Search results for: Heyd–Scuseria–Ernzerhof screened hybrid functional

Authors: Purva Mishra, Rajesh Potlia, Kuljeet Singh Sandhu

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The role of glycyl residues in the protein structure has lingered within the research community for the last several decades. Glycyl residue is the only amino acid that is achiral due to the lack of a side chain and can, therefore, exhibit Ramachandran conformations that are disallowed for L-amino acids. The structural and functional significance of glycyl residues with L-disallowed conformation, however, remains obscure. Through statistical analysis of various datasets, we found that the glycyls with L-disallowed conformations are over-represented at disease-associated sites and tend to be evolutionarily conserved. The mutations of L-disallowed glycyls tend to destabilize the native conformation, reduce protein solubility, and promote inter-molecular aggregations. We uncovered a structural motif referred to as “β-crescent” formed around the L-disallowed glycyl, which prevents β-sheet aggregation by disrupting the alternating pattern of β-pleats. The L-disallowed conformation of glycyls also holds predictive power to infer the pathogenic missense variants. Altogether, our observations highlight that the L-disallowed conformation of glycyls is selected to facilitate native folding and prevent inter-molecular aggregations. The findings may also have implications for designing more stable proteins and prioritizing the genetic lesions implicated in diseases.

Keywords: Ramachandran plot, β-sheet, protein stability, protein aggregation

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Authors: Somayeh Komeylian

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The direction of arrival (DoA) estimation is the crucial aspect of the radar technologies for detecting and dividing several signal sources. In this scenario, the antenna array output modeling involves numerous parameters including noise samples, signal waveform, signal directions, signal number, and signal to noise ratio (SNR), and thereby the methods of the DoA estimation rely heavily on the generalization characteristic for establishing a large number of the training data sets. Hence, we have analogously represented the two different optimization models of the DoA estimation; (1) the implementation of the decision directed acyclic graph (DDAG) for the multiclass least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), and (2) the optimization method of the deep neural network (DNN) radial basis function (RBF). We have rigorously verified that the LS-SVM DDAG algorithm is capable of accurately classifying DoAs for the three classes. However, the accuracy and robustness of the DoA estimation are still highly sensitive to technological imperfections of the antenna arrays such as non-ideal array design and manufacture, array implementation, mutual coupling effect, and background radiation and thereby the method may fail in representing high precision for the DoA estimation. Therefore, this work has a further contribution on developing the DNN-RBF model for the DoA estimation for overcoming the limitations of the non-parametric and data-driven methods in terms of array imperfection and generalization. The numerical results of implementing the DNN-RBF model have confirmed the better performance of the DoA estimation compared with the LS-SVM algorithm. Consequently, we have analogously evaluated the performance of utilizing the two aforementioned optimization methods for the DoA estimation using the concept of the mean squared error (MSE).

Keywords: DoA estimation, Adaptive antenna array, Deep Neural Network, LS-SVM optimization model, Radial basis function, and MSE

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Authors: Georgios Linardatos, Miltiadis Zamparas, Vlasoula Bekiari, Georgios Bokias, Georgios Hotos

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Hydrogels are three-dimensional, hydrophilic, polymeric networks composed of homopolymers or copolymers and are insoluble in water due to the presence of chemical or physical cross-links. When hydrogels come in contact with aqueous solutions, they can effectively sorb and retain the dissolved substances, depending on the nature of the monomeric units comprising the hydrogel. For this reason, hydrogels have been proposed in several studies as water purification agents. At the present work anionic hydrogels bearing negatively charged –COO- groups were prepared and investigated. These gels are based on sodium acrylate (ANa), either homopolymerized (poly(sodiumacrylate), PANa) or copolymerized (P(DMAM-co-ANa)) with N,N Dimethylacrylamide (DMAM). The hydrogels were used to extract some model organic dyes from water. It is found that cationic dyes are strongly sorbed and retained by the hydrogels, while sorption of anionic dyes was negligible. In all cases it was found that both maximum sorption capacity and equilibrium binding constant varied from one dye to the other depending on the chemical structure of the dye, the presence of functional chemical groups and the hydrophobic-hydrophilic balance. Finally, the nonionic hydrogel of the homopolymer poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide), PDMAM, was also used for reasons of comparison.

