Cloud Infrastructure Automation Through IaC (Infrastructure as Code)

Cloud computing has emerged as a key force in the IT sector, allowing businesses to take use of the cloud's scalability and cost-effectiveness to satisfy their IT requirements. When compared to the traditional on-premise method, companies that use cloud services can benefit from higher efficiency, dependability, and agility, as well as lower operational expenses and improved security. In spite of all the benefits, configuring cloud services may be a difficult and time-consuming procedure, especially when done manually. As a solution to the mentioned challenges, the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was introduced. IaC has revolutionised the way organisations approach IT. Organisations may gain improved efficiency, dependability, and agility by exploiting the cloud's scalability and cost-effectiveness, as well as automating the provisioning, configuration, and administration of infrastructure with different IaC tools. However, using cloud and IaC can also present challenges, including complexity, collaboration, versioning, testing, security, integration, and automation. This paper discusses the overview of cloud computing and IaC. Explores the benefits and challenges of using these technologies. Concludes by emphasising the importance of careful planning and execution when using cloud and IaC, in order to maximise the benefits while minimising the difficulties

bbOCR: An Open-source Multi-domain OCR Pipeline for Bengali Documents

Despite the existence of numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, the lack of comprehensive open-source systems hampers the progress of document digitization in various low-resource languages, including Bengali. Low-resource languages, especially those with an alphasyllabary writing system, suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets for various document OCR components such as word-level OCR, document layout extraction, and distortion correction; which are available as individual modules in high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce Bengali$.$AI-BRACU-OCR (bbOCR): an open-source scalable document OCR system that can reconstruct Bengali documents into a structured searchable digitized format that leverages a novel Bengali text recognition model and two novel synthetic datasets. We present extensive component-level and system-level evaluation: both use a novel diversified evaluation dataset and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation suggests that our proposed solution is preferable over the current state-of-the-art Bengali OCR systems. The source codes and datasets are available here: https://bengaliai.github.io/bbocr

BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset

While strides have been made in deep learning based Bengali Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the past decade, the absence of large Document Layout Analysis (DLA) datasets has hindered the application of OCR in document transcription, e.g., transcribing historical documents and newspapers. Moreover, rule-based DLA systems that are currently being employed in practice are not robust to domain variations and out-of-distribution layouts. To this end, we present the first multidomain large Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset: BaDLAD. This dataset contains 33,695 human annotated document samples from six domains - i) books and magazines, ii) public domain govt. documents, iii) liberation war documents, iv) newspapers, v) historical newspapers, and vi) property deeds, with 710K polygon annotations for four unit types: text-box, paragraph, image, and table. Through preliminary experiments benchmarking the performance of existing state-of-the-art deep learning architectures for English DLA, we demonstrate the efficacy of our dataset in training deep learning based Bengali document digitization models

Shari'ah compliant liquid commodity market: {an expositional study on Bursa Suq al-Sil'ah in Malaysia}

One of the major challenges before the emerging Islamic financial Institutions is the dearth of Shariah compliant money market platform for the management of their liquidity. However, a viable panacea to the problem has been developed in Malaysia. One of the measures that were taken for the solving of the problem in the country was the creation of Bursa Suq al-Sil'ah which is a Shariah compliant liquidity commodity market. The market is tremendously efficient and it can form a model for other countries. This paper submits that the creation of a similar commodity market in the emerging jurisdictions will mitigate the problem of Shariah-compliant liquidity management to a great extent. The study adopts Shariah method in its analysis in view of buttressing the mechanism of Bursa Suq al-Sil‟ah as a model for the emerging jurisdiction

Comparative study on the independent and combined effects of omega-3 and vitamin B12 on phospholipids and phospholipase A2 as phospholipid hydrolyzing enzymes in PPA-treated rats as a model for autistic traits

Abstract Background Abnormal phospholipid metabolism is a major component of many neurodevelopmental disorders including autism. Oral administration of propionic acid (PPA) can produce behavioral abnormalities and biochemical features in rodents similar to those observed in autism and can thus be used as a model to understand impaired brain fatty acid metabolism in autism. Methods The present study was designed to understand alterations in phospholipid metabolism in the brain of a rodent model of autism and to explore omega-3 and vitamin B12 as remedies. Five groups of rats were selected: Group 1 was the control. Group 2 was the rodent model of autism treated with a neurotoxic dose of PPA. Group 3 was given vitamin B12 cobalamin (16.7 mg/kg/day) for 30 days after PPA treatment. Group 4 was given pharmaceutical grade Omega-3 (200 mg cholesterol free-DHA/kg body weight/day), a product of Madre lab, Germany, for 30 days after PPA treatment for 3 days. Group 5 was given a combined dose of ω-3 + Vitamin B12 for the same duration post-PPA treatment. Phospholipid levels and Phospholipase A2 were measured in the brain homogenates of all the groups. ELISA and western blotting were used to detect the cPLA2 protein level. Results A significant decrease in phospholipid levels and a significant increase in cPLA2 were found in brain tissue of PPA-treated rats; however, both ω-3 and vitamin B12 were efficient in ameliorating the neurotoxic effect of PPA. Conclusion Both ω-3 and vitamin B12 may play a role in ameliorating impaired phospholipid metabolism in autism; however, proper clinical trials are needed