rotational
circulation, and wake capture. The thrust force is produced as the
leading edge vortex shedding from the trailing edge of airfoil to form a
reverse von Karman vortex. Results also indicated that the inclined
angle is the most significant factor on both the lift force and thrust
force. There are strong interactions between tested factors which mean
an optimization study on parameters should be conducted in further
runs.
Abstract: Home Automation is a field that, among other
subjects, is concerned with the comfort, security and energy
requirements of private homes. The configuration of automatic
functions in this type of houses is not always simple to its inhabitants
requiring the initial setup and regular adjustments. In this work, the
ubiquitous computing system vision is used, where the users- action
patterns are captured, recorded and used to create the contextawareness
that allows the self-configuration of the home automation
system. The system will try to free the users from setup adjustments
as the home tries to adapt to its inhabitants- real habits. In this paper
it is described a completely automated process to determine the light
state and act on them, taking in account the users- daily habits.
Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is used as a pattern recognition
method, classifying for each moment the light state. The work
presented uses data from a real house where a family is actually
living.
Abstract: A set of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based methods
for the design of an effective system of speech recognition of
numerals of Assamese language captured under varied recording
conditions and moods is presented here. The work is related to
the formulation of several ANN models configured to use Linear
Predictive Code (LPC), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and
other features to tackle mood and gender variations uttering numbers
as part of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system in
Assamese. The ANN models are designed using a combination of
Self Organizing Map (SOM) and Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP)
constituting a Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) block trained in a
cooperative environment to handle male and female speech samples
of numerals of Assamese- a language spoken by a sizable population
in the North-Eastern part of India. The work provides a comparative
evaluation of several such combinations while subjected to handle
speech samples with gender based differences captured by a microphone
in four different conditions viz. noiseless, noise mixed, stressed
and stress-free.
Abstract: This paper deals with heterogeneous autoregressive
models of realized volatility (HAR-RV models) on high-frequency
data of stock indices in the USA. Its aim is to capture the behavior of
three groups of market participants trading on a daily, weekly and
monthly basis and assess their role in predicting the daily realized
volatility. The benefits of this work lies mainly in the application of
heterogeneous autoregressive models of realized volatility on stock
indices in the USA with a special aim to analyze an impact of the
global financial crisis on applied models forecasting performance.
We use three data sets, the first one from the period before the global
financial crisis occurred in the years 2006-2007, the second one from
the period when the global financial crisis fully hit the U.S. financial
market in 2008-2009 years, and the last period was defined over
2010-2011 years. The model output indicates that estimated realized
volatility in the market is very much determined by daily traders and
in some cases excludes the impact of those market participants who
trade on monthly basis.
Abstract: The understanding of knee movement during swing
importance for golf swing improving and preventing injury. Thirty
male professional and amateur golfers were assigned to swing time
by time for 3 times. Data from a vedio-based motion capture were
used to compute knee joint movement variables. The results showed
that professional and amateur golfers were significantly in left knee
flexion angle at the impact point and mid follow through phase.
Nevertheless, left knee external rotation in both groups was also
significant. The right knee were no significant different in all
variable. However, pattern of knee joint movement are also likely
between professional and amateur golfers.
Abstract: A multimedia presentation system refers to the integration of a multimedia database with a presentation manager which has the functionality of content selection, organization and playout of multimedia presentations. It requires high performance of involved system components. Starting from multimedia information capture until the presentation delivery, high performance tools are required for accessing, manipulating, storing and retrieving these segments, for transferring and delivering them in a presentation terminal according to a playout order. The organization of presentations is a complex task in that the display order of presentation contents (in time and space) must be specified. A multimedia presentation contains audio, video, images and text media types. The critical decisions for presentation construction include what the contents are, how the contents are organized, and once the decision is made on the organization of the contents of the presentation, it must be conveyed to the end user in the correct organizational order and in a timely fashion. This paper introduces a framework for specification of multimedia presentations and describes the design of sample presentations using this framework from a multimedia database.
Abstract: The scroll pump belongs to the category of positive
displacement pump can be used for continuous pumping of gases at
low pressure apart from general vacuum application. The shape of
volume occupied by the gas moves and deforms continuously as the
spiral orbits. To capture flow features in such domain where mesh
deformation varies with time in a complicated manner, mesh less
solver was found to be very useful. Least Squares Kinetic Upwind
Method (LSKUM) is a kinetic theory based mesh free Euler solver
working on arbitrary distribution of points. Here upwind is enforced
in molecular level based on kinetic flux vector splitting scheme
(KFVS). In the present study we extended the LSKUM to moving
node viscous flow application. This new code LSKUM-NS-MN for
moving node viscous flow is validated for standard airfoil pitching
test case. Simulation performed for flow through scroll pump using
LSKUM-NS-MN code agrees well with the experimental pumping
speed data.
