Search results for: Spanish Regions

Authors: M. F. V. Montezuma, E. P. Deus, M. C. Carvalho

Abstract:

Wind turbines are equipment of great importance for generating clean energy in countries and regions with abundant winds. However, complex loadings fluctuations to which they are subject can cause premature failure of these equipment due to the material fatigue process. This work evaluates fatigue failures in small AISI 304 stainless steel turbine shafts. Fractographic analysis techniques, chemical analyzes using energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), and hardness tests were used to verify the origin of the failures, characterize the properties of the components and the material. The nucleation of cracks on the shafts' surface was observed due to a combined effect of variable stresses, geometric stress concentrating details, and surface wear, leading to the crack's propagation until the catastrophic failure. Beach marks were identified in the macrographic examination, characterizing the probable failure due to fatigue. The sensitization phenomenon was also observed.

Keywords: Fatigue, sensitization phenomenon, stainless steel shafts, wind turbine failure.

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Authors: B. Bagheri Nakhjavanlo, T. S. Ellis, P.Raoofi, Sh.ziari

Abstract:

This paper presents an application of level sets for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms in CTA datasets. An important challenge in reliably detecting aortic is the need to overcome problems associated with intensity inhomogeneities. Level sets are part of an important class of methods that utilize partial differential equations (PDEs) and have been extensively applied in image segmentation. A kernel function in the level set formulation aids the suppression of noise in the extracted regions of interest and then guides the motion of the evolving contour for the detection of weak boundaries. The speed of curve evolution has been significantly improved with a resulting decrease in segmentation time compared with previous implementations of level sets, and are shown to be more effective than other approaches in coping with intensity inhomogeneities. We have applied the Courant Friedrichs Levy (CFL) condition as stability criterion for our algorithm.

Keywords: Image segmentation, Level-sets, Local fitting binary, Thoracic aorta.

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Authors: Qingrong Liu, Tetsuo Hayashi, Yuji Ryu

Abstract:

In this paper, in order to investigate the effects of photovoltaic system introduction to detached houses in Japan, two kinds of works were done. Firstly, the hourly generation amount of a 4.2kW photovoltaic system were simulated in 46 cities to investigate the potential of the system in different regions in Japan using a simulation model of photovoltaic system. Secondly, based on the simulated electricity generation amount, the energy saving, the environmental and the economic effect of the photovoltaic system were examined from hourly to annual timescales, based upon calculations of typical electricity, heating, cooling and hot water supply load profiles for Japanese dwellings. The above analysis was carried out using a standard year-s hourly weather data for the different city provided by the Expanded AMeDAS Weather Data issued by AIJ (Architectural Institute of Japan).

Keywords: Photovoltaic system, Energy saving, Environmental effect, Japanese dwelling, Detached house.

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Authors: M. Guillard, M. Philippe, F. Laurent, J. Martinerie, J. P. Lachaux, G. Florence

Abstract:

One approach to assess neural networks underlying the cognitive processes is to study Electroencephalography (EEG). It is relevant to detect various mental states and characterize the physiological changes that help to discriminate two situations. That is why an EEG (amplitude, synchrony) classification procedure is described, validated. The two situations are "eyes closed" and "eyes opened" in order to study the "alpha blocking response" phenomenon in the occipital area. The good classification rate between the two situations is 92.1 % (SD = 3.5%) The spatial distribution of a part of amplitude features that helps to discriminate the two situations are located in the occipital regions that permit to validate the localization method. Moreover amplitude features in frontal areas, "short distant" synchrony in frontal areas and "long distant" synchrony between frontal and occipital area also help to discriminate between the two situations. This procedure will be used for mental fatigue detection.

Keywords: Classification, EEG Synchrony, alpha, resting situation.

