Parallel processing in knowledge-based diagnostic systems

This paper highlights the use of the parallel processing concept in knowledge-based diagnostic systems. A MIMD machine connected in a cubic mesh fashion using Parlog has been suggested to implement such systems. An algorithm supporting the concurrent execution of multiple conflict set rules of the same production system program is presented. A specific application to communication systems maintenance utilizing these principles has been discussed.     

A study of inverse relaxation in some textile fibers

This article discusses the phenomenon of inverse relaxation in some textile fibers, namely cotton, ramie, wool, polyester, and viscose. If anextended viscoelastic specimen is allowed to recover a part of the deformation given to it, such that its tension has not become zero, the stress in it tends to increase. This phenomenon is termed as “inverse relaxation.” This property is measured in terms of an index referred to as the inverse relaxation index. The values of this index at various extension and retraction levels for the above materials are presented and discussed in this article.     

Third response to comments by M.J. Neatrour on Maxwell's equations

For original papers by Harmuth see ibid., vol.28, no.4, p.250, p.259, p.267 (1986). For Neatrour's article see ibid., vol.29, no.3, p.258 (1987). The question of whether the authors' previous modification of Maxwell's equations adds anything new to physics is addressed. Several plots of electric field strength under various conditions are presented, of which the authors claim about half could not have been derived from Maxwell's original equations. Since they claim these plots are accurate, the modified equations do, indeed, add something to physics     

Privacy of data in education

With cheaper mass data storage equipment and computers that can process data with great speeds there is the perception of an increasing danger that the privacy of student data will be violated. Responses to this have varied with countries. Some are in the initial stage of becoming aware of the problem while others have reached the final stage of enacting and enforcing laws that protect the privacy of student data. These national developments are identified and from (his survey there appears to be a trend in many countries towards the acceptance of certain rights as they relate to privacy of student data. They are the rights of notification, access, challenge, prompt correction, erasure, control and finally, the right to redress. These are discussed along with the possible responses and strategies by educational management. The cost and other implications of each of these strategies are also discussed. The cost is estimated based on experience with implementing privacy rights in the government sector and by a simulation cost model for the education sector. Also discussed are the possible consequences for educational management of not complying with the privacy laws. In some countries this could result in fines, imprisonment or both.     

Design of electronic optimizer for solar electric drive system

There has been considerable interest in the use of solar electrical converters for supplying electric drive motors in pumping schemes for rural areas. The optimum control of solar electric drive motors is desirable because it leads firstly, to higher apparent efficiency of solar energy conversion, and, secondly, to reduced cost per useful watt. Although the ‘fuel’ for solar drives is free, the cost of solar cells is high. Optimization means that smaller areas of solar panels are required, thus reducing the overall cost of the solar drive system. The present investigation has been directed towards the development of a reliable electronic controller, which would ensure stable and optimal performance characteristics of solar electric-powered pumping scheme over a broad range of operating conditions. The design goals are low cost, reasonable accuracy, control capability and efficient utilization of the electrically converted solar power. The developed electronic optimizer provides constant voltage operation of the solar generator so that maximum power can be delivered to the drive motor for any light intensity. The main part of the optimizer is a servo chopper. The chopper operation is automatically adjusted so that the overall system efficiency is always maintained at a maximum value. Details of the electronic optimizer circuits are given and the overall system performance is investigated. Valuable information for the design and operation of the solar electric drive system with the electronic optimizer is gained from this analysis.     

Anomaly detection of smart metering system for power management with battery storage system/electric vehicle

A novel smart metering technique capable of anomaly detection was proposed for real-time home power management system. Smart meter data generated in real-time were obtained from 900 households of single apartments. To detect outliers and missing values in smart meter data, a deep learning model, the autoencoder, consisting of a graph convolutional network and bidirectional long short-term memory network, was applied to the smart metering technique. Power management based on the smart metering technique was executed by multi-objective optimization in the presence of a battery storage system and an electric vehicle. The results of the power management employing the proposed smart metering technique indicate a reduction in electricity cost and amount of power supplied by the grid compared to the results of power management without anomaly detection.     

An Efficient and Robust Hand Gesture Recognition System of Sign Language Employing Finetuned Inception-V3 and Efficientnet-B0 Network

Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) is a promising research area with an extensive range of applications, such as surgery, video game techniques, and sign language translation, where sign language is a complicated structured form of hand gestures. The fundamental building blocks of structured expressions in sign language are the arrangement of the fingers, the orientation of the hand, and the hand’s position concerning the body. The importance of HGR has increased due to the increasing number of touchless applications and the rapid growth of the hearing-impaired population. Therefore, real-time HGR is one of the most effective interaction methods between computers and humans. Developing a user-free interface with good recognition performance should be the goal of real-time HGR systems. Nowadays, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) shows great recognition rates for different image-level classification tasks. It is challenging to train deep CNN networks like VGG-16, VGG-19, Inception-v3, and Efficientnet-B0 from scratch because only some significant labeled image datasets are available for static hand gesture images. However, an efficient and robust hand gesture recognition system of sign language employing finetuned Inception-v3 and Efficientnet-Bo network is proposed to identify hand gestures using a comparative small HGR dataset. Experiments show that Inception-v3 achieved 90% accuracy and 0.93% precision, 0.91% recall, and 0.90% f1-score, respectively, while EfficientNet-B0 achieved 99% accuracy and 0.98%, 0.97%, 0.98%, precision, recall, and f1-score respectively.     

BE-RPL: Balanced-load and Energy-efficient RPL

Internet of Things (IoT) empowers imaginative applications and permits new services when mobile nodes are included. For IoT-enabled low-power and lossy networks (LLN), the Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has become an established standard routing protocol. Mobility under standard RPL remains a difficult issue as it causes continuous path disturbance, energy loss, and increases the end-to-end delay in the network. In this unique circumstance, a Balanced-load and Energy-efficient RPL (BE-RPL) is proposed. It is a routing technique that is both energy-efficient and mobility-aware. It responds quicker to link breakage through received signal strength-based mobility monitoring and selecting a new preferred parent reactively. The proposed system also implements load balancing among stationary nodes for leaf node allocation. Static nodes with more leaf nodes are restricted from participating in the election for a new preferred parent. The performance of BE-RPL is assessed using the COOJA simulator. It improves the energy use, network control overhead, frame acknowledgment ratio, and packet delivery ratio of the network.     

Radial Basis Approximations Based BEMD for Enhancement of Non-Uniform Illumination Images

An image can be degraded due to many environmental factors like foggy or hazy weather, low light conditions, extra light conditions etc. Image captured under the poor light conditions is generally known as non-uniform illumination image. Non-uniform illumination hides some important information present in an image during the image capture Also, it degrades the visual quality of image which generates the need for enhancement of such images. Various techniques have been present in literature for the enhancement of such type of images. In this paper, a novel architecture has been proposed for enhancement of poor illumination images which uses radial basis approximations based BEMD (Bi-dimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition). The enhancement algorithm is applied on intensity and saturation components of image. Firstly, intensity component has been decomposed into various bi-dimensional intrinsic mode function and residue by using sifting algorithm. Secondly, some linear transformations techniques have been applied on various bidimensional intrinsic modes obtained and residue and further on joining the transformed modes with residue, enhanced intensity component is obtained. Saturation part of an image is then enhanced in accordance to the enhanced intensity component. Final enhanced image can be obtained by joining the hue, enhanced intensity and enhanced saturation parts of the given image. The proposed algorithm will not only give the visual pleasant image but maintains the naturalness of image also.