Search results for: star network

Authors: M. Sarraf, J. E. Moros, M. C. Sánchez

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Oleogels are self-standing systems that are able to trap edible liquid oil into a tridimensional network and also help to use less fat by forming crystallization oleogelators. There are different ways to generate oleogelation and oil structuring, including direct dispersion, structured biphasic systems, oil sorption, and indirect method (emulsion-template). The selection of processing conditions as well as the composition of the oleogels is essential to obtain a stable oleogel with characteristics suitable for its purpose. In this sense, one of the ingredients widely used in food products to produce oleogels and emulsions is polysaccharides. Basil seed gum (BSG), with the scientific name Ocimum basilicum, is a new native polysaccharide with high viscosity and pseudoplastic behavior because of its high molecular weight in the food industry. Also, proteins can stabilize oil in water due to the presence of amino and carboxyl moieties that result in surface activity. Whey proteins are widely used in the food industry due to available, cheap ingredients, nutritional and functional characteristics such as emulsifier and a gelling agent, thickening, and water-binding capacity. In general, the interaction of protein and polysaccharides has a significant effect on the food structures and their stability, like the texture of dairy products, by controlling the interactions in macromolecular systems. Using edible oleogels as oil structuring helps for targeted delivery of a component trapped in a structural network. Therefore, the development of efficient oleogel is essential in the food industry. A complete understanding of the important points, such as the ratio oil phase, processing conditions, and concentrations of biopolymers that affect the formation and stability of the emulsion, can result in crucial information in the production of a suitable oleogel. In this research, the effects of oil concentration and pressure used in the manufacture of the emulsion prior to obtaining the oleogel have been evaluated through the analysis of droplet size and rheological properties of obtained emulsions and oleogels. The results show that the emulsion prepared in the high-pressure homogenizer (HPH) at higher pressure values has smaller droplet sizes and a higher uniformity in the size distribution curve. On the other hand, in relation to the rheological characteristics of the emulsions and oleogels obtained, the predominantly elastic character of the systems must be noted, as they present values of the storage modulus higher than those of losses, also showing an important plateau zone, typical of structured systems. In the same way, if steady-state viscous flow tests have been analyzed on both emulsions and oleogels, the result is that, once again, the pressure used in the homogenizer is an important factor for obtaining emulsions with adequate droplet size and the subsequent oleogel. Thus, various routes for trapping oil inside a biopolymer matrix with adjustable mechanical properties could be applied for the creation of the three-dimensional network in order to the oil absorption and creating oleogel.

Keywords: basil seed gum, particle size, viscoelastic properties, whey protein

Procedia PDF Downloads 40

Authors: Naima Bouslah, Leila Bounabi, Farid Ouazib, Nabila Haddadine

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Conventional release dosage forms are known to provide an immediate release of the drug. Controlling the rate of drug release from polymeric matrices is very important for a number of applications, particularly in the pharmaceutical area. Hydrogels are polymers in three-dimensional network arrangement, which can absorb and retain large amounts of water without dissolution. They have been frequently used to develop controlled released formulations for oral administration because they can extend the duration of drug release and thus reduce dose to be administrated improving patient compliance. Tramadol is an opioid pain medication used to treat moderate to moderately severe pain. When taken as an immediate-release oral formulation, the onset of pain relief usually occurs within about an hour. In the present work, we synthesized pH-responsive hydrogels of (hydroxyl ethyl methacrylate-co-acrylic acid), (HEMA-AA) for control drug delivery of tramadol in the gastro-intestinal tractus. The hydrogels with different acrylic acid content, were synthesized by free radical polymerization and characterized by FTIR spectroscopy, X ray diffraction analysis (XRD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA). FTIR spectroscopy has shown specific hydrogen bonding interactions between the carbonyl groups of the hydrogels and hydroxyl groups of tramadol. Both the XRD and DSC studies revealed that the introduction of tramadol in the hydrogel network induced the amorphization of the drug. The swelling behaviour, absorptive kinetics and the release kinetics of tramadol in simulated gastric fluid (pH 1.2) and in simulated intestinal fluid (pH 7.4) were also investigated. The hydrogels exhibited pH-responsive behavior in the swelling study. The (HEMA-AA) hydrogel swelling was much higher in pH =7.4 medium. The tramadol release was significantly increased when pH of the medium was changed from simulated gastric fluid (pH 1.2) to simulated intestinal fluid (pH 7.4). Using suitable mathematical models, the apparent diffusional coefficients and the corresponding kinetic parameters have been calculated.

Keywords: biopolymres, drug delivery, hydrogels, tramadol

Procedia PDF Downloads 332

Authors: Yunbin Deng

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Most existing applications of automatic speech recognition relies on cooperative subjects at a short distance to a microphone. Standoff speech recognition using microphone arrays can extend the subject to sensor distance somewhat, but it is still limited to only a few feet. As such, most deployed applications of standoff speech recognitions are limited to indoor use at short range. Moreover, these applications require air passway between the subject and the sensor to achieve reasonable signal to noise ratio. This study reports long range (50 feet) automatic speech recognition experiments using a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) sensor. This study shows that the LDV sensor modality can extend the speech acquisition standoff distance far beyond microphone arrays to hundreds of feet. In addition, LDV enables 'listening' through the windows for uncooperative subjects. This enables new capabilities in automatic audio and speech intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) for law enforcement, homeland security and counter terrorism applications. The Polytec LDV model OFV-505 is used in this study. To investigate the impact of different vibrating materials, five parallel LDV speech corpora, each consisting of 630 speakers, are collected from the vibrations of a glass window, a metal plate, a plastic box, a wood slate, and a concrete wall. These are the common materials the application could encounter in a daily life. These data were compared with the microphone counterpart to manifest the impact of various materials on the spectrum of the LDV speech signal. State of the art deep neural network modeling approaches is used to conduct continuous speaker independent speech recognition on these LDV speech datasets. Preliminary phoneme recognition results using time-delay neural network, bi-directional long short term memory, and model fusion shows great promise of using LDV for long range speech recognition. To author’s best knowledge, this is the first time an LDV is reported for long distance speech recognition application.

