Wine produced by immobilized cells on dried raisin berries in sensory evaluation comparison with commercial products

Comparative sensory evaluation of wines produced by immobilized cells of Uvaferme 299 on dried raisin berries and free cells using the Saint Denis grape variety and of commercial Greek products (‘Biblia Chora’ rosé wine produced from the Syrah grape variety, ‘Palivos’ and ‘Strofilia’ rosé wines both produced from the Agiorgitiko grape variety) was carried out. Sensory evaluation was conducted twice by 11 tasters previously trained and a method for panel validation was proposed. Subsequently, the wines were evaluated for their aroma intension, aroma complexity, aroma elegance and overall quality. Duncan's multiple range test clearly showed that there were statistically significant differences between wines produced using different grape varieties and fermentation conditions. Linear regression analysis of the results was performed in order to investigate which sensory parameter had a significant effect on the overall quality and it revealed that only aroma elegance affected significantly the overall quality. Wine produced by immobilized cells scored a statistically higher value for its overall quality than the wine produced by free cells. Finally, discriminant sensory evaluation revealed a gooseberry, cherry, mint aroma for ‘Biblia Chora’ wine and a citrus, rose aroma for ‘Strofilia’ and ‘Palivos’ wines. Wines produced using immobilized and free cells were characterized by a fruity, banana‐like aroma, and a herbaceous note was predominant. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

A harmonised model for safety assessment and certification of safety-critical systems in the transportation industries

This paper describes a model for the assessment and certification of safety-critical programmable electronic systems in the transportation industries. The proposed model is founded on the significant commonalities between emerging international safety-related standards in the automotive, railway and aerospace industries. It contains a system development and a safety assessment process which rationalise and unify the common requirements among the standards in these areas. In addition, it defines an evolutionary process for the development of the system’s safety case. The safety case process shows how the evidence produced in the progression of safety assessment can be structured in order to form an overall argument about the safety of the system. We conclude that it is possible to use this model as the basis of a generic approach to the certification of systems across the transportation sector.     

Incremental refinement of image salient-point detection

Low-level image analysis systems typically detect "points of interest", i.e., areas of natural images that contain corners or edges. Most of the robust and computationally efficient detectors proposed for this task use the autocorrelation matrix of the localized image derivatives. Although the performance of such detectors and their suitability for particular applications has been studied in relevant literature, their behavior under limited input source (image) precision or limited computational or energy resources is largely unknown. All existing frameworks assume that the input image is readily available for processing and that sufficient computational and energy resources exist for the completion of the result. Nevertheless, recent advances in incremental image sensors or compressed sensing, as well as the demand for low-complexity scene analysis in sensor networks now challenge these assumptions. In this paper, we investigate an approach to compute salient points of images incrementally, i.e., the salient point detector can operate with a coarsely quantized input image representation and successively refine the result (the derived salient points) as the image precision is successively refined by the sensor. This has the advantage that the image sensing and the salient point detection can be terminated at any input image precision (e.g., bound set by the sensory equipment or by computation, or by the salient point accuracy required by the application) and the obtained salient points under this precision are readily available. We focus on the popular detector proposed by Harris and Stephens and demonstrate how such an approach can operate when the image samples are refined in a bitwise manner, i.e., the image bitplanes are received one-by-one from the image sensor. We estimate the required energy for image sensing as well as the computation required for the salient point detection based on stochastic source modeling. The computation and energy required by the proposed incremental refinement approach is compared against the conventional salient-point detector realization that operates directly on each source precision and cannot refine the result. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of incremental approaches for salient point detection in various classes of natural images. In addition, a first comparison between the results obtained by the intermediate detectors is presented and a novel application for adaptive low-energy image sensing based on points of saliency is presented.     

Implementation and Comparison of the 5/3 Lifting 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform Computation Schedules on FPGAs

The suitability of the 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) as a tool in image and video compression is nowadays indisputable. For the execution of the multilevel 2D DWT, several computation schedules based on different input traversal patterns have been proposed. Among these, the most commonly used in practical designs are: the row–column, the line-based and the block-based. In this work, these schedules are implemented on FPGA-based platforms for the forward 2D DWT by using a lifting-based filter-bank implementation. Our designs were realized in VHDL and optimized in terms of throughput and memory requirements, in accordance with the principles of both the schedules and the lifting decomposition. The implementations are fully parameterized with respect to the size of the input image and the number of decomposition levels. We provide detailed experimental results concerning the throughput, the area, the memory requirements and the energy dissipation, associated with every point of the parameter space. These results demonstrate that the choice of the suitable schedule is a decision that should be dependent on the given algorithmic specifications.