Keywords: anionic organic hydrogels, sorption, organic dyes, water purification agents

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Authors: Elif Bakkaloglu, Necdet Torunbalci

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The fact of earthquakes in Turkiye is an inevitable natural disaster. Therefore, buildings must be prepared for this natural hazard. Especially in hospital buildings, earthquake resistance is an essential point because hospitals are one of the first places where people come after an earthquake. Although hospital buildings are more suitable for horizontal architecture, it is necessary to construct and expand multi-storey hospital buildings due to difficulties in finding suitable places as a result of excessive urbanization, difficulties in obtaining appropriate size land and decrease in suitable places and increase in land values. In Turkiye, using seismic isolators in public hospitals, which are placed in first-degree earthquake zone and have more than 100 beds, is made obligatory by general instruction. As a result of this decision, it may sometimes be necessary to construct seismic isolated multi-storey hospital buildings in cities where those problems are experienced. Although widespread use of seismic isolators in Japan, there are few multi-storey buildings in which seismic isolators are used in Turkiye. As it is known, base isolation systems are the most effective methods of earthquake resistance, as number of floors increases, center of gravity moves away from base in multi-storey buildings, increasing the overturning effect and limiting the use of these systems. In this context, it is aimed to investigate structural systems of multi-storey buildings which built using seismic isolation methods in the World. In addition to this, a working principle is suggested for disseminating seismic isolators in multi-storey hospital buildings. The results to be obtained from the study will guide architects who design multi-storey hospital buildings in their architectural designs and engineers in terms of structural system design.

Keywords: earthquake, energy absorbing systems, hospital, seismic isolation systems

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Authors: Khaled Elbehiery, Hussam Elbehiery

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The success of education is dependent on evolution and adaptation, while the traditional system has worked before, one type of education evolved with the digital age is virtual education that has influenced efficiency in today’s learning environments. Virtual learning has indeed proved its efficiency to overcome the drawbacks of the physical environment such as time, facilities, location, etc., but despite what it had accomplished, the educational system over all is not adequate for being a productive system yet. Earning a degree is not anymore enough to obtain a career job; it is simply missing the skills and creativity. There are always two sides of a coin; a college degree or a specialized certificate, each has its own merits, but having both can put you on a successful IT career path. For many of job-seeking individuals across world to have a clear meaningful goal for work and education and positively contribute the community, a productive correlation and cooperation among employers, universities alongside with the individual technical skills is a must for generations to come. Fortunately, the proposed research “Entrepreneur Universal Education System” is an evolution to meet the needs of both employers and students, in addition to gaining vital and real-world experience in the chosen fields is easier than ever. The new vision is to empower the education to improve organizations’ needs which means improving the world as its primary goal, adopting universal skills of effective thinking, effective action, effective relationships, preparing the students through real-world accomplishment and encouraging them to better serve their organization and their communities faster and more efficiently.

Keywords: virtual education, academic degree, certificates, internship, amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, hybrid models

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Authors: Awol Seid Ebrie

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HIV results as an incurable disease, AIDS. After a person is infected with virus, the virus gradually destroys all the infection fighting cells called CD4 cells and makes the individual susceptible to opportunistic infections which cause severe or fatal health problems. Several studies show that the CD4 cells count is the most determinant indicator of the effectiveness of the treatment or progression of the disease. The objective of this paper is to investigate the progression of the disease over time among patient under HAART treatment. Two main approaches of the generalized multilevel ordinal models; namely the proportional odds model and the nonproportional odds model have been applied to the HAART data. Also, the multilevel part of both models includes random intercepts and random coefficients. In general, four models are explored in the analysis and then the models are compared using the deviance information criteria. Of these models, the random coefficients nonproportional odds model is selected as the best model for the HAART data used as it has the smallest DIC value. The selected model shows that the progression of the disease increases as the time under the treatment increases. In addition, it reveals that gender, baseline clinical stage and functional status of the patient have a significant association with the progression of the disease.

Keywords: nonproportional odds model, proportional odds model, random coefficients model, random intercepts model

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Authors: S. Ghosh, L. Ramos, A. N. Kouamé, A.-L. Teillout, H. Remita

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Catalytic materials have attracted continuous attention due to their promising applications in a variety of energy and environmental applications including clean energy, energy conversion and storage, purification and separation, degradation of pollutants and electrochemical reactions etc. With the advanced synthetic technologies, polymer nanostructures and nanocomposites can be directly synthesized through soft template mediated approach using swollen hexagonal mesophases and modulate the size, morphology, and structure of polymer nanostructures. As an alternative to conventional catalytic materials, one-dimensional PDPB polymer nanostructures shows high photocatalytic activity under visible light for the degradation of pollutants. These photocatalysts are very stable with cycling. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and AFM-IR characterizations reveal that the morphology and structure of the polymer nanostructures do not change after photocatalysis. These stable and cheap polymer nanofibers and metal polymer nanocomposites are easy to process and can be reused without appreciable loss of activity. The polymer nanocomposites formed via one pot chemical redox reaction with 3.4 nm Pd nanoparticles on poly(diphenylbutadiyne) (PDPB) nanofibers (30 nm). The reduction of Pd (II) ions is accompanied by oxidative polymerization leading to composites materials. Hybrid Pd/PDPB nanocomposites used as electrode materials for the electrocatalytic oxidation of ethanol without using support of proton exchange Nafion membrane. Hence, these conducting polymer nanofibers and nanocomposites offer the perspective of developing a new generation of efficient photocatalysts for environmental protection and in electrocatalysis for fuel cell applications.

