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Summary This is the second of a three-part series that charts the history of minimal access surgery from antiquity to current times. Although rapid developments in laparoscopic and robotic surgery have transformed surgical care over the last 30 years, our predecessors made significant advances in their time which set the principles for modern practice. Part I of this series described how ancient medical practitioners developed simple instruments, from metal or wood, for viewing body cavities. Improvements in the use of metal, glass and lighting allowed for inspection of deeper parts of the body. This second part of the series will show how advances in electrical technology allowed the development of improved lighting for endoscopy and laparoscopy along with the use of electrocautery for a wide range of therapeutic procedures.

In this paper, we propose to tackle egocentric action recognition by suppressing background distractors and enhancing action-relevant interactions. The existing approaches usually utilize two independent branches to recognize egocentric actions, i.e., a verb branch and a noun branch. However, the mechanism to suppress distracting objects and exploit local human-object correlations is missing. To this end, we introduce two extra sources of information, i.e., the candidate objects' spatial location and their discriminative features, to enable concentration on the occurring interactions. We design a Symbiotic Attention withObject-centric featureAlignmentframework (SAOA) to provide meticulous reasoning between the actor and the environment. First, we introduce an object-centric feature alignment method to inject the local object features to the verb branch and noun branch. Second, we propose a symbiotic attention mechanism to encourage the mutual interaction between the two branches and select the most action-relevant candidates for classification. The framework benefits from the communication among the verb branch, the noun branch, and the local object information. Experiments based on different backbones and modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, our framework achieves the state-of-the-art on the largest egocentric video dataset.

We present JRDB, a novel egocentric dataset collected from our social mobile manipulator JackRabbot. The dataset includes 64 minutes of annotated multimodal sensor data including stereo cylindrical 360$^\circ$ RGB video at 15 fps, 3D point clouds from two Velodyne 16 Lidars, line 3D point clouds from two Sick Lidars, audio signal, RGB-D video at 30 fps, 360$^\circ$ spherical image from a fisheye camera and encoder values from the robot's wheels. Our dataset incorporates data from traditionally underrepresented scenes such as indoor environments and pedestrian areas, all from the ego-perspective of the robot, both stationary and navigating. The dataset has been annotated with over 2.3 million bounding boxes spread over 5 individual cameras and 1.8 million associated 3D cuboids around all people in the scenes totaling over 3500 time consistent trajectories. Together with our dataset and the annotations, we launch a benchmark and metrics for 2D and 3D person detection and tracking. With this dataset, which we plan on extending with further types of annotation in the future, we hope to provide a new source of data and a test-bench for research in the areas of egocentric robot vision, autonomous navigation, and all perceptual tasks around social robotics in human environments.

We present a solution to egocentric 3D body pose estimation from monocular images captured from downward looking fish-eye cameras installed on the rim of a head mounted VR device. This unusual viewpoint leads to images with unique visual appearance, with severe self-occlusions and perspective distortions that result in drastic differences in resolution between lower and upper body. We propose an encoder-decoder architecture with a novel multi-branch decoder designed to account for the varying uncertainty in 2D predictions. The quantitative evaluation, on synthetic and real-world datasets, shows that our strategy leads to substantial improvements in accuracy over state of the art egocentric approaches. To tackle the lack of labelled data we also introduced a large photo-realistic synthetic dataset. xR-EgoPose offers high quality renderings of people with diverse skintones, body shapes and clothing, performing a range of actions. Our experiments show that the high variability in our new synthetic training corpus leads to good generalization to real world footage and to state of theart results on real world datasets with ground truth. Moreover, an evaluation on the Human3.6M benchmark shows that the performance of our method is on par with top performing approaches on the more classic problem of 3D human pose from a third person viewpoint., 14 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1907.10045

In this work, we consider transferring the structure information from large networks to compact ones for dense prediction tasks in computer vision. Previous knowledge distillation strategies used for dense prediction tasks often directly borrow the distillation scheme for image classification and perform knowledge distillation for each pixel separately, leading to sub-optimal performance. Here we propose to distill structured knowledge from large networks to compact networks, taking into account the fact that dense prediction is a structured prediction problem. Specifically, we study two structured distillation schemes: i) pair-wise distillation that distills the pair-wise similarities by building a static graph; and ii) holistic distillation that uses adversarial training to distill holistic knowledge. The effectiveness of our knowledge distillation approaches is demonstrated by experiments on three dense prediction tasks: semantic segmentation, depth estimation and object detection. Code is available at: https://git.io/StructKD, Comment: v1:10 pages cvpr2019 accepted; v2:15 pages for a journal version; Code is available at: https://github.com/irfanICMLL/structure_knowledge_distillation; fix typos