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Authors: Mansour Nikpour, Mohd Zin kandar, Mohsen Ghasemi, Hossein Fallah

Abstract:

Over half of the total electricity consumption is used in buildings. Air-conditioning and electric lighting are the two main resources of electricity consumption in high rise buildings. One way to reduce electricity consumption would be to limit heat gain into buildings, therefore reduce the demand for air-conditioning during hot summer months especially in hot regions. On the other hand natural daylight can be used to reduce the use of electricity for artificial lighting. In this paper effective factors on minimizing heat gain and achieving required day light were reviewed .As daylight always accompanied by solar heat gain. Also interactions between heat gain and daylight were discussed through previous studies and equations which are related to heat gain and day lighting especially in high rise buildings. As a result importance of building-s form and its component on energy consumption in buildings were clarified.

Keywords: High rise buildings, energy demand, day lighting, heat gain.

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Authors: Yunyoung Nam, Junghun Ryu, Yoo-Joo Choi, We-Duke Cho

Abstract:

This paper presents a novel approach for representing the spatio-temporal topology of the camera network with overlapping and non-overlapping fields of view (FOVs). The topology is determined by tracking moving objects and establishing object correspondence across multiple cameras. To track people successfully in multiple camera views, we used the Merge-Split (MS) approach for object occlusion in a single camera and the grid-based approach for extracting the accurate object feature. In addition, we considered the appearance of people and the transition time between entry and exit zones for tracking objects across blind regions of multiple cameras with non-overlapping FOVs. The main contribution of this paper is to estimate transition times between various entry and exit zones, and to graphically represent the camera topology as an undirected weighted graph using the transition probabilities.

Keywords: Surveillance, multiple camera, people tracking, topology.

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Authors: Yunus Doğan, Ahmet Durap

Abstract:

Coastal regions are the one of the most commonly used places by the natural balance and the growing population. In coastal engineering, the most valuable data is wave behaviors. The amount of this data becomes very big because of observations that take place for periods of hours, days and months. In this study, some statistical methods such as the wave spectrum analysis methods and the standard statistical methods have been used. The goal of this study is the discovery profiles of the different coast areas by using these statistical methods, and thus, obtaining an instance based data set from the big data to analysis by using data mining algorithms. In the experimental studies, the six sample data sets about the wave behaviors obtained by 20 minutes of observations from Mersin Bay in Turkey and converted to an instance based form, while different clustering techniques in data mining algorithms were used to discover similar coastal places. Moreover, this study discusses that this summarization approach can be used in other branches collecting big data such as medicine.

Keywords: Clustering algorithms, coastal engineering, data mining, data summarization, statistical methods.

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Authors: Huanjun Liu, Yaonan Wang, Feng Duan

Abstract:

This text studies glass bottle intelligent inspector based machine vision instead of manual inspection. The system structure is illustrated in detail in this paper. The text presents the method based on watershed transform methods to segment the possible defective regions and extract features of bottle wall by rules. Then wavelet transform are used to exact features of bottle finish from images. After extracting features, the fuzzy support vector machine ensemble is putted forward as classifier. For ensuring that the fuzzy support vector machines have good classification ability, the GA based ensemble method is used to combining the several fuzzy support vector machines. The experiments demonstrate that using this inspector to inspect glass bottles, the accuracy rate may reach above 97.5%.

Keywords: Intelligent Inspection, Support Vector Machines, Ensemble Methods, watershed transform, Wavelet Transform

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Authors: Kari Huhtala, Iiro Jussila

Abstract:

The supervisory board is assumed to use power in the governance of a firm, but the actual use of power has been scantly investigated. The research question of the paper is “How does the supervisory board use power in the selection of the board of directors”. The data stem from 11 large Finnish agricultural cooperatives. The research approach was qualitative including semi-structured interviews of the board of directors and supervisory board chairpersons. The results were analyzed and interpreted against theories of social power. As a result, the use of power is approached from two perspectives: (1) formal position-based authority and (2) informal power. Central elements of power were the mandate of the supervisory board, the role of the supervisory board, the supervisory board chair, the nomination committee, collaboration between the supervisory board and the board of directors, the role of regions and the role of the board of directors. The study contributes to the academic discussion on corporate governance in cooperatives and on the supervisory board in the context of the two-tier model. Additional research of the model in other countries and of other types of cooperatives would further academic understanding of supervisory boards.

