Concept-based evidential reasoning for multimodal fusion in human–computer interaction

Considerable research has been done on using information from multiple modalities, like hands, facial gestures or speech, for better interaction between humans and computers, and many promising human–computer interfaces (HCI) have been developed in recent years. However, most of the current HCI systems have a few drawbacks: firstly, they are highly dependent on the performance of individual sensors. S econdly, the information fusion process from these sensors tends to ignore the semantic nature of the modalities, which may reinforce or clarify each other over time. Finally, they are not robust enough at representing the imprecise nature of human gestures, since individual gestures are highly ambiguous in themselves. In this paper, we propose an approach for the semantic fusion of different input modalities, based on transferable belief models. We show that this approach allows for a better representation of the ambiguity involved in recognizing gestures. Ambiguity is resolved by combining the beliefs of the individual sensors on the input information, to form new extended concepts, based on a pre-defined domain specific knowledge base, represented by conceptual graphs. We apply this technique to a multimodal system consisting of a hand gesture recognition sensor and a brain computing interface. It is shown that the technique can successfully combine individual gestures obtained from the two sensors, to form meaningful concepts and resolve ambiguity. The advantage of this approach is that it is robust even if one of the sensors is inefficient or has no input. Another important feature is its scalability, wherein more input modalities, like speech or facial gestures, can be easily integrated into the system at minimal cost, to form a comprehensive HCI interface.     

A Framework for Coordinated Control of Multiagent Systems and Its Applications

In this paper, a framework is proposed for the distributed control and coordination of multiagent systems (MASs). In the proposed framework, the control of MASs is regarded as achieving decentralized control and coordination of agents. Each agent is modeled as a coordinated hybrid agent, which is composed of an intelligent coordination layer and a hybrid control layer. The intelligent coordination layer takes the coordination input, plant input, and workspace input. In the proposed framework, we describe the coordination mechanism in a domain-independent way, i.e., as simple abstract primitives in a coordination rule base for certain dependence relationships between the activities of different agents. The intelligent coordination layer deals with the planning, coordination, decision making, and computation of the agent. The hybrid control layer of the proposed framework takes the output of the intelligent coordination layer and generates discrete and continuous control signals to control the overall process. To verify the feasibility of the proposed framework, experiments for both heterogeneous and homogeneous MASs are implemented. The proposed framework is applied to a multicrane system, a multiple robot system, and a MAS consisting of an overhead crane, a mobile robot, and a robot manipulator. It is demonstrated that the proposed framework can model the three MASs. The agents in these systems are able to cooperate and coordinate to achieve a global goal. In addition, the stability of systems modeled using the proposed framework is also analyzed.     

Numerical and sensitivity analysis of MHD bioconvective slip flow of nanomaterial with binary chemical reaction and Newtonian heating

The impact of Stefan blowing on the MHD bioconvective slip flow of a nanofluid towards a sheet is explored using numerical and statistical tools. The governing partial differential equations are nondimensionalized and converted to similarity equations using apposite transformations. These transformed equations are solved using the Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg method with the shooting technique. Graphical visualizations are used to scrutinize the effect of the controlling parameters on the flow profiles, skin friction coefficient, local Nusselt, and Sherwood number. Moreover, the sensitivities of the reduced Sherwood and Nusselt number to the input variables of interest are explored by adopting the response surface methodology. The outcomes of the limiting cases are emphatically in corroboration with the outcomes from preceding research. It is found that the heat transfer rate has a positive sensitivity towards the haphazard motion of the nanoparticles and a negative sensitivity towards the thermomigration. The thermal field is enhanced by the Stefan blowing aspect. Moreover, the fluid velocity can be controlled by the applied magnetic field.     

A novel fuzzy evidential reasoning paradigm for data fusion with applications in image processing

This paper presents a novel data fusion paradigm based on fuzzy evidential reasoning. A new fuzzy evidence structure model is first introduced to formulate probabilistic evidence and fuzzy evidence in a unified framework. A generalized Dempster’s rule is then utilized to combine fuzzy evidence structures associated with multiple information sources. Finally, an effective decision rule is developed to take into account uncertainty, quantified by Shannon entropy and fuzzy entropy, of probabilistic evidence and fuzzy evidence, to deal with conflict and to achieve robust decisions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm, we apply it to classifying synthetic images and segmenting multi-modality human brain MR images. It is concluded that the proposed paradigm outperforms both the traditional Dempster–Shafer evidence theory based approach and the fuzzy reasoning based approach     

Dietary protein deficiency induced changes in protein kinase C activity and phospholipid metabolism in rat hepatocytes

Dietary protein deficiency is known to alter the protein kinase C activity in various tissues of rats. Protein kinase C activity is influenced by the metabolism of membrane phosphoinositides and phosphatidyl choline (PC). For metabolic studies, hepatocytes have been the cells of choice of various workers. Therefore, studies on protein kinase C and these phospholipids were conducted in hepatocytes of rats maintained on three different diets viz. casein (20% protein) deficient (4% protein, rice flour as source of protein) and supplemented (deficient diet supplemented with L-lysine and DL-threonine) diet for 28 days. The protein deficiency in diet led to a decline in protein kinase C activity (P < 0.01) without effecting its translocation, an increase in phosphatidyl inositol 4,5-bisphosphate (P < 0.001) and a decrease in phosphatidyl inositol 4-monophosphate and phosphatidyl inositol (P < 0.01) but did not alter the PC contents, as compared to the casein group. Supplementation of deficient diet with L-lysine and DL-threonine could considerably reverse the effect of deficiency of protein in diet. The results suggest that quality of dietary protein is mainly relevant for maintaining phospholipid metabolism and physiology of hepatocytes and thus the signalling mechanism in these cells.     