Keywords: covert speech acquisition, distant speech recognition, DSR, laser Doppler vibrometer, LDV, speech intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, ISR

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Authors: Sumana Kumar, Abha Misra

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Micro-supercapacitors hold great attention as one of the promising energy storage devices satisfying the increasing quest for miniaturized and portable devices. Despite having impressive power density, superior cyclic lifetime, and high charge-discharge rates, micro-supercapacitors still suffer from low energy density, which limits their practical application. The energy density (E=1/2CV²) can be increased either by increasing specific capacitance (C) or voltage range (V). Asymmetric micro-supercapacitors have attracted great attention by using two different electrode materials to expand the voltage window and thus increase the energy density. Currently, versatile fabrication technologies such as inkjet printing, lithography, laser scribing, etc., are used to directly or indirectly pattern the electrode material; these techniques still suffer from scalable production and cost inefficiency. Here, we demonstrate the scalable production of a three-dimensional (3D) carbon foam (CF) based asymmetric micro-supercapacitor by spray printing technique on an array of interdigital electrodes. The solid-state asymmetric micro-supercapacitor comprised of CF-MnO positive electrode and CF-Fe₂O₃ negative electrode achieves a high areal capacitance of 18.4 mF/cm² (2326.8 mF/cm³) at 5 mV/s and a wider potential window of 1.4 V. Consequently, a superior energy density of 5 µWh/cm² is obtained, and high cyclic stability is confirmed with retention of the initial capacitance by 86.1% after 10000 electrochemical cycles. The optimized decoration of pseudocapacitive metal oxides in the 3D carbon network helps in high electrochemical utilization of materials where the 3D interconnected network of carbon provides overall electrical conductivity and structural integrity. The research provides a simple and scalable spray printing method to fabricate an asymmetric micro-supercapacitor using a custom-made mask that can be integrated on a large scale.

Keywords: asymmetric micro-supercapacitors, high energy-density, hybrid materials, three-dimensional carbon-foam

Procedia PDF Downloads 84

Authors: Semachew M. Kassa, Africa M Geremew, Tezera F. Azmatch, Nandyala Darga Kumar

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Frequency ratio (FR) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods are developed based on past landslide failure points to identify the landslide susceptibility mapping because landslides can seriously harm both the environment and society. However, it is still difficult to select the most efficient method and correctly identify the main driving factors for particular regions. In this study, we used fourteen landslide conditioning factors (LCFs) and five soft computing algorithms, including Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Naïve Bayes (NB), to predict the landslide susceptibility at 12.5 m spatial scale. The performance of the RF (F1-score: 0.88, AUC: 0.94), ANN (F1-score: 0.85, AUC: 0.92), and SVM (F1-score: 0.82, AUC: 0.86) methods was significantly better than the LR (F1-score: 0.75, AUC: 0.76) and NB (F1-score: 0.73, AUC: 0.75) method, according to the classification results based on inventory landslide points. The findings also showed that around 35% of the study region was made up of places with high and very high landslide risk (susceptibility greater than 0.5). The very high-risk locations were primarily found in the western and southeastern regions, and all five models showed good agreement and similar geographic distribution patterns in landslide susceptibility. The towns with the highest landslide risk include Amhara Saint Town's western part, the Northern part, and St. Gebreal Church villages, with mean susceptibility values greater than 0.5. However, rainfall, distance to road, and slope were typically among the top leading factors for most villages. The primary contributing factors to landslide vulnerability were slightly varied for the five models. Decision-makers and policy planners can use the information from our study to make informed decisions and establish policies. It also suggests that various places should take different safeguards to reduce or prevent serious damage from landslide events.

Keywords: artificial neural network, logistic regression, landslide susceptibility, naïve Bayes, random forest, support vector machine

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Authors: Nurudeen Ayeni, Kasali Bello, Ovi Abayeh

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Study of the effect of dye–resin complexation on the degree of dye absorption were carried out using Procion Blue MX-R to dye cotton fabric in the presence hexamethylol melamine (MR 6) and its phosphate derivative (MPR 4) for resination. The highest degree of dye exhaustion was obtained at 400 C for 1 hour with the resinated fabric showing more affinity for the dye than the ordinary fiber. Improved fastness properties was recorded which show a relatively higher stability of dye–resin–cellulose network formed.

Keywords: cotton fabric, reactive dye, dyeing, resination

Procedia PDF Downloads 380

Authors: R. Ghasemi, M. R. Rahimi Khoygani

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This paper proposes the designing direct adaptive neural controller to apply for a class of a nonlinear pendulum dynamic system. The radial basis function (RBF) neural adaptive controller is robust in presence of external and internal uncertainties. Both the effectiveness of the controller and robustness against disturbances are importance of this paper. The simulation results show the promising performance of the proposed controller.

