Search results for: quadrature processing

Authors: Nathenal Thomas

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In the food chain and in many other agricultural products, corn, also known as maize, which goes by the scientific name Zea mays subsp, is a widely produced agricultural product. Corn has the highest adaptability. It comes in many different types, is employed in many different industrial processes, and is more adaptable to different agro-climatic situations. In Ethiopia, maize is among the most widely grown crop. Small-scale corn farming may be a household's only source of food in developing nations like Ethiopia. The aforementioned data demonstrates that the country's requirement for this crop is excessively high, and conversely, the crop's productivity is very low for a variety of reasons. The most damaging disease that greatly contributes to this imbalance between the crop's supply and demand is the corn disease. The failure to diagnose diseases in maize plant until they are too late is one of the most important factors influencing crop output in Ethiopia. This study will aid in the early detection of such diseases and support farmers during the cultivation process, directly affecting the amount of maize produced. The diseases in maize plants, such as northern leaf blight and cercospora leaf spot, have distinct symptoms that are visible. This study aims to detect the most frequent and degrading maize diseases using the most efficiently used subset of machine learning technology, deep learning so, called Image Processing. Deep learning uses networks that can be trained from unlabeled data without supervision (unsupervised). It is a feature that simulates the exercises the human brain goes through when digesting data. Its applications include speech recognition, language translation, object classification, and decision-making. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Image Processing, also known as convent, is a deep learning class that is widely used for image classification, image detection, face recognition, and other problems. it will also use this algorithm as the state-of-the-art for my research to detect maize diseases by photographing maize leaves using a mobile phone.

Keywords: CNN, zea mays subsp, leaf blight, cercospora leaf spot

Procedia PDF Downloads 74

Authors: K. S. Vedasingha, K. K. M. T. Perera, K. I. Hathurusinghe, H. W. I. Akalanka, Nelum Chathuranga Amarasena, Nalaka R. Dissanayake

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Railways provide the most convenient and economically beneficial mode of transportation, and it has been the most popular transportation method among all. According to the past analyzed data, it reveals a considerable number of accidents which occurred at railways and caused damages to not only precious lives but also to the economy of the countries. There are some major issues which need to be addressed in railways of South Asian countries since they fall under the developing category. The goal of this research is to minimize the influencing aspect of railway level crossing accidents by developing the “railway process automation system”, as there are high-risk areas that are prone to accidents, and safety at these places is of utmost significance. This paper describes the implementation methodology and the success of the study. The main purpose of the system is to ensure human safety by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and image processing techniques. The system can detect the current location of the train and close the railway gate automatically. And it is possible to do the above-mentioned process through a decision-making system by using past data. The specialty is both processes working parallel. As usual, if the system fails to close the railway gate due to technical or a network failure, the proposed system can identify the current location and close the railway gate through a decision-making system, which is a revolutionary feature. The proposed system introduces further two features to reduce the causes of railway accidents. Railway track crack detection and motion detection are those features which play a significant role in reducing the risk of railway accidents. Moreover, the system is capable of detecting rule violations at a level crossing by using sensors. The proposed system is implemented through a prototype, and it is tested with real-world scenarios to gain the above 90% of accuracy.

Keywords: crack detection, decision-making, image processing, Internet of Things, motion detection, prototype, sensors

Procedia PDF Downloads 177

Authors: Adrienne Kline, Jaydip Desai

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Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a noninvasive technique that registers signals originating from the firing of neurons in the brain. The Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset is a consumer product comprised of 14 EEG channels and was used to record the reactions of the neurons within the brain to two forms of stimuli in 10 participants. These stimuli consisted of auditory and visual formats that provided directions of ‘right’ or ‘left.’ Participants were instructed to raise their right or left arm in accordance with the instruction given. A scenario in OpenViBE was generated to both stimulate the participants while recording their data. In OpenViBE, the Graz Motor BCI Stimulator algorithm was configured to govern the duration and number of visual stimuli. Utilizing EEGLAB under the cross platform MATLAB®, the electrodes most stimulated during the study were defined. Data outputs from EEGLAB were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics® Version 20. This aided in determining the electrodes to use in the development of a brain-machine interface (BMI) using real-time EEG signals from the Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset. Signal processing and feature extraction were accomplished via the Simulink® signal processing toolbox. An Arduino™ Duemilanove microcontroller was used to link the Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset and the right and left Mecha TE™ Hands.

Keywords: brain-machine interface, EEGLAB, emotiv EEG neuroheadset, OpenViBE, simulink

Procedia PDF Downloads 502

Authors: S. Talebnezhad, S. Pourmahdian, D. Soudbar, M. Khosravani, J. Merasi

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Adding toughened polypropylene and plastomer in FFS 3 layered blown film formulation resulted in superior dart impact and MD tear resistance along with acceptable tensile properties in TD and MD. The optimum loading of toughened polypropylene and plastomer in each layer depends on miscibility of polypropylene in polyethylene medium, mechanical properties, welding characteristics in bags top and bottoms and friction coefficient of film surfaces. Film property tests and efficiency of FFS machinery during processing in industrial scale showed that about 4% loading of plastomer and 16% of toughened polypropylene (reactor grade) in middle layer and loading of 0-1% plastomer and 5-19% of toughened polypropylene in other layers results optimum characteristics in the formulation based on 1-butene LLDPE grade with MFR of 0.9 and LDPE grade with MFI of 0.3. Both the plastomer and toughened polypropylene had the MFI of blow 1 and the TiO2 and processing aid masterbatches loading was 2%. The friction coefficient test results also represented the anti-block masterbatch could be omitted from formulation with adding toughened polypropylene due to partial miscibility of PP in PE which makes the surface of films somewhat bristly.