Keywords: conducting polymer, swollen hexagonal mesophases, solar photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, water depollution

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Authors: K. Myška, L. Pilařová

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The article deals with possibilities of using cheap mobile devices with the combination of free or open source software tools as an alternative to professional hardware and software equipment. Especially in social work, it is important to find cheap yet functional solution that can compete with complex but expensive solutions for digitizing paper materials. Our research was focused on the analysis of cheap and affordable solutions for digitizing the most frequently used paper materials that are being commonly used by terrain workers in social work. We used comparative analysis as a research method. Social workers need to process data from paper forms quite often. It is still more affordable, time and cost-effective to use paper forms to get feedback in many cases. Collecting data from paper quizzes and questionnaires can be done with the help of professional scanners and software. These technologies are very powerful and have advanced options for digitizing and processing digitized data, but are also very expensive. According to results of our study, the combination of open source software and mobile phone or cheap scanner can be considered as a cost-effective alternative to professional equipment.

Keywords: digitalization, e-learning, mobile devices, questionnaire

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Authors: Yeimis Milton, Palomino Pichihua

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The city, like living organisms, originates from codes, structured information in the form of rules that condition the physical form and performance of urban space. Usually, the so-called urban codes clash with the spontaneous nature of the city, with the urban Kháos that contextualizes the free creation (poiesis) of human collectives. This contradiction is especially evident in Latin America, which, like other developing regions, lacks adequate instruments to guide urban growth. Thus constructing a hybrid between the formal and informal city, categories that are difficult to separate one from the other. This is a comparative study focusing on the urban codes created to address the pandemic. The objective is to build an overview of these innovations in the region. The sample is made up of official norms published in pandemic, directly linked to urban planning and building control (urban form). The countries analyzed are Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Chile. The study uncovers a shared interest in facing future urban problems, in contrast to the inconsistency of proposed legal instruments. Factors such as the lack of articulation, validity time, and ambiguity, among others, accentuate this problem. Likewise, it evidences that the political situation of each country has a significant influence on the development of these norms and the possibility of their long-term impact. In summary, the global emergency has produced opportunities to transform urban systems from their internal rules; however, there are very few successful examples in this field. Therefore, Latin American cities have the task of learning from this defeat in order to lay the foundations for a more resilient and sustainable urban future.

Keywords: pandemic, regulation, urban planning, latin America

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Authors: M. Pena, J. Shin, H. Park

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The main objective of any engineering activity is the development of a system that fulfills the specific economic, social or environmental needs. Green growth policies, as a system, targets to satisfy two main needs: economic and environmental growth. Cities are complex systems composed of varied characteristics such as differences in socio-environmental conditions and local affordability, among others. Thus, commissioned policies are required to address these differences and to ensure green development. A more maintainable and justifiable, resource-efficient green growth can be obtained in urban areas if multi-criteria framework of policies relevant to green buildings is designed. Reason is that, this approach fits to target the differences and unique conditions of urban areas. By following the principles of axiomatic design, this paper urges to derive a framework for the application of green buildings policies in urban areas with distinctive socio-economic and environmental characteristics. Functional requirements defined as principles to ensure green growth and design parameters are identified in each set of conditions. Design matrices are constructed for each group of urban areas. Thus, the understanding of the needs and differences for each group of urban areas and the methodology to ensure green buildings is achieved.

Keywords: axiomatic design, green growth, sustainable development, urban planning

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Authors: Griaznova Svetlana, Umedov Mekhroz

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The current healthcare facilities trend is the creation of multidisciplinary large-scale centers to provide the maximum possible services in one place, minimizing the number of possible instances in the path of patient treatment. The multifunctional medical centers are mainly designed in urban infrastructure for good accessibility. However, many functions and connections define the building shape, often make it inharmonious, that greatly destroys the city's appearance. The purpose of the research is to scientifically substantiate the factors influencing the shaping, the formation of architectural solutions principles, the formation of recommendations and principles for the multifunctional medical centers' design. The result of the research is the elaboration of architectural and planning solutions principles and the determination of factors affecting the multifunctional healthcare facilities shaping. Research method: Study and generalization of international experience in scientific research, literature, standards, teaching aids, and design materials on the topic of research. An integrated approach to the study of existing international experience of multidisciplinary medical centers. Elaboration of graphical analysis and diagrams based on the system analysis of the processed information. Identification of methods and principles of functional zoning of nuclear medicine centers.