Keywords: adaptive neural controller, nonlinear dynamical, neural network, RBF, driven pendulum, position control

Procedia PDF Downloads 452

Authors: Sascha Kraus, Wolfgang Hora, Philipp Stieg, Thomas Niemand, Ferdinand Thies, Matthias Filser

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In most countries, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are the backbone of the economy due to their impact on job creation, innovation and wealth creation. Moreover, the ongoing globalization makes it inevitable – even for SME that traditionally focused on their domestic markets – to internationalize their business activities to realize further growth and survive in international markets. Thus, internationalization has become one of the most common growth strategies for SME and has received increasing scholarly attention over the last two decades. One the downside internationalization can be also regarded as the most complex strategy that a firm can undertake. Particularly for family firms, that are often characterized by limited financial capital, a risk-averse nature and limited growth aspirations, it could be argued that family firms are more likely to face greater challenges when taking the pathway to internationalization. Especially the triangulation of family, ownership, and management (so-called ‘familiness’) manifests in a unique behavior and decision-making process which is often characterized by the importance given to noneconomic goals and distinguishes a family firm from other businesses. Taking this into account, the concept of socio-emotional wealth (SEW) has been evolved to describe the behavior of family firms. In order to investigate how different internal and external firm characteristics shape internationalization success of family firms, we drew on a sample consisting of 297 small and medium-sized family firms from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Thus, we include SEW as essential family firm characteristic and added the two major intra-organizational characteristics, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), absorptive capacity (AC) as well as collaboration intensity (CI) and relational knowledge (RK) as two major external network characteristics. Based on previous research we assume that these characteristics are important to explain internationalization success of family firm SME. Regarding the data analysis, we applied a Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), an approach that allows identifying configurations of firm characteristics, specifically used to study complex causal relationships where traditional regression techniques reach their limits. Results indicate that several combinations of these family firm characteristics can lead to international success, with no permanently required key characteristic. Instead, there are many roads to walk down for family firms to achieve internationalization success. Consequently, our data states that family owned SME are heterogeneous and internationalization is a complex and dynamic process. Results further show that network related characteristics occur in all sets, thus represent an essential element in the internationalization process of family owned SME. The contribution of our study is twofold, as we investigate different forms of international expansion for family firms and how to improve them. First, we are able to broaden the understanding of the intersection between family firm and SME internationalization with respect to major intra-organizational and network-related variables. Second, from a practical perspective, we offer family firm owners a basis for setting up internal capabilities to achieve international success.

Keywords: entrepreneurial orientation, family firm, fsQCA, internationalization, socio-emotional wealth

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Authors: Carole Salis, Marie F. Wilson, Fabrizio Murgia, Cristian Lai, Franco Atzori, Giulia M. Orrù

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ANDASA is a knowledge management platform for the capitalization of knowledge and cultural assets for the artistic and cultural sectors. It was built based on the priorities expressed by the participating artists. Through mapping artistic activities and specificities, it enables to highlight various aspects of the artistic research and production. Such instrument will contribute to create networks and partnerships, as it enables to evidentiate who does what, in what field, using which methodology. The platform is accessible to network participants and to the general public.

Keywords: cultural promotion, knowledge representation, cultural maping, ICT

Procedia PDF Downloads 386

Authors: Bruno RamaëL, GwenaëL Page, Catherine Knopf-Lenoir, Olivier Baledent, Anne-Virginie Salsac

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No routine technique currently exists for clinicians to measure the mechanical properties of vascular walls non-invasively. Most of the data available in the literature come from traction or dilatation tests conducted ex vivo on native blood vessels. The objective of the study is to develop a non-invasive characterization technique based on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) measurements of the deformation of vascular walls under pulsating blood flow conditions. The goal is to determine the mechanical properties of the vessels by inverse analysis, coupling imaging measurements and numerical simulations of the fluid-structure interactions. The hyperelastic properties are identified using Solidworks and Ansys workbench (ANSYS Inc.) solving an optimization technique. The vessel of interest targeted in the study is the common carotid artery. In vivo MRI measurements of the vessel anatomy and inlet velocity profiles was acquired along the facial vascular network on a cohort of 30 healthy volunteers: - The time-evolution of the blood vessel contours and, thus, of the cross-section surface area was measured by 3D imaging angiography sequences of phase-contrast MRI. - The blood flow velocity was measured using a 2D CINE MRI phase contrast (PC-MRI) method. Reference arterial pressure waveforms were simultaneously measured in the brachial artery using a sphygmomanometer. The three-dimensional (3D) geometry of the arterial network was reconstructed by first creating an STL file from the raw MRI data using the open source imaging software ITK-SNAP. The resulting geometry was then transformed with Solidworks into volumes that are compatible with Ansys softwares. Tetrahedral meshes of the wall and fluid domains were built using the ANSYS Meshing software, with a near-wall mesh refinement method in the case of the fluid domain to improve the accuracy of the fluid flow calculations. Ansys Structural was used for the numerical simulation of the vessel deformation and Ansys CFX for the simulation of the blood flow. The fluid structure interaction simulations showed that the systolic and diastolic blood pressures of the common carotid artery could be taken as reference pressures to identify the mechanical properties of the different arteries of the network. The coefficients of the hyperelastic law were identified using Ansys Design model for the common carotid. Under large deformations, a stiffness of 800 kPa is measured, which is of the same order of magnitude as the Young modulus of collagen fibers. Areas of maximum deformations were highlighted near bifurcations. This study is a first step towards patient-specific characterization of the mechanical properties of the facial vessels. The method is currently applied on patients suffering from facial vascular malformations and on patients scheduled for facial reconstruction. Information on the blood flow velocity as well as on the vessel anatomy and deformability will be key to improve surgical planning in the case of such vascular pathologies.