IKAROS: An HTTP-Based Distributed File System, for Low Consumption & Low Specification Devices

We present the design of IKAROS: an HTTP-based distributed file system, which provides file access scalability and targets a large variety of operating systems and storage systems. IKAROS bypasses the server bottleneck enabling clients to access storage directly, while supporting the usage of multiple types of meta-data. It enables low-consumption, low-specification and low-cost devices to achieve a high throughput data transfer, responding to highly demanding applications. We present data transfer results comparing IKAROS, NFS, PVFS2 and HDFS on a Small Office/Home Office Network Attached Storage infrastructure. We show that IKAROS architecture satisfies and outperforms the data rate demands of high performance applications. We also present experimental results which compare IKAROS and GridFTP using the European Grid Infrastructure. IKAROS performs better in most cases while being competitive at the rest.     

Continuous baker's yeast production using orange peel as promoting support in the bioreactor

Improvements in maximum growth rate and productivity in biomass production using orange peel as promoter were observed in batch aerobic fermentation. Daily biomass productivity and biomass yield up to 14.9 g (dry weight) L^?1 and 0.22 g (dry weight) g^?1 utilized sugar respectively in batch aerobic fermentation by the presence of orange peel as promoter were reported. A novel bioreactor for continuous aerobic fermentation of molasses is described and its suitability for baker's yeast production using orange peel as promoter is investigated. The continuous bioreactor was operated for 12 days, stored for 20 days at 10 °C and operated again for another 13 days without any diminution of biomass productivity. Daily biomass productivity, yield and conversion up to 11.2 g (dry weight) L^?1, 0.16 g (dry weight) produced g^?1 utilized sugar and 90.4% respectively were recorded. The possibility of using such a system for industrial continuous baker's yeast production is discussed. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

Alkali Activation of AOD Stainless Steel Slag Under Steam Curing Conditions

Crystalline argon oxygen decarburization slag, in powdery form, was investigated for its hydration potential by alkali activation and curing at 80°C. Na‐silicate and K‐silicate of the same modulus were used as activators. Isothermal calorimetry at 80°C indicated exothermic reactions in the slag pastes. When the slag mortars were cured under steam at 80°C appreciable gain in compressive strength was measured. This was attributed to C–S–H which was detected in TG, FTIR, and ²⁹Si NMR analyses. Upon hydration at 90 d, the amount of crystalline phases decreased, whereas the XRD amorphous content in the slag increased. Electron microscopy showed the formation of different morphologies of reaction products depending on the alkaline activator employed. Presence of reaction rims around the crystalline phases with a major presence of Ca, Si, and O in the reacted matrix was observed in elemental maps.     

Factors influencing sensory quality in red wines of the variety Aghiorghitiko (Vitis vinifera L.) from Nemea

Sensory quality in wines from the indigenous Greek cultivar Aghiorghitiko of Nemea, in 2 years, was studied with multivariate modelling. The appearance, aroma and oral attributes were assessed separately using rank-rating in 13 red Nemea wines, dominated (10 of 13) by Aghiorghitiko, and headspace congeners (51) quantified by solid phase microextraction with gas chromatography. Partial least squares regression (PLS) and discriminant PLS studied relationships between sensory data and congeners, viticultural and oenological data, producers and influence of wood maturations, respectively. Principal component analysis (PCA) spaces for aroma (11 attributes; 64% variance, 3 PCs), congeners (51; 72%, 7 PCs) and oral characters (13 attributes; 77%, 3 PCs) showed similarities in product clustering. Modelling showed clear relationships between sensory character and plant density, wood maturation and producer, respectively. Sensory characters in Aghiorghitiko wines were primarily differentiated by oak maturation and producer influences. A part of the results of this work was presented at the Second International Symposium on the Evaluation and Exploitation of Grapes of Corresponding Terroir through Winemaking and Commercialisation of Wines, 1–3 June 2006, Santorini.