Keywords: health care, multifunctionality, form, medical center, hospital, PET, CT scan

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Authors: Pei-Wen Lin, Ta-I Yang

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Cancer has been one of the leading causes of human death for centuries. Considerable effort has been devoted to developing new treatments to reduce and control cancers. Magnetic particle hyperthermia and near-infrared photothermal therapy are the promising strategies to treat cancers due to its effectiveness with only mild side effects. This study focused on synthesizing magnetic Ag@Fe3O4 nanoparticles applicable for both of magnetic hyperthermia and near-infrared photothermal therapy. The hydrophilic poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) polymer was utilized to prepare superparamagnetic Fe3O4 clusters and to promote silver nanoparticles grown on Fe3O4 surfaces, obtaining Ag@Fe3O4 nanoparticles. The morphology (shape and dimension) of Ag nanoparticles was subsequently tailored using commercial LED lights. Therefore, the resulting Ag@Fe3O4 nanoparticles can absorb specific wavelength of light ranging from 400 nm to 800 nm by adjusting the wavelength of LED lights and the free silver ions in reaction solution. Heating performance tests confirmed that the synthesized Ag@Fe3O4 nanoparticles show appreciable heating capability for both of magnetic particle hyperthermia and near-infrared photothermal therapy. The findings in this study could provide new ideas to design functional materials to treat cancers.

Keywords: light-emitting diode assisted synthesis, magnetic particles, photothermal materials, hyperthermia

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Authors: Tharwat N. Hijjawi

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Learning oral skills in an Arabic speaking environment is challenging. A blended course (material, activities, and individual/ group work tasks …) was implemented in a module of level B1 for undergraduate students of French as a foreign language in order to increase their opportunities to practice listening and speaking skills. This research investigates the influence of this modality on enhancing active learning and examines the effectiveness of provided strategies. Moreover, it aims at discovering how it allows teacher to flip the traditional classroom and create a learner-centered framework. Which approaches were integrated to motivate students and urge them to search, analyze, criticize, create and accomplish projects? What was the perception of students? This paper is based on the qualitative findings of a questionnaire and a focus group interview with learners. Despite the doubled time and effort both “teacher” and “student” needed, results revealed that the NTIC allowed a shift into a learning paradigm where learners were the “chiefs” of the process. Tasks and collaborative projects required higher intellectual capacities from them. Learners appreciated this experience and developed new life-long learning competencies at many levels: social, affective, ethical and cognitive. To conclude, they defined themselves as motivated young researchers, motivators and critical thinkers.

Keywords: active learning, critical thinking, inverted classroom, learning paradigm, problem-based

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Authors: Hamid Merzouk, Djahida Touati-Talantikite, Amina Zaabar

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New nanosized materials are in huge expansion worldwide. They play a fundamental role in various industrial applications thanks their unique and functional properties. Moreover, in recent years, a great effort has been made to the design and control fabrication of nanostructured semiconductors such zinc sulphide. In recent years, much attention has been accorded in doped and co-doped ZnS to improve the ZnS films quality. We present in this work the preparation and characterization of ZnS and Al doped ZnS thin films. Nanoparticles ZnS and Al doped ZnS films are prepared by chemical bath deposition method (CBD), for various dopant concentrations. Thin films are deposed onto commercial microscope glass slides substrates. Thiourea is used as sulfide ion source, zinc acetate as zinc ion source and manganese acetate as manganese ion source in alkaline bath at 90 °C. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses are carried out at room temperature on films and powders with a powder diffractometer, using CuKα radiation. The average grain size obtained from the Debye–Scherrer’s formula is around 10 nm. Films morphology is examined by scanning electron microscopy. IR spectra of representative sample are recorded with the FTIR between 400 and 4000 cm-1.The transmittance (70 %) is performed with the UV–VIS spectrometer in the wavelength range 200–800 nm. This value is enhanced by Al doping.

Keywords: ZnS, nanostructured semiconductors, thin films, chemical bath deposition

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Authors: E. Chiam, E. Koh, W. Teh, M. Prabhakaran

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Fruits and vegetables (F&V) are widely eaten for their nutritional value and associated health benefits being an immense source of bioactive compounds. However, F&V peels are often discarded, and it accounts for a higher proportion of food waste. Incorporation of F&V peels as functional ingredients can add more value to food due to the higher amounts of phytochemicals present in them. In this research, methanolic extracts of different F&V peels, namely apple, orange, kiwi, grapefruit, dragon fruit, pomelo, and pumpkin are investigated for their total phenolic content (TPC) by Folin-Ciocalteau (FC) assay and the antioxidant capacity was evaluated by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and phosphomolybdenum assay using UV-Vis spectroscopy. Evaluation of the α-glucosidase inhibitory assay was carried out during this study to determine the antidiabetic potential of F&V peels. Results of our study showed that grapefruit peels contained the highest total phenolic content of 477.81 ± 0.01 mg gallic acid equivalent per gram dry weight of the sample, and kiwi peel had the highest antioxidant capacity (90.51 ± 0.10 % inhibition of DPPH radical) among the different F&V peels studied. Fruit peels exhibited high α-glucosidase inhibitory activity. Comparing fruit peels with vegetable peels, it was found that fruit peels had high total phenolic content, antioxidant capacity and anti-diabetic potential compared to vegetable peels.

