Implementation of an Advanced Controller on a Torsional Mechanism

The hardware implementation of an active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is presented in the thesis for a mechanical torsional plant. ADRC is a novel disturbance rejection control technique that is not completely dependent on mathematical models of physical systems. In ADRC framework external disturbances, system uncertainties, and internal dynamics of the system are estimated as a generalized disturbance by an extended state observer and the generalized disturbance is effectively canceled by a PD controller. A torsional plant represents a class of rotational systems. Its control challenges are the vibrations caused by mass imbalance, centrifugal imbalance, and the imbalance caused by the non-coincidence between the principal and geometric axes of rotating disc. In the thesis, the ADRC is applied to the torsional mechanism to control the angular speed and displacement of the rotating disc in the presences of the vibrations. Both simulation and hardware implementation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ADRC. In addition, the hardware implementation results of the ADRC are compared with that of PD controller in terms of performance, control voltage requirement and tuning effort involved in the design process. The comparison study shows the superiority of the ADRC to PD controlle

Implementation of an Advanced Controller on a Torsional Mechanism

The hardware implementation of an active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is presented in the thesis for a mechanical torsional plant. ADRC is a novel disturbance rejection control technique that is not completely dependent on mathematical models of physical systems. In ADRC framework external disturbances, system uncertainties, and internal dynamics of the system are estimated as a generalized disturbance by an extended state observer and the generalized disturbance is effectively canceled by a PD controller. A torsional plant represents a class of rotational systems. Its control challenges are the vibrations caused by mass imbalance, centrifugal imbalance, and the imbalance caused by the non-coincidence between the principal and geometric axes of rotating disc. In the thesis, the ADRC is applied to the torsional mechanism to control the angular speed and displacement of the rotating disc in the presences of the vibrations. Both simulation and hardware implementation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ADRC. In addition, the hardware implementation results of the ADRC are compared with that of PD controller in terms of performance, control voltage requirement and tuning effort involved in the design process. The comparison study shows the superiority of the ADRC to PD controlle

Implementation of an Advanced Controller on a Torsional Mechanism

The hardware implementation of an active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is presented in the thesis for a mechanical torsional plant. ADRC is a novel disturbance rejection control technique that is not completely dependent on mathematical models of physical systems. In ADRC framework external disturbances, system uncertainties, and internal dynamics of the system are estimated as a generalized disturbance by an extended state observer and the generalized disturbance is effectively canceled by a PD controller. A torsional plant represents a class of rotational systems. Its control challenges are the vibrations caused by mass imbalance, centrifugal imbalance, and the imbalance caused by the non-coincidence between the principal and geometric axes of rotating disc. In the thesis, the ADRC is applied to the torsional mechanism to control the angular speed and displacement of the rotating disc in the presences of the vibrations. Both simulation and hardware implementation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ADRC. In addition, the hardware implementation results of the ADRC are compared with that of PD controller in terms of performance, control voltage requirement and tuning effort involved in the design process. The comparison study shows the superiority of the ADRC to PD controlle

Development of a Time Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy System for Near Real-Time Clinical Diagnostic Applications

The design and development of a versatile time resolved fluorescence spectroscopy (TRFS) system capable of near real time data acquisition and processing for potential clinical diagnostic applications is reported. The TRFS apparatus is portable, versatile and compatible with the clinical environment. The main excitation source is a UV nitrogen laser with a nanosecond pulse width and the detection part consists of a dual grating spectrograph coupled with an MCP-PMT. The nitrogen laser also has a dye module attached to it, which enables broadband excitation of the sample. This setup allows rapid acquisition (250 ms for fluorescence decay at a wavelength) of time resolved fluorescence data with a high spectral (as low as 0.5 nm) and temporal (as low as 25 picoseconds) resolution. Alternatively, a state diode pumped pulsed laser can be used for excitation to improve data collection speed. The TRFS system is capable of measuring a broad range of fluorescence emission spectra (visible to near infra-red) and resolving a broad range of lifetimes (ranging from a few hundred picoseconds to several microseconds). The optical setup of the system is flexible permitting the connection of different light sources as well as optical fiber based probes for light delivery/collection depending on the need of the application. This permits the use of the TRFS apparatus in in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo applications. The system is fully automated for real-time data acquisition and processing, facilitating near-real time clinical diagnostic applications

Towards General Game Representations: Decomposing Games Pixels into Content and Style

On-screen game footage contains rich contextual information that players process when playing and experiencing a game. Learning pixel representations of games can benefit artificial intelligence across several downstream tasks including game-playing agents, procedural content generation, and player modelling. The generalizability of these methods, however, remains a challenge, as learned representations should ideally be shared across games with similar game mechanics. This could allow, for instance, game-playing agents trained on one game to perform well in similar games with no re-training. This paper explores how generalizable pre-trained computer vision encoders can be for such tasks, by decomposing the latent space into content embeddings and style embeddings. The goal is to minimize the domain gap between games of the same genre when it comes to game content critical for downstream tasks, and ignore differences in graphical style. We employ a pre-trained Vision Transformer encoder and a decomposition technique based on game genres to obtain separate content and style embeddings. Our findings show that the decomposed embeddings achieve style invariance across multiple games while still maintaining strong content extraction capabilities. We argue that the proposed decomposition of content and style offers better generalization capacities across game environments independently of the downstream task

Homicidal ideation and psychiatric comorbidities in the inpatient adolescents aged 12–17

