Search results for: symbiotic organism search

Authors: James M. Geidner

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Objective: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the evidence for the effectiveness of exercise interventions on reducing metabolic components in children and/or adolescents diagnosed with Paediatric Metabolic Syndrome. Methods: A computerized search was made from four databases: PubMed, PsycInfo, SPORTDiscus, Cochrane Central Register. The analysis was restricted to children and adolescents with metabolic syndrome examining the effect of exercise interventions on metabolic components. Effect size and 95% confidence interval were calculated and the heterogeneity of the studies was estimated using Cochran’s Q-statistic and I2. Bias was assessed using multiple tools and statistical analyses. Results: Thirteen studies, consisting of 19 separate trials, were selected for the meta-analysis as they fulfilled the inclusion criteria (n=908). Exercise interventions resulted in decreased waist circumference, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, fasting glucose, insulin resistance, triglycerides, and High-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol (HDL-C). Conclusions: This meta-analysis provides insights into the effectiveness of exercise interventions on markers of Paediatric Metabolic Syndrome in children and adolescents.

Keywords: metabolic syndrome, syndrome x, pediatric, meta-analysis

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Authors: Manojkumar Sabanayagam

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The Riemann hypothesis is an unsolved millennium problem and the search for a solution to the Riemann hypothesis is to study the pattern of prime number distribution. The scope of this paper is to identify the solution for the critical strip and the critical line axis, which has the non-trivial zero solutions using complex plane functions. The Riemann graphical plot is constructed using a linear complex variable function (X+iY) and is applicable only when X>1. But the investigation shows that complex variable behavior has two zones. The first zone is the transformation zone, where the definition of the complex plane should be a non-linear variable which is the critical strip zone in the graph (X=0 to 1). The second zone is the transformed zone (X>1) defined using linear variables conventionally. This paper deals with the Non-linear function in the transformation zone derived using cosine and sinusoidal time lag w.r.t imaginary number ‘i’. The alternate complex variable (Cosθ+i Sinθ) is used to understand the variables in the critical strip zone. It is concluded that the non-trivial zeros present in the Real part 0.5 are because the linear function is not the correct approach in the critical strip. This paper provides the solution to Reimann's hypothesis.

Keywords: Reimann hypothesis, critical strip, complex plane, transformation zone

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Authors: Ilkay Turk Cakir, Murat Altinli, Zekeriya Uysal, Abdulkadir Senol, Olcay Bolukbasi Yalcinkaya, Ali Yilmaz

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The Higgs boson was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experimental groups in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Production and decay properties of the Higgs boson, Standard Model (SM) couplings, and limits on effective scale of the Higgs boson’s couplings with other bosons are investigated at particle colliders. Deviations from SM estimates are parametrized by effective Lagrangian terms to investigate Higgs couplings. This is a model-independent method for describing the new physics. In this study, sensitivity to neutral gauge boson anomalous couplings with the Higgs boson is investigated using the parameters of the Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC) and the Future Circular electron-hadron Collider (FCC-eh) with a model-independent approach. By using MadGraph5_aMC@NLO multi-purpose event generator with the parameters of LHeC and FCC-eh, the bounds on the anomalous Hγγ, HγZ and HZZ couplings in e− p → e− q H process are obtained. Detector simulations are also taken into account in the calculations.

Keywords: anomalos couplings, FCC-eh, Higgs, Z boson

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Authors: Min-Ha Hong, Kee-Won Kim, Seung-Hoon Kim

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The character in the story-based content, such as novels and movies, is one of the core elements to understand the story. In particular, the character’s tendency is an important factor to analyze the story-based content, because it has a significant influence on the storyline. If readers have the knowledge of the tendency of characters before reading a novel, it will be helpful to understand the structure of conflict, episode and relationship between characters in the novel. It may therefore help readers to select novel that the reader wants to read. In this paper, we propose a method of extracting the tendency of the characters from a novel written in Korean. In advance, we build the dictionary with pairs of the emotional words in Korean and English since the emotion words in the novel’s sentences express character’s feelings. We rate the degree of polarity (positive or negative) of words in our emotional words dictionary based on SenticNet. Then we extract characters and emotion words from sentences in a novel. Since the polarity of a word grows strong or weak due to sentence features such as quotations and modifiers, our proposed method consider them to calculate the polarity of characters. The information of the extracted character’s polarity can be used in the book search service or book recommendation service.