Keywords: FFS 3 layered blown film, toughened polypropylene, plastomer, dart impact, tear resistance

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Authors: Anes Enakoa, Yawei Liang

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Question Answering (QA) system is one of the most important and demanding tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In QA systems, the answer generation task generates a list of candidate answers to the user's question, in which only one answer is correct. Answer selection is one of the main components of the QA, which is concerned with selecting the best answer choice from the candidate answers suggested by the system. However, the selection process can be very challenging especially in Arabic due to its particularities. To address this challenge, an approach is proposed to answer questions with multiple answer choices for Arabic QA systems based on Textual Entailment (TE) recognition. The developed approach employs a Support Vector Machine that considers lexical, semantic and syntactic features in order to recognize the entailment between the generated hypotheses (H) and the text (T). A set of experiments has been conducted for performance evaluation and the overall performance of the proposed method reached an accuracy of 67.5% with C@1 score of 80.46%. The obtained results are promising and demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for TE recognition task.

Keywords: information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, question answering, textual entailment

Procedia PDF Downloads 145

Authors: N. N. Mosola, S. J. Molete, L. S. Masoebe, M. Letsae

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Hand gesture recognition is a technique used to locate, detect, and recognize a hand gesture. Detection and recognition are concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI concepts are applicable in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Expert systems (ES), etc. Hand gesture recognition can be used in sign language interpretation. Sign language is a visual communication tool. This tool is used mostly by deaf societies and those with speech disorder. Communication barriers exist when societies with speech disorder interact with others. This research aims to build a hand recognition system for Lesotho’s Sesotho and English language interpretation. The system will help to bridge the communication problems encountered by the mentioned societies. The system has various processing modules. The modules consist of a hand detection engine, image processing engine, feature extraction, and sign recognition. Detection is a process of identifying an object. The proposed system uses Canny pruning Haar and Haarcascade detection algorithms. Canny pruning implements the Canny edge detection. This is an optimal image processing algorithm. It is used to detect edges of an object. The system employs a skin detection algorithm. The skin detection performs background subtraction, computes the convex hull, and the centroid to assist in the detection process. Recognition is a process of gesture classification. Template matching classifies each hand gesture in real-time. The system was tested using various experiments. The results obtained show that time, distance, and light are factors that affect the rate of detection and ultimately recognition. Detection rate is directly proportional to the distance of the hand from the camera. Different lighting conditions were considered. The more the light intensity, the faster the detection rate. Based on the results obtained from this research, the applied methodologies are efficient and provide a plausible solution towards a light-weight, inexpensive system which can be used for sign language interpretation.

Keywords: canny pruning, hand recognition, machine learning, skin tracking

Procedia PDF Downloads 185

Authors: G. Disciglio, G. Gatta, F. Lops, A. Libutti, A. Tarantino, E. Tarantino

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The experimental trial was carried out in open field at Foggia district (Apulia Region, Southern Italy), during the spring-summer season 2014, in order to evaluate the effect of four biostimulant products (RadiconÒ, Viormon plusÒ, LysodinÒ and SiaptonÒ 10L), compared with a control (no biostimulant), on the infestation of processing tomato crop (cv Dres) by the chlorophyll-lacking root parasite Phelipanche ramosa. Biostimulants consist in different categories of products (microbial inoculants, humic and fulvic acids, hydrolyzed proteins and aminoacids, seaweed extracts) which play various roles in plant growing, including the improvement of crop resistance and quali-quantitative characteristics of yield. The experimental trial was arranged according to a complete randomized block design with five treatments, each of one replicated three times. The processing tomato seedlings were transplanted on 5 May 2014. Throughout the crop cycle, P. ramosa infestation was assessed according to the number of emerged shoots (branched plants) counted in each plot, at 66, 78 and 92 day after transplanting. The tomato fruits were harvested at full-stage of maturity on 8 August 2014. From each plot, the marketable yield was measured and the quali-quantitative yield parameters (mean weight, dry matter content, colour coordinate, colour index and soluble solids content of the fruits) were determined. The whole dataset was tested according to the basic assumptions for the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the differences between the means were determined using Tukey’s tests at the 5% probability level. The results of the study showed that none of the applied biostimulants provided a whole control of Phelipanche, although some positive effects were obtained from their application. To this respect, the RadiconÒ appeared to be the most effective in reducing the infestation of this root-parasite in tomato crop. This treatment also gave the higher tomato yield.

