Abstract: Lycopene, which can be extracted from plants and is
very popular for fruit intake, is restricted for healthy food development
due to its high price. On the other hand, it will get great safety
concerns, especially in the food or cosmetic application, if the raw
material of lycopene is produced by chemical synthesis. In this
project, we provide a key technology to bridge the limitation as
mentioned above. Based on the abundant bioresources of BCRC
(Bioresource Collection and Research Center, Taiwan), a promising
lycopene output will be anticipated by the introduction of fermentation
technology along with industry-related core energy. Our results
showed that addition of tween 80(0.2%) and span 20 produced higher
amount of lycopene. And piperidine, when was added at 48hr to the
cultivation medium, could promote lycopene excretion effectively
also.
Abstract: Understanding the cell's large-scale organization is an
interesting task in computational biology. Thus, protein-protein
interactions can reveal important organization and function of the
cell. Here, we investigated the correspondence between protein
interactions and function for the yeast. We obtained the correlations
among the set of proteins. Then these correlations are clustered using
both the hierarchical and biclustering methods. The detailed analyses
of proteins in each cluster were carried out by making use of their
functional annotations. As a result, we found that some functional
classes appear together in almost all biclusters. On the other hand, in
hierarchical clustering, the dominancy of one functional class is
observed. In brief, from interaction data to function, some correlated
results are noticed about the relationship between interaction and
function which might give clues about the organization of the
proteins.
Abstract: Whereas cellular wireless communication systems are
subject to short-and long-term fading. The effect of wireless channel
has largely been ignored in most of the teletraffic assessment
researches. In this paper, a mathematical teletraffic model is proposed
to estimate blocking and forced termination probabilities of cellular
wireless networks as a result of teletraffic behavior as well as the
outage of the propagation channel. To evaluate the proposed
teletraffic model, gamma inter-arrival and general service time
distributions have been considered based on wireless channel fading
effect. The performance is evaluated and compared with the classical
model. The proposed model is dedicated and investigated in different
operational conditions. These conditions will consider not only the
arrival rate process, but also, the different faded channels models.
Abstract: PT XYZ is a bottled drinking water company. To preserve production resources owned by the company so that the resources could be utilized well, it has implemented maintenance management system, which has important role in company's profitability, and is one of the factors influenced overall company's performance. Yet, up to now the company has never measured maintenance activities' contribution to company's performance. Performance evaluation is done according to adapted Balanced Scorecard model fitted to maintenance function context. This model includes six perspectives: innovation and growth, production, maintenance, environment, costumer, and finance. Actual performance measurement is done through Analytic Hierarchy Process and Objective Matrix. From the research done, we can conclude that the company's maintenance function is categorized in moderate performance. But, there are some indicators which has high priority but low performance, which are: costumers' complain rate, work lateness rate, and Return on Investment.
Abstract: The effective machine-job assignment of injection
molding machines is very important for industry because it is not
only directly affects the quality of the product but also the
performance and lifetime of the machine as well. The phase of
machine selection was mostly done by professionals or experienced
planners, so the possibility of matching a job with an inappropriate
machine might occur when it was conducted by an inexperienced
person. It could lead to an uneconomical plan and defects. This
research aimed to develop a machine selection system for plastic
injection machines as a tool to help in decision making of the user.
This proposed system could be used both in normal times and in
times of emergency. Fuzzy logic principle is applied to deal with
uncertainty and mechanical factors in the selection of both quantity
and quality criteria. The six criteria were obtained from a plastic
manufacturer's case study to construct a system based on fuzzy logic
theory using MATLAB. The results showed that the system was able
to reduce the defects of Short Shot and Sink Mark to 24.0% and
8.0% and the total defects was reduced around 8.7% per month.
Abstract: Migration in breast cancer cell wound healing assay
had been studied using image fractal dimension analysis. The
migration of MDA-MB-231 cells (highly motile) in a wound healing
assay was captured using time-lapse phase contrast video microscopy
and compared to MDA-MB-468 cell migration (moderately motile).