Keywords: character tendency, data mining, emotion word, Korean novel

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Authors: Ramón Aparicio-García, Gustavo Juárez Gracia, Jesús Álvarez Cedillo

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A research line of the computer science that involve the study of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which search to recognize and interpret the user intent by the storage and the subsequent analysis of the electrical signals of the brain, for using them in the control of electronic devices. On the other hand, the affective computing research applies the human emotions in the HCI process helping to reduce the user frustration. This paper shows the results obtained during the hardware and software development of a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) capable of recognizing the human emotions through the association of the brain electrical activity patterns. The hardware involves the sensing stage and analogical-digital conversion. The interface software involves algorithms for pre-processing of the signal in time and frequency analysis and the classification of patterns associated with the electrical brain activity. The methods used for the analysis and classification of the signal have been tested separately, by using a database that is accessible to the public, besides to a comparison among classifiers in order to know the best performing.

Keywords: affective computing, interface, brain, intelligent interaction

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Authors: Martina Kanciruk, Jac J. W. Andrews, Tyrone Donnon

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The purpose of this study was to determine the significance of maternal smoking for the development of childhood overweight and/or obesity. Accordingly, a systematic literature review of English-language studies published from 1980 to 2012 using the following data bases: MEDLINE, PsychINFO, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Dissertation Abstracts International was conducted. The following terms were used in the search: pregnancy, overweight, obesity, smoking, parents, childhood, risk factors. Eighteen studies of maternal smoking during pregnancy and obesity conducted in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America met the inclusion criteria. A meta-analysis of these studies indicated that maternal smoking during pregnancy is a significant risk factor for overweight and obesity; mothers who smoke during pregnancy are at a greater risk for developing obesity or overweight; the quantity of cigarettes consumed by the mother during pregnancy influenced the odds of offspring overweight and/or obesity. In addition, the results from moderator analyses suggest that part of the heterogeneity discovered between the studies can be explained by the region of world that the study occurred in and the age of the child at the time of weight assessment.

Keywords: childhood obesity, overweight, smoking, parents, risk factors

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Authors: Pendar Fazel

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Well-being is a good or satisfactory condition of existence; a state characterized by health, happiness, and prosperity. Well-being of people is correlated with, the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical aspect of their personality. Subjective well-being, people’s emotional and cognitive evaluations of their lives, includes what lay people call happiness, peace, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. Unfortunately in this period of time people are under the pressure of financial, social problems, and other stress factors which made them vulnerable, and their well-being is threatened. Personal Coaching as a holistic orientation and novel approach is ideal for the present century which help people, to find balance, enjoyment and meaning in their lives as well as improving performance, skills and effectiveness. The aim of the present article besides introducing the personal coaching is determining how personal coaching can positively effects on subjective well-being, under this aim we tend to describe how coaching impact on the cognitive and emotional reconstruction. Present qualitative research is descriptive analytic study, which data gathered by manual library research and search within authentic article through internet; analyzed personal coaching which integrated different views into an operational one helps people promote self-awareness as well as evaluate, emotional and cognitive aspect of their personality and provide appropriate subjective well-being.

Keywords: subjective well-being, coaching, well-being, positive psychology, personal growth

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Authors: Linda Ghout

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The main aim of the present case study was to explore EFL teachers’ understanding of learner autonomy. Thus, it sought to uncover how teachers at the de Department of English, University of Béjaia, Algeria view the process of language learning, their learners’ roles, their own roles and their practices to promote learner autonomy. For data collection, firstly, a questionnaire was designed and administered to all the teachers in the department. Secondly, interviews were conducted with some volunteers for the sake of clarifying emerging issues and digging deeper into some of the teachers’ answers to the questionnaire. The analysis revealed interesting data pertaining to the teachers’ cognition and its effects on their teaching practices. With regard to their views of language learning, it seems that the participants hold discrete views which are in opposition with the principles of learner autonomy. The teachers seemed to have a limited knowledge of the characteristics of autonomous learners and autonomy- based methodology. When it comes to teachers’ practices to promote autonomy in their classes, the majority reported that the most effective way is to ask students to search for information on their own. However, in defining their roles in the EFL learning process, most of the respondents claimed that teachers should play the role of facilitators.