Objectives: Adolescents with a homicidal tendency is a growing concern in the United States. Studies in the past have showcased the relationship between homicidal ideation (HI) and psychiatric illnesses, but very limited information is available on the adolescent and inpatient population. We aim to evaluate the prevalence of demographic characteristics and psychiatric disorders in adolescents with and without HI. Materials and methods: Adolescent (age 12–17) population admitted to the hospital with the diagnosis of homicidal ideation was identified from the 2016–2018 National Inpatient Sample Dataset (NISD). Patients without HI were defined as the control group. The prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities between the groups was compared by applying the Rao-Scott adjusted chi-square test. We used multivariable logistic regression to generate odds ratio (OR) of homicidal ideation as an outcome; we adjusted age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, substance use disorders, alcohol use disorders, and psychiatric comorbidities. Results: A total of 18,935 patients (mean age: 14.5) with HI diagnosis were identified in this study. Majority of the patients were male subjects in the HI group compared to the control group (58.7 vs. 41.2%, p \u3c 0.001). Racially, HI was more prevalent in white race (56.0 vs. 52.6%, p \u3c 0.001) and black race (22.3 vs. 17.8%, p \u3c 0.001), compared to Hispanic race (14.9 vs. 21.3%, p \u3c 0.001). Major depression (Odds ratio [OR]: 2.66, p \u3c 0.001), bipolar disorder (OR: 3.52, p \u3c 0.001), anxiety disorder (OR: 1.85, p \u3c 0.001), ADHD, and other conduct disorders (OR: 4.01, p \u3c 0.001), schizophrenia (OR: 4.35, p \u3c 0.001) are strong predictors of HI. Suicidality was prevalent in 66.9% of patients with HI. Conclusion: We found a higher prevalence of psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder in adolescents with homicidal ideation in the inpatient setting. White and black races were more prevalent in patients with homicidal ideation. Further large-scale longitudinal research studies are warranted to establish the correlation between psychiatric disorders and homicidal ideation among adolescents

An intensive monitoring of adverse drug reaction in indoor patients of medicine department at tertiary care teaching hospital

Background: Use of drugs itself may result into illness and death due to their adverse effects. In India 10-20% of inpatients developed adverse drug reactions. Most of these problems can be overcome by undertaking hospital based intensive monitoring. Objective of this study was to estimate the incidence and document the spectrum of ADRs in studied patients in terms of causality, severity, frequency, type and preventability. A prospective, observational, single centre study conducted among the indoor patients of the department of general medicine, Guru Gobind singh government hospital, Jamnagar over a period of 12 months.Methods: Admitted patients who either had developed a clinically suspected ADR after admission (group A) or were admitted primarily because of an ADR (group B) were included. In all ADR related patients the necessary data was recorded on a pre-designed case record form, NCC-PvPI form and analysis was done.Results: Total 3566 patients were screened. 87 patients had 101 ADRs, among them 62 from group A and 25 from group B with 2.44% incidence. In causality, by WHO-UMC and by naranjo scale most common ‘probable’ category in group A (54.7%) and group B (50%) and 89.9% group A and 84.6% in group B respectively.95.05% ADRs were ‘Not preventable’. Hartwig seigle’s scale maximum ADRs 65.4% ADRs in group A and 73.1% in group B were ‘moderate’ in severity.Conclusions: Intercurrent illness, longer hospital stay and poly pharmacy was playing a major role in occurrence of multiple ADRs with 2.44% incidence in our setup

Drug utilization pattern of antimicrobial drugs in intensive care unit of a tertiary care hospital attached with a medical college

Background: A number of antimicrobial drugs are prescribed to the patients in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Drug utilization research was defined by WHO as the study of marketing, distribution, prescription, and use of drugs in a society, with special emphasis on the resulting medical, social and economic consequences. There is lack of information about the use of antimicrobial agents in the ICU at GGGH till date. So we decided to conduct this type of study.Methods: A prospective observational study was carried out for 12 months. Patients of age >18 of both sexes who was admitted in ICU were included in the study while pregnant and lactating women excluded. The prescribing pattern was analyzed by using World Health Organization basic drug indicators. Results: Among 611 patients, 373 (61.04%) were male and 238 (38.95%) were female. The most common emergency was post-operative 204 (33.38%).The most common prescribed antimicrobial drug group and drug was antiamoebic drugs and metronidazole respectively in 437 (24.04%) out of total drugs prescribed. The numbers of antimicrobial drugs prescribed per patient were 2.97. 68% drugs were prescribed from WHO and national EML list. Total 57.26% drugs were prescribed by generic name. Average antimicrobial drug cost per patient was 1805.34 rs.Conclusions: Despite of limitations of present study it gives important conclusion about how antimicrobial drugs are used in GGGH ICU. This information can be used for improvement of current treatment strategies

Knowing Your Annotator: Rapidly Testing the Reliability of Affect Annotation

The laborious and costly nature of affect annotation is a key detrimental factor for obtaining large scale corpora with valid and reliable affect labels. Motivated by the lack of tools that can effectively determine an annotator's reliability, this paper proposes general quality assurance (QA) tests for real-time continuous annotation tasks. Assuming that the annotation tasks rely on stimuli with audiovisual components, such as videos, we propose and evaluate two QA tests: a visual and an auditory QA test. We validate the QA tool across 20 annotators that are asked to go through the test followed by a lengthy task of annotating the engagement of gameplay videos. Our findings suggest that the proposed QA tool reveals, unsurprisingly, that trained annotators are more reliable than the best of untrained crowdworkers we could employ. Importantly, the QA tool introduced can predict effectively the reliability of an affect annotator with 80% accuracy, thereby, saving on resources, effort and cost, and maximizing the reliability of labels solicited in affective corpora. The introduced QA tool is available and accessible through the PAGAN annotation platform