Keywords: polyphenolics, fruit peels, antioxidant, antidiabetic

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Authors: Jiangxia Han, Liang Xue, Keda Chen

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Despite the significant progress over the last decades in reservoir simulation using numerical discretization, meshing is complex. Moreover, the high degree of freedom of the space-time flow field makes the solution process very time-consuming. Therefore, we present Physics-Informed Convolutional Neural Networks(PICNN) as a hybrid scientific theory and data method for reservoir modeling. Besides labeled data, the model is driven by the scientific theories of the underlying problem, such as governing equations, boundary conditions, and initial conditions. PICNN integrates governing equations and boundary conditions into the network architecture in the form of a customized convolution kernel. The loss function is composed of data matching, initial conditions, and other measurable prior knowledge. By customizing the convolution kernel and minimizing the loss function, the neural network parameters not only fit the data but also honor the governing equation. The PICNN provides a methodology to model and history-match flow and transport problems in porous media. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed PICNN can provide an accurate physical solution from a limited dataset. We show how this method can be applied in the context of a forward simulation for continuous problems. Furthermore, several complex scenarios are tested, including the existence of data noise, different work schedules, and different good patterns.

Keywords: convolutional neural networks, deep learning, flow and transport in porous media, physics-informed neural networks, reservoir simulation

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Authors: Aman Ullah

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The use of renewable resources in supplementing and/or replacing traditional petrochemical products, through green chemistry, is becoming the focus of research. The utilization of oils can play a primitive role towards sustainable development due to their large scale availability, built-in-functionality, biodegradability and no net CO2 production. Microwaves, being clean, green and environmentally friendly, are emerging as an alternative source for product development. Solvent free conversion of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME's) derived from canola oil and waste cooking oil under microwave irradiation demonstrated dramatically enhanced rates. The microwave-assisted reactions lead to the most valuable terminal olefins with enhanced yields, purities and dramatic shortening of reaction times. Various monomers/chemicals were prepared in high yield in very short time. The complete conversions were observed at temperatures as low as 40 ºC within less than five minutes. The products were characterized by GC-MS, GC-FID and NMR. The monomers were separated and polymerized into different polymers including biopolyesthers, biopolyesters, biopolyamides and biopolyolefins. The polymers were characterized in details for their structural, thermal, mechanical and viscoelastic properties. The ability for complete conversion of oils under solvent free conditions and synthesis of different biopolymers is undoubtedly an attractive concept from both an academic and an industrial point of view.

Keywords: monomers, biopolymers, green chemistry, bioplastics, biomaterials

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Authors: Shengping Zhong, Qimin Shi, Yaling Deng, Shoufeng Yang

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Additive manufacturing has exerted a tremendous fascination on the development of the manufacturing and materials industry in the past three decades. Zirconia-based advanced ceramic has been poured substantial attention in the interest of structural and functional ceramics. As a novel material jetting process for selectively depositing nanoparticles, NanoParticle Jetting™ is capable of fabricating dense zirconia components with a high-detail surface, precisely controllable shrinkage, and remarkable mechanical properties. The presence of NPJ™ gave rise to a higher elevation regarding the printing process and printing accuracy. Emphasis is placed on the performance evaluation of NPJ™ printed ceramic components by which the physical, chemical, and mechanical properties are evaluated. The experimental results suggest the Y₂O₃-stabilized ZrO₂ boxes exhibit a high relative density of 99.5%, glossy surface of minimum 0.33 µm, general linear shrinkage factor of 17.47%, outstanding hardness and fracture toughness of 12.43±0.09 GPa and 7.52±0.34 MPa·m¹/², comparable flexural strength of 699±104 MPa, and dense and homogeneous grain distribution of microstructure. This innovative NanoParticle Jetting system manifests an overwhelming potential in dental, medical, and electronic applications.

Keywords: nanoparticle jetting, ZrO₂ ceramic, materials jetting, performance evaluation

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Authors: Claire Norman-Maillet

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Insider fraud, otherwise known as occupational, employee, or internal fraud, is a financial crime threat. Perpetrated by defrauding (or attempting to defraud) one’s current, prospective, or past employer, an ‘employee’ covers anyone employed by the company, including board members and contractors. The Coronavirus pandemic has forced insider fraud into the spotlight, and it isn’t dimming. As the focus of most academics and practitioners has historically been on that of ‘external fraud’, insider fraud is often overlooked or not considered to be a real threat. However, since COVID-19 changed the working world, pushing most of us into remote or hybrid working, employers cannot easily keep an eye on what their staff are doing, which has led to reliance on trust and transparency. This, therefore, brings about an increased risk of insider fraud perpetration. The objective of this paper is to explore why insider fraud is, therefore, now the biggest threat to a business. To achieve the research objective, participating individuals within the financial crime sector (either as a practitioner or consultants) attended semi-structured interviews with the researcher. The principal recruitment strategy for these individuals was via the researcher’s LinkedIn network. The main findings in the research suggest that insider fraud has been ignored and rejected as a threat to a business, owing to a reluctance to admit that a colleague may perpetrate. A positive of the Coronavirus pandemic is that it has forced insider fraud into a more prominent position and giving it more importance on a business’ agenda and risk register. Despite insider fraud always having been a possibility (and therefore a risk) within any business, it is very rare that a business has given it the attention it requires until now, if at all. The research concludes that insider fraud needs to prioritised by all businesses, and even ahead of external fraud. The research also provides advice on how a business can add new or enhance existing controls to mitigate the risk.