The Higuchi fractal method was used to compute the fractal
dimension of the image intensity fluctuation along a single pixel
width region parallel to the wound. The near-wound region fractal
dimension was found to decrease three times faster in the MDA-MB-
231 cells initially as compared to the less cancerous MDA-MB-468
cells. The inner region fractal dimension was found to be fairly
constant for both cell types in time and suggests a wound influence
range of about 15 cell layer. The box-counting fractal dimension
method was also used to study region of interest (ROI). The MDAMB-
468 ROI area fractal dimension was found to decrease
continuously up to 7 hours. The MDA-MB-231 ROI area fractal
dimension was found to increase and is consistent with the behavior
of a HGF-treated MDA-MB-231 wound healing assay posted in the
public domain. A fractal dimension based capacity index has been
formulated to quantify the invasiveness of the MDA-MB-231 cells in
the perpendicular-to-wound direction. Our results suggest that image
intensity fluctuation fractal dimension analysis can be used as a tool
to quantify cell migration in terms of cancer severity and treatment
responses.
Abstract: As days go by, we hear more and more about HIV,
Ebola, Bird Flu and other dreadful viruses which were unknown a
few decades ago. In both detecting and fighting viral diseases
ordinary methods have come across some basic and important
difficulties. Vaccination is by a sense introduction of the virus to the
immune system before the occurrence of the real case infection. It is
very successful against some viruses (e.g. Poliomyelitis), while
totally ineffective against some others (e.g. HIV or Hepatitis-C). On
the other hand, Anti-virus drugs are mostly some tools to control and
not to cure a viral disease. This could be a good motivation to try
alternative treatments. In this study, some key features of possible
physical-based alternative treatments for viral diseases are presented.
Electrification of body parts or fluids (especially blood) with micro
electric signals with adjusted current or frequency is also studied. The
main approach of this study is to find a suitable energy field, with
appropriate parameters that are able to kill or deactivate viruses. This
would be a lengthy, multi-disciplinary research which needs the
contribution of virology, physics, and signal processing experts. It
should be mentioned that all the claims made by alternative cures
researchers must be tested carefully and are not advisable at the time
being.
Abstract: The research study evaluated the performance of
irrigation system by using special scientific tools like Remote
Sensing and GIS technology, so that proper measurements could be
taken for the sustainable agriculture and water management.
Different performance evaluation parameters had been calculated for
the purposed data was gathered from field investigation and different
government and private organizations. According to the calculations,
organic matter ranges from 0.19% (low value) to 0.76% (high value).
In flat irrigation system for wheat yield ranges from 3347.16 to
5260.39 kg/ha, while the total water applied to wheat crop ranges
from 252.94 to 279.19 mm and WUE ranges from 13.07 to 18.37
kg/ha/mm. For rice yield ranges from 3347.47 to 5433.07 kg/ha with
total water supplied to rice crop ranges from 764.71 to 978.15 mm
and WUE ranges from 3.49 to 5.71 kg/ha/mm. Similarly, in raised
bed system wheat yield ranges from 4569.13 to 6008.60 kg/ha, total
water supplied ranges from 158.87 to 185.09 mm and WUE ranges
from 27.20 to 33.54 kg/ha/mm while in rice crop, yield ranges from
5285.04 to 6716.69 kg/ha, total water supplied ranges from 600.72 to
755.06 mm and WUE ranges from 6.41 to 10.05 kg/ha/mm. Almost
51.3% water saving is observed in bed irrigation system as compared
to flat system. Less water supplied to beds is more affective as its
WUE value is higher than flat system where more water is supplied
in both the seasons. Similarly, RWS values show that maximum
water deficit while minimum area is getting adequate water supply.
Greater yield is recorded in bed system as plant per square meter is
more in bed system in comparison of flat system Thus, the integration
of GIS tools to regularly compute performance indices could provide
irrigation managers with the means for managing efficiently the
irrigation system.
Abstract: A new conceptual architecture for low-level neural
pattern recognition is presented. The key ideas are that the brain
implements support vector machines and that support vectors are
represented as memory patterns in competitive queuing memories. A
binary classifier is built from two competitive queuing memories
holding positive and negative valence training examples respectively.