Keywords: biostimulant, control methods, Phelipanche ramosa, tomato crop

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Authors: Bilha Paryente, Roni Gez Langerman

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Background and Objectives: The current study focused on how kindergarten children have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. The main goals were understanding children’s emotions, coping strategies, and thoughts regarding the presence of the COVID-19 virus in their daily lives, using the salute genic approach to study their sense of coherence, and to promote relevant professional instruction. Design and Method: Semistructured in-depth interviews were held with 130 five- to six-year-old children, with an equal number of boys and girls. All of the children were recruited from kindergartens affiliated with the state's secular education system. Results: Data were structured into three themes: 1) the child’s pandemic perception as manageable through meaningful accompanying and missing figures; 2) the child’s comprehension of the virus as dangerous, age differentiating, and contagious. 3) the child’s emotional processing of the pandemic as arousing fear of death and, through images, as thorny and as a monster. Conclusions: Results demonstrate the young children’s sense of coherence, characterized as extrapersonal perception, interpersonal coping, and intrapersonal emotional processing, and the need for greater acknowledgement of child-parent educators' informed interventions that could give children a partial feeling of the adult’s awareness of their needs.

Keywords: kindergarten children, continuous stress, COVID-19, salutogenic approach

Procedia PDF Downloads 177

Authors: Asmamaw Yehun

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The name “TANA” is one of International Geodetic Service (IGS) Global Positioning System (GPS) station which is found in Bahir Dar University in Institute of Land Administration. The station name taken from one of big Lakes in Africa ,Lake Tana. The Institute of Land Administration (ILA) is part of Bahir Dar University, located in the capital of the Amhara National Regional State, Bahir Dar. The institute is the first of its kind in East Africa. The station is installed by cooperation of ILA and Sweden International Development Agency (SIDA) fund support. The Continues Operating Reference Station (CORS) is a network of stations that provide global satellite system navigation data to help three dimensional positioning, meteorology, space, weather, and geophysical applications throughout the globe. TANA station was as CORS since 2013 and sites are independently owned and operated by governments, research and education facilities and others. The data collected by the reference station is downloadable through Internet for post processing purpose by interested parties who carry out GNSS measurements and want to achieve a higher accuracy. We made a first observation on TANA, monitor stations on May 29th 2013. We used Leica 1200 receivers and AX1202GG antennas and made observations from 11:30 until 15:20 for about 3h 50minutes. Processing of data was done in an automatic post processing service CSRS-PPP by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) . Post processing was done June 27th 2013 so precise ephemeris was used 30 days after observation. We found Latitude (ITRF08): 11 34 08.6573 (dms) / 0.008 (m), Longitude (ITRF08): 37 19 44.7811 (dms) / 0.018 (m) and Ellipsoidal Height (ITRF08): 1850.958 (m) / 0.037 (m). We were compared this result with GAMIT/GLOBK processed data and it was very closed and accurate. TANA station is one of the second IGS station for Ethiopia since 2015 up to now. It provides data for any civilian users, researchers, governmental and nongovernmental users. TANA station is installed with very advanced choke ring antenna and GR25 Leica receiver and also the site is very good for satellite accessibility. In order to test hydrostatic and wet zenith delay for positional data quality, we used GAMIT/GLOBK and we found that TANA station is the most accurate IGS station in East Africa. Due to lower tropospheric zenith and ionospheric delay, TANA and ADIS IGS stations has 2 and 1.9 meters 3D positional accuracy respectively.

Keywords: atmosphere, GNSS, neutral atmosphere, precipitable water vapour

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Authors: Mohamed M. Emara, Heba Ashraf

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This study is to investigation the effect of silicon carbide (SiC) particle size and thermo-mechanical processing on dimensional stability of aluminum alloy 2124. Three combinations of SiC weight fractions are investigated, 2.5, 5, and 10 wt. % with different SiC particle sizes (25 μm, 5 μm, and 100nm) were produced using mechanical ball mill. The standard testing samples were fabricated using powder metallurgy technique. Both samples, prior and after extrusion, were heated from room temperature up to 400ºC in a dilatometer at different heating rates, that is, 10, 20, and 40ºC/min. The analysis showed that for all materials, there was an increase in length change as temperature increased and the temperature sensitivity of aluminum alloy decreased in the presence of both micro and nano-sized silicon carbide. For all conditions, nanocomposites showed better dimensional stability compared to conventional Al 2124/SiC composites. The after extrusion samples showed better thermal stability and less temperature sensitivity for the aluminum alloy for both micro and nano-sized silicon carbide.

Keywords: aluminum 2124 metal matrix composite, SiC nano-sized reinforcements, powder metallurgy, extrusion mechanical ball mill, dimensional stability

Procedia PDF Downloads 526

Authors: Hira Lal Gope, Hidekazu Fukai

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The aim of this study is to develop a system which can identify and sort peaberries automatically at low cost for coffee producers in developing countries. In this paper, the focus is on the classification of peaberries and normal coffee beans using image processing and machine learning techniques. The peaberry is not bad and not a normal bean. The peaberry is born in an only single seed, relatively round seed from a coffee cherry instead of the usual flat-sided pair of beans. It has another value and flavor. To make the taste of the coffee better, it is necessary to separate the peaberry and normal bean before green coffee beans roasting. Otherwise, the taste of total beans will be mixed, and it will be bad. In roaster procedure time, all the beans shape, size, and weight must be unique; otherwise, the larger bean will take more time for roasting inside. The peaberry has a different size and different shape even though they have the same weight as normal beans. The peaberry roasts slower than other normal beans. Therefore, neither technique provides a good option to select the peaberries. Defect beans, e.g., sour, broken, black, and fade bean, are easy to check and pick up manually by hand. On the other hand, the peaberry pick up is very difficult even for trained specialists because the shape and color of the peaberry are similar to normal beans. In this study, we use image processing and machine learning techniques to discriminate the normal and peaberry bean as a part of the sorting system. As the first step, we applied Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as machine learning techniques to discriminate the peaberry and normal bean. As a result, better performance was obtained with CNN than with SVM for the discrimination of the peaberry. The trained artificial neural network with high performance CPU and GPU in this work will be simply installed into the inexpensive and low in calculation Raspberry Pi system. We assume that this system will be used in under developed countries. The study evaluates and compares the feasibility of the methods in terms of accuracy of classification and processing speed.