A dual‐band case‐printed planar inverted‐F antenna design with independent resonance control for wearable short range telemetric systems

In this article, a novel 3D meandered planar inverted‐F antenna (PIFA) is proposed for dual band application targeting Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The proposed antenna is printed on the casing of a 3D‐base‐station model having a size of 88 × 95 × 10.2 mm³. The proposed PIFA covers two bands including medical implant communication service (MICS) (402‐405 MHz), as well as the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) (2.4‐2.48 GHz) bands. Each of the two bands can be controlled independently. The 3D configuration contains two linked meandered resonators to downsize the structure. Due to its conformal shape, omnidirectional radiation pattern, and low‐profile nature, the proposed PIFA is a potential candidate for targeting the WBAN applications. The proposed antenna, covering the MICS and ISM bands, works with an optimally matching (VSWR<2) at the aforementioned bands. The design concept was validated by fabricating the antenna prototype and measuring its characteristics.     

Hybrid opto-digital signal processing in 112 Gbit/s DP-16QAM and DP-QDB transmission for long-haul large-$$\hbox {A}_\mathrm{eff}$$ pure-silica-core fiber links

In this work, we investigate the energy efficiency in optical code division multiplexing access (OCDMA) networks with forward error correction (FEC). We have modeled the energy efficiency considering the capacity of information transmitted and the network power consumption. The proposed network power consumption model considers the optical transmitter, receiver, optical amplifiers, FEC and network infrastructure as encoders, decoders, star coupler and network control in the overall optical power network consumption balance. Furthermore, an expression relating the signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio gain for forward error correction with low-density parity-check code scheme considering the power consumption and bandwidth occupancy has been derived. Numerical results for OCDMA networks with aggregated FEC procedure have revealed the viability of the FEC deployment aiming to increase the overall energy efficiency of OCDMA networks.     

Cementation-induced recovery of self-assembled ultrafine copper powders from spent etching solutions of printed circuit boards

Ultrafine copper powders have been recovered from spent etching solutions of printed circuit boards by cementation on helical-form iron scrap chips. The tested solution is an ammoniacal copper solution containing 135 g/l copper with minor impurities. The influences of contact time, temperature, pH, initial copper concentration and Fe stoichiometry on the yield, purity and grain size and shape of the precipitated copper powders were studied. Ultrafine self-assembled copper nanocubes with high purity of about > 99% was obtained at temperature 25 °C, time 20 min, pH 2, Fe stoichiometry 1X and initial copper concentration 20 g/l Cu. It was proposed that the precipitation of copper from the solution involved two main processes: (1) adsorption of copper ions on the surface of the iron chips due to the iron oxides present on it and (2) cementation of copper ions onto the metallic iron contained in the chips. Scrap iron chips is seen to be an effective material for copper powder recovery from spent etching solutions in a pure and fine form.     

Semantic Understanding of General Linguistic Items by Means of Fuzzy Set Theory

Modern statistical techniques used in the field of natural language processing are limited in their applications by the fact they suffer from the loss of most of the semantic information contained in text documents. Fuzzy techniques have been proposed as a way to correct this problem through the modelling of the relationships between words while accommodating the ambiguities of natural languages. However, these techniques are currently either restricted to modelling the effects of simple words or are specialized in a single domain. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical-fuzzy methodology to represent the actions described in a variety of text documents by modelling the relationships between subject-verb-object triplets. The research will focus in the first place on the technique used to accurately extract the triplets from the text, on the necessary equations to compute the statistics of the subject-verb and verb-object pairs, and on the formulas needed to interpolate the fuzzy membership functions from these statistics and on those needed to de fuzzify the membership value of unseen triplets. Taken together, these sets of equations constitute a comprehensive system that allows the quantification and evaluation of the meaning of text documents, while being general enough to be applied to any domain. In the second phase, this paper will proceed to experimentally demonstrate the validity of our new methodology by applying it to the implementation of a fuzzy classifier conceived especially for this research. This classifier is trained using a section of the Brown Corpus, and its efficiency is tested with a corpus of 20 unseen documents drawn from three different domains. The positive results obtained from these experimental tests confirm the soundness of our new approach and show that it is a promising avenue of research.     

Remote monitoring of cardiac activity using a flexible loop antenna

In this paper, a meandered loop antenna, useful for medical cardiac monitoring application, more specifically, for heart beating close scrutiny is designed and experimentally tested. The proposed antenna is operating at the MICS band displays a high flexibility which allowing it to be curved easily around the heart's wall. In both, Simulation and measured results the antenna shows a sensitive nature any change introduced in heart's model size and would certainly bring about a noticeable shift in the antenna's resonant frequency. Linking the frequency variations taking place in concord with the heart movement turns out to stand as an effective key that provides extremely valuable information about the heart's activities. A correspondence between the obtained frequency variation linking with the change in size of the heart. In addition to the frequency response evaluation, the antenna characteristically displays an omni‐directional radiation pattern, which necessarily fits it for in‐body operation.