In this study, CO₂ conversion to acetate and CH₄ was achieved in a flow-through laboratory-scale microbial electrosynthesis (MES) cell composed of a 3D conductive polylactic acid (cPLA) lattice cathode with electrodeposited metal electrocatalyst coatings. The MES cell with a bare cPLA cathode showed the poorest performance with the lowest H₂ and CH₄ production rates and low Coulombic efficiency. This was ascribed to a poor electrocatalytic activity of cPLA towards H₂ production and high electrode resistivity. When the cPLA electrode was modified with metal coatings, the CH₄, acetate and H₂ production rate increased significantly, with the following trend: cPLA < Ni < NiFe < NiFeMn. The better performance of the metal-coated cPLA in terms of CH₄ production was attributed to the lower electrical resistance, enhanced H₂ production and enhanced electron transfer between the cathode and the biofilm. At the cell potential of 2.8 V, the best-performing NiFeMn cPLA cathode showed stable production of CH₄ (50 ± 6 mL d⁻¹), acetate (185 ± 27 mg d⁻¹), and H₂ (545 ± 175 mL d⁻¹) at close to 100% Coulombic efficiency.

We propose a novel logic, called Frame Logic (FL), that extends first-order logic (with recursive definitions) using a construct Sp(.) that captures the implicit supports of formulas -- the precise subset of the universe upon which their meaning depends. Using such supports, we formulate proof rules that facilitate frame reasoning elegantly when the underlying model undergoes change. We show that the logic is expressive by capturing several data-structures and also exhibit a translation from a precise fragment of separation logic to frame logic. Finally, we design a program logic based on frame logic for reasoning with programs that dynamically update heaps that facilitates local specifications and frame reasoning. This program logic consists of both localized proof rules as well as rules that derive the weakest tightest preconditions in FL., This manuscript is an extended and revised version of the publication with the same title that appeared at ESOP 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_19). It is currently under review

This paper studies the coordinated use of smart inverters with legacy voltage regulating devices to help increase the energy savings from conservation voltage reduction (CVR) in distribution systems with high photovoltaic penetration. Two voltage optimization algorithms are developed to evaluate the CVR benefit by considering two types of smart inverter functions: aggregated reactive power control and autonomous volt/VAR control. In each algorithm, smart inverters are coordinately controlled with the operation of legacy voltage regulating devices including load tap changers and capacitor banks. Both algorithms are tested on representative utility distribution system models. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can achieve around 1.8-3.6% energy savings when only using legacy voltage regulating devices and an additional 0.3-0.9% when adding smart inverters.

In this paper, a long-term workload management problem for multi-server edge computing with server collaboration is studied. In the considered model, mobile users computation-intensive tasks are generated dynamically over the time and offloaded to associated edge servers according to pre-determined subscription agreements. Upon receiving the subscribed workload, each edge server can then decide to whether participate in server collaboration for enabling workload re-allocation (i.e., workload exchange) with other heterogeneously configured edge servers. Unlike most of the existing work, this paper takes into account both competitions and collaborations among strategic edge servers in sharing their computing capacities. To achieve the equilibrium for each edge server in minimizing its expected cost (including energy consumption, delay, transmission, configuration and pricing costs), a joint optimization is formulated for determining i) its amount of workload to undertake, ii) compensation price charged from peers, and iii) computing speed to adopt. To efficiently solve this problem, we propose a novel cooperative queueing game approach, which integrates a convex optimization, a core cost sharing scheme and a mapping rule. Theoretical analyses and extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising paradigm catering to overwhelming explosions of mobile applications, by offloading the compute-intensive tasks to an MEC network for processing. The surging of deep learning brings new vigor and vitality to shape the prospect of intelligent Internet of Things (IoT), and edge intelligence arises to provision real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference services for users. In this paper, we study a novel delay-aware DNN inference throughput maximization problem by accelerating each DNN inference through jointly exploring DNN partitioning and multi-thread parallelism. Specifically, we consider the problem under both offline and online request arrival settings: a set of DNN inference requests is given in advance, and a sequence of DNN inference requests arrives one by one without the knowledge of future arrivals, respectively. We first show that the defined problems are NP-hard. We then devise a novel constant approximation algorithm for the problem under the offline setting. We also propose an online algorithm with a provable competitive ratio for the problem under the online setting. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising.

PurposeThis study aims to assess and decompose the sustainable development using the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Iran in 2018, for proposing agenda-setting of public policy.Design/methodology/approachIt ranks the SDGs not only in Iran but also in the region and the world to reveal the synergetic effects.FindingsBased on the results, subaltern-populace generally suffers from the hegemonic domination of ruling elite-bourgeois, lack of strong institutions, heterogeneous policy networks and lack of advocacy role of non-governmental organizations, due to no transparency, issues in law or no rule of law, no stringent regulation, rent, suppression and Mafia, all leading to corruption and injustice.Practical implicationsTo stop the loop of corruption-injustice, Iran should homogenize the structure of the policy network. Furthermore, the failed SDGs of the three-geographic analysis are the same in a character; all of them propose SDG 3, good health and well-being as a serious failed goal.Social implicationsIn this regard, strong evidence is the pandemic Coronavirus, COVID 19 since 2019, due to its highly-disastrous consequences in early 2020 where the public policymakers could not adopt policies promptly in the glob, particularly in Iran.Originality/valueIn Iran, in addition to this, the malfunction of health is rooted in “subjective well-being” and “traffic deaths,” respectively. Concerning the transportations system in Iran, it is underscored that it is damaging the sustainable development from all the three pillars of sustainable development including, economic, social and environmental.