Abstract: Recent developments in automotive technology are focused on economy, comfort and safety. Vehicle tracking and collision detection systems are attracting attention of many investigators focused on safety of driving in the field of automotive mechatronics. In this paper, a vision-based vehicle detection system is presented. Developed system is intended to be used in collision detection and driver alert. The system uses RGB images captured by a camera in a car driven in the highway. Images captured by the moving camera are used to detect the moving vehicles in the image. A vehicle ahead of the camera is detected in daylight conditions. The proposed method detects moving vehicles by subtracting successive images. Plate height of the vehicle is determined by using a plate recognition algorithm. Distance of the moving object is calculated by using the plate height. After determination of the distance of the moving vehicle relative speed of the vehicle and Time-to-Collision are calculated by using distances measured in successive images. Results obtained in road tests are discussed in order to validate the use of the proposed method.
Abstract: Most of the biclustering/projected clustering algorithms are based either on the Euclidean distance or correlation coefficient which capture only linear relationships. However, in many applications, like gene expression data and word-document data, non linear relationships may exist between the objects. Mutual Information between two variables provides a more general criterion to investigate dependencies amongst variables. In this paper, we improve upon our previous algorithm that uses mutual information for biclustering in terms of computation time and also the type of clusters identified. The algorithm is able to find biclusters with mixed relationships and is faster than the previous one. To the best of our knowledge, none of the other existing algorithms for biclustering have used mutual information as a similarity measure. We present the experimental results on synthetic data as well as on the yeast expression data. Biclusters on the yeast data were found to be biologically and statistically significant using GO Tool Box and FuncAssociate.
Abstract: Representation and description of object shapes by the
slopes of their contours or borders are proposed. The idea is to capture
the essence of the features that make it easier for a shape to be
stored, transmitted, compared and recognized. These features must
be independent of translation, rotation and scaling of the shape. A
approach is proposed to obtain high performance, efficiency and to
merge the boundaries into sequence of straight line segments with
the fewest possible segments. Evaluation on the performance of the
proposed method is based on its comparison with established method
of object shape description.
Abstract: Cosmic showers, from their places of origin in space,
after entering earth generate secondary particles called Extensive Air
Shower (EAS). Detection and analysis of EAS and similar High
Energy Particle Showers involve a plethora of experimental setups
with certain constraints for which soft-computational tools like
Artificial Neural Network (ANN)s can be adopted. The optimality
of ANN classifiers can be enhanced further by the use of Multiple
Classifier System (MCS) and certain data - dimension reduction
techniques. This work describes the performance of certain data
dimension reduction techniques like Principal Component Analysis
(PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Self Organizing
Map (SOM) approximators for application with an MCS formed
using Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network
(RNN) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN). The data inputs are
obtained from an array of detectors placed in a circular arrangement
resembling a practical detector grid which have a higher dimension
and greater correlation among themselves. The PCA, ICA and SOM
blocks reduce the correlation and generate a form suitable for real
time practical applications for prediction of primary energy and
location of EAS from density values captured using detectors in a
circular grid.
Abstract: Human genome is not only the evolutionary
summation of all advantageous events, but also houses lesions of
deleterious foot prints. A single gene mutation sometimes may
express multiple consequences in numerous tissues and a linear
relationship of the genotype and the phenotype may often be obscure.
ß Thalassemia minor, a transfusion independent mild anaemia,
coupled with environment among other factors may articulate into
phenotypic pleotropy with Hypocholesterolemia, Vitamin D
deficiency, Tissue hypoxia, Hyper-parathyroidism and Psychological
alterations. Occurrence of Pancreatic insufficiency, resultant
steatorrhoea, Vitamin-D (25-OH) deficiency (13.86 ngm/ml) with
Hypocholesterolemia (85mg/dl) in a 30 years old male ß Thal-minor
patient (Hemoglobin 11mg/dl with Fetal Hemoglobin 2.10%, Hb A2
4.60% and Hb Adult 84.80% and altered Hemogram) with increased
Para thyroid hormone (62 pg/ml) & moderate Serum Ca+2
(9.5mg/ml) indicate towards a cascade of phenotypic pleotropy
where the ß Thalassemia mutation ,be it in the 5’ cap site of the
mRNA , differential splicing etc in heterozygous state is effecting
several metabolic pathways. Compensatory extramedulary
hematopoiesis may not coped up well with the stressful life style of
the young individual and increased erythropoietic stress with high
demand for cholesterol for RBC membrane synthesis may have
resulted in Hypocholesterolemia.Oxidative stress and tissue hypoxia
may have caused the pancreatic insufficiency, leading to Vitamin D
deficiency. This may in turn have caused the secondary
hyperparathyroidism to sustain serum Calcium level. Irritability and
stress intolerance of the patient was a cumulative effect of the vicious
cycle of metabolic compromises. From these findings we propose
that the metabolic deficiencies in the ß Thalassemia mutations may
be considered as the phenotypic display of the pleotropy to explain
the genetic epidemiology.