Keywords: Board, cooperative, supervisory board, selection, director, power.

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Authors: A. Elmarhomy, S. Karungaru, K. Terada

Abstract:

Understanding the number of people and the flow of the persons is useful for efficient promotion of the institution managements and company-s sales improvements. This paper introduces an automated method for counting passerby using virtualvertical measurement lines. The process of recognizing a passerby is carried out using an image sequence obtained from the USB camera. Space-time image is representing the human regions which are treated using the segmentation process. To handle the problem of mismatching, different color space are used to perform the template matching which chose automatically the best matching to determine passerby direction and speed. A relation between passerby speed and the human-pixel area is used to distinguish one or two passersby. In the experiment, the camera is fixed at the entrance door of the hall in a side viewing position. Finally, experimental results verify the effectiveness of the presented method by correctly detecting and successfully counting them in order to direction with accuracy of 97%.

Keywords: counting passersby, virtual-vertical measurement line, passerby speed, space-time image

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Authors: W. Sun, W. Wen, J. Lu, A. A. Becker

Abstract:

In this work, methods for determining creep properties which can be used to represent the full life until failure from miniature specimen creep tests based on analytical solutions are presented. Examples used to demonstrate the application of the methods include a miniature rectangular thin beam specimen creep test under three-point bending and a miniature two-material tensile specimen creep test subjected to a steady load. Mathematical expressions for deflection and creep strain rate of the two specimens were presented for the Kachanov-Rabotnov creep damage model. On this basis, an inverse procedure was developed which has potential applications for deriving the full life creep damage constitutive properties from a very small volume of material, in particular, for various microstructure constitutive  regions, e.g. within heat-affected zones of power plant pipe weldments. Further work on validation and improvement of the method is addressed.

Keywords: Creep damage property, analytical solutions, inverse approach, miniature specimen test.

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Authors: M. Nageswara Rao, N. Sumathi, V. S. N. K. Chaitanya

Abstract:

In electrical power system, high voltage insulators are necessary for consistent performance. All insulators are exposed to different mechanical and electrical stresses. Mechanical stresses occur due to various loads such as wind load, hardware and conductors weight. Electrical stresses are due to over voltages and operating voltages. The performance analysis of polymer insulators is an essential, as most of the electrical utility companies are employing polymer insulators for new and updated transmission lines. In this paper, electric field is analyzed for 400 kV silicone (SiR) composite insulator by COULOMB 3D software based on boundary element method. The field results are compared with EPRI reference values. Our results proved that values at critical regions are very less compared to EPRI reference values. And also experimentally 400 kV single V suspension string is evaluated as per IEC standards.

Keywords: Electric field analysis, silicone composite insulator, boundary element method, RIV, Corona.

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Authors: Evita Straumite, Zanda Kruma, Ruta Galoburda, Kaiva Saulite

Abstract:

Dill (Anethum graveolens L.) is a popular herb used in many regions, including Baltic countries. Dill is widely used for flavoring foods and beverages due to its pleasant spicy aroma. The aim of this work was to determine the best blanching method for processing of dill prior to microwave vacuum drying based on sensory properties, color and volatile compounds in dried product. Two blanching mediums were used – water and steam, and for part of samples microwave pretreatment was additionally used. Evaluation of dried dill volatile aroma compounds, color changes and sensory attributes was performed. Results showed that blanching significantly influences the quality of dried dill. After evaluation of volatile aroma compounds, color and sensory properties of microwave vacuum dried dill, as the best method for dill pretreatment was established blanching at 90 °C for 30 s.

