Feature-blind fairness in collaborative filtering recommender systems

Knowledge and Information Systems - Recommender systems were originally proposed for suggesting potentially relevant items to users, with the unique objective of providing accurate suggestions....     

Conservation Policy Changes in Protected Areas on Hilltops in Brazil: Effects on Hydrological Response in a Small Watershed

Water Resources Management - Public policies affecting land use/land cover also have an impact on water resource availability, and hilltop protected areas are a relevant factor in ensuring...     

Use of Oxone® as a Potential Catalyst in Biodiesel Production from Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD)

Catalysis Letters - Palm fatty acid distillate PFAD is an example of potential low-cost palm biofuel second generation feedstock, most used as a source of fatty acid for non-food applications in...     

Impact of environmental strategies and practices on the socioeconomic development of the Brazilian sugar-energy sector

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Different environmental strategies have been devised and implemented as instruments to change companies’ socio-environmental behavior worldwide....     

Experimental design as a tool to study the reaction parameters in hydrogen production from photoinduced reforming of glycerol over CdS photocatalyst

The aim of this study was to set the reaction conditions of the photoinduced reforming of glycerol aqueous solution over Pt/hex-CdS under visible light irradiation for enhancement of hydrogen production by using a fractional factorial experimental design followed by a Box–Behnken design. The parameters assessed were irradiation time, mass of photocatalyst, concentration of glycerol, pH and electrolyte concentration (NaCl). The preliminary two-level fractional factorial design (2⁵⁻¹) showed that all of the investigated factors have significant effect in hydrogen production, being pH the most important parameter. The three factors Box–Behnken design showed maximum response for hydrogen production in pH 4.0, 55% glycerol and 1.5 mol L⁻¹ NaCl. The amount of hydrogen obtained under these conditions was 270% higher than our previous result, using the same photocatalyst and electron donor. In the ideal pH, >CdSH₂⁺and >CdOH species are predominant before irradiation, indicating that such species play an important role in the primary steps of the photoelectrochemical mechanism, which served as the basis for proposing a mechanism for hydrogen generation as well as glycerol photooxidation. Based on the surface response [NaCl] × [glycerol], a solution with salinity equivalent to approximately the natural seawater was tested and the result for hydrogen production was comparable to the best condition; besides, under this condition, the solubility of CdS in aqueous solution is reduced.     

An anonymous and unlinkable electronic toll collection system

International Journal of Information Security - Electronic toll collection (ETC) systems make it easier for drivers to pay the fee for driving on toll roads. Nevertheless, digitalization of any...     

A methodology for detection and classification of power quality disturbances using a real‐time operating system in the context of home energy management systems

Demand‐side management comprises a portfolio of actions on the consumers' side to ensure reliable power indices from the electrical system. The home energy management system (HEMS) is used to manage the consumption and production of energy in smart homes. However, the technology of HEMS architecture can be used for the detection and classification of power quality disturbances. This paper presents low‐voltage metering hardware that uses an ARM Cortex M4 and real‐time operating system to detect and classify power quality disturbances. In the context of HEMS, the proposed metering infrastructure can be used as a smart meter, which provides the service of power quality monitoring. For this type of application, there is a need to ensure that the development of this device has an acceptable cost, which is one of the reasons for the choice of an ARM microprocessor. However, managing a wide range of operations (data acquisition, data preprocessing, disturbance detection and classification, energy consumption, and data exchange) is a complex task and, consequently, requires the optimization of the embedded software. To overcome this difficulty, the use of a real‐time operating system provided by Texas Instruments (called TI‐RTOS) is proposed with the objective of managing operations at the hardware level. Thus, a methodology with low computational cost has been defined and embedded. The proposed approach uses a preprocessing stage to extract some features that are used as inputs to detect and classify disturbances. In this way, it was possible to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of the embedded algorithm when applied to synthetic and real power quality signals. Consequently, it is noted that the results are significant in the analysis of power quality in a smart grid scenario, as the smart meter offers low cost and high accuracy in both detecting (an accuracy rate above 90%) and classifying (an average accuracy rate above 94%) disturbances.