Keywords: convolutional neural networks, coffee bean, peaberry, sorting, support vector machine

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Authors: R. Pérez Castells, J. M. Carbajo

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Sepiolite is used as a processing aid in the manufacture of fibre cement from the start of the replacement of asbestos in the 80s. Sepiolite increases the inter-laminar bond between cement layers and improves homogeneity of the slurries. A new type of sepiolite processed product, Wollatrop TF/C, has been checked as a retention agent for fine particles in the production of fibre cement in a Hatschek machine. The effect of Wollatrop T/FC on filtering and fine particle losses was studied as well as the interaction with anionic polyacrylamide and microsilica. The design of the experiments were factorial and the VDT equipment used for measuring retention and drainage was modified Rapid Köethen laboratory sheet former. Wollatrop TF/C increased the fine particle retention improving the economy of the process and reducing the accumulation of solids in recycled process water. At the same time, drainage time increased sharply at high concentration, however drainage time can be improved by adjusting APAM concentration. Wollatrop TF/C and microsilica are having very small interactions among them. Microsilica does not control fine particle losses while Wollatrop TF/C does efficiently. Further research on APAM type (molecular weight and anionic character) is advisable to improve drainage.

Keywords: drainage, fibre-reinforced cement, fine particle losses, flocculation, microsilica, sepiolite

Procedia PDF Downloads 327

Authors: Akhilesh G. Naik, Dipankar Pal

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In today’s scenario, the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) applications and various microcontroller architectures have been increasing to such an extent that the traditional approaches to multiplier design in most processors are becoming outdated for being comparatively slow. Modern processing applications require suitable pipelined approaches, and therefore, algorithms that are friendlier with pipelined architectures. Traditional algorithms like Wallace Tree, Radix-4 Booth, Radix-8 Booth, Dadda architectures have been proven to be comparatively slow for pipelined architectures. These architectures, therefore, need to be optimized or combined with other architectures amongst them to enhance its performances and to be made suitable for pipelined hardware/architectures. Recently, Vedic algorithm mathematically has proven to be efficient by appearing to be less complex and with fewer steps for its output establishment and have assumed renewed importance. This paper describes and shows how the Vedic algorithm can be better suited for pipelined architectures and also can be combined with traditional architectures and algorithms for enhancing its ability even further. In this paper, we also established that for complex applications on DSP and other microcontroller architectures, using Vedic approach for multiplication proves to be the best available and efficient option.

Keywords: Wallace Tree, Radix-4 Booth, Radix-8 Booth, Dadda, Vedic, Single-Stage Karatsuba (SSK), Looped Karatsuba (LK)

Procedia PDF Downloads 169

Authors: Nazim Uddin, Yohiko Nakaura, Kazutaka Yamamoto

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Compote (fruit in syrup) of pineapple (Ananas comosus L. Merrill) is expected to have a high market potential as one of convenient ready-to-eat (RTE) foods worldwide. High hydrostatic pressure (HHP) in combination with low temperature (LT) was applied to the processing of pineapple compote as well as medium HHP (MHHP) in combination with medium-high temperature (MHT) since both processes can enhance liquid impregnation and inactivate microbes. MHHP+MHT (55 or 65 °C) process, as well as the HHP+LT process, has successfully inactivated the microbes in the compote to a non-detectable level. Although the compotes processed by MHHP+MHT or HHP+LT have lost the fresh texture as in a similar manner as those processed solely by heat, it was indicated that the texture degradations by heat were suppressed under MHHP. Degassing process reduced the hardness, while calcium (Ca) contributed to be retained hardness in MHT and MHHP+MHT processes. Electrical impedance measurement supported the damage due to degassing and heat. The color, Brix, and appearance were not affected by the processing methods significantly. MHHP+MHT and HHP+LT processes may be applicable to produce high-quality, safe RTE pineapple compotes. Further studies on the optimization of packaging and storage condition will be indispensable for commercialization.

Keywords: compote of pineapple, RTE, medium high hydrostatic pressure, postharvest loss, texture

Procedia PDF Downloads 137

Authors: A. E. El-Henawey, A. A. El-Kouny, M. M. Abd –El-Halim

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Moving target indication (MTI) which is an anti-clutter technique that limits the display of clutter echoes. It uses the radar received information primarily to display moving targets only. The purpose of MTI is to discriminate moving targets from a background of clutter or slowly-moving chaff particles as shown in this paper. Processing system in these radars is so massive and complex; since it is supposed to perform a great amount of processing in very short time, in most radar applications the response of a single canceler is not acceptable since it does not have a wide notch in the stop-band. A double-delay canceler is an MTI delay-line canceler employing the two-delay-line configuration to improve the performance by widening the clutter-rejection notches, as compared with single-delay cancelers. This canceler is also called a double canceler, dual-delay canceler, or three-pulse canceler. In this paper, a double delay line canceler is chosen for study due to its simplicity in both concept and implementation. Discussing the implementation of a simple digital moving target indicator (DMTI) using FPGA which has distinct advantages compared to other application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the purposes of this work. The FPGA provides flexibility and stability which are important factors in the radar application.

