Bananas were chilled at 6oC and the appearance of brown spots when exposed to ambient air, a
phenomenon known as chilling injury (CI), was detected using computer vision. The system consisted of a digital colour camera for acquiring images, an illumination set-up for uniform lighting, a computer for receiving, storing and displaying of images and software for analyzing the images. The RGB colour space values of the images were transformed into that of HSI colour space which is intuitive to human vision. Visual assessment of CI by means of a browning scale was used as a reference and correlation between this reference values and hue was investigated. Results of the computer vision study successfully demonstrate the potential of the system in substituting visual assessment in the evaluation of CI in bananas. The results indicate significant influence, at α=0.05, of treatment days and temperature on hue. A strong correlation was also found between hue and visual assessment with R>0.85.
This paper is concerned with the existence, types and the cardinality of the integral solutions for
diophantine equation
4 4 3
x y z + = where x , y and z are integers. The aim of this paper was to
develop methods to be used in finding all solutions to this equation. Results of the study show the
existence of infinitely many solutions to this type of diophantine equation in the ring of integers
for both cases, x y = and x y ¹ . For the case when x y = , the form of solutions is given by
3 3 4
( , , ) (4 , 4 ,8 ) x y z n n n = , while for the case when x y ¹ , the form of solutions is given by
3 1 3 1 4 1
( , , ) ( , , )
k k k
x y z un vn n
- - -
= . The main result obtained is a formulation of a generalized method to find
all the solutions for both types of diophantine equations.
This study demonstrated the utilization of radiation-induced initiator methods for the formation of
nanoparticles of Acrylated Palm Oil (APO) using aqueous Pluronic F-127 (PF-127) microemulsion
system. This microemulsion system was subjected to gamma irradiation to form the crosslinked APO
nanoparticles. Dynamic light scattering (DLS), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and
Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) were used to characterize the size and the chemical structure
of the nanoparticles. As a result, the size of the APO nanoparticle was decreased when the irradiation
dose increased. The decrease in size might be due to the effects of intermolecular crosslinking and
intramolecular crosslinking reactions of the APO nanoparticles during irradiation process. The size of the
nanoparticle is in the range of 98 to 200 nanometer (nm) after irradiation using gamma irradiator. This radiation-induced method provides a free initiator
induced and easy to control process as compared
to the classical or chemical initiator process. The
study has shown that radiation-induced initiator
methods, namely, polymerization and crosslinking
in the microemulsion, were promising for the
synthesis of nanoparticles.
Electron beam irradiation, without any addition of cross-linking agents, was investigated at varying
doses of EB-Irradiation to develop an environmentally friendly hybridized kenaf (bast)/ pineapple leaf
fibre (PALF) bio-composites. Improvement in tensile property of the hybrid was achieved with the result
showing a direct proportionality relationship between tensile properties and increasing radiation dose.
Statistical analysis software (SAS) was employed to validate the result. HDPE has been shown to have
self-cross-linked, enabling interesting tensile properties with irradiation. Statistical analysis validated
the results obtained and also showed that adequate mixing of fibres and matrix had taken place at 95%
confidence level. Hybridization and subsequent irradiation increased the tensile strength and modulus
of HDPE up to 31 and 185%, respectively, at about 100kGy. Meanwhile, SEM was used to view the
interaction between the fibres and matrix.
Thermal characterization of sugar palm fibre (SPF), reinforced high impact polystyrene (HIPS)
composites, was studied by means of thermogravimetric analysis. The effects of alkaline treatment and compatibilizing agent on the thermal stability of the composites were evaluated. Alkaline treatment was carried out by soaking the fibres in 4 and 6% of NaOH solution, while treatment with compatibilizing agent was employed by adding 2 and 3% maleic anhydride-graft-polystyrene (MA-g-PS) to the composites. Both the treatments were aimed to improve the mechanical performance of the composites. From the study, the thermal stability of the treated composites was found to be higher than that of untreated composites. It is shown that the incorporation of sugar palm fibre influences the degree of thermal stability of the composites. The treatments on composites also contributed to shifting the peak temperature of degradation of the composites. In other words, there are strong chemical reactions between the components of the treated composites. The thermal stability of the composites, with alkaline treatment and compatibilizing agent, was found to be better as compared to those of the untreated composites.