Keywords: dried dill, sensory panel, sensory properties, aroma compounds, color

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Authors: Jae Kyung Son, Wan Shik Jang, Sung hyun Shim, Yoon Gyung Sung

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the application of the vision control algorithm for robot's point placement task in discontinuous trajectory caused by obstacle. The presented vision control algorithm consists of four models, which are the robot kinematic model, vision system model, parameters estimation model, and robot joint angle estimation model.When the robot moves toward a target along discontinuous trajectory, several types of obstacles appear in two obstacle regions. Then, this study is to investigate how these changes will affect the presented vision control algorithm.Thus, the practicality of the vision control algorithm is demonstrated experimentally by performing the robot's point placement task in discontinuous trajectory by obstacle.

Keywords: Vision control algorithm, location of obstacle region, range of obstacle region, point placement.

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Authors: Samiah Alammari, Nassim Ammour

Abstract:

When providing a massive number of tasks successively to a deep learning process, a good performance of the model requires preserving the previous tasks data to retrain the model for each upcoming classification. Otherwise, the model performs poorly due to the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. To overcome this shortcoming, we developed a successful continual learning deep model for remote sensing hyperspectral image regions classification. The proposed neural network architecture encapsulates two trainable subnetworks. The first module adapts its weights by minimizing the discrimination error between the land-cover classes during the new task learning, and the second module tries to learn how to replicate the data of the previous tasks by discovering the latent data structure of the new task dataset. We conduct experiments on hyperspectral image (HSI) dataset on Indian Pines. The results confirm the capability of the proposed method.

Keywords: Continual learning, data reconstruction, remote sensing, hyperspectral image segmentation.

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Authors: S. Baghdar Hosseini, K. Bashirnezhad, A. R. Moghiman, Y. Khazraii, N. Nikoofal

Abstract:

The increasing industrialization and motorization of the world has led to a steep rise for the demand of petroleum-based fuels. Petroleum-based fuels are obtained from limited reserves. These finite reserves are highly concentrated in certain regions of the world. Therefore, those countries not having these resources are facing energy/foreign exchange crisis, mainly due to the import of crude petroleum. Hence, it is necessary to look for alternative fuels which can be produced from resources available locally within the country such as alcohol, biodiesel, vegetable oils etc. Biodiesel is a renewable, domestically produced fuel that has been shown to reduce particulate, hydrocarbon, and carbon monoxide emissions from combustion. In the present study an experimental investigation on emission characteristic of a liquid burner system operating on several percentage of biodiesel and gas oil is carried out. Samples of exhaust gas are analysed with Testo 350 Xl. The results show that biodiesel can lower some pollutant such as CO, CO2 and particulate matter emissions while NOx emission would increase in comparison with gas oil. The results indicate there may be benefits to using biodiesel in industrial processes.

Keywords: Biodiesel, combustion, gas oil, pollutant.

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Authors: J. Furuya, S. Kobayashi, S. D. Meyer

Abstract:

This research examines possible effects of climatic change focusing on global warming and its impacts on world agricultural product markets, by using a world food model developed to consider climate changes. GDP and population for each scenario were constructed by IPCC and climate data for each scenario was reported by the Hadley Center and are used in this research to consider results in different contexts. Production and consumption of primary agriculture crops of the world for each socio-economic scenario are obtained and investigated by using the modified world food model. Simulation results show that crop production in some countries or regions will have different trends depending on the context. These alternative contexts depend on the rate of GDP growth, population, temperature, and rainfall. Results suggest that the development of environment friendly technologies lead to more consumption of food in many developing countries. Relationships among environmental policy, clean energy development, and poverty elimination warrant further investigation.

Keywords: Global warming, SRES scenarios, World food model.

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Authors: J. Dumrongsak, A. M. Savill

Abstract:

Non-premixed turbulent combustion Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been carried out in a simplified methanefuelled coaxial jet combustor employing Large Eddy Simulation (LES). The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of LES in modelling non-premixed combustion using a commercial software, FLUENT, and investigate the effects of the grid density and chemistry models employed on the accuracy of the simulation results. A comparison has also been made between LES and Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) predictions. For LES grid sensitivity test, 2.3 and 6.2 million cell grids are employed with the equilibrium model. The chemistry model sensitivity analysis is achieved by comparing the simulation results from the equilibrium chemistry and steady flamelet models. The predictions of the mixture fraction, axial velocity, species mass fraction and temperature by LES are in good agreement with the experimental data. The LES results are similar for the two chemistry models but influenced considerably by the grid resolution in the inner flame and near-wall regions.