Keywords: identification, mechanical properties, arterial walls, MRI measurements, numerical simulations

Procedia PDF Downloads 289

Authors: Joy Cao, Min Zhou

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Purpose: Acute Type A aortic dissection is a well-known cause of extremely high mortality rate. A highly accurate and cost-effective non-invasive predictor is critically needed so that the patient can be treated at earlier stage. Although various CFD approaches have been tried to establish some prediction frameworks, they are sensitive to uncertainty in both image segmentation and boundary conditions. Tedious pre-processing and demanding calibration procedures requirement further compound the issue, thus hampering their clinical applicability. Using the latest physics informed deep learning methods to establish an accurate and cost-effective predictor framework are amongst the main goals for a better Type A aortic dissection treatment. Methods: Via training a novel physics-informed deep residual network, with non-invasive 4D MRI displacement vectors as inputs, the trained model can cost-effectively calculate all these biomarkers: aortic blood pressure, WSS, and OSI, which are used to predict potential type A aortic dissection to avoid the high mortality events down the road. Results: The proposed deep learning method has been successfully trained and tested with both synthetic 3D aneurysm dataset and a clinical dataset in the aortic dissection context using Google colab environment. In both cases, the model has generated aortic blood pressure, WSS, and OSI results matching the expected patient’s health status. Conclusion: The proposed novel physics-informed deep residual network shows great potential to create a cost-effective, non-invasive predictor framework. Additional physics-based de-noising algorithm will be added to make the model more robust to clinical data noises. Further studies will be conducted in collaboration with big institutions such as Cleveland Clinic with more clinical samples to further improve the model’s clinical applicability.

Keywords: type-a aortic dissection, deep residual networks, blood flow modeling, data-driven modeling, non-invasive diagnostics, deep learning, artificial intelligence.

Procedia PDF Downloads 56

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

Procedia PDF Downloads 90

Authors: Laura N. Bolivar T.

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The tourism importance for regional development is mainly highlighted by the collaborative, cooperating and competitive relationships of the involved agents. The fostering of associativity processes, in particular, the cluster approach emphasizes the beneficial outcomes from the concentration of enterprises, where innovation and entrepreneurship flourish and shape the dynamics for tourism empowerment. Considering the department of Huila, it is located in the south-west of Colombia and holds the biggest coffee production in the country, although it barely contributes to the national GDP. Hence, its economic development strategy is looking for more dynamism and Huila could be consolidated as a leading destination for cultural, ecological and heritage tourism, if at least the public policy making processes for the tourism management of La Tatacoa Desert, San Agustin Park and Bambuco’s National Festival, were implemented in a more efficient manner. In this order of ideas, this study attempts to address the potential restrictions and beneficial factors for the consolidation of the tourism sector of Huila-Colombia as a cluster and how could it impact its regional development. Therefore, a set of theoretical frameworks such as the Tourism Routes Approach, the Tourism Breeding Environment, the Community-based Tourism Method, among others, but also a collection of international experiences describing tourism clustering processes and most outstanding problematics, is analyzed to draw up learning points, structure of proceedings and success-driven factors to be contrasted with the local characteristics in Huila, as the region under study. This characterization involves primary and secondary information collection methods and comprises the South American and Colombian context together with the identification of involved actors and their roles, main interactions among them, major tourism products and their infrastructure, the visitors’ perspective on the situation and a recap of the related needs and benefits regarding the host community. Considering the umbrella concepts, the theoretical and the empirical approaches, and their comparison with the local specificities of the tourism sector in Huila, an array of shortcomings is analytically constructed and a series of guidelines are proposed as a way to overcome them and simultaneously, raise economic development and positively impact Huila’s well-being. This non-exhaustive bundle of guidelines is focused on fostering cooperating linkages in the actors’ network, dealing with Information and Communication Technologies’ innovations, reinforcing the supporting infrastructure, promoting the destinations considering the less known places as well, designing an information system enabling the tourism network to assess the situation based on reliable data, increasing competitiveness, developing participative public policy-making processes and empowering the host community about the touristic richness. According to this, cluster dynamics would drive the tourism sector to meet articulation and joint effort, then involved agents and local particularities would be adequately assisted to cope with the current changing environment of globalization and competition.

Keywords: innovative strategy, local development, network of tourism actors, tourism cluster

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Authors: D. Serero, L. Couton, J. D. Parisse, R. Leroy

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In urban planning, an increasing number of cities require wind analysis to verify comfort of public spaces and around buildings. These studies are made using computer fluid dynamic simulation (CFD). However, this technique is often based on wind information taken from meteorological stations located at several kilometers of the spot of analysis. The approximated input data on project surroundings produces unprecise results for this type of analysis. They can only be used to get general behavior of wind in a zone but not to evaluate precise wind speed. This paper presents another approach to this problem, based on collecting wind data and generating an urban wind cartography using connected ultrasound anemometers. They are wireless devices that send immediate data on wind to a remote server. Assembled in array, these devices generate geo-localized data on wind such as speed, temperature, pressure and allow us to compare wind behavior on a specific site or building. These Netatmo-type anemometers communicate by wifi with central equipment, which shares data acquired by a wide variety of devices such as wind speed, indoor and outdoor temperature, rainfall, and sunshine. Beside its precision, this method extracts geo-localized data on any type of site that can be feedback looped in the architectural design of a building or a public place. Furthermore, this method allows a precise calibration of a virtual wind tunnel using numerical aeraulic simulations (like STAR CCM + software) and then to develop the complete volumetric model of wind behavior over a roof area or an entire city block. The paper showcases connected ultrasonic anemometers, which were implanted for an 18 months survey on four study sites in the Grand Paris region. This case study focuses on Paris as an urban environment with multiple historical layers whose diversity of typology and buildings allows considering different ways of capturing wind energy. The objective of this approach is to categorize the different types of wind in urban areas. This, particularly the identification of the minimum and maximum wind spectrum, helps define the choice and performance of wind energy capturing devices that could be implanted there. The localization on the roof of a building, the type of wind, the altimetry of the device in relation to the levels of the roofs, the potential nuisances generated. The method allows identifying the characteristics of wind turbines in order to maximize their performance in an urban site with turbulent wind.