A biodegradable composite (PLA/KBF blends) was prepared using melt blending technique in a brabender mixer and characterized with FTIR and TGA analyzer. Five percent of triacetin and glycerol contents were used as plasticizers to plasticise PLA matrix. KBF was treated with 4% NaOH solution, while 30 wt% of fibre loading was used constantly for all the composite samples. From the FTIR analysis, the additions of triacetin and glycerol to PLA composites did not produce any significant difference, and there were no chemical changes in both the plasticized PLA with the treated and untreated KBF, respectively. Observation done on the TGA analysis revealed that both plasticizers did improve the thermal stability of the composites, and this might be due to the modification on the fibre surfaces, which further led to the delay in the degradation of the PLA matrix and to significant stabilization effect.
Multi-feature methods are able to contribute to a more effective method compared to single-feature
methods since feature fusion methods will be able to close the gap that exists in the single-feature
methods. This paper presents a feature fusion method, which focuses on extracting colour and shape features for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The colour feature is extracted based on the proposed Multi-resolution Joint Auto Correlograms (MJAC), while the shape information is obtained through the proposed Extended Generalised Ridgelet-Fourier (EGRF). These features are fused together through a proposed integrated scheme. The feature fusion method has been tested on the SIMPLIcity image database, where several retrieval measurements are utilised to compare the effectiveness of the proposed method with few other comparable methods. The retrieval results show that the proposed Integrated Colour-shape (ICS) descriptor has successfully obtained the best overall retrieval performance in all the retrieval measurements as compared to the benchmark methods, which include precision (53.50%), precision at 11 standard recall levels (52.48%), and rank (17.40).
Developing a trust management scheme in mobile computing environment is increasingly important,
and the effective trust management model is a challenging task. Business, education, military, and
entertainment have motivated the growth of ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, which are always available due to the widespread of portable and embedded devices. Wireless and mobile computing are good example of ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments. Due to the uncertainty and mobility in such environments, the issue of trust has been regarded as an important security problem. Malicious nodes are a major threat to these networks; the trust system can monitor the behaviour of nodes and accordingly rewards well-behaved nodes and punishes misbehaving ones. At present, there are a lot of endeavours on the trust model of the pervasive computing environment. In this paper, a trust management framework for mobile computing is presented. The hybrid framework is based on a fusion of the support vector machine (SVM) and fuzzy logic system. From the results, it can be stated that the framework is effective, dynamic, lightweight, and applicable.
Natural language interfaces to ontologies allow users to query the system using natural language queries.
These systems take natural language query as input and transform it to formal query language equivalent
to retrieve the desired information from ontologies. The existing natural language interfaces to ontologies
offer support for handling negation queries; however, they offer limited support for dealing with them.
This paper proposes a negation query handling engine which can handle relatively complex natural
language queries than the existing systems. The proposed engine effectively understands the intent of
the user query on the basis of a sophisticated algorithm, which is governed by a set of techniques and
transformation rules. The proposed engine was evaluated using the Mooney data set and AquaLog dataset,
and it manifested encouraging results.
As the amount of document increases, automation of classification that aids the analysis and management of documents receive focal attention. Classification, based on association rules that are generated from a collection of documents, is a recent data mining approach that integrates association rule mining and classification. The existing approaches produces either high accuracy with large number of rules or a small number of association rules that generate low accuracy. This work presents an association rule mining that employs a new item production algorithm that generates a small number of rules and produces an acceptable accuracy rate. The proposed method is evaluated on UCI datasets and measured based on prediction accuracy and the number of generated association rules. Comparison is later made against an existing classifier, Multi-class Classification based on Association Rule (MCAR). From the undertaken experiments, it is learned that the proposed method produces similar accuracy rate as MCAR but yet uses lesser number of rules.