Keywords: English, learner autonomy, learning process, teacher cognition

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Authors: Huy Hieu Pham, Houssam Salmane, Louahdi Khoudour, Alain Crouzil, Pablo Zegers, Sergio Velastin

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We present a deep learning-based multitask framework for joint 3D human pose estimation and action recognition from color video sequences. Our approach proceeds along two stages. In the first, we run a real-time 2D pose detector to determine the precise pixel location of important key points of the body. A two-stream neural network is then designed and trained to map detected 2D keypoints into 3D poses. In the second, we deploy the Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) algorithm to find an optimal network architecture that is used for modeling the Spatio-temporal evolution of the estimated 3D poses via an image-based intermediate representation and performing action recognition. Experiments on Human3.6M, Microsoft Research Redmond (MSR) Action3D, and Stony Brook University (SBU) Kinect Interaction datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the targeted tasks. Moreover, we show that our method requires a low computational budget for training and inference.

Keywords: human action recognition, pose estimation, D-CNN, deep learning

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Authors: Muhammad Zaheer Babar, Amer Kashif, Muhammad Rizwan Javed

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Nowadays distributed generation integration is best way to overcome the increasing load demand. Optimal allocation of distributed generation plays a vital role in reducing system losses and improves voltage profile. In this paper, a Meta heuristic technique is proposed for allocation of DG in order to reduce power losses and improve voltage profile. The proposed technique is based on Multi Objective Particle Swarm optimization. Fewer control parameters are needed in this algorithm. Modification is made in search space of PSO. The effectiveness of proposed technique is tested on IEEE 33 bus test system. Single DG as well as multiple DG scenario is adopted for proposed method. Proposed method is more effective as compared to other Meta heuristic techniques and gives better results regarding system losses and voltage profile.

Keywords: Distributed generation (DG), Multi Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), IEEE standard Test System

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Authors: Antonina A. Shumakova, Sergey A. Khotimchenko

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The relevance of research is associated, on the one hand, with an ever-increasing volume of production and the expansion of the scope of application of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), and on the other hand, with the lack of sufficient scientific information on the nature of the interactions of nanoparticles (NPs) with components of biogenic and abiogenic origin. In particular, studying the effect of ENMs (TiO2 NPs, SiO2 NPs, Al2O3 NPs, fullerenol) on the toxicometric characteristics of common contaminants such as lead and cadmium is an important hygienic task, given the high probability of their joint presence in food products. Data were obtained characterizing a multidirectional change in the toxicity of model toxicants when they are co-administered with various types of ENMs. One explanation for this fact is the difference in the adsorption capacity of ENMs, which was further studied in in vitro studies. For this, a method was proposed based on in vitro modeling of conditions simulating the environment of the small intestine. It should be noted that the obtained data are in good agreement with the results of in vivo experiments: - with the combined administration of lead and TiO2 NPs, there were no significant changes in the accumulation of lead in rat liver; in other organs (kidneys, spleen, testes and brain), the lead content was lower than in animals of the control group; - studying the combined effect of lead and Al2O3 NPs, a multiple and significant increase in the accumulation of lead in rat liver was observed with an increase in the dose of Al2O3 NPs. For other organs, the introduction of various doses of Al2O3 NPs did not significantly affect the bioaccumulation of lead; - with the combined administration of lead and SiO2 NPs in different doses, there was no increase in lead accumulation in all studied organs. Based on the data obtained, it can be assumed that at least three scenarios of the combined effects of ENMs and chemical contaminants on the body: - ENMs quite firmly bind contaminants in the gastrointestinal tract and such a complex becomes inaccessible (or inaccessible) for absorption; in this case, it can be expected that the toxicity of both ENMs and contaminants will decrease; - the complex formed in the gastrointestinal tract has partial solubility and can penetrate biological membranes and / or physiological barriers of the body; in this case, ENMs can play the role of a kind of conductor for contaminants and, thus, their penetration into the internal environment of the body increases, thereby increasing the toxicity of contaminants; - ENMs and contaminants do not interact with each other in any way, therefore the toxicity of each of them is determined only by its quantity and does not depend on the quantity of another component. Authors hypothesized that the degree of adsorption of various elements on the surface of ENMs may be a unique characteristic of their action, allowing a more accurate understanding of the processes occurring in a living organism.

Keywords: absorption, cadmium, engineered nanomaterials, lead

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Authors: Jonas Palmer, Leon Brüning, Lukas Himmelsbach

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The worldwide ambitions to transform the transportation sector are increasingly affecting the safety conditions for all traffic participants and the required infrastructure. To contribute to the transformation and for health aspects, individuals search for carbon-free alternatives that include physical excitation. Especially e-bikes experience a growing demand within the last few years and consequently change the safety requirements. E-cyclists are exposed to amplified risks due to higher velocity in comparison to classic cyclists. Furthermore, cyclists suffer from a lack of infrastructure, rider assistance systems as well as awareness of other road users. For minimizing the risk of accidents, it is crucial to identify, develop and implement safety measures for cyclists. The paper aims to contribute to future research with delivering an overview of the latest publications and to subsequently identify essential research gaps. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the areas of technical adjustments as well as legal aspects and the correlation of both. The review`s insights can intensify the awareness of safety issues related to e-bikes and promote the development and implementation of appropriate measures.

