Abstract: Echocardiography imaging is one of the most common diagnostic tests that are widely used for assessing the abnormalities of the regional heart ventricle function. The main goal of the image enhancement task in 2D-echocardiography (2DE) is to solve two major anatomical structure problems; speckle noise and low quality. Therefore, speckle noise reduction is one of the important steps that used as a pre-processing to reduce the distortion effects in 2DE image segmentation. In this paper, we present the common filters that based on some form of low-pass spatial smoothing filters such as Mean, Gaussian, and Median. The Laplacian filter was used as a high-pass sharpening filter. A comparative analysis was presented to test the effectiveness of these filters after being applied to original 2DE images of 4-chamber and 2-chamber views. Three statistical quantity measures: root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal-to-ratio (PSNR) and signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) are used to evaluate the filter performance quantitatively on the output enhanced image.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to improve electromagnetic characteristics on grounding grid by applying the conductive concrete. The conductive concrete in this study is under an extra high voltage (EHV, 345kV) system located in a high-tech industrial park or science park. Instead of surrounding soil of grounding grid, the application of conductive concrete can reduce equipment damage and body damage caused by switching surges. The focus of the two cases on the EHV distribution system in a high-tech industrial park is presented to analyze four soil material styles. By comparing several soil material styles, the study results have shown that the conductive concrete can effectively reduce the negative damages caused by electromagnetic transient. The adoption of the style of grounding grid located 1.0 (m) underground and conductive concrete located from the ground surface to 1.25 (m) underground can obviously improve the electromagnetic characteristics so as to advance protective efficiency.
Abstract: The National Agricultural Biotechnology Information
Center (NABIC) plays a leading role in the biotechnology information
database for agricultural plants in Korea. Since 2002, we have
concentrated on functional genomics of major crops, building an
integrated biotechnology database for agro-biotech information that
focuses on bioinformatics of major agricultural resources such as rice,
Chinese cabbage, and microorganisms. In the NABIC,
integration-based biotechnology database provides useful information
through a user-friendly web interface that allows analysis of genome
infrastructure, multiple plants, microbial resources, and living
modified organisms.
Abstract: In modern human computer interaction systems
(HCI), emotion recognition is becoming an imperative characteristic.
The quest for effective and reliable emotion recognition in HCI has
resulted in a need for better face detection, feature extraction and
classification. In this paper we present results of feature space analysis
after briefly explaining our fully automatic vision based emotion
recognition method. We demonstrate the compactness of the feature
space and show how the 2d/3d based method achieves superior features
for the purpose of emotion classification. Also it is exposed that
through feature normalization a widely person independent feature
space is created. As a consequence, the classifier architecture has
only a minor influence on the classification result. This is particularly
elucidated with the help of confusion matrices. For this purpose
advanced classification algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines
and Artificial Neural Networks are employed, as well as the simple k-
Nearest Neighbor classifier.
Abstract: Falling has been one of the major concerns and threats
to the independence of the elderly in their daily lives. With the
worldwide significant growth of the aging population, it is essential
to have a promising solution of fall detection which is able to operate
at high accuracy in real-time and supports large scale implementation
using multiple cameras. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a
highly promising tool to be used as a hardware accelerator in many
emerging embedded vision based system. Thus, it is the main
objective of this paper to present an FPGA-based solution of visual
based fall detection to meet stringent real-time requirements with
high accuracy. The hardware architecture of visual based fall
detection which utilizes the pixel locality to reduce memory accesses
is proposed. By exploiting the parallel and pipeline architecture of
FPGA, our hardware implementation of visual based fall detection
using FGPA is able to achieve a performance of 60fps for a series of
video analytical functions at VGA resolutions (640x480). The results
of this work show that FPGA has great potentials and impacts in
enabling large scale vision system in the future healthcare industry
due to its flexibility and scalability.