The support vector machine classification function is calculated in
synchronized evaluation cycles. The kernel is computed by bisymmetric
feed-forward networks feed by sensory input and by
competitive queuing memories traversing the complete sequence of
support vectors. Temporary summation generates the output
classification. It is speculated that perception apparatus in the brain
reuses structures that have evolved for enabling fluent execution of
prepared action sequences so that pattern recognition is built on
internalized motor programmes.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to identify the practical strategies of R&D (research and development) entities for developing converging technology in organizational context. Based on the multi-assignation technological domains of patents derived from entire government-supported R&D projects for 13 years, we find that technology convergence is likely to occur when a university solely develops technology or when university develops technology as one of the collaborators. These results reflect the important role of universities in developing converging technology
Abstract: The transformation of vocal characteristics aims at
modifying voice such that the intelligibility of aphonic voice is
increased or the voice characteristics of a speaker (source speaker) to
be perceived as if another speaker (target speaker) had uttered it. In
this paper, the current state-of-the-art voice characteristics
transformation methodology is reviewed. Special emphasis is placed
on voice transformation methodology and issues for improving the
transformed speech quality in intelligibility and naturalness are
discussed. In particular, it is suggested to use the modulation theory
of speech as a base for research on high quality voice transformation.
This approach allows one to separate linguistic, expressive, organic
and perspective information of speech, based on an analysis of how
they are fused when speech is produced. Therefore, this theory
provides the fundamentals not only for manipulating non-linguistic,
extra-/paralinguistic and intra-linguistic variables for voice
transformation, but also for paving the way for easily transposing the
existing voice transformation methods to emotion-related voice
quality transformation and speaking style transformation. From the
perspectives of human speech production and perception, the popular
voice transformation techniques are described and classified them
based on the underlying principles either from the speech production
or perception mechanisms or from both. In addition, the advantages
and limitations of voice transformation techniques and the
experimental manipulation of vocal cues are discussed through
examples from past and present research. Finally, a conclusion and
road map are pointed out for more natural voice transformation
algorithms in the future.
Abstract: Delivering course material via a virtual environment
is beneficial to today-s students because it offers the interactivity,
real-time interaction and social presence that students of all ages
have come to accept in our gaming rich community. It is essential
that the Net Generation also known as Generation Why, have
exposure to learning communities that encompass interactivity to
form social and educational connections. As student and professor
become interconnected through collaboration and interaction in a
virtual learning space, relationships develop and students begin to
take on an individual identity. With this in mind the research project
was developed to investigate the use of virtual environments on
student satisfaction and the effectiveness of course delivery.
Furthermore, the project was designed to integrate both interactive
(real-time) classes conducted in the Virtual Reality (VR)
environment while also creating archived VR sessions for student use
in retaining and reviewing course content.
Abstract: Since the European renewable energy directives set the
target for 22.1% of electricity generation to be supplied by 2010
[1], there has been increased interest in using green technologies
also within the urban enviroment. The most commonly considered
installations are solar thermal and solar photovoltaics. Nevertheless,
as observed by Bahaj et al. [2], small scale turbines can reduce the
built enviroment related CO2 emissions. Thus, in the last few years,
an increasing number of manufacturers have developed small wind
turbines specifically designed for the built enviroment. The present
work focuses on the integration into architectural systems of such
installations and presents a survey of successful case studies.
Abstract: This paper explores gender related barriers to interagency collaboration in statutory children safeguard partnerships against a theoretical framework that considers individuals, professions and organisations interacting as part of a complex adaptive system. We argue that gender-framed obstacles to effective communication between culturally discrepant agencies can ultimately impact on the effectiveness of policy delivery,. We focused our research on three partnership structures in Sefton Metropolitan Borough in order to observe how interactions occur, whether the agencies involved perceive their occupational environment as being gender affected and whether they believe this can hinder effective collaboration with other biased organisations. Our principal empirical findings indicate that there is a general awareness amongst professionals of the role that gender plays in each of the agencies reviewed, that gender may well constitute a barrier to effective communication, but there is a sense in which there is little scope for change in the short term. We aim to signal here, however, the need to change against the risk of service failure.