Keywords: computer fluid dynamic simulation in urban environment, wind energy harvesting devices, net-zero energy building, urban wind behavior simulation, advanced building skin design methodology

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Authors: Diego De Almeida Pereira, Diana Borchenko

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Artificial neural networks are used for many applications as they are able to learn complex nonlinear relationships between input and output data. As the number of neurons and layers in a neural network increases, it is possible to represent more complex behaviors. The present study proposes that artificial neural networks are a valuable tool for architecture and engineering professionals concerned with understanding how buildings influence human and social well-being based on theories of environmental psychology.

Keywords: environmental psychology, architecture, neural networks, human and social well-being

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Authors: Sarah Reker, Christiane H. Kellner

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From the perspective of people with disabilities, inequalities can also emerge from spatial segregation, the lack of social contacts or limited economic resources. In order to reduce or even eliminate these disadvantages and increase general well-being, community-based participation as well as decentralisation efforts within exclusively residential homes is essential. Therefore, the new research project “Index for participation development and quality of life for persons with disabilities”(TeLe-Index, 2014-2016), which is anchored at the Technische Universität München in Munich and at a large residential complex and service provider for persons with disabilities in the outskirts of Munich aims to assist the development of community-based living environments. People with disabilities should be able to participate in social life beyond the confines of the institution. Since a diverse society is a society in which different individual needs and wishes can emerge and be catered to, the ultimate goal of the project is to create an environment for all citizens–regardless of disability, age or ethnic background–that accommodates their daily activities and requirements. The UN-Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Germany also ratified, postulates the necessity of user-centered design, especially when it comes to evaluating the individual needs and wishes of all citizens. Therefore, a multidimensional approach is required. Based on this insight, the structure of the town-like center will be remodeled to open up the community to all people. This strategy should lead to more equal opportunities and open the way for a much more diverse community. Therefore, macro-level research questions were inspired by quality of life theory and were formulated as follows for different dimensions: •The user dimension: what needs and necessities can we identify? Are needs person-related? Are there any options to choose from? What type of quality of life can we identify? The economic dimension: what resources (both material and staff-related) are available in the region? (How) are they used? What costs (can) arise and what effects do they entail? •The environment dimension: what “environmental factors” such as access (mobility and absence of barriers) prove beneficial or impedimental? In this context, we have provided academic supervision and support for three projects (the construction of a new school, inclusive housing for children and teenagers with disabilities and the professionalization of employees with person-centered thinking). Since we cannot present all the issues of the umbrella-project within the conference framework, we will be focusing on one project more in-depth, namely “Outpatient Housing Options for Children and Teenagers with Disabilities”. The insights we have obtained until now will enable us to present the intermediary results of our evaluation. The most central questions pertaining to this part of the research were the following: •How have the existing network relations been designed? •What meaning (or significance) does the existing service offers and structures have for the everyday life of an external residential group? These issues underpinned the environmental analyses as well as the qualitative guided interviews and qualitative network analyses we carried out.

Keywords: decentralisation, environmental analyses, outpatient housing options for children and teenagers with disabilities, qualitative network analyses

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Authors: Julius Y Asamoah

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Mobile money has seen faster adoption in the decade. Its emergence serves as an essential driver of financial inclusion and an innovative financial service delivery channel, especially to the unbanked population. The rising importance of mobile money services has caught policymakers and regulators' attention, seeking to understand the many issues emerging from this context. At the same time, it is unlocking the potential of knowledge of this new technology. Regulatory responses and support are essential, requiring significant changes to current regulatory practices in Ghana. The article aims to answer the following research questions: "What risk does an unregulated mobile money service pose to consumers and the financial system? "What factors stimulate and hinder the introduction of mobile payments in developing countries? The sample size used was 250 respondents selected from the study area. The study has adopted an analytical approach comprising a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. Actor-network theory (ANT) is used as an interpretive lens to analyse this process. ANT helps analyse how actors form alliances and enrol other actors, including non-human actors (i.e. technology), to secure their interests. The study revealed that government regulatory policies impact mobile money as critical to mobile money services in developing countries. Regulatory environment should balance the needs of advancing access to finance with the financial system's stability and draw extensively from Kenya's work as the best strategies for the system's players. Thus, regulators need to address issues related to the enhancement of supportive regulatory frameworks. It recommended that the government involve various stakeholders, such as mobile phone operators. Moreover, the national regulatory authority creates a regulatory environment that promotes fair practices and competition to raise revenues to support a business-enabling environment's key pillars as infrastructure.

Keywords: actor-network theory (ANT), cashless future, Developing countries, Ghana, Mobile Money

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Authors: Enrique Barra, Aldo Gordillo, Juan Quemada

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This paper presents the Virtual Science Hub platform. It is an open source platform that combines a social network, an e-learning authoring tool, a video conference service and a learning object repository for science teaching enrichment. These four main functionalities fit very well together. The platform was released in April 2012 and since then it has not stopped growing. Finally we present the results of the surveys conducted and the statistics gathered to validate this approach.