Abstract: Research in quantum computation is looking for the consequences of having information encoding, processing and communication exploit the laws of quantum physics, i.e. the laws which govern the ultimate knowledge that we have, today, of the foreign world of elementary particles, as described by quantum mechanics. This paper starts with a short survey of the principles which underlie quantum computing, and of some of the major breakthroughs brought by the first ten to fifteen years of research in this domain; quantum algorithms and quantum teleportation are very biefly presented. The next sections are devoted to one among the many directions of current research in the quantum computation paradigm, namely quantum programming languages and their semantics. A few other hot topics and open problems in quantum information processing and communication are mentionned in few words in the concluding remarks, the most difficult of them being the physical implementation of a quantum computer. The interested reader will find a list of useful references at the end of the paper.
Abstract: A review of the literature found that Domestic
violence and child maltreatment co-occur in many families, the
purpose of this study attempts to emphasize the factors relating to
intra-family relationships (order point of view) on violence against
the children, For this purpose a survey technique on the sample size
amounted 200 students of governmental guidance schools of city of
Gilanegharb in country of Iran were considered. For measurement of
violence against the children (VAC) the CTS scaled has been used
.The results showed that children have experienced the violence more
than once during the last year. degree of order in family is high.
Explanation result indicated that the order variables in family
including collective thinking, empathy, communal co-circumstance
have significant effects on VAC.
Abstract: Energetic and structural results for ethanol-water mixtures as a function of the mole fraction were calculated using Monte Carlo methodology. Energy partitioning results obtained for equimolar water-ethanol mixture and ether organic liquids are compared. It has been shown that at xet=0.22 the RDFs for waterethanol and ethanol-ethanol interactions indicated strong hydrophobic interactions between ethanol molecules and the local structure of solution is less structured at this concentration as at ether ones. Results obtained for ethanol-water mixture as a function of concentration are in good agreement with the experimental data.
Abstract: Jordan exerts many efforts to nurture their academically gifted students in special schools since 2001. During
the past nine years of launching these schools, their learning and excellence environments were believed to be distinguished compared
to public schools. This study investigated the environments of gifted
students compared with other non-gifted, using a survey instrument
that measures the dimensions of family, peers, teachers, school- support, society, and resources –dimensions rooted deeply in supporting gifted education, learning, and achievement. A total
number of 109 were selected from excellence schools for
academically gifted students, and 119 non-gifted students were selected from public schools. Around 8.3% of the non-gifted students
reported that they “Never" received any support from their surrounding environments, 14.9% reported “Seldom" support, 23.7% reported “ Often" support, 26.0% reported “Frequent" support, and
32.8% reported “Very frequent" support. Where the gifted students reported more “Never" support than the non-gifted did with 11.3%,
“Seldom" support with 15.4%, “Often" support with 26.6%,
“Frequent" support with 29.0%, and reported “Very frequent" support less than the non-gifted students with 23.6%. Unexpectedly,
statistical differences were found between the two groups favoring
non-gifted students in perception of their surrounding environments
in specific dimensions, namely, school- support, teachers, and society. No statistical differences were found in the other dimensions
of the survey, namely, family, peers, and resources. As the
differences were found in teachers, school- support, and society, the
nurturing environments for the excellence schools need to be revised to adopt more creative teaching styles, rich school atmosphere and
infrastructures, interactive guiding for the students and their parents, promoting for the excellence environments, and re-build successful
identification models. Thus, families, schools, and society should
increase their cooperation, communication, and awareness of the
gifted supportive environments. However, more studies to investigate
other aspects of promoting academic giftedness and excellence are recommended.
Abstract: An immunomodulator bioproduct is prepared in a
batch bioprocess with a modified bacterium Pseudomonas
aeruginosa. The bioprocess is performed in 100 L Bioengineering
bioreactor with 42 L cultivation medium made of peptone, meat
extract and sodium chloride. The optimal bioprocess parameters were
determined: temperature – 37 0C, agitation speed - 300 rpm, aeration
rate – 40 L/min, pressure – 0.5 bar, Dow Corning Antifoam M-max.
4 % of the medium volume, duration - 6 hours. This kind of
bioprocesses are appreciated as difficult to control because their
dynamic behavior is highly nonlinear and time varying. The aim of
the paper is to present (by comparison) different models based on
experimental data.
The analysis criteria were modeling error and convergence rate.
The estimated values and the modeling analysis were done by using
the Table Curve 2D.
The preliminary conclusions indicate Andrews-s model with a
maximum specific growth rate of the bacterium in the range of
0.8 h-1.
