Impacts Of Probiotics On The Production Performance And Immune Status Of Broiler Chickens From Arbor Acre Strains

The aim of the present research was to evaluate the probiotic activity of Lactobacillus acidophilus in broilers of the ARBOR ACRE strain. The probiotic was administered in drinking water at a rate of 50 ml per 1000 chicks every 7 days during the breeding period. Growth performance, the effect on endogenous flora and on the structure of the gut and the bursa of Fabricius, as well as the immune response, were recorded at 20 and 37 days. We evaluated the effectiveness of Lactobacillus acidophilus added to broiler diets, a zootechnical study (mortality, growth rate, index of growth) and a clinical survey, homogeneity and antibody production. Zootechnical studies revealed that the best growth performances were achieved by the probiotic-treated chickens, with significant differences (p<0.05).  which concluded with a positive effect on zootechnical performance compared with the controls. Similarly, the study of the organism's reaction showed a good response from the birds supplemented with Lactobacillus acidophilus in the animal's digestive tract, with interactions with the endogenous flora, compared with the control subjects (P<0.05). Antibody titration showed that the Lactobacillus acidophilus-based diet had a positive effect on antibody levels, resulting in a coverage rate higher than the average indicated by the baseline (1000-2500) and also higher than the control batch antibodies

Introducing Preference-Based Argumentation to Inconsistent Ontological Knowledge Bases

International audienceHandling inconsistency is an inherent part of decision making in traditional agri-food chains – due to the various concerns involved. In order to explain the source of inconsistency and represent the existing conflicts in the ontological knowledge base, argumentation theory can be used. However, the current state of art methodology does not allow to take into account the level of significance of the knowledge expressed by the various ontological knowledge sources. We propose to use preferences in order to model those differences between formulas and evaluate our proposal practically by implementing it within the INRA platform and showing a use case using this formalism in a bread making decision support system

On the performance of adaptive coding schemes for energy efficient and reliable clustered wireless sensor networks

Clustering is the key for energy constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Energy optimization and communication reliability are the most important consideration in designing efficient clustered WSN. In lossy environment, channel coding is mandatory to ensure reliable and efficient communication. This reliability is compromised by additional energy of coding and decoding in cluster heads. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offbetween reliability and energy efficiency and proposed adaptive FEC/FWD and FEC/ARQ coding frameworks for clustered WSNs. The proposed schemes consider channel condition and inter-node distance to decide the adequate channel coding usage. Simulation results show that both the proposed frameworks are energy efficient compared to ARQ schemes and FEC schemes, and suitable to prolong the clustered network lifespan as well as improve the reliability

Explainable Recommendations in Intelligent Systems: Delivery Methods, Modalities and Risks

With the increase in data volume, velocity and types, intelligent human-agent systems have become popular and adopted in different application domains, including critical and sensitive areas such as health and security. Humans’ trust, their consent and receptiveness to recommendations are the main requirement for the success of such services. Recently, the demand on explaining the recommendations to humans has increased both from humans interacting with these systems so that they make an informed decision and, also, owners and systems managers to increase transparency and consequently trust and users’ retention. Existing systematic reviews in the area of explainable recommendations focused on the goal of providing explanations, their presentation and informational content. In this paper, we review the literature with a focus on two user experience facets of explanations; delivery methods and modalities. We then focus on the risks of explanation both on user experience and their decision making. Our review revealed that explanations delivery to end-users is mostly designed to be along with the recommendation in a push and pull styles while archiving explanations for later accountability and traceability is still limited. We also found that the emphasis was mainly on the benefits of recommendations while risks and potential concerns, such as over-reliance on machines, is still a new area to explore

A new Linux based TCP congestion control mechanism for long distance high bandwidth sustainable smart cities

NoPeople, systems, and things in the cities generate large amount of data which is considered to be the most scalable asset of any smart city. Linux users are rapidly increased in last few years, and many large multinational organizations are deploying long distance high bandwidth (LDHB) cloud networks for centralizing the data from various smart cities on a central location. TCP is responsible for reliable communication of data in these cloud networks. For reliability communication among various smart cities, a number of TCP congestion control mechanisms have been developed in the past. TCP Compound, TCP Fusion, and TCP CUBIC are the default TCP congestion control mechanisms for Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, and Linux operating systems respectively. The response function of TCP CUBIC is higher than the response function of Standard TCP, which is a trademark congestion control mechanism. As a result, TCP CUBIC does not behave friendly with Standard TCP in LDHB cloud networks. The Congestion Window (cwnd) reduction and growth of TCP CUBIC is very aggressive, which causes high packet loss rate and unfair share of available link bandwidth among competing flows from various smart cities. The aim of this research is to design a new TCP congestion control mechanism for Linux operating system to achieve maximum performance in LDHB cloud networks being used by smart cities. In this paper, congestion control module for slow start (CCM-SS) is designed by increasing the lower boundary limit of cwnd size in slow start phase of communication. Congestion control module for loss event (CCM-LE) is designed by increasing the cwnd reduction rate at each packet loss event and finally Advance Response Function for TCP CUBIC (ARFC) is proposed to design a new congestion control mechanism for Linux operating system. NS-2 is used to compare the performance of TCP CUBIC* with TCP CUBIC in short distance high bandwidth (SDHB) and long distance high bandwidth (LDHB) cloud networks. Results show that TCP CUBIC* has outperformed in LDHB networks, at least by a factor of 18% as compared to TCP CUBIC

Multi-Criteria Decision Making with Existential Rules using Repair Techniques

International audienceThe central problem in multi-criteria decision making is to reach an acceptable decision aggregating preferences over multiple criteria. In this paper, we explain how to benefit from the reasoning capabilities of existential rules for modelling a multi-criteria decision making problem as an inconsistent knowledge base. The repairs of this knowledge base represent the maximally consistent point of views and inference strategies can be used for decision making

Arguing About End-of-Life of Packagings: Preferences to the Rescue

International audienceArgumentation methods and associated tools permit to analyze arguments against or in favor of a set of alternatives under discussion. The outputs of the argument methods are sets of conflict-free arguments collectively defending each other, called extensions. In case of multiple extensions, it is often difficult to select one out of many alternatives. We present in this paper the implementation of an complementary approach which permits to filter or rank extensions according to the expression of preferences. Methods and tools are illustrated on a real use case in food packagings. The aim is to help the industry choose among different end-of-life possibilities by linking together consumer behavior insights, socioeconomic developments and technical properties of packagings. The tool has been used on a real use-case concerning end-of-life possibilities for packag-ings

Formalizing Explanatory Dialogues

International audienceMany work have proposed architectures and models to incorporate explanation within agent's design for various reasons, i.e. human-agent teamwork improvement, training in virtual environment, belief revision, to name just a few. With this novel architectures a problematic is emerged: how to communicate these explanations in a goal-directed and rule-governed dialogue system?In this paper we formalize Walton’s CE dialectical system of explanatory dialogues in the framework of Prakken. We extend this formalization within the Extended CE system by generalizing the protocol and incorporating a general account of dialectical shifts. More precisely, we show how a shift to any dialogue type can take place, as an example we describe a shift to argumentative dialogue with the goal of giving the explainee the possibility to challenge explainer's explanations. In addition, we propose the use of commitment and understanding stores to avoid circular and inconsistent explanations and to judge the success of explanation. We show that the dialogue terminates, under specific conditions, in finite steps and the space complexity of the stores evolves polynomially in the size of the explanatory model