The proliferation of enterprise social media generates an ever-growing record of digital traces that provides ample opportunities to study the social making of organisations. Subsequently, we present the social fabric framework, which comprises a structured five-step approach for eliciting, interpreting, and representing the situated social idiosyncrasies and underlying patterns of the social making of organisations. The paper focuses on the application of the social fabric framework as a research method. However, the framework also lends itself to practice as a diagnostic tool that can detect emergent changes in the social fabric of an organisation as well as support organisational development and change. Moreover, by providing a vocabulary for articulating the social making of organisations, the framework can help organisation members reify their dispositions, make sense of the social dynamics, and enable a constructive discussion at the grassroots level about any controversy or aspiration.

Social touch is essential to human development and communication. Mediated social touch is suggested as a solution for circumstances where distance prevents skin-to-skin contact. However, past research aimed at demonstrating efficacy of mediated touch in reducing stress and promoting helping have produced mixed findings. These inconsistent findings could possibly be due to insufficient control of contextual factors combined with unnatural interaction scenarios. For example, touch occurs less frequently among strangers and is often accompanied with nonverbal visual cues. We investigated how visual presentation of touch, and interpersonal relationship to the sender influence perception, affective experiences, and autonomic responses the touch evoke. Fifty couples of mixed gender were recruited. A mediated touch was repeatedly applied by either the male partner or male confederate to female participants. The latter witnessed through a webcam as the sender caressed a rubber hand or touchpad to send the touch. Following our hypotheses, touch sent by one's partner was perceived softer and more comforting than stranger touch. The partner's touch also resulted in weaker skin conductance responses, particularly when sent by touching a touchpad. In sum, how a mediated touch is experienced depends both on who is touching, and on how the touch is visually represented.

Language carries implicit human biases, functioning both as a reflection and a perpetuation of stereotypes that people carry with them. Recently, ML-based NLP methods such as word embeddings have been shown to learn such language biases with striking accuracy. This capability of word embeddings has been successfully exploited as a tool to quantify and study human biases. However, previous studies only consider a predefined set of biased concepts to attest (e.g., whether gender is more or less associated with particular jobs), or just discover biased words without helping to understand their meaning at the conceptual level. As such, these approaches can be either unable to find biased concepts that have not been defined in advance, or the biases they find are difficult to interpret and study. This could make existing approaches unsuitable to discover and interpret biases in online communities, as such communities may carry different biases than those in mainstream culture. This paper improves upon, extends, and evaluates our previous data-driven method to automatically discover and help interpret biased concepts encoded in word embeddings. We apply this approach to study the biased concepts present in the language used in online communities and experimentally show the validity and stability of our method

Temporal point process is widely used for sequential data modeling. In this paper, we focus on the problem of modeling sequential event propagation in graph, such as retweeting by social network users, news transmitting between websites, etc. Given a collection of event propagation sequences, conventional point process model consider only the event history, i.e. embed event history into a vector, not the latent graph structure. We propose a Graph Biased Temporal Point Process (GBTPP) leveraging the structural information from graph representation learning, where the direct influence between nodes and indirect influence from event history is modeled respectively. Moreover, the learned node embedding vector is also integrated into the embedded event history as side information. Experiments on a synthetic dataset and two real-world datasets show the efficacy of our model compared to conventional methods and state-of-the-art., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

In this article, we investigate the problem of social link inference in a target location-aware social network (LSN), which aims at predicting the unobserved links between users within the network. This problem is critical for downstream applications, including network completion and friend recommendation. In addition to the network structures commonly used in general link prediction, the studies tailored for social link inference in an LSN leverage user trajectories from the spatial aspect. However, the temporal factor lying in user trajectories is largely overlooked by most of the prior studies, limiting the capabilities of capturing the temporal relevance between users. Moreover, effective user matching by fusing different views, i.e., social, spatial, and temporal factors, remains unresolved, which hinders the potential improvement of link inference. To this end, this article devises a novel multiview matching network (MVMN) by regarding each of the three factors as one view of any target user pair. MVMN enjoys the flexibility and completeness of modeling each factor by developing its suitable matching module: 1) location matching module; 2) time-series matching module; and 3) relation matching module. Each module learns a view-specific representation for matching, and MVMN fuses them for final link inference. Extensive experiments on two real-world data sets demonstrate the superiority of our approach against several competitive baselines for link prediction and sequence matching, validating the contribution of its key components.

The adaptive neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is a structured multioutput learning machine that has been successfully adopted in learning problems without noise or outliers. However, it does not work well for learning problems with noise or outliers. High-accuracy real-time forecasting of traffic flow is extremely difficult due to the effect of noise or outliers from complex traffic conditions. In this study, a novel probabilistic learning system, probabilistic regularized extreme learning machine combined with ANFIS (probabilistic R-ELANFIS), is proposed to capture the correlations among traffic flow data and, thereby, improve the accuracy of traffic flow forecasting. The new learning system adopts a fantastic objective function that minimizes both the mean and the variance of the model bias. The results from an experiment based on real-world traffic flow data showed that, compared with some kernel-based approaches, neural network approaches, and conventional ANFIS learning systems, the proposed probabilistic R-ELANFIS achieves competitive performance in terms of forecasting ability and generalizability.