Keywords: FPGA, MTI, double delay line canceler, Doppler Shift

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Authors: Khaled Nagaty, Heba Nagaty, Gerard McKee

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A signature is a behavioral biometric that is used for authenticating users in most financial and legal transactions. Signatures can be easily forged by skilled forgers. Therefore, it is essential to verify whether a signature is genuine or forged. The aim of any signature verification algorithm is to accommodate the differences between signatures of the same person and increase the ability to discriminate between signatures of different persons. This work presented in this paper proposes an automatic signature verification system to indicate whether a signature is genuine or not. The system comprises four phases: (1) The pre-processing phase in which image scaling, binarization, image rotation, dilation, thinning, and connecting ridge breaks are applied. (2) The feature extraction phase in which global and local features are extracted. The local features are minutiae points, curvature orientation, and curve plateau. The global features are signature area, signature aspect ratio, and Hu moments. (3) The post-processing phase, in which false minutiae are removed. (4) The classification phase in which features are enhanced before feeding it into the classifier. k-nearest neighbors and support vector machines are used. The classifier was trained on a benchmark dataset to compare the performance of the proposed offline signature verification system against the state-of-the-art. The accuracy of the proposed system is 92.3%.

Keywords: signature, ridge breaks, minutiae, orientation

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Authors: Kanika Sood, Sijie Shang

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A fundamental goal of education includes preparing students to become a part of the global workforce by making beneficial contributions to society. In this paper, we analyze student performance for multiple courses that involve different teaching pedagogies: a cooperative learning technique and an inquiry-based learning strategy. Student performance includes student engagement, grades, and attendance records. We perform this study in the Computer Science department for online and in-person courses for 450 students. We will perform correlation analysis to study the relationship between student scores and other parameters such as gender, mode of learning. We use natural language processing and machine learning to analyze student feedback data and performance data. We assess the learning outcomes of two teaching pedagogies for undergraduate and graduate courses to showcase the impact of pedagogical adoption and learning outcome as determinants of academic achievement. Early findings suggest that when using the specified pedagogies, students become experts on their topics and illustrate enhanced engagement with peers.

Keywords: bag-of-words, cooperative learning, education, inquiry-based learning, in-person learning, natural language processing, online learning, sentiment analysis, teaching pedagogy

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Authors: Chen Zhang, Bernhard Schwarz-Röhr, Alexander Härting

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To acquire accurate ship motions at the center of gravity, a single low-cost inertial sensor is utilized and applied on board to measure ship oscillating motions. As observations, the three axes accelerations and three axes rotational rates provided by the sensor are used. The mathematical model of processing the observation data includes determination of the distance vector between the sensor and the center of gravity in x, y, and z directions. After setting up the transfer matrix from sensor’s own coordinate system to the ship’s body frame, an extended Kalman filter is applied to deal with nonlinearities between the ship motion in the body frame and the observation information in the sensor’s frame. As a side effect, the method eliminates sensor noise and other unwanted errors. Results are not only roll and pitch, but also linear motions, in particular heave and surge at the center of gravity. For testing, we resort to measurements recorded on a small vessel in a well-defined sea state. With response amplitude operators computed numerically by a commercial software (Seaway), motion characteristics are estimated. These agree well with the measurements after processing with the suggested method.

Keywords: extended Kalman filter, nonlinear estimation, sea trial, ship motion estimation

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Authors: Lindani Mbatha, Suvendi Rimer, Mpho Gololo

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Image segmentation is the process of dividing an image into several sections, such as the object's background and the foreground. It is a critical technique in both image-processing tasks and computer vision. Most of the image segmentation algorithms have been developed for gray-scale images and little research and algorithms have been developed for the color images. Most image segmentation algorithms or techniques vary based on the input data and the application. Nearly all of the techniques are not suitable for noisy environments. Most of the work that has been done uses the Markov Random Field (MRF), which involves the computations and is said to be robust to noise. In the past recent years' image segmentation has been brought to tackle problems such as easy processing of an image, interpretation of the contents of an image, and easy analysing of an image. This article reviews and summarizes some of the image segmentation techniques and algorithms that have been developed in the past years. The techniques include neural networks (CNN), edge-based techniques, region growing, clustering, and thresholding techniques and so on. The advantages and disadvantages of medical ultrasound image segmentation techniques are also discussed. The article also addresses the applications and potential future developments that can be done around image segmentation. This review article concludes with the fact that no technique is perfectly suitable for the segmentation of all different types of images, but the use of hybrid techniques yields more accurate and efficient results.