Keywords: e-bike safety measures, future mobility, risk management, road safety

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Authors: Taha Benarbia, Kay W. Axhausen, Anugrah Ilahi

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Electric car sharing system as ecologic transportation increasing in the world. The complexity of managing electric car sharing systems, especially one-way trips and battery autonomy have direct influence to on supply and demand of system. One must be able to precisely model the demand and supply of these systems to better operate electric car sharing and estimate its effect on mobility management and the accessibility that it provides in urban areas. In this context, our work focus to develop performances optimization model of the system based on discrete event simulation and stochastic Petri net. The objective is to search optimal decisions and management parameters of the system in order to fulfil at best demand while minimizing undesirable situations. In this paper, we present new model of electric cars sharing with relocation based on monitoring system. The proposed approach also help to precise the influence of battery charging level on the behaviour of system as important decision parameter of this complex and dynamical system.

Keywords: electric car-sharing systems, smart mobility, Petri nets modelling, discrete event simulation

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Authors: Roseminu Varghese, Laveena Anitha Barboza, Jyothi Chakrabarty, Ravishankar

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Depression among post-stroke survivors is prevalent, but it is unidentified. The purpose of this review was to determine the pooled prevalence of depression among post-stroke survivors in the South Asian region from all published health sciences research articles. The review also aimed to analyze the disparities in the prevalence of depression among the post-stroke survivors from different study locations. Data search to identify the relevant research articles published from 2005 to 2016 was done by using mesh terms and keywords in Web of Science, PubMed Medline, CINAHL, Scopus, J gate, IndMED databases. The final analysis comprised of 9 studies, including a population of 1,520 men and women. Meta-analysis was performed in STATA version 13.0. The overall pooled post-stroke depression prevalence was 0.46, 95% (CI), (0.3- 0.62). The prevalence rate in this systematic review is evident of depression among post-stroke survivors in the South Asian Region. Identifying the prevalence of post-stroke depression at an early stage is important to improve outcomes of the rehabilitative process of stroke survivors and for its early intervention.

Keywords: depression, post stroke survivors, prevalence, systematic review

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Authors: Sunil Kumar

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For many years, small organic molecules derived naturally from microbes and plants have delivered a number of expedient therapeutic drug agents. The search for naturally occurring lead compounds has continued in recent years as well, with the constituents of marine flora and fauna along with those of telluric microorganisms and plants being investigated for their anti-bacterial and anti-cancer activities. It has been observed that such promising lead molecules incline to promptly generate substantial attention among scientists like synthetic organic chemists and biologists. Subsequently, the availability of a given precious natural product sample may be enriched, and it may be possible to determine a preliminary idea of structure-activity relationships to develop synthetic analogues. For instance, anti-tumor drug topotecan is a synthetic chemical compound similar in chemical structure to camptothecin which is found in extracts of Camptotheca acuminate. Similarly, researchers at AstraZeneca discovered anti-biotic pyrrolamide through a fragment-based lead generation approach from kibdelomycin, which is isolated from Staphylococcus aureuss.

Keywords: anticancer, antibiotic, lead molecule, natural product, synthetic analogues

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Authors: Martina Kanciruk, Jac J. W. Andrews, Tyrone Donnon

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The purpose of this study was to determine the significance of history of obesity for the development of childhood overweight and/or obesity. Accordingly, a systematic literature review of English-language studies published from 1980 to 2012 using the following data bases: MEDLINE, PsychINFO, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Dissertation Abstracts International was conducted. The following terms were used in the search: pregnancy, overweight, obesity, family history, parents, childhood, risk factors. Eleven studies of family history and obesity conducted in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America met the inclusion criteria. A meta-analysis of these studies indicated that family history of obesity is a significant risk factor of overweight and /or obesity in offspring; risk for offspring overweight and/or obesity associated with family history varies depending of the family members included in the analysis; and when family history of obesity is present, the offspring are at greater risk for developing obesity or overweight. In addition, the results from moderator analyses suggest that part of the heterogeneity discovered between the studies can be explained by the region of world that the study occurred in and the age of the child at the time of weight assessment.

