A Series-Elastic Robot for Back-Pain Rehabilitation

Robotics research has been broadly expanding into various fields during the past decades. It is widely spread and best known for solving many technical necessities in different fields. With the rise of the industrial revolution, it upgraded many factories to use industrial robots to prevent the human operator from dangerous and hazardous tasks. The rapid development of application fields and their complexity have inspired researchers in the robotics community to find innovative solutions to meet the new desired requirements of the field. Currently, the creation of new needs outside the traditional industrial robots are demanding robots to attend to the new market and to assist humans in meeting their daily social needs (i.e., agriculture, construction, cleaning.). The future integration of robots into other types of production processes, added new requirements that require more safety, flexibility, and intelligence in robots. Areas of robotics has evolved into various fields. This dissertation addresses robotics research in four different areas: rehabilitation robots, biologically inspired robots, optimization techniques, and neural network implementation. Although these four areas may seem different from each other, they share some research topics and applications

A Proposed Style to Rationalize Decision-Making in Public Policy Making in Gulf Cooperation Countries

The approach of this paper is both normative and analytical. The normative aspect intends to present one possible rational approach, i.e., Multigoal Analysis, to address the challenges posed by some types of public policy problems in the Gulf Cooperation Countries and to help provide manageable information on public policy problems to address uncertainty surrounding them. Many important public policy issue areas present considerable challenges to policymakers in the Gulf Cooperation Countries. The traditional economic tools such as cost-benefit analysis (CBO) and cost-effectiveness (CE), emphasize the criteria of efficiency and admit only quantitatively monetized criteria. Therefore they are not suitable for some ill-structured types of public problems encountered by the Gulf Cooperation Countries policymakers because they involve many criteria. Unlike the economic tools, the Multigoal approach integrates economic, social, political, administrative as well as other types of criteria that are important to policymakers in the Gulf Cooperation Countries. Unfortunately, at present policy advisors in the GCC in different areas of ill-structured problems are drawn from economists and business administration specialists who, by their very training, do not consider any criteria beyond efficiency and effectiveness. The analytical side of the paper seeks to review critically in public policy analysis the literature and to analyze the particular political context in the Gulf Cooperation Countries and the types of public problems it produces

The influence of system designer intention over collaborative tagging. an analysis of tagging behaviour in CiteULike and Delicious

Tagging provides support for retrieval and categorization of online content depending on users' tag choice. A number of models of tagging behaviour have been proposed to identify factors that are considered to affect taggers, such as users' tagging history. In this paper, we use Semiotics Analysis and Activity theory, to study the effect the system designer has over tagging behaviour. The framework we use shows the components that comprise the tagging system and how they interact together to direct tagging behaviour. We analysed two collaborative tagging systems: CiteULike and Delicious by studying their components by applying our framework. Using datasets from both systems, we found that 35% of CiteULike users did not provide tags compared to only 0.1% of Delicious users. This was directly linked to the type of tools used by the system designer to support tagging

Privacy-preserving patient clustering for personalized federated learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning framework that enables multiple organizations to train a model without sharing their data with a central server. However, it experiences significant performance degradation if the data is non-identically independently distributed (non-IID). This is a problem in medical settings, where variations in the patient population contribute significantly to distribution differences across hospitals. Personalized FL addresses this issue by accounting for site-specific distribution differences. Clustered FL, a Personalized FL variant, was used to address this problem by clustering patients into groups across hospitals and training separate models on each group. However, privacy concerns remained as a challenge as the clustering process requires exchange of patient-level information. This was previously solved by forming clusters using aggregated data, which led to inaccurate groups and performance degradation. In this study, we propose Privacy-preserving Community-Based Federated machine Learning (PCBFL), a novel Clustered FL framework that can cluster patients using patient-level data while protecting privacy. PCBFL uses Secure Multiparty Computation, a cryptographic technique, to securely calculate patient-level similarity scores across hospitals. We then evaluate PCBFL by training a federated mortality prediction model using 20 sites from the eICU dataset. We compare the performance gain from PCBFL against traditional and existing Clustered FL frameworks. Our results show that PCBFL successfully forms clinically meaningful cohorts of low, medium, and high-risk patients. PCBFL outperforms traditional and existing Clustered FL frameworks with an average AUC improvement of 4.3% and AUPRC improvement of 7.8%

Game Theory in Political Science and Public Policy: The Case of the Establishment of the United Arab Emirates

The objective of this article is quasi-experimental. By using the logic of game theory to explain the establishment of the state of the United Arab Emirates, the article intends to test the ability of game theory to explain a pre-played game. Although formal game theory is not susceptible to experimentation, game to political science and public policy is like experiments to psychology. Hence this paper attempts to use the already played game of the establishment of the state of the United Arab Emirates as an experiment to answer the question: is the outcome of this game conforms with game theory modeling. Thus, the article models that game as the Extended Battle of Sexes game and use both the normal and extensive forms to address that question