Data sparsity is a common issue for most recommender systems and can severely degrade the usefulness of a system. One of the most successful solutions has been cross-domain recommender systems, which supplement the sparse data of the target domain with knowledge transferred from a source domain rich with data that is in some way related. However, there are three challenges that, if overcome, could significantly improve the quality and accuracy of cross-domain recommendation: 1) ensuring latent feature spaces of the users and items are both maximally matched; 2) taking consideration of user-item relationship and their interaction in modelling user preference; 3) enabling a two-way cross-domain recommendation that both the source and the target domains benefit from a knowledge exchange. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network called Dual Adversarial network for Cross-Domain Recommendation. By training the shared encoders with a domain discriminator via dual adversarial learning, the latent feature spaces for both the users and items are maximally matched. Allowing the two domains to collaboratively benefit from each other results in better recommendations for both domains. Extensive experiments with real-world datasets on six tasks demonstrate that DA-CDR significantly outperforms seven state-of-the-art baselines.

The rise of the digital society is accompanied by incalculable social risks, but very little IS research has examined the implications of the new digital society. Drawing on concepts from Beck’s critical theory of the risk society and critical discourse analysis, this study examines the public discourse on risk events during the launch of NemID, a personal digital identifier for Danish citizens. This research illustrates our difficulties and challenges in managing some of the fundamental social risks from societal digitalisation. Limited institutional capabilities for digital technologies force public officials to depend on private companies motived by profit instead of the public interest. Beliefs in digital technology as the primary determinant of social and economic progress also present many public management dilemmas. When digital risk events occur and citizens’ fears are stoked by news media and public discourse, public officials seem to have no other strategy for managing the escalating fears than systematically distorted communication. The continued rise of the digital risk society demands that IS research respond to the challenge of generating knowledge for its public management.

A simple and accurate method based on degenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) to evaluate optical fiber dispersion and nonlinearity is presented. We investigated the continuous wave degenerate FWM characteristics of two photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) and a SMF28 fiber. Simply by measuring and analyzing the continuous wave degenerate FWM conversion efficiency as a function of the wavelength difference between pump and signal waves, fitting between experimental data and analytical FWM conversion efficiency expression is carried out to determine the dispersion, dispersion slope and nonlinear coefficient of the fiber. The fiber parameters simultaneously obtained from a single set of FWM measurement for Single Mode Fiber 28 (SMF28) are found to be agreement with the manufacturer specifications for this fiber, thus validating the PCF results and, more generally, the acceptable accuracy of the simple method proposed here.

У статті наведено рівняння для дослідження залежності напруженості електричного поля в біологічно активних точках від параметрів радіоімпульсного випромінювання. Отримані результати дозволили провести аналіз якісних властивостей процесу взаємодії радіоімпульсного випромінювання з біологічно активними точками. Було запропоновано біологічно активні точки розглядати як діелектричний резонатор, поміщений в плоску діелектричне середовище. Тому, якщо частота заповнення радіоімпульсу близька до власної частоти такого резонатора, то можливо резонансне збільшення напруженості електричного поля в біологічно активних точках. При проведенні численних розрахунків було прийнято, що сумарний потенціал на мембрані біологічних клітин не повинен перевищувати величину в 100 мВ. У процесі теоретичного аналізу розробленої моделі було встановлено, що для підвищення життєздатності новонароджених телят хворих диспепсією їх біологічно активні точки слід опромінювати інформаційним радіоімпульсного випромінюванням в діапазоні змін параметрів: тривалість імпульсів 0,5 · 10-7 ... 1,5 · 10-7 с; період проходження імпульсів 0,5 · 10 .... 1,5 · 10-5 с; величина щільності потоку потужності 15 мкВт / см2; частота заповнення імпульсів 50ГГц; час експозиції 15 ... 20 с; напруженість електричного поля E0 = 8,8 В / м, Еср = 5,7 В / м.

Introduction. To represent our national goods at the Western market it is necessary to ensure, first of all, the competitiveness of local products through complex mechanization of technological processes, labour costs reduction, increasing yields and quality of received products. The aim of the research is to provide the comparative analysis of technology and machines for potato harvesting, to determine the main factors that influence the agricultural technical indicators of harvesting equipment, to develop technological process patterns and to examine the strategies for improving the potato root-and-harvest machines. Methods and methodology. The research was carried out on the basis of technological and constructional analysis of technology and machines for potato harvesting. The methods of comparison and mathematical modelling of technological processes were used in the study. The research studies of Ukrainian and foreign scientists on technology and machines for potato harvesting were used as information base of our paper. Results. A comparative analysis of technology and machines for potato harvesting made it possible to determine the main factors that influence the agricultural performance of harvesting machinery and to develop the technological process for a digger, a double-loader digger and a harvester (harvesting machines). A theoretical model of the technological processes of harvesting machines includes both uncontrolled and controlled factors that influence the choice of a potato harvesting technology of a digger, a double-loader digger and a harvester. Nevertheless, the first factors are connected, primarily, with the conditions of potato growth and its biological properties, and the second factors deal with the organizational and technical measures, including the improvement of the working bodies of machines (cutting, dirt digging through, top separation, longitudinal hump with cut roller and other constructive and kinematic parameters), quality of received products, length and terms of potato storage, available farming human resources, free vehicle in the period of harvesting, farm potato storage, farm equipment for potato cleaning and sorting.

