Abstract: Peer review is an activity where students review their
classmates- writing and then evaluate the content, development, unity
and organization. Studies have shown that peer review activities
benefit both the reviewer and the writer in developing their reading
and writing skills. Furthermore, peer review activities may also
enhance students- soft skills. This study was conducted to find out the
benefits of peer review activity in a technical writing class based on
engineering students- perceptions. The study also highlights how
these benefits could improve the students- soft skills. A set of
questionnaire was given to 200 undergraduate students of a technical
writing course. The results of the study indicate that the activity could
help improve their critical thinking skills, written and oral
communication skills, as well as team work. This paper further
discusses how the implications of these benefits could help enhance
students- soft skills.
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 the light of the clustering data, we have verified some interactions which were not identified as core interactions in DIP and also, we have characterized some functionally unknown proteins according to the interaction data and functional correlation. 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, also to predict new interactions and to characterize functions of unknown proteins.
Abstract: This paper considers the control of the longitudinal
flight dynamics of an F-16 aircraft. The primary design objective
is model-following of the pitch rate q, which is the preferred
system for aircraft approach and landing. Regulation of the aircraft
velocity V (or the Mach-hold autopilot) is also considered, but
as a secondary objective. The problem is challenging because the
system is nonlinear, and also non-affine in the input. A sliding
mode controller is designed for the pitch rate, that exploits the
modal decomposition of the linearized dynamics into its short-period
and phugoid approximations. The inherent robustness of the SMC
design provides a convenient way to design controllers without gain
scheduling, with a steady-state response that is comparable to that
of a conventional polynomial based gain-scheduled approach with
integral control, but with improved transient performance. Integral
action is introduced in the sliding mode design using the recently
developed technique of “conditional integrators", and it is shown that
robust regulation is achieved with asymptotically constant exogenous
signals, without degrading the transient response. Through extensive
simulation on the nonlinear multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
longitudinal model of the F-16 aircraft, it is shown that the conditional
integrator design outperforms the one based on the conventional linear
control, without requiring any scheduling.
Abstract: In this research work, poly (acrylonitrile-butadienestyrene)/
polypropylene (ABS/PP) blends were processed by melt
compounding in a twin-screw extruder. Upgrading of the thermal
characteristics of the obtained materials was attempted by the
incorporation of organically modified montmorillonite (OMMT), as
well as, by the addition of two types of compatibilizers;
polypropylene grafted with maleic anhydride (PP-g-MAH) and ABS
grafted with maleic anhydride (ABS-g-MAH). The effect of the
above treatments was investigated separately and in combination.
Increasing the PP content in ABS matrix seems to increase the
thermal stability of their blend and the glass transition temperature
(Tg) of SAN phase of ABS. From the other part, the addition of ABS
to PP promotes the formation of its β-phase, which is maximum at 30
wt% ABS concentration, and increases the crystallization temperature
(Tc) of PP. In addition, it increases the crystallization rate of PP.The
β-phase of PP in ABS/PP blends is reduced by the addition of
compatibilizers or/and organoclay reinforcement. The incorporation
of compatibilizers increases the thermal stability of PP and reduces
its melting (ΔΗm) and crystallization (ΔΗc) enthalpies. Furthermore it
decreases slightly the Tgs of PP and SAN phases of ABS/PP blends.
Regarding the storage modulus of the ABS/PP blends, it presents a
change in their behavior at about 10°C and return to their initial
behavior at ~110°C. The incorporation of OMMT to no compatibilized
and compatibilized ABS/PP blends enhances their storage modulus.
Abstract: Robustness is one of the primary performance criteria for an Intelligent Video Surveillance (IVS) system. One of the key factors in enhancing the robustness of dynamic video analysis is,providing accurate and reliable means for shadow detection. If left undetected, shadow pixels may result in incorrect object tracking and classification, as it tends to distort localization and measurement information. Most of the algorithms proposed in literature are computationally expensive; some to the extent of equalling computational requirement of motion detection. In this paper, the homogeneity property of shadows is explored in a novel way for shadow detection. An adaptive division image (which highlights homogeneity property of shadows) analysis followed by a relatively simpler projection histogram analysis for penumbra suppression is the key novelty in our approach.