Keywords: Coaxial jet, reacting LES, non-premixed combustion, turbulent flow.

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Authors: Anirut Luadsong, Nitima Aschariyaphotha

Abstract:

The spectral action balance equation is an equation that used to simulate short-crested wind-generated waves in shallow water areas such as coastal regions and inland waters. This equation consists of two spatial dimensions, wave direction, and wave frequency which can be solved by finite difference method. When this equation with dominating convection term are discretized using central differences, stability problems occur when the grid spacing is chosen too coarse. In this paper, we introduce the splitting upwind schemes for avoiding stability problems and prove that it is consistent to the upwind scheme with same accuracy. The splitting upwind schemes was adopted to split the wave spectral action balance equation into four onedimensional problems, which for each small problem obtains the independently tridiagonal linear systems. For each smaller system can be solved by direct or iterative methods at the same time which is very fast when performed by a multi-processor computer.

Keywords: upwind scheme, parallel algorithm, spectral action balance equation, splitting method.

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Authors: B. Bagheri Nakhjavanlo, T. J. Ellis, P. Raoofi, J. Dehmeshki

Abstract:

This paper presents a customized deformable model for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms in CTA datasets. An important challenge in reliably detecting aortic aneurysm is the need to overcome problems associated with intensity inhomogeneities and image noise. Level sets are part of an important class of methods that utilize partial differential equations (PDEs) and have been extensively applied in image segmentation. A Gaussian kernel function in the level set formulation, which extracts the local intensity information, aids the suppression of noise in the extracted regions of interest and then guides the motion of the evolving contour for the detection of weak boundaries. The speed of curve evolution has been significantly improved with a resulting decrease in segmentation time compared with previous implementations of level sets. The results indicate the method is more effective than other approaches in coping with intensity inhomogeneities.

Keywords: Abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms, intensityinhomogeneity, level sets, local fitting binary.

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Authors: S. Hosseini, M. Ahmadi Najafabadi, M. Akhlaghi

Abstract:

The health of the journal bearings is very important in preventing unforeseen breakdowns in rotary machines, and poor lubrication is one of the most important factors for producing the bearing failures. Hydrodynamic lubrication (HL), mixed lubrication (ML), and boundary lubrication (BL) are three regimes of a journal bearing lubrication. This paper uses acoustic emission (AE) measurement technique to correlate features of the AE signals to the three lubrication regimes. The transitions from HL to ML based on operating factors such as rotating speed, load, inlet oil pressure by time domain and time-frequency domain signal analysis techniques are detected, and then metal-to-metal contacts between sliding surfaces of the journal and bearing are identified. It is found that there is a significant difference between theoretical and experimental operating values that are obtained for defining the lubrication regions.

Keywords: Acoustic emission technique, pressure fed journal bearing, time and frequency signal analysis, metal-to-metal contact.

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Authors: U. Umadevi, T. Umakanthan

Abstract:

Globally, mycotic dermatitis is very common but there is no single proven specific allopathic treatment regimen. In this study, domestic animals with skin diseases of different age and breed from geographically varied regions of Tamil Nadu state, India were employed. Most of them have had previous treatment with native and allopathic medicines without success. Clinically, the skin lesions were found to be mild to severe. The trial animals were treated with poly herbal formulation (ointment) prepared using the indigenous medicinal plants – viz Andrographis paniculata, Lawsonia inermis and Madhuca longifolia. Allopathic antifungal drugs and ointments, povidone iodine and curabless (Terbinafine HCl, Ofloxacin, Ornidazole, Clobetasol propionate) were used in control. Comparatively, trial animals were found to have lesser course of treatment time and higher recovery rate than control. In Ethnoveterinary, this combination was tried for the first time. This herbal formulation is economical and an alternative for skin diseases.