Finding relevant disaster data from a huge metadata overhead often results in frustrating search
experiences caused by unclear access points, ambiguous search methods, unsuitable metadata, and long response times. More frequently, semantic relation between the retrieved objects is neglected. This paper presents a system architecture that makes use of ontologies in order to enable semantic metadata descriptions for gathering and integrating multi-format documents in the context of disaster management. After a brief discussion on the challenges of the integration process, the Multi-format Information Retrieval, Integration and Presentation (MIRIP) architecture is presented. A specific approach for ontology development and mapping process is introduced in order to semantically associate user’s query and documents metadata. An ontology model approach was designed to follow inspirational and collaborative approaches with top-down to bottom-up implementation. A prototype of the integrated disaster management information system is currently under development, based on the architecture that is presented in this paper.
Mobile users have the capability of accessing information anywhere at any time with the introduction of mobile browsers and mobile web search. However, the current mobile browsers are implemented without considering the characteristics of mobile searches. As a result, mobile users need to devote time and effort in order to retrieve relevant information from the web in mobile devices. On the other hand, mobile users often request information related to their surroundings, which is also known as context. This recognizes the importance of including context in information retrieval. Besides, the availability of the embedded sensors in mobile devices has supported the recognition of context. In this study, the context acquisition and utilization for mobile information retrieval are proposed. The “just-in-time” approach is exploited in which the information that is relevant to a user is retrieved without the user requesting it. This will reduce the mobile user’s effort, time and interaction when retrieving information in mobile devices. In this paper, the context dimensions and context model are presented. Simple experiments are shown where user context is predicted using the context model.
Cross-document Structure Theory (CST) has recently been proposed to facilitate tasks related to multidocument analysis. Classifying and identifying the CST relationships between sentences across topically related documents have since been proven as necessary. However, there have not been sufficient studies presented in literature to automatically identify these CST relationships. In this study, a supervised machine learning technique, i.e. Support Vector Machines (SVMs), was applied to identify four types of CST relationships, namely “Identity”, “Overlap”, “Subsumption”, and “Description” on the datasets obtained from CSTBank corpus. The performance of the SVMs classification was measured using Precision, Recall and F-measure. In addition, the results obtained using SVMs were also compared with those from the previous literature using boosting classification algorithm. It was found that SVMs yielded better results in classifying the four CST relationships.
Heuristic Evaluation (HE) is used as a basis in developing a new technique to evaluate usability or
educational computer games known as Playability Heuristic Evaluation for Educational Computer Game (PHEG). PHEG was developed to identify usability problems that accommodate five heuristics, namely, interface, educational elements, content, playability and multimedia. In HE process, usability problems are rated based on severity score and this is followed by presentation of a mean value. The mean value is used to determine the level of usability problems; however, in some cases, this value may not accurate because it will ignore the most critical problems found in a specific part. In developing PHEG, a new quantitative approach was proposed in analyzing usability problems data. Numbers of sub-heuristics for each heuristic involved were taken into account in calculating percentage for each heuristic. Functions to calculate critical problems were also introduced. Evaluation for one educational game that was still in development process was conducted and the results showed that most of the critical problems were found in educational elements and content heuristics (57.14%), while the least usability problems were found in playability heuristic. In particular, the mean value in this analysis can be used as an indicator in identifying critical problems for educational computer games.
Similarity measurement is a critical component in any case-based reasoning (CBR) system. CBR is
a superior technique for solving new problems based on previous experiences. Main assumption in
CBR relies on the hypothesis that states similar problems should have similar solutions. This paper
describes a comparative analysis on several commonly used similarity measures (Canberra, Clark, and Normalized Euclidean distance) in retrieving phase of the case-based reasoning approach to facilitate supplier selection. In addition, the proposed agent-based supplier selection framework was designed to use customer’s defined weights to evaluate the price, volume, quality grade, and delivery date of supply materials, and also provide them with alternative products which are closest to their first order if it was out of stock. Finally, based on the proposed framework, a numerical example of the used approach is illustrated.