Modeling, Identification, Validation and Control of a Hybrid Maglev Ball System

In this thesis, the electrodynamics of a single axis hybrid electromagnetic suspension Maglev system was modeled and validated by applying it to a single axis hybrid maglev ball experiment. By exploring its linearized model, it was shown that the single axis hybrid Maglev ball has inherently unstable dynamics. Three control scenarios were explored based on the linearized model; (1) Proportional, Deferential (PD) control, (2) Proportional, Deferential, Integral (PID) and (3) PID controller with pre-filtering. This thesis has shown that a PID controller with a pre-filtering technique can stabilize such a system and provide a well-controlled response. A parametric system identification technique was applied to fit the theoretically derived model to a single axis hybrid maglev ball experiment. It is known that the identified model has different model parameters than the theoretically derived parameters. This thesis has examined and discussed the deviation from the theoretical model. Importantly, it was shown that such a system can be identified by estimating the values of two parameters instead of five to increase the accuracy. A Numerical nonlinear simulation was developed for the experiment based on the theoretically derived and experimentally identified model. This simulation was validated by real-time experiment outputs

Gravity Data Interpretation Using Different New Algorithms: A Comparative Study

Gravity data interpretation is useful in exploring regions that have different geological structures, which contain minerals, ores and oil deposits. There are different numerical methods for the model parameters (depth (z), origin location (xo), shape parameter (q) and amplitude coefficient (A)) evaluation of a covered structure such as gradient method, particle swarm optimization technique and Werner deconvolution method. In this study, application of these methods is utilized to appraise the model parametric quantity of the covered structures. The application of these methods was demonstrated by different engineered data without and with various range of noise (5%, 10%) and applied for a real example from Egypt. The result values of each method were compared together and with those published and drilling information

Osteoarthritic Synovial Derived Stem Cells Augmented with Subchondral Drilling for Repair of Large Osteochondral Defects in Rabbit Model

This study showed the effectiveness of combination therapy of osteoarthritic synovial derived stem cells (OA-SDSCs) with subchondral drilling for large osteochondral defects repair in mature rabbit model. The defect was created at load-bearing area of the medial femoral condyle of both knees (6 mm length × 3 mm width). Then, mature rabbits were separated randomly into 2 groups: 3 subchondral holes were penetrated the subchondral bone in the defect site (drilled group), and then an intra-articular injection of one million OA-SDSCs into the knee joint was performed (combined group). After two months, rabbits were euthanized to perform histological assessment of the repaired tissue using safranin O stain. Repaired tissue was visually more whitish in the drilled group than in the combined group. Histologically, repaired tissue almost revealed fibrocartilage with subchondral repair in the combined group. However, fibrous tissue was represented in the drilled group. On Pineda score, the combined group was significantly better than of the drilled group (P = 0.001). Finally, using of OA-SDSCs with subchondral drilling promotes better cartilage repair than using subchondral drilling alone

Development of Real Time Operating Systen for PIC18F Microcontrollers for Educational Purposes

Real Time Operating System (RTOS) is a small operating system designed to manage the peripherals of Microcontrollers and exhibit a low level layer to enhance the parallel execution of multiple programs. In addition to that, RTOSes are most of concern about guarantee the processing at real time. This project aims to implement and develop RTOS on PIC18Fxxx family. This RTOS is to be developed under MPLAB IDE integrated development environment. The kernel of this RTOS is written in Assembly language while the users may use both assembly and C to develop their applications. A previous RTOS project called PICos18 developed by Pragamtec inc. is being considered. The selection of this system is due to its free license and the availability of its documentations. PICos18 is based on OSEK/VDX (German/French industrial standards for operating systems). The main contribution in this project is first, by developing RTOS to review and demonstrate the concept of RTOS and secondly, by developing drivers and application compatible with the developed RTOS and finally presenting the developed RTOS in educational form for future use as a teaching tool in microcontroller-based courses

Larvicidal potency of Mexican poppy ( Argemone mexicana L.) seed oil alone or mixed with selected vegetable oils against mosquito larvae

       البعوض عائل مهم لمرض الملاريا . قاتلات االيرقات الزيتية تستعمل لقتل اليرقات بواسطة السمية او الاختناق. بذور الارجمون مكسكانا تنتج زيت ثابت يحتوي علي قلويدات سامة، اظهرت سمية ضد يرقات البعوض عند استخدامها في صور مستحلب مركز. في هذه الدراسة تم استخدام زيت بذور الارجمون مخلوطا" مع زيوت طعام كتجهيزات قاتلة لليرقات. استخدمت للتخفيفات الزيوت المستخلصة من بذور الفول السوداني , زهرة الشمس, السمسم والذره الشامية. تم تقييم زيت الأرجمون علي يرقات البعوض بعد تخفيفه بالنسب (25%,75%,100%) من الزيوت المذكورة. اظهر الزيت النقي لبذور الأرجمون سمية متزايدة مع زمن التعرض وصلت حتي 100%. عند مقارنة تأثير الزيوت الأخرى مع زيت الأرجمون وجد ان زيت الفول السوداني له خاصية تضاد مع زيت الأرجمون. زيت السمسم اظهر سمية بسيطة جدا" عند استعماله منفردا"  مع انه تسبب في زيادة فعالية الأرجمون بعد التخفيف به اكثر من زيت زهرة الشمس. اظهر زيت الذرة الشامية النقي فاعلية كقاتل يرقات تماثل فاعلية الأرجمون وعند خلط تخفيفاته مع زيت الأرجمون لم تتأثر فعاليته