Investigation of using possibility of grape pomace in wafer sheet for wheat flour substitution

In this study, grape pomace (GP), a by-product consisting of grape skins and seeds rich in dietary fibres and polyphenols, was used in wafer sheets at different concentrations [5.00 (GP5), 10.0 (GP10), and 15.0 g 100 g⁻¹ (GP15)] for the partial replacement of wheat flour (WF) and improve the functionality of wafer sheets. The GP inclusion at concentrations higher than 5.00 g 100 g⁻¹ significantly affected the texture of sheets as well as the flow behaviour of batters, resulting in softer sheets and more viscous batters (P < 0.05). Moisture contents did not significantly change after GP addition (P > 0.05). After the addition of GP, the L* values decreased and the a* values increased, making the wafers darker (P < 0.05). Moreover, under simulated in vitro digestion conditions, the bioaccessibility of total phenolic compounds in saliva, gastric juice, and intestinal juice was significantly higher than control even at the lowest GP concentration (P < 0.05). Regarding sensory properties, only smoothness and crispness were significantly affected by GP addition, and samples were found to be crisper with higher concentrations of GP. In conclusion, it is possible to partially replace the WF in wafers with GP at a concentration of 5.00 g 100 g⁻¹ to develop a product with higher functionality and nutrient content.     

Utilising grape juice processing by-products as bulking and colouring agent in white chocolate

In this study, grape pomace (mixture of grape seeds and skins) powder (GPP), obtained from grape processing, was used at different concentrations [10.0 (GPP10), 20.0 (GPP10) and 30.0 (GPP10) g/100 g] in white chocolate formulation for the partial replacement of sucrose. The results indicated that GPP addition at a higher concentration (>10.0 g/100 g) significantly affected the particle size, moisture content, texture and flow behaviour of white chocolate samples (P < 0.05). However, using GPP at a concentration of 10.0 g/100 g had advantages for physicochemical and flow properties. As expected, under simulated in vitro digestion conditions, the bioaccessibility of total phenolic compounds in saliva, gastric juice and intestinal juice for GPP10 samples was significantly higher than the control (P < 0.05). In conclusion, results of the study showed that it was possible to partially replace the sucrose with GPP at a concentration of 10.0 g/100 g in white chocolate formulations.     

Monitoring the film formation process of polystyrene/poly acrylamide (PS/PAAm) composite films annealed by IR heating

In this study, UV‐visible (UVV) technique was used to probe the evolution of optical transmission during the film formation from composites of polystyrene (PS) latex particles and poly acrylamide (PAAm) films annealed by the infrared radiative heating (IRH) and convectional heating. Activation energies corresponding to the void closure and the interdiffusion stages were calculated. It was shown that the activation energy for the void closure processes of viscous flow from the composite films decreased considerably in IRH annealing technique. It was observed that IRH heating speeds up the film formation process and the decrease the required energy. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 58:353–360, 2018. © 2017 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Unusual behavior of dynamic hydrogen generation from sodium borohydride

In this study, for the first time, hydrogen gas generation rate is dynamically measured by transferring required amount of sodium borohydride solution to maintain 1 or 2 normal liters of hydrogen gas generation per minute. Three different catalysts (iron, platinum and ruthenium) are used in order to investigate the critical catalyst concentration, catalyst amount and the rate relation and as well as the influence of the sodium borohydride concentration on the rate equations. It has been demonstrated that the linear approximation from the initial hydrogen gas generation data usually reported in the literature is not valid. Moreover, the actual rates reported here are higher and lower than the linear approximations depending on the type of the catalyst. It is about 60 percent lower than linear approximation when iron catalyst is used. Therefore, calculating hydrogen gas generation rate as NL min⁻¹ g⁻¹_catalyst is invalid. On the other hand, it has been observed that the rate equation may not be dependent on the amount of the sodium borohydride concentration if the highest catalytic activity is achieved. Hence, most of the rate equations in the literature are only valid for a range, which is limited to the highest catalytic activity. Additionally, it has been concluded that the amount of catalyst and sodium borohydride concentration may be optimized to observe almost 100% efficiencies.     