Unit square visibility graphs (USV) are described by axis-parallel visibility between unit squares placed in the plane. If the squares are required to be placed on integer grid coordinates, then USV become unit square grid visibility graphs (USGV), an alternative characterisation of the well-known rectilinear graphs. We extend known combinatorial results for USGV and we show that, in the weak case (i.e., visibilities do not necessarily translate into edges of the represented combinatorial graph), the area minimisation variant of their recognition problem is $${{\,\mathrm{{\textsf{N}}{\textsf{P}}}\,}}$$ N P -hard. We also provide combinatorial insights with respect to USV, and as our main result, we prove their recognition problem to be $${{\,\mathrm{{\textsf{N}}{\textsf{P}}}\,}}$$ N P -hard, which settles an open question.

Exciting recent advances in genome sequencing, coupled with greatly reduced storage and computation costs, make genomic testing increasingly accessible to individuals. Already today, one’s digitized DNA can be easily obtained from a sequencing lab and later used to conduct numerous tests by engaging with a testing facility. Due to the inherent sensitivity of genetic material and the often-proprietary nature of genomic tests, privacy is a natural and crucial issue. While genomic privacy received a great deal of attention within and outside the research community, genomic security has not been sufficiently studied. This is surprising since the usage of fake or altered genomes can have grave consequences, such as erroneous drug prescriptions and genetic test outcomes. Unfortunately, in the genomic domain, privacy and security (as often happens) are at odds with each other. In this article, we attempt to reconcile security with privacy in genomic testing by designing a novel technique for a secure and private genomic range query protocol between a genomic testing facility and an individual user. The proposed technique ensures authenticity and completeness of user-supplied genomic material while maintaining its privacy by releasing only the minimum thereof. To confirm its broad usability, we show how to apply the proposed technique to a previously proposed genomic private substring matching protocol. Experiments show that the proposed technique offers good performance and is quite practical. Furthermore, we generalize the genomic range query problem to sparse integer sets and discuss potential use cases.

Tree fruit architecture results from combination of the training system and pruning and thinning processes across multiple growth and development years. Further, the tree fruit architecture contributes to the light interception and improves tree growth, fruit quality, and fruit yield, in addition to easing the process of orchard management and harvest. Currently tree architectural traits are measured manually by researchers or growers, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this study, the remote sensing techniques were evaluated to phenotype critical architectural traits with the final goal to assist tree fruit breeders, physiologists and growers in collecting architectural traits efficiently and in a standardized manner. For this, a consumer-grade red–green–blue (RGB) camera was used to collect apple tree side-images, while an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) integrated RGB camera was programmed to image tree canopy at 15 m above ground level to evaluate multiple tree fruit architectures. The sensing data were compared to ground reference data associated with tree orchard blocks within three training systems (Spindle, V-trellis, Bi-axis), two rootstocks (‘WA 38 trees grafted on G41 and M9-Nic29) and two pruning methods (referred as bending and click pruning). The data were processed to extract architectural features from ground-based 2D images and UAV-based 3D digital surface model. The traits extracted from sensing data included box-counting fractal dimension (DBs), middle branch angle, number of branches, trunk basal diameter, and tree row volume (TRV). The results from ground-based sensing data indicated that there was a significant (P

In an effort for further improvement of LSCF hollow fiber membrane properties in oxygen purification application, this work studied the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) with different molecular weight of 2000, 3400 and 6000 Da as a pore former. A well-prepared hollow fiber membrane was successfully fabricated via extrusion followed by a sintering method. The results showed that the addition of PEG increased the viscosity of the dope suspension and formed a constant asymmetric pore configuration of the membrane after sintering at 1250 °C. The increasing molecular weight of PEG also leads to a decrease in the mechanical strength of the membranes, indicating that finger-like pores were sacrificed by forming irregular pores. The gas tightness was also examined under room temperature which showed that membrane with PEG 3400 achieved the best tightness with the nitrogen permeability of 3.55 × 10−5 mol·m−2·s−1·Pa−1. The oxygen permeation of the membranes was also influenced by the addition of PEG, where the highest oxygen permeation flux of 6.07 × 10−8 mol·cm−2·s−1 was obtained using a hollow fiber membrane with PEG 3400 due to the existence of the lowest dense layer thickness.