Abstract: Housing is a basic human right. The provision of new
house shall be free from any defects, even for the defects that people
do normally considered as 'cosmetic defects'. This paper studies
about the building defects of newly completed house of 72 unit of
double-storey terraced located in Bangi, Selangor. The building
survey implemented using protocol 1 (visual inspection). As for new
house, the survey work is very stringent in determining the defects
condition and priority. Survey and reporting procedure is carried out
based on CSP1 Matrix that involved scoring system, photographs and
plan tagging. The analysis is done using Statistical Package for Social
Sciences (SPSS). The finding reveals that there are 2119 defects
recorded in 72 terraced houses. The cumulative score obtained was
27644 while the overall rating is 13.05. These results indicate that the
construction quality of the newly terraced houses is low and not up to
an acceptable standard as the new house should be.
Abstract: There is a real threat on the VIPs personal pages on
the Social Network Sites (SNS). The real threats to these pages is
violation of privacy and theft of identity through creating fake pages
that exploit their names and pictures to attract the victims and spread
of lies. In this paper, we propose a new secure architecture that
improves the trusting and finds an effective solution to reduce fake
pages and possibility of recognizing VIP pages on SNS. The
proposed architecture works as a third party that is added to
Facebook to provide the trust service to personal pages for VIPs.
Through this mechanism, it works to ensure the real identity of the
applicant through the electronic authentication of personal
information by storing this information within content of their
website. As a result, the significance of the proposed architecture is
that it secures and provides trust to the VIPs personal pages.
Furthermore, it can help to discover fake page, protect the privacy,
reduce crimes of personality-theft, and increase the sense of trust and
satisfaction by friends and admirers in interacting with SNS.
Abstract: To unveil the mechanism of fast autooxidation of fish
myoglobins, the effect of temperature on the structural change of tuna
myoglobin was investigated. Purified myoglobin was subjected to
preincubation at 5, 20, 50 and 40oC. Overall helical structural decay
through thermal treatment up to 95oC was monitored by circular
dichroism spectrometry, while the structural changes around the heme
pocket was measured by ultraviolet/visible absorption spectrophotometry.
As a result, no essential structural change of myoglobin
was observed under 30oC, roughly equivalent to their body
temperature, but the structure was clearly damaged at 40oC. The Soret
band absorption hardly differed irrespective of preincubation
temperature, suggesting that the structure around the heme pocket was
not perturbed even after thermal treatment.
Abstract: An Optimal Power Flow based on Improved Particle
Swarm Optimization (OPF-IPSO) with Generator Capability Curve
Constraint is used by NN-OPF as a reference to get pattern of
generator scheduling. There are three stages in Designing NN-OPF.
The first stage is design of OPF-IPSO with generator capability curve
constraint. The second stage is clustering load to specific range and
calculating its index. The third stage is training NN-OPF using
constructive back propagation method. In training process total load
and load index used as input, and pattern of generator scheduling
used as output. Data used in this paper is power system of Java-Bali.
Software used in this simulation is MATLAB.
Abstract: This paper presents nonlinear elastic dynamic analysis
of 3-D semi-rigid steel frames including geometric and connection
nonlinearities. The geometric nonlinearity is considered by using
stability functions and updating geometric stiffness matrix. The
nonlinear behavior of the steel beam-to-column connection is
considered by using a zero-length independent connection element
comprising of six translational and rotational springs. The nonlinear
dynamic equilibrium equations are solved by the Newmark numerical
integration method. The nonlinear time-history analysis results are
compared with those of previous studies and commercial SAP2000
software to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed
procedure.
Abstract: This paper presents an application of level sets for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms in CTA
datasets. An important challenge in reliably detecting aortic is the
need to overcome problems associated with intensity
inhomogeneities. Level sets are part of an important class of methods
that utilize partial differential equations (PDEs) and have been extensively applied in image segmentation. A kernel function in the
level set formulation aids the suppression of noise in the extracted
regions of interest and then guides the motion of the evolving contour
for the detection of weak boundaries. The speed of curve evolution
has been significantly improved with a resulting decrease in segmentation time compared with previous implementations of level
sets, and are shown to be more effective than other approaches in
coping with intensity inhomogeneities. We have applied the Courant
Friedrichs Levy (CFL) condition as stability criterion for our algorithm.