Keywords: insider fraud, occupational fraud, COVID-19, COVID, coronavirus, pandemic, internal fraud, financial crime, economic crime

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Authors: Alireza Taghdiri, Sara Ghanbarzade Ghomi

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With gravity load reduction in the structural and non-structural components, the lightweight construction will be achieved as well as the improvement of efficiency and functional specifications. The advantages of lightweight construction can be examined in two levels. The first is the mass reduction of load bearing structure which results in increasing internal useful space and the other one is the mass reduction of building which decreases the effects of seismic load as a result. In order to achieve this goal, the essential building materials specifications and also optimum load bearing geometry of structural systems and elements have to be considered, so lightweight materials selection particularly with lightweight aggregate for building components will be the first step of lightweight construction. In the next step, in addition to selecting the prominent samples of Iran's traditional architecture, the process of these works improvement is analyzed through the viewpoints of structural efficiency and lightweighting and also the practical methods of lightweight construction have been extracted. The optimum design of load bearing geometry of structural system has to be considered not only in the structural system elements, but also in their composition and the selection of dimensions, proportions, forms and optimum orientations, can lead to get a maximum materials efficiency for loads and stresses bearing.

Keywords: gravity load, lightweighting structural system, load bearing geometry, seismic behavior

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Authors: Meng Su

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High-dimensional data analysis often presents challenges in capturing the complex, nonlinear relationships and manifold structures inherent to the data. This article presents a novel approach that leverages the strengths of two powerful techniques, Diffusion Maps and Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs), to address these challenges. By integrating the dimensionality reduction capability of Diffusion Maps with the data modeling ability of DPMs, the proposed method aims to provide a comprehensive solution for analyzing and generating high-dimensional data. The Diffusion Map technique preserves the nonlinear relationships and manifold structure of the data by mapping it to a lower-dimensional space using the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian matrix. Meanwhile, DPMs capture the dependencies within the data, enabling effective modeling and generation of new data points in the low-dimensional space. The generated data points can then be mapped back to the original high-dimensional space, ensuring consistency with the underlying manifold structure. Through a detailed example implementation, the article demonstrates the potential of the proposed hybrid approach to achieve more accurate and effective modeling and generation of complex, high-dimensional data. Furthermore, it discusses possible applications in various domains, such as image synthesis, time-series forecasting, and anomaly detection, and outlines future research directions for enhancing the scalability, performance, and integration with other machine learning techniques. By combining the strengths of Diffusion Maps and DPMs, this work paves the way for more advanced and robust data analysis methods.

Keywords: diffusion maps, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs), manifold learning, high-dimensional data analysis

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Authors: Luís Antonio de Almeida Rodriguez, José Maria Parente de Oliveira, Ednelson Oliveira

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In the last two decades, the world’s aviation authorities have made several attempts to create consensus about a global and accepted approach for applying semantics to web services registry descriptions. This problem has led communities to face a fat and disorganized infrastructure to describe aeronautical web services. It is usual for developers to implement ad-hoc connections among consumers and providers and manually create non-standardized service compositions, which need some particular approach to compose and semantically discover a desired web service. Current practices are not precise and tend to focus on lightweight specifications of some parts of the OWL-S and embed them into syntactic descriptions (SOAP artifacts and OWL language). It is necessary to have the ability to manage the use of both technologies. This paper presents an implementation of the ontology OWL-S that describes a Brazilian Aeronautical Web Service Registry, which makes it able to publish, advertise, make multi-criteria semantic discovery aligned with the ideas of the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Program, and invoke web services within the Air Traffic Management context. The proposal’s best finding is a generic approach to describe semantic web services. The paper also presents a set of functional requirements to guide the ontology development and to compare them to the results to validate the implementation of the OWL-S Ontology.