Keywords: childhood obesity, overweight, family history, risk factors, meta-analysis

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Authors: T. J. Hasanova, C. N. Imamalieva

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The problem about the movement of the rigid cylinder keeping the vertical position under the influence of running superficial waves in a liquid is considered. The indignation of a falling wave caused by the presence of the cylinder which moves is thus considered. Special decomposition on a falling harmonious wave is used. The problem dares an operational method. For a finding of the original decision, Considering that the image denominator represents a tabular function, Voltaire's integrated equation of the first sort which dares a numerical method is used. Cylinder movement in the continuous environment under the influence of waves is considered in work. Problems are solved by an operational method, thus originals of required functions are looked for by the numerical definition of poles of combinations of transcendental functions and calculation of not own integrals. Using specificity of a task below, Decisions are under construction the numerical solution of the integrated equation of Volter of the first sort that does not create computing problems of the complex roots of transcendental functions connected with search.

Keywords: rigid cylinder, linear interpolation, fluctuations, Voltaire's integrated equation, harmonious wave

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Authors: S. Alansary, M. Nagi

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This paper presents an approach of conducting semantic annotation of Arabic corpus using the Universal Networking Language (UNL) framework. UNL is intended to be a promising strategy for providing a large collection of semantically annotated texts with formal, deep semantics rather than shallow. The result would constitute a semantic resource (semantic graphs) that is editable and that integrates various phenomena, including predicate-argument structure, scope, tense, thematic roles and rhetorical relations, into a single semantic formalism for knowledge representation. The paper will also present the Interactive Analysis​ tool for automatic semantic annotation (IAN). In addition, the cornerstone of the proposed methodology which are the disambiguation and transformation rules, will be presented. Semantic annotation using UNL has been applied to a corpus of 20,000 Arabic sentences representing the most frequent structures in the Arabic Wikipedia. The representation, at different linguistic levels was illustrated starting from the morphological level passing through the syntactic level till the semantic representation is reached. The output has been evaluated using the F-measure. It is 90% accurate. This demonstrates how powerful the formal environment is, as it enables intelligent text processing and search.

Keywords: semantic analysis, semantic annotation, Arabic, universal networking language

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Authors: Munaf Rashid

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For content-based human action retrieval systems, search accuracy is often inferior because of the following two reasons 1) global information pertaining to videos is totally ignored, only low level motion descriptors are considered as a significant feature to match the similarity between query and database videos, and 2) the semantic gap between the high level user concept and low level visual features. Hence, in this paper, we propose a method that will address these two issues and in doing so, this paper contributes in two ways. Firstly, we introduce a method that uses both global and local information in one framework for an action retrieval task. Secondly, to minimize the semantic gap, a user concept is involved by incorporating features weight updating (FWU) Relevance Feedback (RF) approach. We use statistical characteristics to dynamically update weights of the feature descriptors so that after every RF iteration feature space is modified accordingly. For testing and validation purpose two human action recognition datasets have been utilized, namely Weizmann and UCF. Results show that even with a number of visual challenges the proposed approach performs well.

Keywords: relevance feedback (RF), action retrieval, semantic gap, feature descriptor, codebook

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Authors: F. Guspi, E. García

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This exploratory study gives an overview of the evolution of the main financial and performance indicators of the Academic Spin-Off’s and High Growth Academic Spin-Off’s in year 3 and year 6 after its creation in the region of Catalonia in Spain. The study compares and evaluates results of these different measures of performance and the degree of success of these companies for each University. We found that the average Catalonian Academic Spin-Off is small and have not achieved the sustainability stage at year 6. On the contrary, a small group of High Growth Academic Spin-Off’s exhibit robust performance with high profits in year 6. Our results support the need to increase selectivity and support for these companies especially near year 3, because are the ones that will bring wealth and employment. University role as an investor has rigid norms and habits that impede an efficient economic return from their ASO investment. Universities with high performance on sales and employment in year 3 not always could sustain this growth in year 6 because their ASO’s are not profitable. On the contrary, profitable ASO exhibit superior performance in all measurement indicators in year 6. We advocate the need of a balanced growth (with profits) as a way to obtain subsequent continuous growth.