Abstract: In this paper, a mathematical model of human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV) is utilized and an optimization problem is
proposed, with the final goal of implementing an optimal 900-day
structured treatment interruption (STI) protocol. Two type of commonly
used drugs in highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART),
reverse transcriptase inhibitors (RTI) and protease inhibitors (PI), are
considered. In order to solving the proposed optimization problem an
adaptive memetic algorithm with population management (AMAPM)
is proposed. The AMAPM uses a distance measure to control the
diversity of population in genotype space and thus preventing the
stagnation and premature convergence. Moreover, the AMAPM uses
diversity parameter in phenotype space to dynamically set the population
size and the number of crossovers during the search process.
Three crossover operators diversify the population, simultaneously.
The progresses of crossover operators are utilized to set the number
of each crossover per generation. In order to escaping the local optima
and introducing the new search directions toward the global optima,
two local searchers assist the evolutionary process. In contrast to
traditional memetic algorithms, the activation of these local searchers
is not random and depends on both the diversity parameters in
genotype space and phenotype space. The capability of AMAPM in
finding optimal solutions compared with three popular metaheurestics
is introduced.
Abstract: The most severe damage of the turbine rotor is its
distortion. The rotor straightening process must lead, at the first
stage, to removal of the stresses from the material by annealing and
next, to straightening of the plastic distortion without leaving any
stress by hot spotting. The straightening method does not produce
stress accumulations and the heating technique, developed
specifically for solid forged rotors and disks, enables to avoid local
overheating and structural changes in the material. This process also
does not leave stresses in the shaft material. An experimental study
of hot spotting is carried out on a large turbine rotor and some of the
most important effective parameters that must be considered on
annealing and hot spotting processes are investigated in this paper.
Abstract: The ever growing sentiment of environmentalism across the globe has made many people think on the green lines. But most of such ideas halt short of implementation because of the short term economic viability issues with the concept of going green. In this paper we have tried to amalgamate the green concept with social entrepreneurship for solving a variety of issues faced by the society today. In addition the paper also tries to ensure that the short term economic viability does not act as a deterrent. The paper comes up three sustainable models of social entrepreneurship which tackle a wide assortment of issues such as nutrition problem, land problems, pollution problems and employment problems. The models described fall under the following heads: - Spirulina cultivation: The model addresses nutrition, land and employment issues. It deals with cultivation of a blue green alga called Spirulina which can be used as a very nutritious food. Also, the implementation of this model would bring forth employment to the poor people of the area. - Biocomposites: The model comes up with various avenues in which biocomposites can be used in an economically sustainable manner. This model deals with the environmental concerns and addresses the depletion of natural resources. - Packaging material from empty fruit bunches (EFB) of oil palm: This one deals with air and land pollution. It is intended to be a substitute for packaging materials made from Styrofoam and plastics which are non-biodegradable. It takes care of the biodegradability and land pollution issues. It also reduces air pollution as the empty fruit bunches are not incinerated. All the three models are sustainable and do not deplete the natural resources any further. This paper explains each of the models in detail and deals with the operational/manufacturing procedures and cost analysis while also throwing light on the benefits derived and sustainability aspects.
Abstract: The research object was apple-black currant
marmalade candies. Experiments were carried out at the Faculty of
Food Technology of the Latvia University of Agriculture. An active
packaging in combination with modified atmosphere (MAP, CO2
100%) was examined and compared with traditional packaging in air
ambiance. Polymer Multibarrier 60 and paper bags were used.
Influence of iron based oxygen absorber in sachets of 500 cc
obtained from Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Europe Ageless® was tested
on the quality during the shelf of marmalade. Samples of 80±5 g
were packaged in polymer pouches (110 mm x 110 mm),
hermetically sealed by MULTIVAC C300 vacuum chamber machine,
and stored in room temperature +20.0±1.0 °C. The physiochemical
properties – weight losses, moisture content, hardness, aw, pH, colour,
changes of atmosphere content (CO2 and O2) in headspace of packs,
and microbial conditions were analysed before packaging and in the
1st, 3rd , 5th, 8th, 11th and 15th weeks of storage.