Keywords: aeronautical web services, OWL-S, semantic web services discovery, ontologies

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Authors: Jorge Gonzalez Camus, Carlos Lizama

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In this work is proved the existence of at least one globally attractive mild solution to the Cauchy problem, for fractional evolution equation of neutral type, involving the fractional derivate in Caputo sense. An almost sectorial operator on a Banach space X and a kernel belonging to a large class appears in the equation, which covers many relevant cases from physics applications, in particular, the important case of time - fractional evolution equations of neutral type. The main tool used in this work was the Hausdorff measure of noncompactness and fixed point theorems, specifically Darbo-type. Initially, the equation is a Cauchy problem, involving a fractional derivate in Caputo sense. Then, is formulated the equivalent integral version, and defining a convenient functional, using the analytic integral resolvent operator, and verifying the hypothesis of the fixed point theorem of Darbo type, give us the existence of mild solution for the initial problem. Furthermore, each mild solution is globally attractive, a property that is desired in asymptotic behavior for that solution.

Keywords: attractive mild solutions, integral Volterra equations, neutral type equations, non-local in time equations

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Authors: M. Govindarajan

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One of the major developments in machine learning in the past decade is the ensemble method, which finds highly accurate classifier by combining many moderately accurate component classifiers. In this research work, new ensemble classification methods are proposed with homogeneous ensemble classifier using bagging and heterogeneous ensemble classifier using arcing and their performances are analyzed in terms of accuracy. A Classifier ensemble is designed using Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as base classifiers. The feasibility and the benefits of the proposed approaches are demonstrated by the means of standard datasets of intrusion detection. The main originality of the proposed approach is based on three main parts: preprocessing phase, classification phase, and combining phase. A wide range of comparative experiments is conducted for standard datasets of intrusion detection. The performance of the proposed homogeneous and heterogeneous ensemble classifiers are compared to the performance of other standard homogeneous and heterogeneous ensemble methods. The standard homogeneous ensemble methods include Error correcting output codes, Dagging and heterogeneous ensemble methods include majority voting, stacking. The proposed ensemble methods provide significant improvement of accuracy compared to individual classifiers and the proposed bagged RBF and SVM performs significantly better than ECOC and Dagging and the proposed hybrid RBF-SVM performs significantly better than voting and stacking. Also heterogeneous models exhibit better results than homogeneous models for standard datasets of intrusion detection. 

Keywords: data mining, ensemble, radial basis function, support vector machine, accuracy

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Authors: Ahmed Zahran

Abstract:

Bifidobacterium breve ATCC 15700, Bifidobacterium adolescents ATCC 15704 and Bifidobacterium longum ATCC 15707 were tested for their growth, acid production, bile tolerance, antibiotic resistance and adherence to columnar epithelial cells of the small intestine of goat. The growth of all studied species was determined in the MRSL medium. B.longum 15707 was the most active species in comparison with the other two species; it was also more resistant to bile acids. The adhesion of the studied species to the columnar epithelial cells was studied. All the studied species showed some degree of adhesion; however, B.longum adhered more than the other two species. This species was resistant to four types of antibiotics and was sensitive to chloramphenicol 30 µg. The activity of Bifidobacterium species in soymilk was evaluated by measuring the development of titratalle acidity. B.longum 15707 was the most active species in terms of growth and activity of soymilk. So, soymilk containing bifidobacteria could be added to goat milk to produce acceptable functional soy yogurt, using the ratio of (1:4) soy milk to goat milk. This product could be of unique health benefits, especially in the case of high cholesterol levels and replenishment of intestinal flora after antibiotic therapy.

Keywords: bifidobacteria physiological properties, soy milk, goat milk, attachment epithelial cells, columnar tissues, probiotic food

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Authors: Ghazi Faisal Najmuldeen, Ali Abdul Rahman–Al Ezzi, Tharmathas A/L Alagappan

Abstract:

The aim of this investigation was to produce biofuel from castor oil through microwave assisted thermal cracking with zeolite ZSM-5 as catalyst. The obtained results showed that microwave assisted thermal cracking of castor oil with Zeolite ZSM-5 as catalyst generates products consisting of alcohol, methyl esters and fatty acids. The products obtained from this experimental procedure by the cracking of castor oil are components of biodiesel. Samples of cracked castor oil containing 1, 3 and 5wt % catalyst was analyzed, however, only the sample containing the 5wt % catalyst showed significant presence of condensate. FTIR and GCMS studies show that the condensate obtained is an unsaturated fatty acid, is 9, 12-octadecadienoic acid, suitable for biofuel use. 9, 12-octadecadienoic acid is an unsaturated fatty acid with a molecular weight of 280.445 g/mol. Characterization of the sample demonstrates that functional group for the products from the three samples display a similar peak in the FTIR graph analysis at 1700 cm-1 and 3600 cm-1. The result obtained from GCMS shows that there are 16 peaks obtained from the sample. The compound with the highest peak area is 9, 12-octadecadienoic acid with a retention time of 9.941 and 24.65 peak areas. All these compounds are organic material and can be characterized as biofuel and biodiesel.