Results of fourteen two-span continuous deep beams those made from ordinary reinforced concrete (ORC) as a reference and rubberized reinforced concrete (RRC) are presented and discussed in this research. The main parameters are the rubber ratios as a replacement with coarse and fine aggregate and shear span/depth ratio (a/h) is 1.33 and 1.66. Chip and crumb rubbers were used to replace coarse and fine aggregate respectively in four different amounts by volume (5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%). The proposed mix shows an ability to replace 20% of the aggregate (coarse or fine), and the production is still structural concrete. All beams design to fail in shear. The main crack is formatted between the intermediate support and the applied load diagonally. In spite of the inclusion of waste tire rubber in concrete has specific apparent degradations, the potential benefit seems to overlook the adverse effects and also provides the primary significant value of resolution for rubber waste problems. The results show that 20% volumetric substitution of natural coarse or fine aggregates with tier rubber reduced the ultimate load of continuous deep beams by 32.06% and 32.65% but significantly increases the ultimate deflection by 83.07% and 106.28% respectively. The ductility of rubberized continuous deep beams increases up to 36.95% when the replacement ratio of crumb rubber is 20%.

Amidst a world of never-ending waste production and waste disposal crises, scientists have been working their ways to come up with solutions to serve the earth better. Two such commonly found trashes deteriorating the environment are glass and tin can waste. This study aims to investigate the comparative suitability of response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) in predicting the mechanical strength of concrete prepared with fine glass aggregate (GFA) and condensed milk can (tin) fibers (CMCF). An experimental scheme has been designed in this study with two input variables as GFA and CMCF, and two output variables as compressive and splitting tensile strength. The results show that both variables influenced the compressive and splitting tensile strength of concrete at 7, 28, and 56 days (p

A novel Log periodic patch with circular slot antenna has been presented here, the perturbation of shape of antenna has been done by combining a triangular shape with a semicircular shape. The antenna proposed here is with a DGS structure on its ground plane and its effects on band width and gain enhancement of the antenna is analyzed. The substrate of FR-epoxy material with length, breadth and height 170 mm, 50 mm and 1.6 mm, respectively is taken for implementation of the antenna on it. This proposed antenna operates at 12 GHz to 18 GHz that includes Ku-band with return loss below-10 dB. The parameters of antenna like S-parameters, antenna gain, directivity, VSWR, surface current distribution and radiation efficiency are determined one by one to ascertain its better performance. The simulation as well as the measurement results are comparatively analyzed.

The compatibility problems become main concern in the utilization of biodiesel especially regarding to degradation and corrosion. The present study is conducted to describe the corrosion behaviour that occurs in steel tanks after contact with palm-based biodiesel for a period of 7 months. The storage tank used is respectively made of galvanised steel (GS), carbon steel (CS) and stainless steel (SS). It is performed in vertical cylinders with a floating-roof model. In every 30 days of storage time, the profile changes in the wall, roof and base surface of each tank were observed. The oil fuel properties were monitored in the parameter of viscosity, acid numbers, water content and oil colour. The topographic profiles on the surface of the walls and bottom of each tank wetted by biodiesel were examined over three zones inside the tanks using an endoscope imager. The main results of this study indicate that the tank steel with different protective layers exhibits different types of corrosion. The corrosion was localized in SS tanks but generalized in GS and CS tanks. The oil contamination in SS tanks was relatively lower than that in CS and GS tanks. The type of corrosion performed differently in different zones on the inside of the tank. The potential for leaks is greater at the base than on the walls and roof of the storage tank.

Monitoring the degradation of induction motors is an essential concern for industries, especially when there are high costs related to maintenance and their stops. Nowadays, there are many non-invasive ways to monitor the health status of induction motors, including sensors to measure temperature, magnetic field, vibration, current, and power. However, installing these sensors may not be a simple task since intrusive procedures such as engine disassembling, wire separation, and engine interruption are commonly observed. Thus, we propose MUCLA (Multiphase Clamp and Tracking - patent pending) as a new device and methodology for monitoring motor degradation by analyzing its stator current. MUCLA introduces a non-invasive current sensors array on a proposed clamp in the hardware perspective, while a spectral tracking methodology refers to our novelty in the software viewpoint. For end-users, the main MUCLA contribution relies on the combination of the simplicity of installation and the possibility of using the proposed device even when considering Variable-Frequency Drive powered engines. The results obtained with both simulation and practical tests show encouraging results over different input workloads and emulated degradation. Compared to the current initiatives, we can classify MUCLA as a better solution for industrial plants in terms of installation time, installation complexity, and cost.

The reliability of the result significantly affects the use of the Coefficient of Variation (within the test variation), which reflects the variability of the concrete properties rather than the standard deviation. For the estimation of reliability and precision, comprehensive statistical analysis (within test variation) is conducted on 534 test samples using a rebound hammer. Different standards, like BIS, EN, ACI, and ASTM, are used in this study to compare the test results. Empirical research revealed that there are contradictions in literature as well as the standards used in many countries. The present paper focuses on detailed investigations of uncertainty measurements of the surface hardness test by statistical parameters (range of rebound index, standard deviation, and Coefficient of Variation). The unbiased estimate of the variability parameters from the published results has been verified concerning to the European standard. Concrete parameters namely cement type, water to cement ratio, compaction deficiency, curing condition, and elevated temperature have an impact on the output of the rebound hardness in terms of the variability of the compressive strength. Based on the results, the authors are willing to propose amendments to the Indian code graciously in compliance with the variability of the rebound hammer.