Keywords: clustering-based, convolution-network, edge-based, region-growing

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Authors: Irene Yi

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Machine learning, natural language processing, and neural network models of language are becoming more and more prevalent in the fields of technology and linguistics today. Training data for machines are at best, large corpora of human literature and at worst, a reflection of the ugliness in society. Computational linguistics is a growing field dealing with such issues of data collection for technological development. Machines have been trained on millions of human books, only to find that in the course of human history, derogatory and sexist adjectives are used significantly more frequently when describing females in history and literature than when describing males. This is extremely problematic, both as training data, and as the outcome of natural language processing. As machines start to handle more responsibilities, it is crucial to ensure that they do not take with them historical sexist and misogynistic notions. This paper gathers data and algorithms from neural network models of language having to deal with syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and text classification. Computational analysis on such linguistic data is used to find patterns of misogyny. Results are significant in showing the existing intentional and unintentional misogynistic notions used to train machines, as well as in developing better technologies that take into account the semantics and syntax of text to be more mindful and reflect gender equality. Further, this paper deals with the idea of non-binary gender pronouns and how machines can process these pronouns correctly, given its semantic and syntactic context. This paper also delves into the implications of gendered grammar and its effect, cross-linguistically, on natural language processing. Languages such as French or Spanish not only have rigid gendered grammar rules, but also historically patriarchal societies. The progression of society comes hand in hand with not only its language, but how machines process those natural languages. These ideas are all extremely vital to the development of natural language models in technology, and they must be taken into account immediately.

Keywords: computational analysis, gendered grammar, misogynistic language, neural networks

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Authors: Madalin Enache, Simona Neagu, Roxana Cojoc, Ioana Gomoiu, Delia Ionela Dobre, Ancuta Roxana Trifoi

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Various types of halophilic and halotolerant microorganisms able to be cultivated in laboratory on culture media with a wide range of sodium chloride content are isolated from several salted environments. The extracellular enzymes of these microorganisms showed the enzymatic activity in these spectrums of salinity thus being attractive for several biotechnological processes developed at high ionic strength. In present work, a number of amylase, protease, esterase, lipase, cellulase, pectinase, xilanases and innulinase were identified for more than 50th bacterial strains isolated from water samples and sapropelic mud from four saline and hypersaline lakes located in Romanian plain. On the other hand, the cellulase and pectinase activity were also detected in some halotolerant microorganisms isolated from secondary agricultural flow of grapes processing. The preliminary data revealed that from totally tested strains seven harbor proteases activity, eight amylase activity, four for esterase and another four for lipase, three for pectinase and for one strain were identified either cellulase or pectinase activity. There were no identified enzymes able to hydrolase innulin added to culture media. Several strains isolated from sapropelic mud showed multiple extracellular enzymatic activities, namely three strains harbor three activities and another seven harbor two activities. The data revealed that amylase and protease activities were frequently detected if compare with other tested enzymes. In the case of pectinase were investigated, their ability to be used for increasing resveratrol recovery from material resulted after grapes processing. In this way, the resulted material from grapes processing was treated with microbial supernatant for several times (two, four and 24 hours) and the content of resveratrol was detected by High Performance Liquid Chromatography method (HPLC). The preliminary data revealed some positive results of this treatment.

Keywords: halophilic microorganisms, enzymes, pectinase, salinity

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Authors: Ramadas Narayanan, Surya Bhattrai, Vu Hoan

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Threshing and cleaning are crucial post-harvest procedures that are carried out to separate the grain or seed from the harvested plant and eliminate any potential contaminants or foreign debris. After harvesting, threshing and cleaning are necessary for the clean seeds to guarantee high quality and acceptable for consumption or further processing. For mechanised production, threshing can be conducted in a thresher. Afterwards, the seeds are to be cleaned in dedicated seed-cleaning facilities. This research investigates the effectiveness of Kimseed cleaning equipment MK3, designed for grain crops for processing new crops such as sesame, fennel and kalonji. Subsequently, systematic trials were conducted to adapt the equipment to the applications in sesame and spice crops. It was done to develop methods for mechanising harvest and post-harvest operations. For sesame, it is recommended to have t a two-step process in the cleaning machine to remove large and small contaminants. The first step is to remove the large contaminants, and the second is to remove the smaller ones. The optimal parameters for cleaning fennel are a shaker frequency of 6.0 to 6.5 Hz and an airflow of 1.0 to 1.5 m/s. The optimal parameters for cleaning kalonji are a shaker frequency of 5.5Hz to 6.0 Hz and airflow of 1.0 to under 1.5m/s.

Keywords: sustainable mechanisation, sead cleaning process, optimal setting, shaker frequency

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Authors: Chajira Garrote, Laura Arango, Lourdes Merino

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This research explains how to obtain nutritious powder from a variety of ripe mango peels Hilacha (Mangifera indica L.) to use it as a food additive. Also, this study intends to use efficiently the by-products resulting from the operations of mango pulp manufacturing process by processing companies with the aim of giving them an added value. The physical and chemical characteristics of the mango peels and the benefits that may help humans, were studied. Unit operations are explained for the processing of mango peels and the production of nutritive powder as a food additive. Emphasis is placed on the preliminary operations applied to the raw material and on the drying method, which is very important in this project to obtain the suitable characteristics of the nutritive powder. Once the powder was obtained, it was subjected to laboratory tests to determine its functional properties: water retention capacity (WRC) and oil retention capacity (ORC), also a sensory analysis for the powder was performed to determine the product profile. The nutritive powder from the ripe mango peels reported excellent WRC and ORC values: 7.236 g of water / g B.S. and 1.796 g water / g B.S. respectively and the sensory analysis defined a complete profile of color, odor and texture of the nutritive powder, which is suitable to use it in the food industry.