Keywords: Academic Spin-Off (ASO), university entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial university, high growth, New Technology Based Companies (NTBC), University Spin-Off

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Authors: Amandeep Kaur, Sangeeta Sharma

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Keeping in view the serious entanglement of heavy metals ( Pb+2 and Ni+2) ions in an aqueous environment, a rapid search for efficient adsorbents for the adsorption of heavy metals has become highly desirable. In this quest, green synthesized Fe np’s have gathered attention because of their excellent adsorption capability of heavy metals from aqueous solution. This research report aims at the fabrication of Fe np’s using the fruit Cucumis melo and leaves of Ficus virens via a biogenic synthesis route. Further, synthesized CM-Fe-np’s and FV-Fe-np’s have been tested as potential bio-adsorbents for the removal of Pb+2 and Ni+2 by carrying out adsorption batch experiments. The influence of myriad parameters like initial concentration of Pb/Ni (5,10,15,20,25 mg/L), contact time (10 to 200 min.), adsorbent dosage (0.5, 0.10, 0.15 mg/L), shaking speed (120 to 350 rpm) and pH value (6,7,8,9) has been investigated. The maximum removal with CM-Fe-np’s and FV-Fe-np’s has been achieved at pH 7, metal conc. 5 mg/L, dosage 0.9 g/L, shaking speed 200 rpm and reaction contact time 200 min during the adsorption experiment. The results obtained are found to be in accordance with Freundlich and Langmuir's adsorption models; consequently, they could be highly applicable to the wastewater treatment plant.

Keywords: adsorption, biogenic synthesis, nanoparticles, nickel, lead

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Authors: Lenka Morávková, Zuzana Sedláková, Jiří Vejražka, Věra Jandová, Pavel Izák

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The need to minimize the costs of biogas upgrading leads to a continuous search for new and more effective membrane materials. The improvement of biogas combustion efficiency is connected with polar gases removal from a feed stream. One of the possibilities is the use of water–swollen polyamide layer of thin film composite reverse osmosis membrane for simultaneous carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide removal. Transport properties and basic characteristics of a thin film composite membrane were compared in the term of appropriate water-swollen membrane choice for biogas upgrading. SEM analysis showed that the surface of the best performing composites changed significantly upon swelling by water. The surface changes were found to be a proof that the selective skin polyamide layer was swollen well. Further, the presence of a sufficient number of associative centers, namely amido groups, inside the upper layer of the hydrophilic thin composite membrane can play an important role in the polar gas separation from a non-polar gas. The next key factor is a high porosity of the membrane support.

Keywords: biogas upgrading, carbon dioxide separation, hydrogen sulphide separation, water-swollen membrane

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Authors: Debjit Ray

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Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and recombination leads to the emergence of bacterial antibiotic resistance and pathogenic traits. HGT events can be identified by comparing a large number of fully sequenced genomes across a species or genus, define the phylogenetic range of HGT, and find potential sources of new resistance genes. In-depth comparative phylogenomics can also identify subtle genome or plasmid structural changes or mutations associated with phenotypic changes. Comparative phylogenomics requires that accurately sequenced, complete and properly annotated genomes of the organism. Assembling closed genomes requires additional mate-pair reads or “long read” sequencing data to accompany short-read paired-end data. To bring down the cost and time required of producing assembled genomes and annotating genome features that inform drug resistance and pathogenicity, we are analyzing the performance for genome assembly of data from the Illumina NextSeq, which has faster throughput than the Illumina HiSeq (~1-2 days versus ~1 week), and shorter reads (150bp paired-end versus 300bp paired end) but higher capacity (150-400M reads per run versus ~5-15M) compared to the Illumina MiSeq. Bioinformatics improvements are also needed to make rapid, routine production of complete genomes a reality. Modern assemblers such as SPAdes 3.6.0 running on a standard Linux blade are capable in a few hours of converting mixes of reads from different library preps into high-quality assemblies with only a few gaps. Remaining breaks in scaffolds are generally due to repeats (e.g., rRNA genes) are addressed by our software for gap closure techniques, that avoid custom PCR or targeted sequencing. Our goal is to improve the understanding of emergence of pathogenesis using sequencing, comparative genomics, and machine learning analysis of ~1000 pathogen genomes. Machine learning algorithms will be used to digest the diverse features (change in virulence genes, recombination, horizontal gene transfer, patient diagnostics). Temporal data and evolutionary models can thus determine whether the origin of a particular isolate is likely to have been from the environment (could it have evolved from previous isolates). It can be useful for comparing differences in virulence along or across the tree. More intriguing, it can test whether there is a direction to virulence strength. This would open new avenues in the prediction of uncharacterized clinical bugs and multidrug resistance evolution and pathogen emergence.