According to the recommendations from the NIH Workshop on
Gene-Environment Interplay in Common Complex Diseases: Forging
an Integrative Model, study design of observations should be
informed by gene-environment hypotheses and results of a study
(genetic diseases) should be published to inform future hypotheses.
Variety of approaches is needed to capture data on all possible
aspects, each of which is likely to contribute to the etiology of
disease. Speakers also agreed that there is a need for development of
new statistical methods and measurement tools to appraise
information that may be missed out by conventional method where
large sample size is needed to segregate considerable effect.
A meta analytic cohort study in future may bring about significant
insight on to the title comment.
Abstract: Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) are known to be
persistent and bioaccumulative toxicants that may cause reproductive
impairments in wildlife as well as human. The current study uses the
snail-eating turtle Malayemys macrocephala, a long-lived animal
commonly distribute in rice field habitat in central part of Thailand,
as a sentinel to monitor OCP contamination in environment. The
nest soil, complete clutch of eggs, and blood of the turtle were
collected from agricultural areas in the Chao Phraya River Basin,
Thailand during the nesting season of 2007-2008. The novel
methods for tissue extraction by an accelerated solvent extractor
(ASE, for egg) and liquid-liquid extraction (for blood) have been
developed. The nineteen OCP residues were analyzed by gas
chromatography with micro-electron captured detector (GC-μECD).
The validated methods have met requirements of the AOAC
standard. The results indicated that significant amounts of OCPs are
still contaminated in nest soil and eggs of the turtle even though the
OCPs had been banned in this area for many years. This suggested
the potential risk to health of wildlife as well as human in the area.
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the Ocean wave kinetic energy harvesting system. Energy harvesting is a concept by which energy is captured, stored, and utilized using various sources by employing interfaces, storage devices, and other units. Ocean wave energy harvesting in which the kinetic and potential energy contained in the natural oscillations of Ocean waves are converted into electric power. The kinetic energy harvesting system could be used for a number of areas. The main applications that we have discussed in this paper are to how generate the energy from Ocean wave energy (kinetic energy) to electric energy that is to eliminate the requirement for continual battery replacement.
Abstract: Ontology-based modelling of multi-formatted
software application content is a challenging area in content
management. When the number of software content unit is huge and
in continuous process of change, content change management is
important. The management of content in this context requires
targeted access and manipulation methods. We present a novel
approach to deal with model-driven content-centric information
systems and access to their content. At the core of our approach is an
ontology-based semantic annotation technique for diversely
formatted content that can improve the accuracy of access and
systems evolution. Domain ontologies represent domain-specific
concepts and conform to metamodels. Different ontologies - from
application domain ontologies to software ontologies - capture and
model the different properties and perspectives on a software content
unit. Interdependencies between domain ontologies, the artifacts and
the content are captured through a trace model. The annotation traces
are formalised and a graph-based system is selected for the
representation of the annotation traces.
Abstract: This paper explores the opportunity of using tri-axial
wireless accelerometers for supervised monitoring of sports
movements. A motion analysis system for the upper extremities of
lawn bowlers in particular is developed. Accelerometers are placed
on parts of human body such as the chest to represent the shoulder
movements, the back to capture the trunk motion, back of the hand,
the wrist and one above the elbow, to capture arm movements. These
sensors placement are carefully designed in order to avoid restricting
bowler-s movements. Data is acquired from these sensors in soft-real
time using virtual instrumentation; the acquired data is then
conditioned and converted into required parameters for motion
regeneration. A user interface was also created to facilitate in the
acquisition of data, and broadcasting of commands to the wireless
accelerometers. All motion regeneration in this paper deals with the
motion of the human body segment in the X and Y direction, looking
into the motion of the anterior/ posterior and lateral directions
respectively.