Keywords: mango, peel, powder, nutritive, functional properties, sensory analysis

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Authors: Win Nee Phong, Tau Chuan Ling, Pau Loke Show

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From an industrial perspective, the exploitation of microalgae for protein source is of great economical and commercial interest due to numerous attractive characteristics. Nonetheless, the release of protein from microalgae is limited by the multiple layers of the rigid thick cell wall that generally contain a large proportion of cellulose. Thus an efficient cell disruption process is required to rupture the cell wall. The conventional downstream processing methods which typically involve several unit operational steps such as disruption, isolation, extraction, concentration and purification are energy-intensive and costly. To reduce the overall cost and establish a feasible technology for the success of the large-scale production, microalgal industry today demands a more cost-effective and eco-friendly technique in downstream processing. One of the main challenges to extract the proteins from microalgae is the presence of rigid cell wall. This study aims to provide some guidance on the selection of the efficient solvent to facilitate the proteins released during the cell disruption process. The effects of solvent types such as methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol and water in rupturing the microalgae cell wall were studied. It is interesting to know that water is the most effective solvent to recover proteins from microalgae and the cost is cheapest among all other solvents.

Keywords: green, microalgae, protein, solvents

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Authors: Zelalem Fantahun

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Part-of-speech tagging is the process of assigning a part-of-speech or other lexical class marker to each word into naturally occurring text. Part-of-speech tagging is the most fundamental and basic task almost in all natural language processing. In natural language processing, the problem of providing large amount of manually annotated data is a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Since, Amharic is one of under-resourced language, the availability of tagged corpus is the bottleneck problem for natural language processing especially for POS tagging. A promising direction to tackle this problem is to provide a system that does not require manually tagged data. In unsupervised learning, the learner is not provided with classifications. Unsupervised algorithms seek out similarity between pieces of data in order to determine whether they can be characterized as forming a group. This paper explicates the development of unsupervised part-of-speech tagger using K-Means clustering for Amharic language since large amount of data is produced in day-to-day activities. In the development of the tagger, the following procedures are followed. First, the unlabeled data (raw text) is divided into 10 folds and tokenization phase takes place; at this level, the raw text is chunked at sentence level and then into words. The second phase is feature extraction which includes word frequency, syntactic and morphological features of a word. The third phase is clustering. Among different clustering algorithms, K-means is selected and implemented in this study that brings group of similar words together. The fourth phase is mapping, which deals with looking at each cluster carefully and the most common tag is assigned to a group. This study finds out two features that are capable of distinguishing one part-of-speech from others these are morphological feature and positional information and show that it is possible to use unsupervised learning for Amharic POS tagging. In order to increase performance of the unsupervised part-of-speech tagger, there is a need to incorporate other features that are not included in this study, such as semantic related information. Finally, based on experimental result, the performance of the system achieves a maximum of 81% accuracy.

Keywords: POS tagging, Amharic, unsupervised learning, k-means

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Authors: Elizabeta Krstić Vukelja

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Digitization of personal data is a consequence of the development of information and communication technologies that create a new work environment with many advantages and challenges, but also potential threats to privacy and personal data protection. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council is becoming a law and obligation that should address the issues of personal data protection and information security. The existence of the Regulation leads to the conclusion that national legislation in the field of virtual environment, protection of the rights of EU citizens and processing of their personal data is insufficiently effective. In the health system, special emphasis is placed on the processing of special categories of personal data, such as health data. The healthcare industry is recognized as a particularly sensitive area in which a large amount of medical data is processed, the digitization of which enables quick access and quick identification of the health insured. The protection of the individual requires quality IT solutions that guarantee the technical protection of personal categories. However, the real problems are the technical and human nature and the spatial limitations of the application of the Regulation. Some conclusions will be drawn by analyzing the implementation of the basic principles of the Regulation on the example of the Croatian health care system and comparing it with similar activities in other EU member states.

Keywords: regulation, healthcare system, personal dana protection, quality data assurance

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Authors: Andrés Durán, Brian Castellanos, Marta Quicazán, Carlos Zuluaga-Domínguez