Keywords: genomics, pathogens, genome assembly, superbugs

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Authors: Ciprian Briciu-Burghina, Brendan Heery, Dermot Brabazon, Fiona Regan

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Good quality bathing water is a highly desirable natural resource which can provide major economic, social, and environmental benefits. Both in Ireland and Europe, such water bodies are managed under the European Directive for the management of bathing water quality (BWD). The BWD aims mainly: (i) to improve health protection for bathers by introducing stricter standards for faecal pollution assessment (E. coli, enterococci), (ii) to establish a more pro-active approach to the assessment of possible pollution risks and the management of bathing waters, and (iii) to increase public involvement and dissemination of information to the general public. Standard methods for E. coli and enterococci quantification rely on cultivation of the target organism which requires long incubation periods (from 18h to a few days). This is not ideal when immediate action is required for risk mitigation. Municipalities that oversee the bathing water quality and deploy appropriate signage have to wait for laboratory results. During this time, bathers can be exposed to pollution events and health risks. Although forecasting tools exist, they are site specific and as consequence extensive historical data is required to be effective. Another approach for early detection of faecal pollution is the use of marker enzymes. β-glucuronidase (GUS) is a widely accepted biomarker for E. coli detection in microbiological water quality control. GUS assay is particularly attractive as they are rapid, less than 4 h, easy to perform and they do not require specialised training. A method for on-site detection of GUS from environmental samples in less than 75 min was previously demonstrated. In this study, the capability of ColiSense as an early warning system for faecal pollution in freshwater is assessed. The system successfully detected GUS activity in all of the 45 freshwater samples tested. GUS activity was found to correlate linearly with E. coli (r2=0.53, N=45, p < 0.001) and enterococci (r2=0.66, N=45, p < 0.001) Although GUS is a marker for E. coli, a better correlation was obtained for enterococci. For this study water samples were collected from 5 rivers in the Dublin area over 1 month. This suggests a high diversity of pollution sources (agricultural, industrial, etc) as well as point and diffuse pollution sources were captured in the sample size. Such variety in the source of E. coli can account for different GUS activities/culturable cell and different ratios of viable but not culturable to viable culturable bacteria. A previously developed protocol for the recovery and detection of E. coli was coupled with a miniaturised fluorometer (ColiSense) and the system was assessed for the rapid detection FIB in freshwater samples. Further work will be carried out to evaluate the system’s performance on seawater samples.

Keywords: faecal pollution, β-glucuronidase (GUS), bathing water, E. coli

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Authors: M. Macchiaroli, V. Pellecchia, L. Dolores

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The water supply for production users (craft, commercial, industrial), understood as the set of water supply and wastewater collection services becomes an increasingly felt problem in a water scarcity regime. In fact, disputes are triggered between the different social parties for the fair and efficient use of water resources. Within this aspect, the problem arises of the different pricing of services between civil users and production users. Of particular interest is the question of defining the tariff classes depending on consumption levels. If for civil users, this theme is strongly permeated by social profiles (a topic dealt with by the author in a forthcoming research contribution) connected with the inalienability of the right to have water and with the reconciliation of the needs of the weakest groups of the population, for consumers in the production sector the logic adopted by the manager may be inspired by criteria of greater corporate rationality. This work illustrates the Italian regulatory framework and shows an optimization model of tariff classes in the production sector that reconciles the public objective of sustainable use of the resource and the needs of a production system in search of recovery after the depressing effects caused by COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: decision making, economic evaluation, urban water management, water tariff

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Authors: Shahid-ul-Islam, Faqeer Mohammad

Abstract:

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of annatto, teak and flame of the forest natural dyes on color, fastness, and antimicrobial property of protein based textile substrate. The color strength (K/S) of wool samples at various concentrations of dyes were analysed using a Reflective Spectrophotometer. The antimicrobial activity of natural dyes before and after application on wool was tested against common human pathogens Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Candida albicans, by using micro-broth dilution method, disc diffusion assay and growth curve studies. The structural morphology of natural protein fibre (wool) was investigated by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Annatto and teak natural dyes proved very effective in inhibiting the microbial growth in solution phase and after application on wool and resulted in a broad beautiful spectrum of colors with exceptional fastness properties. The results encourage the search and exploitation of new plant species as source of dyes to replace toxic synthetic antimicrobial agents currently used in textile industry.

