Design and deployment challenges in immersive and wearable technologies

The current century has brought an unimaginable growth in information and communications technology (ICT) and needs of enormous computing. The advancements in computer hardware and software particularly helped fuel the requirements of human beings, and revolutionized the smart products as an outcome. The advent of wearable devices from their development till successful materialisation has only taken less than a quarter of a century. The huge benefits of these smart wearable technologies cannot be fully enjoyed until and unless the reliability of a complete system is ensured. The reliability can be increased by the consistent advancements in hardware and software in parallel. User expectations actually are the challenges that keep the advancements alive while improving at an unmatchable pace. The future of wearable and other smart devices depends on whether they can provide a timely solution that is reliable, richer in resources, smaller in size, and cheaper in price. This paper addresses the threats and opportunities in the development and the acceptance of immersive and wearable technologies. The hardware and software challenges for the purpose of development are discussed to demonstrate the bottlenecks of the current technologies and the limitations that impose those bottlenecks. For the purpose of adoption, social and commercial challenges related to innovation and acceptability are discussed. The paper proposes guidelines that are expected to be applicable in several considerable applications of wearable technologies, for example, social networks, healthcare, and banking.     

Transaction models for Web accessibility

The Web has evolved into a dominant digital medium for conducting many types of online transactions such as shopping, paying bills, making travel plans, etc. Such transactions typically involve a number of steps spanning several Web pages. For sighted users these steps are relatively straightforward to do with graphical Web browsers. But they pose tremendous challenges for visually impaired individuals. This is because screen readers, the dominant assistive technology used by visually impaired users, function by speaking out the screen’s content serially. Consequently, using them for conducting transactions can cause considerable information overload. But usually one needs to browse only a small fragment of a Web page to do a step of a transaction (e.g., choosing an item from a search results list). Based on this observation this paper presents a model-directed transaction framework to identify, extract and aurally render only the “relevant” page fragments in each step of a transaction. The framework uses a process model to encode the state of the transaction and a concept model to identify the page fragments relevant for the transaction in that state. We also present algorithms to mine such models from click stream data generated by transactions and experimental evidence of the practical effectiveness of our models in improving user experience when conducting online transactions with non-visual modalities.     

Modelling of air damping effect on the performance of encapsulated MEMS resonators

Microsystem Technologies - The dynamic performance of a micro-resonator depends on its energy loss mechanism which is quantified by Q-factor (Quality factor). This paper presents numerical...     

Tweet and user validation with supervised feature ranking and rumor classification

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Filtering fake news from social network posts and detecting social network users who are responsible for generating and propagating these rumors have become two...     

A New,Thorough Look on Unusual and Neglected Group III-VI Compounds Toward Novel Perusals

The attention on group III-VI compounds in the last decades has been centered on the optoelectronic properties of indium and gallium chalcogenides. These outstanding properties are leading to novel advancements in terms of fundamental and applied science. One of the advantages of these compounds is to present laminated structures, which can be exfoliated down to monolayers. Despite the large knowledge gathered toward indium and gallium chalcogenides, the family of the group III-VI compounds embraces several other noncommon compounds formed by the other group III elements. These compounds present various crystal lattices, among which a great deal is offered from layered structures. Studies on aluminium chalcogenides show interesting potential as anodes in batteries and as semiconductors. Thallium (Tl), which is commonly present in the +1 oxidation state, is one of the key components in ternary chalcogenides. However, binary Tl–Q (Q = S, Se, Te) systems and derived films are still studied for their semiconducting and thermoelectric properties. This review aims to summarize the biggest features of these unusual materials and to shed some new light on them with the perspective that in the future, novel studies can revive these compounds in order to give rise to a new generation of technology.     

Least square and Kalman based methodsfor dynamic phasor estimation: a review

The characterization of sinusoidal signals with time varying amplitude and phase is useful and applicable for many fields. Therefore several algorithms have been suggested to estimate main aspects of these signals. Within no standard approach to test the properties of these algorithms, it seems to be helpful to discuss a large class of algorithms according to their properties. In this paper, six methods of estimating dynamic phasor have been reviewed and discussed which three of them are based on least square and others are based on Kalman filter. Taylor expansion is used as a first step and continued with least square or Kalman filter in accordance with the proposal observer of each method. The theoretical processes of these methods are briefly clarified. The characterizations have been made by some tests in time and frequency domains. The tests include amplitude step, phase step, frequency step, frequency response, total vector error, transient monitor, noise, sample number, computation time, harmonic and DC offset which build a framework to compare the different methods.     

Integration of textual cues for fine-grained image captioning using deep CNN and LSTM

Neural Computing and Applications - The automatic narration of a natural scene is an important trait in artificial intelligence that unites computer vision and natural language processing. Caption...     

Bacillus subtilis: As an Efficient Bacterial Strain for the Reclamation of Water Loaded with Textile Azo Dye,Orange II

The azo dye orange II is used extensively in the textile sector for coloring fabrics. High concentrations of it are released into aqueous environments through textile effluents. Therefore, its removal from textile wastewater and effluents is necessary. Herein, initially, we tested 11 bacterial strains for their capabilities in the degradation of orange II dye. It was revealed in the preliminary data that B. subtilis can more potently degrade the selected dye, which was thus used in the subsequent experiments. To achieve maximum decolorization, the experimental conditions were optimized whereby maximum degradation was achieved at: a 25 ppm dye concentration, pH 7, a temperature of 35 °C, a 1000 mg/L concentration of glucose, a 1000 mg/L urea concentration, a 666.66 mg/L NaCl concentration, an incubation period of 3 days, and with hydroquinone as a redox mediator at a concentration of 66.66 mg/L. The effects of the interaction of the operational factors were further confirmed using response surface methodology, which revealed that at optimum conditions of pH 6.45, a dye concentration of 17.07 mg/L, and an incubation time of 9.96 h at 45.38 °C, the maximum degradation of orange II can be obtained at a desirability coefficient of 1, estimated using the central composite design (CCD). To understand the underlying principles of degradation of the metabolites in the aliquot mixture at the optimized condition, the study steps were extracted and analyzed using GC-MS(Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry), FTIR(Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy), ¹H and carbon 13 NMR(Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy). The GC-MS pattern revealed that the original dye was degraded into o-xylene and naphthalene. Naphthalene was even obtained in a pure state through silica gel column isolation and confirmed using ¹H and ¹³C NMR spectroscopic analysis. Phytotoxicity tests on Vigna radiata were also conducted and the results confirmed that the dye metabolites were less toxic than the parent dye. These results emphasize that B. subtilis should be used as a potential strain for the bioremediation of textile effluents containing orange II and other toxic azo dyes.