POEMS: program for outliers elimination in multidimensional space

A Program for Outliers Elimination in Multidimensional Space (POEMS), which allows the user to eliminate outliers from training spaces as a prior step to any statistical study, is presented. Even though the program can be applied to any scientific field, the characteristics of POEMS makes it particularly suitable for 'series design' on Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships studies.     

Real time 3D face and facial feature tracking

Detecting and tracking human faces in video sequences is useful in a number of applications such as gesture recognition and human-machine interaction. In this paper, we show that online appearance models (holistic approaches) can be used for simultaneously tracking the head, the lips, the eyebrows, and the eyelids in monocular video sequences. Unlike previous approaches to eyelid tracking, we show that the online appearance models can be used for this purpose. Neither color information nor intensity edges are used by our proposed approach. More precisely, we show how the classical appearance-based trackers can be upgraded in order to deal with fast eyelid movements. The proposed eyelid tracking is made robust by avoiding eye feature extraction. Experiments on real videos show the usefulness of the proposed tracking schemes as well as their enhancement to our previous approach.

Photon absorption in a hybrid slurry photocatalytic reactor: Assessment of differential approximations

Radiative transfer inside a slurry photocatalytic reactor with hybrid illumination from both solar radiation and lamps is examined. The local volumetric rate of photon absorption is evaluated. For this purpose, the P1 and the modified differential approximations (MDAs) are used, and results compared to a solution by the Monte Carlo method. It is found that significant differences may arise between the predictions of the above approximations and the exact results provided by the Monte Carlo simulations. The P1 approximation is very inaccurate near to the radiation entrance for the partially collimated solar radiation, although it improves, as optical depth increases. As expected, the MDA improves the results near to the boundary. Surprisingly, it turns out to be much worse than the P1 approximation at medium and large optical depths. In the case of lamp irradiation, the behavior of the MDA is the opposite; it works better at small optical depths. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 58: 3256–3265, 2012     

Optimization of the silane treatment of cellulosic fibers from eucalyptus wood using response surface methodology

Viscose cellulosic fibers from eucalyptus wood were treated with organosilanes to introduce specific functionalities on the fibers and enhance their wettability and adhesion with phenolic matrices in composites. Modeling procedures were employed to optimize the conditions of the treatments of the fibers with the silanes (3‐aminopropyl) trimethoxysilane (APS) and 3‐(2‐aminoethylamino) propyltrimethoxysilane (AAPS). The analyzed responses were relative intensities of the bands 1565/897 and 1120/897 cm⁻¹, measured by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and the silicon amount incorporated into the cellulosic fibers, which was determined by energy dispersive X‐ray analysis. In addition, surface morphology of the silane treated fibers was observed using scanning electron microscopy. The treatments of the cellulosic fibers with 2.2% APS for 120 min and 1.5% AAPS for 100 min were selected as optimums. According to contact angle measurements, both treatments enhanced the wettability between the fibers and a resol‐type phenolic resin, revealing the possible use of the silane treated fibers as reinforcement in phenolic composites. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2015 , 132, 42157.     

Multifunctional Silver‐Exchanged Zeolite Micromotors for Catalytic Detoxification of Chemical and Biological Threats

Multifunctional reactive‐zeolite‐based micromotors have been developed and characterized toward effective and rapid elimination of chemical and biological threats. The incorporation of silver ions (Ag⁺) into aluminosilicate zeolite framework imparts several attractive functions, including strong binding to chemical warfare agents (CWA) followed by effective degradation, and enhanced antibacterial activity. The new zeolite‐micromotors protocol thus combines the remarkable adsorption capacity of zeolites and the efficient catalytic properties of the reactive Ag⁺ ions with the autonomous movement of the zeolite micromotors for an accelerated detoxification of CWA. Furthermore, the high antibacterial activity of Ag⁺ along with the rapid micromotor movement enhances the contact between bacteria and reactive Ag⁺, leading to a powerful “on‐the‐fly” bacteria killing capacity. These attractive adsorptive/catalytic features of the self‐propelled zeolite micromotors eliminate secondary environmental contamination compared to adsorptive micromotors. The distinct cubic geometry of the zeolite micromotors leads to enhanced bubble generation and faster movement, in unique movement trajectories, which increases the fluid convection and highly efficient detoxification of CWA and killing of bacteria. The attractive capabilities of these zeolite micromotors will pave the way for their diverse applications in defense, environmental and biomedical applications in more economical and sustainable manner.     

Scalable and fault‐tolerant key agreement protocol for dynamic groups

With the widespread use of the Internet, the popularity of group communication‐based applications has grown considerably. Since most communications over the Internet involve the traversal of insecure networks, basic security services are necessary for these collaborative applications. These security services can be facilitated if the authorized group members share a common secret. In such distributed applications, key agreement protocols are preferred to key distribution protocols. In the past two decades, there have been many proposals for key agreement protocols. Most of these protocols are not efficient and limit the size of the underlying group. In this paper, we consider the scalability problem in group key agreement protocols. We propose a novel framework based on extension of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol. The efficiency of our protocol comes from the clustering of the group members, where the common session key is established collaboratively by all participants. We present the auxiliary protocols needed when the membership changes. We show that our protocol is superior in complexity in both communication and computation overheads required to generate the session key. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bandwidth sharing under the assured forwarding Per-Hop behavior

The DiffServ’s Assured Forwarding (af) Per-Hop Behavior (phb) Group defines a differentiated forwarding of packets in four independent classes, each class having three levels of drop precedence. Specific end-to-end services based on thisphb are still being defined. A particular type of service that could assure a given rate to a traffic aggregate has been outlined elsewhere. In such a service, a fair distribution of bandwidth is one of the main concerns. This paper presents experimental work carried out to evaluate howaf distributes bandwidth among flows under different load conditions and traffic patterns. We focused on the effect that marking mechanisms have on bandwidth sharing among flows within a singleaf class. The traffic types we used includeudp flows, individual and aggregatedtcp flows, mix oftcp andudp, tcp sessions with heterogeneous round-trip times, as well as color-blind and color-aware re-marking at the aggregation point fortcp flows. Tests were performed on real and simulated networks. We have found certain conditions under whichaf distributes bandwidth fairly among nonadaptiveudp flows andtcp aggregates. Finally, we evaluate a basic rule for setting the parameters of the two-rate Three-Color Marker conditioning algorithm (trtcm) in order to achieve a better bandwidth distribution fortcp flows.