Facial feature extraction using a probabilistic approach

Facial features such as lip corners, eye corners and nose tip are critical points in a human face. Robust extraction of such facial feature locations is an important problem which is used in a wide range of applications. In this work, we propose a probabilistic framework and several methods which can extract critical points on a face using both location and texture information. The new framework enables one to learn the facial feature locations probabilistically from training data. The principle is to maximize the joint distribution of location and apperance/texture parameters. We first introduce an independence assumption which enables independent search for each feature. Then, we improve upon this model by assuming dependence of location parameters but independence of texture parameters. We model location parameters with a multi-variate Gaussian and the texture parameters are modeled with a Gaussian mixture model which are much richer as compared to the standard subspace models like principal component analysis. The location parameters are found by solving a maximum likelihood optimization problem. We show that the optimization problem can be solved using various search strategies. We introduce local gradient-based methods such as gradient ascent and Newton's method initialized from independent model locations both of which require certain non-trivial assumptions to work. We also propose a multi-candidate coordinate ascent search and a coarse-to-fine search strategy which both depend on efficiently searching among multiple candidate points. Our framework is compared in detail with the conventional statistical approaches of active shape and active appearance models. We perform extensive experiments to show that the new methods outperform the conventional approaches in facial feature extraction accuracy.     

SpyDetector: An approach for detecting side-channel attacks at runtime

International Journal of Information Security - In this work, we first present a low-cost, anomaly-based semi-supervised approach, which is instrumental in detecting the presence of ongoing...     

Tough and hierarchical porous cryogel scaffolds preparation using n-butanol as a non-solvent

Hierarchical porous chitosan cryogels were prepared by combination of cryogelation and phase separation techniques. n-Butanol was included as a non-solvent in the initial polymer solutions to enable phase separation. The internal morphology of the resulting cryogels revealed hierarchical porosity where larger pores of between 25–50?µm were formed via cryogelation, whereas smaller pores of between 4–10?µm were produced by phase separation. The control sample prepared without n-butanol exhibited monotype porosity. Any crack development was not observed when samples were compressed up to 80% strain. The results demonstrated hierarchical porous and tough scaffolds with potential use in tissue engineering.     

Nanocrystal Skins with Exciton Funneling for Photosensing

Highly photosensitive nanocrystal (NC) skins based on exciton funneling are proposed and demonstrated using a graded bandgap profile across which no external bias is applied in operation for light‐sensing. Four types of gradient NC skin devices (GNS) made of NC monolayers of distinct sizes with photovoltage readout are fabricated and comparatively studied. In all structures, polyelectrolyte polymers separating CdTe NC monolayers set the interparticle distances between the monolayers of ligand‐free NCs to <1 nm. In this photosensitive GNS platform, excitons funnel along the gradually decreasing bandgap gradient of cascaded NC monolayers, and are finally captured by the NC monolayer with the smallest bandgap interfacing the metal electrode. Time‐resolved measurements of the cascaded NC skins are conducted at the donor and acceptor wavelengths, and the exciton transfer process is confirmed in these active structures. These findings are expected to enable large‐area GNS‐based photosensing with highly efficient full‐spectrum conversion.     

Mining spatiotemporal co-occurrence patterns in non-relational databases

Spatiotemporal co-occurrence patterns (STCOPs) represent the subsets of feature types whose instances are frequently co-occurring both in space and time. Spatiotemporal co-occurrences reflect the spatiotemporal overlap relationships among two or more spatiotemporal instances both in spatial and temporal dimensions. STCOPs can be potentially used to predict and understand the generation and evolution of different types of interacting phenomena in various scientific fields such as astronomy, meteorology, biology, geosciences. Meaningful and statistically significant data analysis for these scientific fields requires processing sufficiently large datasets. Due to the computationally expensive nature of spatiotemporal operations required for mining spatiotemporal co-occurrences, it is increasingly difficult to identify spatiotemporal co-occurrences and discover STCOPs in centralized system settings. As a solution, we developed a cloud-based distributed mining system for discovering STCOPs. Our system uses Accumulo, a column-oriented non-relational database management system as its backbone. In order to efficiently mine the STCOPs, we propose three data models for managing trajectory-based spatiotemporal data in Accumulo. We introduce an in-memory join-index structure and a join algorithm for effectively performing spatiotemporal join operations on spatiotemporal trajectories in non-relational databases. Lastly, with the experiments with artificial and real life datasets, we evaluate the performance of the proposed models for STCOP mining.