Keywords: castor oil, biofuel, biodiesel, thermal cracking, microwave

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Authors: Reyhaneh Soltanshah, Hamid R. Zarandi

Abstract:

In order to be more efficient in industries that are related to computer systems, software testing is necessary despite spending time and money. In the embedded system software test, complete knowledge of the embedded system architecture is necessary to avoid significant costs and damages. Software tests increase the price of the final product. The aim of this article is to provide a method to reduce time and cost in tests based on program structure. First, a complete review of eleven white box test methods based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 2015 and 2021 versions has been done. The proposed algorithm is designed using two versions of the 29119 standards, and some white-box testing methods that are expensive or have little coverage have been removed. On each of the functions, white box test methods were applied according to the 29119 standard and then the proposed algorithm was implemented on the functions. To speed up the implementation of the proposed method, the Unity framework has been used with some changes. Unity framework can be used in embedded software testing due to its open source and ability to implement white box test methods. The test items obtained from these two approaches were evaluated using a mathematical ratio, which in various software mining reduced between 50% and 80% of the test cost and reached the desired result with the minimum number of test items.

Keywords: embedded software, reduce costs, software testing, white-box testing

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Authors: Changchun Liang, Xiaodong Zhang, Xin Liu, Pengfei Sun

Abstract:

Space intelligent robotic systems are expected to play an increasingly important role in the future. The robotic on-orbital service, whose key is the tracking and capturing technology, becomes research hot in recent years. In this paper, the authors propose a vision servo control system for target capturing. Robotic manipulator will be an intelligent robotic system with large-scale movement, functional agility, and autonomous ability, and it can be operated by astronauts in the space station or be controlled by the ground operator in the remote operation mode. To realize the autonomous movement and capture mission of SRM, a kind of autonomous programming strategy based on multi-camera vision fusion is designed and the selection principle of object visual position and orientation measurement information is defined for the better precision. Distributed control system hierarchy is designed and reliability is considering to guarantee the abilities of control system. At last, a ground experiment system is set up based on the concept of robotic control system. With that, the autonomous target capturing experiments are conducted. The experiment results validate the proposed algorithm, and demonstrates that the control system can fulfill the needs of function, real-time and reliability.

Keywords: control system, on-orbital service, space robot, vision servo

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Authors: Nuray Güy, Mahmut Özacar

Abstract:

In the past few decades, considerable attention has been devoted to the photocatalysts for the photocatalytic degradation of environmental pollutants. Many novel nanostructured photocatalysts for wastewater treatment have been investigated, such as TiO2 and, CdS, ZnO and silver halides (AgX, X = Cl, Br, I). The silver halides are photosensitive materials which can absorb photons in the visible region to produce electron–hole pairs. Silver halides are expensive that restricts their applications in large-scale photocatalytic processes. Tannin contains hydroxyl functional groups, it was employed as a modifier to improve the surface properties and adsorption capacity of the activated carbon towards the metal cations uptake. In this work, we designed a new structure of magnetically separable photocatalyst that combines AgCl/ZnO nanoparticles with Fe3O4 nanoparticles deposited on tannin, which was denoted as (AgI/ZnO)-Fe3O4/Tannin. The as-prepared products are characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), diffuse reflectance spectra (DRS) and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The photocatalyst exhibited high activity degrading a textile dye under visible light irradiation. Moreover, the excellent magnetic property gives a more convenient way to recycle the photocatalysts.

Keywords: AgI/ZnO-Fe3O4/Tannin, visible light, magnetically separable, photocatalyst

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Authors: Sonam Kumari

Abstract:

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the causative agent of tuberculosis, possesses a remarkable feature of entering into and emerging from a persistent state. The mechanism by which Mtb switches from the dormant state to the replicative form is still poorly characterized. Proteome studies have given us an insight into the role of certain proteins in giving stupendous virulence to Mtb, but numerous dotsremain unconnected and unaccounted. The WhiB family of proteins is one such protein that is associated with developmental processes in actinomycetes.Mtb has seven such proteins (WhiB1 to WhiB7).WhiB proteins are transcriptional regulators; their conserved C-terminal HTH motif is involved in DNA binding. They regulate various essential genes of Mtbby binding to their promoter DNA. Biophysical Analysis of the effect of DNA binding on WhiB proteins has not yet been appropriately characterized. Interaction with DNA induces conformational changes in the WhiB proteins, confirmed by steady-state fluorescence and circular dichroism spectroscopy. ITC has deduced thermodynamic parameters and the binding affinity of the interaction. Since these transcription factors are highly unstable in vitro, their stability and solubility were enhanced by the co-expression of molecular chaperones. The present study findings help determine the conditions under which the WhiB proteins interact with their interacting partner and the factors that influence their binding affinity. This is crucial in understanding their role in regulating gene expression in Mtbandin targeting WhiB proteins as a drug target to cure TB.

Keywords: tuberculosis, WhiB proteins, mycobacterium tuberculosis, nucleic acid binding

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