Abstract: A study has been carried out to determine the effect of
coating two commercial glass-ionomer cements in either petroleum
jelly or wax. After coating, specimens were stored in water for 24 or
168 hours, then the coating removed and the surface examined.
Coating in wax was found to increase the surface hardness
significantly compared with the uncoated control, whereas coating
the specimens in petroleum jelly led to only a slight increase in
surface hardness. Coating in wax led to no detectable ion release
after either 24 or 168 hours, though there was some ion release after
the coating had been removed and the specimens exposed to water
for a further 24 hours. This shows that soluble species remained in
these specimens. Overall, this study confirms the idea that immature
glass-ionomers should be protected from early exposure to moisture,
and that the protection offered by petroleum jelly is only modest.
Abstract: In this paper we intend to ascertain the state of the art on multifingered end-effectors, also known as robotic hands or dexterous robot hands, and propose an experimental setup for an innovative task based design approach, involving cutting edge technologies in motion capture. After an initial description of the capabilities and complexity of a human hand when grasping objects, in order to point out the importance of replicating it, we analyze the mechanical and kinematical structure of some important works carried out all around the world in the last three decades and also review the actuators and sensing technologies used. Finally we describe a new design philosophy proposing an experimental setup for the first stage using recent developments in human body motion capture systems that might lead to lighter and always more dexterous robotic hands.
Abstract: The accuracy of estimated stability and control
derivatives of a light aircraft from flight test data were evaluated. The light aircraft, named ChangGong-91, is the first certified aircraft from
the Korean government. The output error method, which is a maximum likelihood estimation technique and considers measurement
noise only, was used to analyze the aircraft responses measures. The
multi-step control inputs were applied in order to excite the short period mode for the longitudinal and Dutch-roll mode for the lateral-directional motion. The estimated stability/control derivatives of Chan Gong-91 were analyzed for the assessment of handling
qualities comparing them with those of similar aircraft. The accuracy of the flight derivative estimates derived from flight test measurement
was examined in engineering judgment, scatter and Cramer-Rao bound, which turned out to be satisfactory with minor defects..
Abstract: The mobile users with Laptops need to have an
efficient access to i.e. their home personal data or to the Internet from
any place in the world, regardless of their location or point of
attachment, especially while roaming outside the home subnet. An
efficient interpretation of packet losses problem that is encountered
from this roaming is to the centric of all aspects in this work, to be
over-highlighted. The main previous works, such as BER-systems,
Amigos, and ns-2 implementation that are considered to be in
conjunction with that problem under study are reviewed and
discussed. Their drawbacks and limitations, of stopping only at
monitoring, and not to provide an actual solution for eliminating or
even restricting these losses, are mentioned. Besides that, the
framework around which we built a Triple-R sequence as a costeffective
solution to eliminate the packet losses and bridge the gap
between subnets, an area that until now has been largely neglected, is
presented. The results show that, in addition to the high bit error rate
of wireless mobile networks, mainly the low efficiency of mobile-IP
registration procedure is a direct cause of these packet losses.
Furthermore, the output of packet losses interpretation resulted an
illustrated triangle of the registration process. This triangle should be
further researched and analyzed in our future work.
Abstract: Recently, there are significant improvements in the
capabilities of mobile devices; rendering large terrain is tedious
because of the constraint in resources of mobile devices. This
paper focuses on the implementation of terrain rendering on
mobile device to observe some issues and current constraints
occurred. Experiments are performed using two datasets with
results based on rendering speed and appearance to ascertain both
the issues and constraints. The result shows a downfall of frame
rate performance because of the increase of triangles. Since the
resolution between computer and mobile device is different, the
terrain surface on mobile device looks more unrealistic compared
to on a computer. Thus, more attention in the development of
terrain rendering on mobile devices is required. The problems
highlighted in this paper will be the focus of future research and
will be a great importance for 3D visualization on mobile device.