Using oil futures, we examine expectation formation and how it alters the macroeconomic transmission of shocks. Our empirical framework, where investors learn about the persistence of oil-price movements, successfully replicates the fluctuations in oil-price futures since the Late 1990s. By embedding this learning mechanism in an estimated model, we document that an increase in the persistence of TFP-driven fluctuations in oil demand largely accounts for investors' perceptions that oil-price movements became increasingly permanent during the 2000s. Learning alters the macroeconomic impact of shocks, making the responses time dependent and conditional on perceptions of shocks' likely persistence.

Today there is a rapid development taking place in phenotyping of plants using non-destructive image based machine vision techniques. Machine vision based plant phenotyping ranges from single plant trait estimation to broad assessment of crop canopy for thousands of plants in the field. Plant phenotyping systems either use single imaging method or integrative approach signifying simultaneous use of some of the imaging techniques like visible red, green and blue (RGB) imaging, thermal imaging, chlorophyll fluorescence imaging (CFIM), hyperspectral imaging, 3-dimensional (3-D) imaging or high resolution volumetric imaging. This paper provides an overview of imaging techniques and their applications in the field of plant phenotyping. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on recent machine vision methods for plant trait estimation and classification. In this paper, information about publicly available datasets is provided for uniform comparison among the state-of-the-art phenotyping methods. This paper also presents future research directions related to the use of deep learning based machine vision algorithms for structural (2-D and 3-D), physiological and temporal trait estimation, and classification studies in plants.

In regions such as hawai'i, south australia, Tasmania, Texas, and Ireland, power systems are commonly experiencing instantaneous penetration levels of inverter-based power sources (IBPSs) such as wind, solar photovoltaics (PV), and battery storage in excess of 50n60% relative to system demands.

This is the first work that incorporates recent advancements in "explainability" of machine learning (ML) to build a routing obfuscator called ObfusX. We adopt a recent metric---the SHAP value---which explains to what extent each layout feature can reveal each unknown connection for a recent ML-based split manufacturing attack model. The unique benefits of SHAP-based analysis include the ability to identify the best candidates for obfuscation, together with the dominant layout features which make them vulnerable. As a result, ObfusX can achieve better hit rate (97% lower) while perturbing significantly fewer nets when obfuscating using a via perturbation scheme, compared to prior work. When imposing the same wirelength limit using a wire lifting scheme, ObfusX performs significantly better in performance metrics (e.g., 2.4 times more reduction on average in percentage of netlist recovery).

For cloud network performance profiling, network tomography based on end-to-end measurement is often used in deducing the network performance for its efficiency. However, most tomography problems are under-constrained, which require additional assumptions or probing monitors planted among network switches, which are often unavailable in software-defined networking (SDN) environment. On the other hand, SDN based flow mirroring could provide accurate flow information, but the cost of both gathering and analysing the packet traces is tremendous that it is impossible to cover the whole network. We propose ScoutFlow, a method combining SDN flow measurement and end-to-end performance tomography, to achieve accurate performance profiling for cloud network while keeping low monitoring overhead. We evaluate ScoutFlow in our campus data center cloud, the experiment shows good scalability and accuracy.

Secure, Clean, and Efficient Energy is one of the great societal challenges of our time. Electricity as a sustainable energy carrier plays a central role in the most effective transition scenarios toward sustainability. To harness this potential, the current electricity infrastructure needs to be rigorously re-engineered into an integrated and intelligent electricity system: the smart grid. Key elements of the smart grid vision are the coordination mechanisms. In such a system, vast numbers of devices, currently just passively connected to the grid, will become actively involved in system-wide and local coordination tasks. In this light, transactive energy (TE ) is emerging as a strong contender for orchestrating the coordinated operation of so many devices.

Battery energy storage effectively staBIlizes the electric grid and aids renewable integration by balancing supply and demand in real time. The importance of such storage is especially crucial in densely populated urban areas, where traditional storage techniques such as pumped hydroelectric energy storage and compressed-air energy storage are often not feasible.

This paper proposes a comprehensive steady-state analysis for a front-end Modular Multi-Parallel Rectifiers (MMR) system with a shared DC-link. A generalised mathematical representation for n number of parallel rectifiers is proposed. The MMR is analysed for both Continuous Conduction Mode (CCM) and Discontinuous Conduction Mode (DCM). In addition, the CCM and DCM boundary of the MMR is identified mathematically. A 60kW Simulink model for the MMR is utilised to confirm the proposed steady-state mathematical modelling equations.