The term halal refers to what ispermitted by Islamic law. It is a basic need for Muslims and encompasses all materials used in everyday life including cosmetics.Muslims want to be assured that the ingredients,handling, processing, distribution, transportation and types of cosmetic used are halal compliant. The halal aspects of cosmetic and personal care products cover ingredients, all the processes involved in production right up to delivery to consumers, safety and product efficacy evaluations. In order to verify halal compliance of cosmetic products, a method of detecting halal and non-halal ingredients is very important and critically needed. Halal cosmetic standards, halal certification and the halal logo can be used as benchmarks for halal compliance. In view of the importance of cosmetic and personal care products from the halal perspective, this review will cover the halal principles, halal cosmetic and personal care products, ingredients, standard and certification as well as safety. The development of the process of detecting non-halal ingredients and authenticating halal ingredients for potential cosmetic applications in recent years are included in this paper.
Clostridium difficile can cause severe diseases with significant morbidity and mortality in infected patients.
The rate of Clostridium difficile infection is high in North America and European countries. Metronidazole
and vancomycin have been recommended as the treatments of choice since 1990s. Recurrent infection
due to Clostridium difficile is common after several days of antibiotic administration. Probiotics have
been used in these patients as an adjunct treatment with some successful findings. However, a detailed
investigation on the use of probiotic for infected patients is still needed, particularly for its real efficacy.
Academic and corporate interest in sustainable product and process development has risen considerably
in recent years. This can be seen by the number of papers published and in particular by special issued of journals. This paper reports the results of a review of published peer-reviewed literature from 1987 to 2012 to provide an up-to-date picture of sustainability and sustainable assessment. A structured methodology is followed to narrow down the search from around 3500 papers to 111. A variety of different sustainability assessment methodologies are reviewed in two classified research areas: product sustainability assessment and process sustainability assessment. In presenting a detailed taxonomy of product and process sustainability assessment methods, the paper also outlines the advantages and weaknesses of the sustainability assessment methods. The review sheds light on the weak points of current research in this area. The paper also highlights several key issues which have to be taken into account in attempting to develop a product or process sustainability assessment research paradigm for future applications in manufacturing systems.
The present investigation deals with the development of ethanol-vapour-sensing materials coated with the semiconducting oxide TiO2. Thick films of anatase TiO2 were deposited using the sol-gel dip-coating technique on alumina substrates by conventional alkoxide sol and modified sol added with Degussa P-25 as the sensing medium. It was shown that crystallised TiO2 anatase was obtained at the annealing temperature of 500oC. The fabricated TiO2 sensors exhibited highest sensitivity at the sensing temperature of 350 ºC. Sensitivity towards the ethanol vapour was further increased with UV light effect. The enhancement of the sensitivity of the modified catalytic pellet can be explained by the crystallite of anatase TiO2 and the effect of the photocatalytic of TiO2. The high sensitivity of the TiO2 film deposited with modified sol revealed that the modified sol could be a new alternative in the development of a TiO2 ethanol sensor.
Tailing sand is the residue mineral from tin extraction that contains between 94% and 99.5% silica, which can be used as moulding sand. It is found in abundance in the Kinta Valley in the state of Perak, Malaysia. Adequate water content and clay in moulding sand are important factors for better strength and
casting quality of products made from tailing sand. Samples of tailing sand were investigated according
to the American Foundrymen Society (AFS) standard. Cylindrical test pieces of Ø50 mm×50 mm in height from various sand-water ratios were compacted by applying three ramming blows of 6666g each using a Ridsdale-Dietert metric standard rammer. The specimens were tested for green compression strength using a Ridsdale-Dietert universal sand strength machine. Before the tests were conducted, moisture content of the tailing sand was measured using a moisture analyser. A mixture bonded with 8% clay possesses higher green compression strength compared to samples bonded with 4% clay. The results also show that in order to achieve maximum green compression strength, the optimum allowable moisture content for mixtures bonded with 8% clay is ranged between 3.75 and 6.5% and for mixtures bonded with 4% clay is 3-5.5%.