Abstract: Avoidable unscheduled maintenance events and unnecessary
spare parts deliveries are mostly caused by an incorrect choice
of the underlying maintenance strategy. For a faster and more efficient
supply of spare parts for aircrafts of an airline we examine options for
improving the underlying logistics network integrated in an existing
aviation industry network. This paper presents a dynamic prediction
model as decision support for maintenance method selection considering
requirements of an entire flight network. The objective is
to guarantee a high supply of spare parts by an optimal interaction
of various network levels and thus to reduce unscheduled maintenance
events and minimize total costs. By using a prognostics-based
preventive maintenance strategy unscheduled component failures are
avoided for an increase in availability and reliability of the entire
system. The model is intended for use in an aviation company that
utilizes a structured planning process based on collected failures data
of components.
Abstract: This paper presents an effective traffic lights detection
method at the night-time. First, candidate blobs of traffic lights are
extracted from RGB color image. Input image is represented on the
dominant color domain by using color transform proposed by Ruta,
then red and green color dominant regions are selected as candidates.
After candidate blob selection, we carry out shape filter for noise
reduction using information of blobs such as length, area, area of
boundary box, etc. A multi-class classifier based on SVM (Support
Vector Machine) applies into the candidates. Three kinds of features
are used. We use basic features such as blob width, height, center
coordinate, area, area of blob. Bright based stochastic features are also
used. In particular, geometric based moment-s values between
candidate region and adjacent region are proposed and used to improve
the detection performance. The proposed system is implemented on
Intel Core CPU with 2.80 GHz and 4 GB RAM and tested with the
urban and rural road videos. Through the test, we show that the
proposed method using PF, BMF, and GMF reaches up to 93 % of
detection rate with computation time of in average 15 ms/frame.
Abstract: Today, the central role of industrial robots in automation in general and in material handling in particular is crystal clear. Based on the current status of Photovoltaics and by focusing on lightweight material handling, PV industry has turned into a potential candidate for introducing a fresh “pick and place" robot technology. Thus, to examine the industry needs in this regard, firstly the best suited applications for such robotic automation,and then the essential prerequisites in PV industry should be identified. The objective of this paper is to present holistic views on the industry trends, general automation status and existing challenges facing lightweight robotic material handling in PV Silicon Wafer and Thin Film technologies. The results of this study show that currently no uniform pick and place solution prevails among PV Silicon Wafer manufacturers and the industry calls for a new robot solution to satisfy its needs in new directions.
Abstract: Aim of this work was to compare the efficacy of two
loading methods of proteins onto polymeric nanocarriers: adsorption
and encapsulation methods. Preliminary studies of protein loading
were done using Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) as model protein.
Nanocarriers were prepared starting from polylactic co-glycolic acid
(PLGA) polymer; production methods used are two different variants
of emulsion evaporation method. Nanoparticles obtained were
analyzed in terms of dimensions by Dynamic Light Scattering and
Loading Efficiency of BSA by Bradford Assay. Loaded
nanoparticles were then submitted to in-vitro protein dissolution test
in order to study the effect of the delivery system on the release rate
of the protein.
Abstract: Twenty four New Zealand white rabbits (12 does and
12 bucks) and twenty four Flanders (12 does and 12 bucks) rabbits,
allotted into two feeding regime (6 for each breed, 3 males and 3
females) first one fed commercial ration and second one fed
commercial diet plus sodium butyrate (300 g/ton). The obtained
results showed that at end of 8th week experimental period New
Zealand white rabbits were heavier body weight than Flanders rabbits
(1934.55+39.05 vs. 1802.5+30.99 g); significantly high body weight
gain during experimental period especially during 8th week
(136.1+3.5 vs. 126.8+1.8 g/week); better feed conversion ratio during
all weeks of experiment from first week (3.07+0.16 vs. 3.12+0.10)
till the 8th week of experiment (5.54+0.16 vs. 5.76+0.07) with
significantly high dressing percentages (0.54+0.01 vs. 0.52+0.01).
Also all carcass cuts were significantly high in New Zealand white
rabbits than Flanders. Females rabbits (at the same age) were lower
body weight than males from start of experiment (941.1+39.8
vs.972.1+33.5 g) till the end of experiment (1833.64+37.69 vs.
1903.41+36.93 g); gained less during all weeks of experiment except
during 8th week (132.1+2.3 vs. 130.9+3.4 g/week), with lower
dressing percentage (0.52+0.01 vs. 0.53+0.01) and lighter carcass
cuts than males, however, they had better feed conversion ratio
during 1st week, 7th week and 8th week of experiment. Addition of
300g sodium butyrate/ton of rabbit increased the body weight of
rabbits at the end of experimental period (1882.71+26.45 vs.