Keywords: Allopathic drugs, dermatitis, domestic animals, poly herbal formulation.

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Authors: Arnab Bandyopadhyay, Anubhab Pal, Subhajit Debnath

Abstract:

Climate change is a cumulative change in weather patterns over a period of time. Trend analysis using non-parametric Mann-Kendall test may help to determine the existence and magnitude of any statistically significant trend in the climatic data. Another index called Sen slope may be used to quantify the magnitude of such trends. A toolbar extension to ESRI ArcGIS named Arc Trends has been developed in this study for performing the above mentioned tasks. To study the temporal trend of meteorological parameters, 32 years (1971-2002) monthly meteorological data were collected for 133 selected stations over different agro-ecological regions of India. Both the maximum and minimum temperatures were found to be rising. A significant increasing trend in the relative humidity and a consistent significant decreasing trend in the wind speed all over the country were found. However, a general increase in rainfall was not found in recent years.

Keywords: Temporal trend, climate change, ArcGIS, Mann- Kendall test, Sen slope

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Authors: Mongkorn Klingajay, Tawatchai Jitson

Abstract:

The pipe inspection operation is the difficult detective performance. Almost applications are mainly relies on a manual recognition of defective areas that have carried out detection by an engineer. Therefore, an automation process task becomes a necessary in order to avoid the cost incurred in such a manual process. An automated monitoring method to obtain a complete picture of the sewer condition is proposed in this work. The focus of the research is the automated identification and classification of discontinuities in the internal surface of the pipe. The methodology consists of several processing stages including image segmentation into the potential defect regions and geometrical characteristic features. Automatic recognition and classification of pipe defects are carried out by means of using an artificial neural network technique (ANN) based on Radial Basic Function (RBF). Experiments in a realistic environment have been conducted and results are presented.

Keywords: Artificial neural network, Radial basic function, Curve fitting, CCTV, Image segmentation, Data acquisition.

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Authors: B. Michelle Sweeting

Abstract:

Pepper spray use has gained momentum since 1992 and although the active ingredient is readily available, it is considered a weapon with restricted use in many regions, including The Bahamas. In light of controversy in the literature regarding the severity of presenting respiration complaints among individuals postacute exposure of pepper spray inhalation, this descriptive case series study was conducted to assess the respiratory status of persons evaluated during a mass casualty in The Bahamas. Parameters noted were patients- demographics and respiration severity determined via clinical examination findings, disposition and follow-up review of the 20 persons. Their most common complaint was difficulty breathing post exposure. Two required admission and stayed for <24 hours uneventfully. All cases remained without residual complaints upon follow-up. Results showed that although respiration difficulty was perceived as the most detrimental of presenting complaints, it was noted to be mostly subjective with benign outcome.

Keywords: Acute Pepper Spray Inhalation, Capsaicinoids, Oleoresin Capsicum, Pepper spray, Respiratory severity severity.

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Authors: Zhenhuan Zhu, David Mulvaney, Vassilios Chouliaras

Abstract:

A new genetic algorithm, termed the 'optimum individual monogenetic genetic algorithm' (OIMGA), is presented whose properties have been deliberately designed to be well suited to hardware implementation. Specific design criteria were to ensure fast access to the individuals in the population, to keep the required silicon area for hardware implementation to a minimum and to incorporate flexibility in the structure for the targeting of a range of applications. The first two criteria are met by retaining only the current optimum individual, thereby guaranteeing a small memory requirement that can easily be stored in fast on-chip memory. Also, OIMGA can be easily reconfigured to allow the investigation of problems that normally warrant either large GA populations or individuals many genes in length. Local convergence is achieved in OIMGA by retaining elite individuals, while population diversity is ensured by continually searching for the best individuals in fresh regions of the search space. The results given in this paper demonstrate that both the performance of OIMGA and its convergence time are superior to those of a range of existing hardware GA implementations.

