Learning the behavior model of a robot

Complex artifacts are designed today from well specified and well modeled components. But most often, the models of these components cannot be composed into a global functional model of the artifact. A significant observation, modeling and identification effort is required to get such a global model, which is needed in order to better understand, control and improve the designed artifact.     

Ozone-Induced Biodegradability Enhancement and Color Reduction of a Complex Pharmaceutical Effluent

The treatment of a complex pharmaceutical effluent using a combination of ozonation and biological treatment is reported with the use of ozonation as a pre- and posttreatment. Pretreatment facilitated biodegradability index (BI = BOD/COD) enhancement of up to 0.44 along with COD and color reduction of up to 42% and 33%, respectively. Subsequent anaerobic biodegradation of effluent indicated negligible biogas generation; however, aerobic biodegradation of pretreated effluent resulted in COD reduction (73%) and color reduction (62%), which was also indicated by the biokinetic parameters. Further, ozonation as a posttreatment led to higher overall COD (87%) and color (93%) removal.     

Synthesis, Structure Optimization and Antifungal Screening of Novel Tetrazole Ring Bearing Acyl-Hydrazones

Azoles are generally fungistatic, and resistance to fluconazole is emerging in several fungal pathogens. In an attempt to find novel azole antifungal agents with improved activity, a series of tetrazole ring bearing acylhydrazone derivatives were synthesized and screened for their in vitro antifungal activity. The mechanism of their antifungal activity was assessed by studying their effect on the plasma membrane using flow cytometry and determination of the levels of ergosterol, a fungal-specific sterol. Propidium iodide rapidly penetrated a majority of yeast cells when they were treated with the synthesized compounds at concentrations just above MIC, implying that fungicidal activity resulted from extensive lesions of the plasma membrane. Target compounds also caused a considerable reduction in the amount of ergosterol. The results also showed that the presence and position of different substituents on the phenyl ring of the acylhydrazone pendant seem to play a role on the antifungal activity as well as in deciding the fungistatic and fungicidal nature of the compounds.     

Analysis of traditional and modern image encryption algorithms under realistic ambience

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Cryptography (encryption/decryption) is one of the prevailing mechanisms for protection of information (data or image) in the growing era of computerized...     

Effect of Temperature, Salts and Ureas on the Association Behavior of an Amphiphilic Phenothiazine Drug Promethazine Hydrochloride

Association behavior of an amphiphilic phenothiazine drug promethazine hydrochloride in the presence of inorganic salts (LiCl, NaF, NaCl, NaBr, and KCl) and ureas (urea and thiourea) has been studied conductometrically at different additive concentrations (0?C100?mmol?kg^?1) and temperatures (293.15?C308.15?K). The critical micelle concentration (CMC) values showed an inverted U-shaped behavior with temperature; the maximum being at 298.15?K with or without additives. The inorganic salts decreased the CMC which is explained on the basis of nature and ion size. Ureas decreased the CMC at low concentration (0.2?mmol?kg^?1 urea and 0.1?mmol?kg^?1 thiourea) but, at higher concentrations, an increase in CMC was observed with both the additives. Relevant thermodynamic parameters were also evaluated and discussed on the basis of the nature of particular types of the additives. The thermodynamic parameters suggest dehydration of the hydrophobic part of the drug at higher temperatures.     

Extreme learning machine based approach for diagnosis and analysis of breast cancer

Due to the heterogeneous and complex nature of clinical data, the need to use sophisticated diagnosis techniques has increased significantly in recent years. The proposed approach for diagnosis of breast cancer exploits the potential of an extreme learning machine (ELM) and analyzes its performance after classification into benign and malignant cases. To optimize the ELM network in terms of computation time and memory resources, weight pruning is used without performance compromise. Using real data sets, numerical experiments have been conducted. With an accuracy of 93%, the optimum numbers of node layers for breast cancer diagnosis has been found to be 20. Comparative results demonstrate over-performance of the proposed ELM approach.     

Stagnation‐point flow of Maxwell fluid with magnetic field and radiation effects

The effect of heat transfer on the steady two‐dimensional stagnation point flow of a Maxwell fluid over a stretching sheet is discussed. The fluid is electrically conducting in the presence of a uniform applied magnetic field. The radiation effect in the energy equation is taken into account. The arising nonlinear problem is solved by a homotopy analysis method (HAM). Convergence of the series solutions is checked. The values of skin friction coefficient and local Nusselt number have been computed and discussed. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res; Published online in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/htj ). DOI 10.1002/htj.20385