1851.5+49.82 g); improve body weight gain at 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and
7th week of experiment and significantly improve feed conversion
ratio during all weeks of the experiment from 1st week (2.85+0.07
vs. 3.30+0.15) till the 8th week of the experiment (5.51+0.12 vs.
5.77+0.12). Also the dressing percentage was higher in Sodium
butyrate fed groups than control one (0.53+0.01 vs. 0.52+0.01) and
the most important results of feeding sodium butyrate is the reducing
of the mortality percentage in rabbits during 8 week experiment to
zero percentage as compared with 16% in control group.
Abstract: The scattering effect of light in fog improves the
difficulty in visibility thus introducing disturbances in transport
facilities in urban or industrial areas causing fatal accidents or public
harassments, therefore, developing an enhanced fog vision system
with radio wave to improvise the way outs of these severe problems
is really a big challenge for researchers. Series of experimental
studies already been done and more are in progress to know the
weather effect on radio frequencies for different ranges. According to
Rayleigh scattering Law, the propagating wavelength should be
greater than the diameter of the particle present in the penetrating
medium. Direct wave RF signal thus have high chance of failure to
work in such weather for detection of any object. Therefore an
extensive study was required to find suitable region in the RF band
that can help us in detecting objects with proper shape. This paper
produces some results on object detection using 912 MHz band with
successful detection of the persistence of any object coming under the
trajectory of a vehicle navigating in indoor and outdoor environment.
The developed images are finally transformed to video signal to
enable continuous monitoring.
Abstract: In this present work, the development of an avionics
system for flight data collection of a Raptor 30 V2 is carried out. For the data acquisition both onground and onboard avionics systems are developed for testing of a small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
(UAV) helicopter. The onboard avionics record the helicopter state
outputs namely accelerations, angular rates and Euler angles, in real time, and the on ground avionics system record the inputs given to
the radio controlled helicopter through a transmitter, in real time. The avionic systems are designed and developed taking into consideration
low weight, small size, anti-vibration, low power consumption, and easy interfacing. To mitigate the medium frequency vibrations
embedded on the UAV helicopter during flight, a damper is designed
and its performance is evaluated. A number of flight tests are carried
out and the data obtained is then analyzed for accuracy and repeatability and conclusions are inferred.
Abstract: Given a simple connected unweighted undirected graph G = (V (G), E(G)) with |V (G)| = n and |E(G)| = m, we present a new algorithm for the all-pairs shortest-path (APSP) problem. The running time of our algorithm is in O(n2 log n). This bound is an improvement over previous best known O(n2.376) time bound of Raimund Seidel (1995) for general graphs. The algorithm presented does not rely on fast matrix multiplication. Our algorithm with slight modifications, enables us to compute the APSP problem for unweighted directed graph in time O(n2 log n), improving a previous best known O(n2.575) time bound of Uri Zwick (2002).
Abstract: This work concerns the evolution and the maintenance
of an ontological resource in relation with the evolution of the corpus
of texts from which it had been built.
The knowledge forming a text corpus, especially in dynamic domains,
is in continuous evolution. When a change in the corpus occurs, the
domain ontology must evolve accordingly. Most methods manage
ontology evolution independently from the corpus from which it is
built; in addition, they treat evolution just as a process of knowledge
addition, not considering other knowledge changes. We propose a
methodology for managing an evolving ontology from a text corpus
that evolves over time, while preserving the consistency and the
persistence of this ontology.
Our methodology is based on the changes made on the corpus to
reflect the evolution of the considered domain - augmented surgery
in our case. In this context, the results of text mining techniques,
as well as the ARCHONTE method slightly modified, are used to
support the evolution process.
Abstract: The use of computer hardware and software in
education and training dates to the early 1940s, when American
researchers developed flight simulators which used analog computers
to generate simulated onboard instrument data.Computer software is
widely used to help engineers and undergraduate student solve their
problems quickly and more accurately. This paper presents the list of
computer software in geotechnical engineering.