Keywords: e-learning, platform, authoring tool, science teaching, educational sciences

Procedia PDF Downloads 362

Authors: Ademola Ibukunolu Atanda

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Research undertakings are meant to proffer solutions to issues and challenges in society. This justifies the need for research in ivory towers. Multinational and non-governmental organisations, as well as foundations, commit financial resources to support research endeavours. In recent times, the direction and dimension of research undertaking encourage collaborations, whereby experts from different disciplines or specializations would bring their expertise in addressing any identified problem, whether in humanities or sciences. However, the extent to which collaborative research undertakings are perceived and embraced by academic staff would determine the impact collaborative research would have on society. To this end, this study investigated academic staff’s perception and willingness to be involved in collaborative research for the purpose of proffering solutions to societal problems. The study adopted a descriptive research design. The population comprised academic staff in southern Nigeria. The sample was drawn through a convenient sampling technique. The data were collected using a questionnaire titled “Perception and Willingness to Participate in Collaborative Research Questionnaire (PWPCRQ)’ using Google Forms. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics of simple percentages, mean and charts. The findings showed that Academic Staff’s readiness to participate in collaborative research is to a great extent (89%) and they participate in collaborative research very often (51%). The Academic Staff was involved more in collaboration research among their colleagues within their universities (1.98) than participation in inter-disciplines collaboration (1.47) with their colleagues outside Nigeria. Collaborative research was perceived to impact on development (2.5). Collaborative research offers the following benefits to members’ aggregation of views, the building of an extensive network of contacts, enhancement of sharing of skills, facilitation of tackling complex problems, increased visibility of research network and citations and promotion of funding opportunities. The study concluded that Academic staff in universities in the South-West of Nigeria participate in collaborative research but with their colleagues within Nigeria rather than outside the country. Based on the findings, it was recommended that the management of universities in South-West Nigeria should encourage collaborative research with some incentives.

Keywords: collaboration, research, development, participation

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Authors: Chao Wang

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Under rapid innovation of information technology, the media plays a very important role in the dissemination of information, and it has a totally different analogy generations face. However, the involvement of narrative images provides more possibilities of narrative text. "Images" through the process of aperture, a camera shutter and developable photosensitive processes are manufactured, recorded and stamped on paper, displayed on a computer screen-concretely saved. They exist in different forms of files, data, or evidence as the ultimate looks of events. By the interface of media and network platforms and special visual field of the viewer, class body space exists and extends out as thin as sebum layer, extremely soft and delicate with real full tension. The physical space of sebum layer of confuses the fact that physical objects exist, needs to be established under a perceived consensus. As at the scene, the existing concepts and boundaries of physical perceptions are blurred. Sebum layer physical simulation shapes the “Topical-Similarity" immersing, leading the contemporary social practice communities, groups, network users with a kind of illusion without the presence, i.e. a non-real illusion. From the investigation and discussion of literatures, digital movies editing manufacture and produce the variability characteristics of time (for example, slices, rupture, set, and reset) are analyzed. Interactive eBook has an unique interaction in "Waiting-Greeting" and "Expectation-Response" that makes the operation of image narrative structure more interpretations functionally. The works of digital editing and interactive technology are combined and further analyze concept and results. After digitization of Interventional Imaging and interactive technology, real events exist linked and the media handing cannot be cut relationship through movies, interactive art, practical case discussion and analysis. Audience needs more rational thinking about images carried by the authenticity of the text.

Keywords: sebum layer, topical and similarity, interactive technology, image narrative

Procedia PDF Downloads 362

Authors: Zhao Gao, Eran Edirisinghe

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The production of an accurate sketch of a suspect based on a verbal description obtained from a witness is an essential task for most criminal investigations. The criminal investigation system employs specifically trained professional artists to manually draw a facial image of the suspect according to the descriptions of an eyewitness for subsequent identification. Within the advancement of Deep Learning, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have shown great promise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Additionally, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have also proven to be very effective in image generation. In this study, a trained GAN conditioned on textual features such as keywords automatically encoded from a verbal description of a human face using an RNN is used to generate photo-realistic facial images for criminal investigations. The intention of the proposed system is to map corresponding features into text generated from verbal descriptions. With this, it becomes possible to generate many reasonably accurate alternatives to which the witness can use to hopefully identify a suspect from. This reduces subjectivity in decision making both by the eyewitness and the artist while giving an opportunity for the witness to evaluate and reconsider decisions. Furthermore, the proposed approach benefits law enforcement agencies by reducing the time taken to physically draw each potential sketch, thus increasing response times and mitigating potentially malicious human intervention. With publically available 'CelebFaces Attributes Dataset' (CelebA) and additionally providing verbal description as training data, the proposed architecture is able to effectively produce facial structures from given text. Word Embeddings are learnt by applying the RNN architecture in order to perform semantic parsing, the output of which is fed into the GAN for synthesizing photo-realistic images. Rather than the grid search method, a metaheuristic search based on genetic algorithms is applied to evolve the network with the intent of achieving optimal hyperparameters in a fraction the time of a typical brute force approach. With the exception of the ‘CelebA’ training database, further novel test cases are supplied to the network for evaluation. Witness reports detailing criminals from Interpol or other law enforcement agencies are sampled on the network. Using the descriptions provided, samples are generated and compared with the ground truth images of a criminal in order to calculate the similarities. Two factors are used for performance evaluation: The Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). A high percentile output from this performance matrix should attribute to demonstrating the accuracy, in hope of proving that the proposed approach can be an effective tool for law enforcement agencies. The proposed approach to criminal facial image generation has potential to increase the ratio of criminal cases that can be ultimately resolved using eyewitness information gathering.