Abstract: Maintenance costs incurred on building differs. The
difference can be as results of the types, functions, age, building
health index, size, form height, location and complexity of the
building. These are contributing to the difficulty in maintenance
development of deterministic maintenance cost model. This paper is
concerns with reporting the preliminary findings on the creation of
building maintenance cost distributions for universities in Malaysia.
This study is triggered by the need to provide guides on maintenance
costs distributions for decision making. For this purpose, a survey
questionnaire was conducted to investigate the distribution of
maintenance costs in the universities. Altogether, responses were
received from twenty universities comprising both private and
publicly owned. The research found that engineering services,
roofing and finishes were the elements contributing the larger
segment of the maintenance costs. Furthermore, the study indicates
the significance of maintenance cost distribution as decision making
tool towards maintenance management.
Abstract: This paper aims to present the main instruments used
in the economic literature for measuring the price risk, pointing out
on the advantages brought by the conditional variance in this respect.
The theoretical approach will be exemplified by elaborating an
EGARCH model for the price returns of wheat, both on Romanian
and on international market. To our knowledge, no previous
empirical research, either on price risk measurement for the
Romanian markets or studies that use the ARIMA-EGARCH
methodology, have been conducted. After estimating the
corresponding models, the paper will compare the estimated
conditional variance on the two markets.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of building a unified
structure to describe a peer-to-peer system. Our approach uses the
well-known notations in the P2P area, and provides a global
architecture that puts a separation between the platform specific
characteristics and the logical ones. In order to enable the navigation
of the peer across platforms, a roaming layer is added. The latter
provides a capability to define a unique identification of peer and
assures the mapping between this identification and those used in
each platform. The mapping task is assured by special wrapper. In
addition, ontology is proposed to give a clear presentation of the
structure of the P2P system without interesting in the content and the
resource managed by the peer. The ontology is created according to
the web semantic paradigm and using OWL language; so, the
structure of the system is considered as a web resource.
Abstract: Trihalomethanes (THMs) were among the first
disinfection byproducts to be discovered in chlorinated water. The
substances form during a reaction between chlorine and organic
matter in the water. Trihalomethanes are suspected to have negative
effects on birth such as, low birth weight, intrauterine growth
retardation in term births, as well as gestational age and preterm
delivery. There are also some evidences showing these by-products to
be mutagenic and carcinogenic, the greatest amount of evidence being
related to the bladder cancer. However, there exist inconsistencies
regarding such effects of THMs as different studies have provided
different results in this regard. The aim of the present study is to
provide a review of the related researches about the above mentioned
health effects of THMs.
Abstract: This work presents a new phonetic transcription system based on a tree of hierarchical pronunciation rules expressed as context-specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The tree is automatically inferred from a phonetic dictionary by incrementally analyzing deeper context levels, eventually representing a minimum set of exhaustive rules that pronounce without errors all the words in the training dictionary and that can be applied to out-of-vocabulary words. The proposed approach improves upon existing rule-tree-based techniques in that it makes use of graphemes, rather than letters, as elementary orthographic units. A new linear algorithm for the segmentation of a word in graphemes is introduced to enable outof- vocabulary grapheme-based phonetic transcription. Exhaustive rule trees provide a canonical representation of the pronunciation rules of a language that can be used not only to pronounce out-of-vocabulary words, but also to analyze and compare the pronunciation rules inferred from different dictionaries. The proposed approach has been implemented in C and tested on Oxford British English and Basic English. Experimental results show that grapheme-based rule trees represent phonetically sound rules and provide better performance than letter-based rule trees.
Abstract: This research deals with a flexible flowshop
scheduling problem with arrival and delivery of jobs in groups and
processing them individually. Due to the special characteristics of
each job, only a subset of machines in each stage is eligible to
process that job. The objective function deals with minimization of
sum of the completion time of groups on one hand and minimization
of sum of the differences between completion time of jobs and
delivery time of the group containing that job (waiting period) on the
other hand. The problem can be stated as FFc / rj , Mj / irreg which
has many applications in production and service industries. A
mathematical model is proposed, the problem is proved to be NPcomplete,
and an effective heuristic method is presented to schedule
the jobs efficiently. This algorithm can then be used within the body
of any metaheuristic algorithm for solving the problem.