Recently, thinning an antenna has resulted in attractive antenna radiation characteristics enhancement. This performance enhancement using a thin antenna array is achieved because the inter-coupling effects of the array elements are reduced. Though the thinning both reduces the weight of the antenna and enhances the radiation characteristics, iterative algorithms can further enhance the performance and hence, in this research, an optimizer algorithm and inter-coupling reducing mechanisms are applied. The excitation weights of the individual array elements are thinned by turning some of the elements off while some of the elements are turned on. The purpose of the thinning is to enhance the antenna performances like reduced SLL, high directivity, reduced power consumption and flexible radiation pattern. The SLL attenuation mechanism is applied to reduce the SLL in addition to the SLL reduction using the thinning and beamforming. Hence, in this paper, the three techniques (thinning, beamforming and SLL attenuation) are proposed to be integrated to enhance the antenna radiation characteristics. In general, the proposed combined method has resulted in much better SLL reduction, directivity improvement, and power wastage reduction.

TruthSift is a cloud-based platform that logically combines members' contributions into a collective intelligence. Members add statements and directed connectors to diagrams. TruthSift monitors which statements have been logically established by demonstrations for which every challenge has beenrefuted by an established refutation, and the complement: which statements have been refuted by established refutations. When members run out of rational objections the result is a converged diagramsuccinctly representing the state of knowledge about a topic, including plausible challenges and how they were refuted. Previous computer systems for collaborative intelligence did not have a qualitatively better solution for combining contributions than voting, and are subject to group think, interest group capture, and inability to follow a multi-step logical argument. They did not settle issues automatically point by point and propagate the consequences up. I review indications that many practically important statements most people believe to be firmly established will be revealed to be firmly refuted upon computer assisted scrutiny. TruthSift also supports construction of powerful probabilistic models over networks of causes, implications, tests, and necessary factors.

Multi-view classification with limited sample size and data augmentation is a very common machine learning (ML) problem in medicine. With limited data, a triplet network approach for two-stage representation learning has been proposed. However, effective training and verifying the features from the representation network for their suitability in subsequent classifiers are still unsolved problems. Although typical distance-based metrics for the training capture the overall class separability of the features, the performance according to these metrics does not always lead to an optimal classification. Consequently, an exhaustive tuning with all feature-classifier combinations is required to search for the best end result. To overcome this challenge, we developed a novel nearest-neighbor (NN) validation strategy based on the triplet metric. This strategy is supported by a theoretical foundation to provide the best selection of the features with a lower bound of the highest end performance. The proposed strategy is a transparent approach to identify whether to improve the features or the classifier. This avoids the need for repeated tuning. Our evaluations on real-world medical imaging tasks (i.e., radiation therapy delivery error prediction and sarcoma survival prediction) show that our strategy is superior to other common deep representation learning baselines [i.e., autoencoder (AE) and softmax]. The strategy addresses the issue of feature's interpretability which enables more holistic feature creation such that the medical experts can focus on specifying relevant data as opposed to tedious feature engineering.

With the rapid progress of wireless communication technologies along with their digital revolutions, the quantity of Internet of Things (IoT) has been increased by manifolds resulting in a huge increase in data volume and network traffic. It became easier for an intruder to pretend as a valid service provider, and generate different types of network attacks. This becomes even more severe when the service involves digital financial transactions. This paper proposes an intrusion detection system (IDS) based on a stacked autoencoder (AE) and a deep neural network (DNN). The stacked AE learns the features of the input network record in an unsupervised manner to decrease the feature width. Then, the DNN is trained in a supervised manner to extract deep-learned features for the classifier. In the proposed system, the stacked AE has two latent layers and the DNN has two or three layers, where each layer has a fully-connected layer, a batch normalization, and a dropout. The system was evaluated on three publicly available datasets: KDDCup99, NSL-KDD, and AWID. Experimental results exhibited that the proposed IDS achieved 94.2%, 99.7%, 99.9% accuracy, respectively, for multiclass classification.

Determining the properties of mine waste dump material is very difficult, it is caused by the difference of dimension between the laboratory equipment and field material size distribution. This study aims to determine the material properties from mine waste dump material using back analysis method after failure was occurred. The back analysis method is based on a trial and error concept which focuses on failure geometry and it is conducted by varying the cohesion and friction angle until the safety factor was less than 1.0. The laboratory results showed a 66.2 kPa change as well as a 48.8°friction angle deviation in mine waste dump material properties, while the back analysis indicated 33.7 kPa and 27.4°. It means, there is a reduction in the value. Therefore, the increasing in these properties are expected to allow the redesign of heap stability.

Federated Learning (FL) has attracted significant interest given its prominent advantages and applicability in many scenarios. However, it has been demonstrated that sharing updated gradients/weights during the training process can lead to privacy concerns. In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), this can be exacerbated due to Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), which are intended to detect security attacks by analyzing the devices' network traffic. Our work provides a comprehensive evaluation of Differential Privacy (DP) techniques, which are applied during the training of an FL-enabled IDS for Industrial IoT (IIoT). Unlike previous approaches, we deal with non-iid data over the recent ToN_IoT dataset and compare the accuracy obtained considering different privacy requirements and aggregation functions, namely FedAvg and the recently proposed Fed+. According to our evaluation, the use of Fed+ in our setting provides similar results even when noise is included in the federated training process.