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Bee-pollen is an apicultural-derived food product, with a growing appreciation among consumers given the remarkable nutritional and functional composition, in particular, protein (24%), dietary fiber (15%), phenols (15 – 20 GAE/g) and carotenoids (600 – 900 µg/g). These properties are given by the geographical and climatic characteristics of the region where it is collected. There are several countries recognized by their pollen production, e.g. China, United States, Japan, Spain, among others. Beekeepers use traps in the entrance of the hive where bee-pollen is collected. After the removal of foreign particles and drying, this product is ready to be marketed. However, in countries located along the equator, the absence of seasons and a constant tropical climate throughout the year favors a more rapid spoilage condition for foods with elevated water activity. The climatic conditions also trigger the proliferation of microorganisms and insects. This, added to the factor that beekeepers usually do not have adequate processing systems for bee-pollen, leads to deficiencies in the quality and safety of the product. In contrast, the Andean region of South America, lying on equator, typically has a high production of bee-pollen of up to 36 kg/year/hive, being four times higher than in countries with marked seasons. This region is also located in altitudes superior to 2500 meters above sea level, having extremes sun ultraviolet radiation all year long. As a mechanism of defense of radiation, plants produce more secondary metabolites acting as antioxidant agents, hence, plant products such as bee-pollen contain remarkable more phenolics and carotenoids than collected in other places. Considering this, the improvement of bee-pollen processing facilities by technical modifications and the implementation of an integrated cleaning and drying system for the product in an apiary in the area was proposed. The beehives were modified through the installation of alternative bee-pollen traps to avoid sources of contamination. The processing facility was modified according to considerations of Good Manufacturing Practices, implementing the combined use of a cabin dryer with temperature control and forced airflow and a greenhouse-type solar drying system. Additionally, for the separation of impurities, a cyclone type system was implemented, complementary to a screening equipment. With these modifications, a decrease in the content of impurities and the microbiological load of bee-pollen was seen from the first stages, principally with a reduction of the presence of molds and yeasts and in the number of foreign animal origin impurities. The use of the greenhouse solar dryer integrated to the cabin dryer allowed the processing of larger quantities of product with shorter waiting times in storage, reaching a moisture content of about 6% and a water activity lower than 0.6, being appropriate for the conservation of bee-pollen. Additionally, the contents of functional or nutritional compounds were not affected, even observing an increase of up to 25% in phenols content and a non-significant decrease in carotenoids content and antioxidant activity.

Keywords: beekeeping, drying, food processing, food safety

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Authors: Folasade Adegbaju, Olusola Arowolo, Olufisayo Onawumi

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Owolowo ile – ege garri processing industry which is a small scale cassava processing industry, located in Ilesha, Osun State was purposively selected as a case study because it is a cooperative business. This industry was established in 1991 by eight men (8) who were mostly retirees. A researcher made questionnaire was used to collect information from thirty (30) respondents: the manager, four official staffs and 25 randomly selected processors in the industry. The study found that within twelve years of the utilization of their self raised initial capital of N240, 000 naira (Two hundred and forty thousand naira) this cassava – based industry had impacted on and attracted the involvement of many more people because within the period of the study (i.e. 2007-2011) the processors had quadrupled in number (e.g. 8 to 30), the facilities (equipment) in use had increased from one machine and a frying pot to many, this translated into being able to produce large quantities of fried garri, fufu and also starch for marketing to the people in Ilesha and neighbouring cities like Ibadan, Lagos, etc. This is indicative of economic growth. The industry also became a source of employment for community members in the sense that, as at the time of study four staffs were employed to work and coordinate the industry. It was observed that despite all odds of small-scale industry and the problem of people migrating from rural to urban area, this agro-based industry still existed successfully in the community, and many of such industry can be replicated by such agricultural cooperative groups nationwide so as to further boost the productivity as well as the economy of the area and nation at large. However, government and individual still have major roles to play in ensuring the growth and development of the nation in this respect.The local agricultural cooperative groups should form regional cooperative consortium with more networking for the farmers, in order to create more jobs for the young ones and to increase agricultural productivity in the country thus resulting in a better and more sustainable economy.

Keywords: agricultural cooperative, cassava processing industry, model, small scale enterprise

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Authors: Musa M. Umar, S. G. Ado

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The paper examines the activities of the National Programme for food security (NPFS) for averting food insecurity in Nigeria and beyond. The components of the NPFS include site development, outreach, community development and management support. On each site, core activities comprise crop productivity, production diversification and agro-processing. The outreach activities consist of inputs and commodity marketing, rural finance, strengthening research-extension-farmers-inputs linkages, health and nutrition and expansion of site activities. The community development activities include small-scale rural infrastructure, micro-earth dams and community forestry. The overall benefits include food security, improved productivity, marketing and processing, enhanced land and water use, increased animal production and fish catches, improved nutrition, reduction in post-harvest losses and value addition, improved rural infrastructure and diversification of production leading to improved livelihood. The NPFS would poster sustained development of small-holder agricultural and income generation.

Keywords: food-security, community development, post-harvest, production

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Authors: Pi-Lan Yang

Abstract:

It is controversial which type of gloss condition (i.e., gloss language or gloss position) is more effective in second or foreign language (L2) vocabulary learning. The present study compared the performance on learning ten English words in the conditions of L2 English reading with no glosses and with glosses of Chinese equivalents/translations and L2 English definitions at the side of a page and at an attached sheet for low-intermediate Chinese-speaking learners of English, who were technology university students in Taiwan. It is found first that the performances on the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest were overall better in the gloss condition than those in the no-gloss condition. Next, it is found that the glosses of Chinese translations were more effective and sustainable than those of L2 English definitions. Finally, the effects of L2 English glosses at the side of a page were observed to be less sustainable than those at an attached sheet. In addition, an opinion questionnaire used also showed a preference for the glosses of Chinese translations in L2 English reading. These results would be discussed in terms of automated lexical access, sentence processing mechanisms, and the trade-off nature of storage and processing functions in working memory system, proposed by the capacity theory of language comprehension.

Keywords: glosses of Chinese equivalents/translations, glosses of L2 English definitions, L2 vocabulary learning, L2 English reading

Procedia PDF Downloads 247