Keywords: RNN, GAN, NLP, facial composition, criminal investigation

Procedia PDF Downloads 136

Authors: Mehmet Karaata

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Given two distinct vertices (nodes) source s and target t of a graph G = (V, E), the two node-disjoint paths problem is to identify two node-disjoint paths between s ∈ V and t ∈ V . Two paths are node-disjoint if they have no common intermediate vertices. In this paper, we present an algorithm with O(m)-time complexity for finding two node-disjoint paths between s and t in arbitrary graphs where m is the number of edges. The proposed algorithm has a wide range of applications in ensuring reliability and security of sensor, mobile and fixed communication networks.

Keywords: disjoint paths, distributed systems, fault-tolerance, network routing, security

Procedia PDF Downloads 415

Authors: Shankaran Sitarama

Abstract:

Teamwork is an extremely effective pedagogical tool in engineering education. New Product Development (NPD) has been an effective strategy of companies to streamline and bring innovative products and solutions to customers. Thus, Engineering curriculum in many schools, some collaboratively with business schools, have brought NPD into the curriculum at the graduate level. Teamwork is invariably used during instruction, where students work in teams to come up with new products and solutions. There is a significant emphasis of grade on the semester long teamwork for it to be taken seriously by students. As the students work in teams and go through this process to develop the new product prototypes, their effectiveness and learning to a great extent depends on how they function as a team and go through the creative process, come together, and work towards the common goal. A core attribute of a successful NPD team is their creativity and innovation. The team needs to be creative as a group, generating a breadth of ideas and innovative solutions that solve or address the problem they are targeting and meet the user’s needs. They also need to be very efficient in their teamwork as they work through the various stages of the development of these ideas resulting in a POC (proof-of-concept) implementation or a prototype of the product. The simultaneous requirement of teams to be creative and at the same time also converge and work together imposes different types of tensions in their team interactions. These ideational tensions / conflicts and sometimes relational tensions / conflicts are inevitable. Effective teams will have to deal with the Team dynamics and manage it to be resilient enough and yet be creative. This research paper provides a computational analysis of the teams’ communication that is reflective of the team dynamics, and through a superimposition of latent semantic analysis with social network analysis, provides a computational methodology of arriving at patterns of visual interaction. These team interaction patterns have clear correlations to the team dynamics and provide insights into the functioning and thus the effectiveness of the teams. 23 student NPD teams over 2 years of a course on Managing NPD that has a blend of engineering and business school students is considered, and the results are presented. It is also correlated with the teams’ detailed and tailored individual and group feedback and self-reflection and evaluation questionnaire.

Keywords: team dynamics, social network analysis, team interaction patterns, new product development teamwork, NPD teams

Procedia PDF Downloads 85

Authors: Doaa El-Shereef

Abstract:

The Canaanite civilization was one of the early great civilizations of the Near East, they influenced and been influenced from the civilizations of the ancient world especially the Egyptian and Mesopotamia civilizations. The development of the Canaanite trade started from the Chalcolithic Age to the Iron Age through the oldest trade route in the Middle East. This paper will focus on defining the Canaanites and from where did they come from and the meaning of the term Canaan and how the Ancient Manuscripts define the borders of the land of Canaan and this essay will describe the Canaanite trade route and their exported goods such as cedar wood, and pottery.

Keywords: archaeology, bronze age, Canaanite, colonies, Massilia, pottery, shipwreck, vineyards

Procedia PDF Downloads 180

Authors: Suraj Mehrotra

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The stock market is a volatile, bustling marketplace that is a cornerstone of economics. It defines whether companies are successful or in spiral. A thorough understanding of it is important - many companies have whole divisions dedicated to analysis of both their stock and of rivaling companies. Linking the world of finance and artificial intelligence (AI), especially the stock market, has been a relatively recent development. Predicting how stocks will do considering all external factors and previous data has always been a human task. With the help of AI, however, machine learning models can help us make more complete predictions in financial trends. Taking a look at the stock market specifically, predicting the open, closing, high, and low prices for the next day is very hard to do. Machine learning makes this task a lot easier. A model that builds upon itself that takes in external factors as weights can predict trends far into the future. When used effectively, new doors can be opened up in the business and finance world, and companies can make better and more complete decisions. This paper explores the various techniques used in the prediction of stock prices, from traditional statistical methods to deep learning and neural networks based approaches, among other methods. It provides a detailed analysis of the techniques and also explores the challenges in predictive analysis. For the accuracy of the testing set, taking a look at four different models - linear regression, neural network, decision tree, and naïve Bayes - on the different stocks, Apple, Google, Tesla, Amazon, United Healthcare, Exxon Mobil, J.P. Morgan & Chase, and Johnson & Johnson, the naïve Bayes model and linear regression models worked best. For the testing set, the naïve Bayes model had the highest accuracy along with the linear regression model, followed by the neural network model and then the decision tree model. The training set had similar results except for the fact that the decision tree model was perfect with complete accuracy in its predictions, which makes sense. This means that the decision tree model likely overfitted the training set when used for the testing set.

Keywords: machine learning, testing set, artificial intelligence, stock analysis

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Authors: S. Adjiri-Bailiche, S. M. Boudia, H. Daaou, S. Hadouche, A. Benzaoui

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In this work the study of changes in the wind speed depending on the altitude is calculated and described by the model of the neural networks, the use of measured data, the speed and direction of wind, temperature and the humidity at 10 m are used as input data and as data targets at 50m above sea level. Comparing predict wind speeds and extrapolated at 50 m above sea level is performed. The results show that the prediction by the method of artificial neural networks is very accurate.