Keywords: annatto, antimicrobial agents, natural dyes, green textiles

Procedia PDF Downloads 318

Authors: Diana Codat

Abstract:

Tweets' analysis is part of text mining. Each document is a written text. It's possible to apply the usual text search techniques, in particular by switching to the bag-of-words representation. But the tweets induce peculiarities. Some may enrich the analysis. Thus, their length is calibrated (at least as far as public messages are concerned), special characters make it possible to identify authors (@) and themes (#), the tweet and retweet mechanisms make it possible to follow the diffusion of the information. Conversely, other characteristics may disrupt the analyzes. Because space is limited, authors often use abbreviations, emoticons to express feelings, and they do not pay much attention to spelling. All this creates noise that can complicate the task. The tweets carry a lot of potentially interesting information. Their exploitation is one of the main axes of the analysis of the social networks. We show how to access Twitter-related messages. We will initiate a study of the properties of the tweets, and we will follow up on the exploitation of the content of the messages. We will work under R with the package 'twitteR'. The study of tweets is a strong focus of analysis of social networks because Twitter has become an important vector of communication. This example shows that it is easy to initiate an analysis from data extracted directly online. The data preparation phase is of great importance.

Keywords: data mining, language R, social networks, Twitter

Procedia PDF Downloads 184

Authors: J. Andrade-Garda, A. Anguera, J. Ares-Casal, M. Hidalgo-Lorenzo, J.-A. Lara, D. Lizcano, S. Suárez-Garaboa

Abstract:

In the current constantly changing economic context, collaborative networks allow partners to undertake projects that would not be possible if attempted by them individually. These projects usually involve the performance of a group of tasks (named roles) that have to be distributed among the partners. Thus, an allocation/matching problem arises that will be referred to as Role-Partner Allocation problem. In real life this situation is addressed by negotiation between partners in order to reach ad hoc agreements. Besides taking a long time and being hard work, both historical evidence and economic analysis show that such approach is not recommended. Instead, the allocation process should be automated by means of a centralized matching scheme. However, as a preliminary step to start the search for such a matching mechanism (or even the development of a new one), the problem and its core components must be specified. To this end, this paper establishes (i) the definition of the problem and its constraints, (ii) the key features of the involved elements (i.e., roles and partners); and (iii) how to create preference lists both for roles and partners. Only this way it will be possible to conduct subsequent methodological research on the solution method.     

Keywords: collaborative network, matching, partner, preference list, role

Procedia PDF Downloads 235

Authors: Qiang Zhang, Chun Yuan

Abstract:

Since the PU (Prediction Unit) decision process is the most time consuming part of the emerging HEVC (High Efficient Video Coding) standardin intra and inter frame coding, this paper proposes the fast PU decision algorithm and speed up the algorithm using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). In intra frame coding, the fast PU decision algorithm uses the texture features to skip intra-frame prediction or terminal the intra-frame prediction for smaller PU size. In inter frame coding of HEVC, the fast PU decision algorithm takes use of the similarity of its own two Nx2N size PU's motion vectors and the hierarchical structure of CU (Coding Unit) partition to skip some modes of PU partition, so as to reduce the motion estimation times. The accelerate algorithm using CUDA is based on the fast PU decision algorithm which uses the GPU to make the motion search and the gradient computation could be parallel computed. The proposed algorithm achieves up to 57% time saving compared to the HM 10.0 with little rate-distortion losses (0.043dB drop and 1.82% bitrate increase on average).

Keywords: HEVC, PU decision, inter prediction, intra prediction, CUDA, parallel

Procedia PDF Downloads 399

Authors: Harriet Nalubega, Eddie Mwebesa

Abstract:

In Uganda, over 90% of people use herbal remedies. Herbal medicine use has been associated with delayed clinical appointments, presentation with advanced cancers, financial constraints, and misdiagnosis. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of herbal medicine use and practices amongst cancer patients receiving Palliative Care at Mobile Hospice Mbarara (MHM) and the associated challenges. This was a mixed-methods prospective study conducted in 2022 at MHM, where patients were interviewed, and a questionnaire was completed. 87% of the patients had used herbal medicine. Of these, 83% were female, and 59% had not received formal education. 27% of patients had used herbal remedies for a year or more. 51% of patients who were consuming herbs stopped using them after starting palliative care treatment. Motivations for herbal medicine use were in the hope for a cure in 59%, for pain relief in 30%, and peer influence in 10%. There is a high prevalence of herbal medicine use in Palliative Care. Female gender and lack of formal education were disproportionately associated with herbal remedy use. Most patients consume herbal remedies in search of a cure or to relieve severe pain. Education of cancer patients about herbal remedy use may improve treatment outcomes in Palliative Care.

Keywords: prevalence, herbal medicine, cancer patients, palliative care

Procedia PDF Downloads 135