Keywords: Genetic algorithms, genetic hardware, machinelearning.

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Authors: Manel Mosbahi

Abstract:

The risk of water erosion is one of the main environmental concerns in the southern Mediterranean regions. Thus, quantification of soil loss is an important issue for soil and water conservation managers. The objective of this paper is to examine the applicability of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model in The Sarrath river catchment, North of Tunisia, and to identify the most vulnerable areas in order to help manager implement an effective management program. The spatial analysis of the results shows that 7 % of the catchment experiences very high erosion risk, in need for suitable conservation measures to be adopted on a priority basis. The spatial distribution of erosion risk classes estimated 3% high, 5,4% tolerable, and 84,6% low. Among the 27 delineated subcatchments only 4 sub-catchments are found to be under high and very high soil loss group, two sub-catchments fell under moderate soil loss group, whereas other sub-catchments are under low soil loss group.

Keywords: Critical source areas, Erosion risk, SWAT model.

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Authors: Ebru Aktepe Erkoç, Atilla Uluğ

Abstract:

In this research which has been prepared to show the relationship between Gökova Bay’s morphotectonic structure and seismicity, it is clear that there are many active faults in the region. The existence of a thick sedimentary accumulation since Late Quaternary times is obvious as a result of the geophysical workings in the region and the interpretation of seismic data which has been planning to be taken from the Bay. In the regions which have been tectonically active according to the interpretation of the taken data, the existence of the successive earthquakes in the last few years is remarkable. By analyzing large earthquakes affecting the areas remaining inside the sediments in West Anatolian Collapse System, this paper aims to reveal the fault systems constituting earthquakes with the information obtained from this study and to determine seismicity of the present residential areas right next to them. It is also aimed to anticipate the measures to be taken against possible earthquake hazards, to identify these areas posing a risk in terms of residential and urban planning and to determine at least partly the characteristics of the basin.

Keywords: Gökova Bay, seismic, sedimentation, West Anatolian Region.

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Authors: K. Thulasimani, K. G. Srinivasagan

Abstract:

Driver fatigue is an important factor in the increasing number of road accidents. Dynamic template matching method was proposed to address the problem of real-time driver fatigue detection system based on eye-tracking. An effective vision based approach was used to analyze the driver’s eye state to detect fatigue. The driver fatigue system consists of Face detection, Eye detection, Eye tracking, and Fatigue detection. Initially frames are captured from a color video in a car dashboard and transformed from RGB into YCbCr color space to detect the driver’s face. Canny edge operator was used to estimating the eye region and the locations of eyes are extracted. The extracted eyes were considered as a template matching for eye tracking. Edge Map Overlapping (EMO) and Edge Pixel Count (EPC) matching function were used for eye tracking which is used to improve the matching accuracy. The pixel of eyeball was tracked from the eye regions which are used to determine the fatigue state of the driver.

Keywords: Driver fatigue detection, Driving safety, Eye tracking, Intelligent transportation system, Template matching.

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Authors: Kensho Takahashi, Ko Watanabe, Takashi Kaburagi, Hiroshi Tanaka, Kajiro Watanabe, Yosuke Kurihara

Abstract:

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has been widely used as a non-invasive method to measure brain activity, but it is corrupted by baseline drift noise. Here we present a method to measure regional cerebral blood flow as a derivative of NIRS output. We investigate whether, when listening to languages, blood flow can reasonably localize and represent regional brain activity or not. The prefrontal blood flow distribution pattern when advanced second-language listeners listened to a second language (L2) was most similar to that when listening to their first language (L1) among the patterns of mean and standard deviation. In experiments with 25 healthy subjects, the maximum blood flow was localized to the left BA46 of advanced listeners. The blood flow presented is robust to baseline drift and stably localizes regional brain activity.

Keywords: NIRS, oxy-hemoglobin, baseline drift, blood flow, working memory, BA46, first language, second language.

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