Keywords: MATLAB, neural network, power low, vertical extrapolation, wind energy, wind speed

Procedia PDF Downloads 651

Authors: Duncan Wallace, M-Tahar Kechadi

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In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) approaches have been successfully applied to an analysis of patient symptom data in the context of disease diagnosis, at least where such data is well codified. However, much of the data present in Electronic Health Records (EHR) are unlikely to prove suitable for classic ML approaches. Furthermore, as scores of data are widely spread across both hospitals and individuals, a decentralized, computationally scalable methodology is a priority. The focus of this paper is to develop a method to predict outliers in an out-of-hours healthcare provision center (OOHC). In particular, our research is based upon the early identification of patients who have underlying conditions which will cause them to repeatedly require medical attention. OOHC act as an ad-hoc delivery of triage and treatment, where interactions occur without recourse to a full medical history of the patient in question. Medical histories, relating to patients contacting an OOHC, may reside in several distinct EHR systems in multiple hospitals or surgeries, which are unavailable to the OOHC in question. As such, although a local solution is optimal for this problem, it follows that the data under investigation is incomplete, heterogeneous, and comprised mostly of noisy textual notes compiled during routine OOHC activities. Through the use of Deep Learning methodologies, the aim of this paper is to provide the means to identify patient cases, upon initial contact, which are likely to relate to such outliers. To this end, we compare the performance of Long Short-Term Memory, Gated Recurrent Units, and combinations of both with Convolutional Neural Networks. A further aim of this paper is to elucidate the discovery of such outliers by examining the exact terms which provide a strong indication of positive and negative case entries. While free-text is the principal data extracted from EHRs for classification, EHRs also contain normalized features. Although the specific demographical features treated within our corpus are relatively limited in scope, we examine whether it is beneficial to include such features among the inputs to our neural network, or whether these features are more successfully exploited in conjunction with a different form of a classifier. In this section, we compare the performance of randomly generated regression trees and support vector machines and determine the extent to which our classification program can be improved upon by using either of these machine learning approaches in conjunction with the output of our Recurrent Neural Network application. The output of our neural network is also used to help determine the most significant lexemes present within the corpus for determining high-risk patients. By combining the confidence of our classification program in relation to lexemes within true positive and true negative cases, with an inverse document frequency of the lexemes related to these cases, we can determine what features act as the primary indicators of frequent-attender and non-frequent-attender cases, providing a human interpretable appreciation of how our program classifies cases.

Keywords: artificial neural networks, data-mining, machine learning, medical informatics

Procedia PDF Downloads 102

Authors: Sandeep Mehmi, Harsh Verma, A. L. Sangal

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Ever since the idea of using computing services as commodity that can be delivered like other utilities e.g. electric and telephone has been floated, the scientific fraternity has diverted their research towards a new area called utility computing. New paradigms like cluster computing and grid computing came into existence while edging closer to utility computing. With the advent of internet the demand of anytime, anywhere access of the resources that could be provisioned dynamically as a service, gave rise to the next generation computing paradigm known as cloud computing. Today, cloud computing has become one of the most aggressively growing computer paradigm, resulting in growing rate of applications in area of IT outsourcing. Besides catering the computational and storage demands, cloud computing has economically benefitted almost all the fields, education, research, entertainment, medical, banking, military operations, weather forecasting, business and finance to name a few. Smart grid is another discipline that direly needs to be benefitted from the cloud computing advantages. Smart grid system is a new technology that has revolutionized the power sector by automating the transmission and distribution system and integration of smart devices. Cloud based smart grid can fulfill the storage requirement of unstructured and uncorrelated data generated by smart sensors as well as computational needs for self-healing, load balancing and demand response features. But, security issues such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability and privacy need to be resolved for the development of smart grid cloud. In recent years, a number of intrusion prevention techniques have been proposed in the cloud, but hackers/intruders still manage to bypass the security of the cloud. Therefore, precise intrusion detection systems need to be developed in order to secure the critical information infrastructure like smart grid cloud. Considering the success of artificial neural networks in building robust intrusion detection, this research proposes an artificial neural network based model for detecting attacks in smart grid cloud.

Keywords: artificial neural networks, cloud computing, intrusion detection systems, security issues, smart grid

Procedia PDF Downloads 293

Authors: Thulane Paepae, Tumisang Seodigeng

Abstract:

This paper demonstrates the use of a method of synthesizing process flowsheets using a graphical tool called the GH-plot and in particular, to look at how it can be used to compare the reactions of a combined simultaneous process with regard to their thermodynamics. The technique uses fundamental thermodynamic principles to allow the mass, energy and work balances locate the attainable region for chemical processes in a reactor. This provides guidance on what design decisions would be best suited to developing new processes that are more effective and make lower demands on raw material and energy usage.

Keywords: attainable regions, dimethyl ether, optimal reaction network, GH Space

Procedia PDF Downloads 214

Authors: Lawrence Williams

Abstract:

As the mechanism which converts domains to internet protocol (IP) addresses, Domain Name System (DNS) is an essential part of internet usage. It was not designed securely and can be subject to attacks. DNS attacks have become more frequent and sophisticated and the need for detecting and preventing them becomes more important for the modern network. DNS tunnelling attacks are one type of attack that are primarily used for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and data exfiltration. Discussion of different techniques to detect and prevent DNS tunneling attacks is done. The methods, models, experiments, and data for each technique are discussed. A proposal about feasibility is made. Future research on these topics is proposed.

Keywords: DNS, tunneling, exfiltration, botnet

Procedia PDF Downloads 39