Decision Fusion and Contextual Information for Arabic Words Recognition for Computing and Informatics

The study of multiple classifier systems has become recently an area of intensive research in pattern recognition. Also in handwriting recognition, systems combining several classifiers have been investigated. An approach for recognizing the legal amount for handwritten Arabic bank check is described in this article. The solution uses multiple information sources to recognize words. The recognition step is preformed with a parallel combination of three kinds of classifiers using holistic word structural features. The classification stage results are first normalized, and the sum combination is performed as a decision fusion scheme, after which a syntactic analyzer makes final decision on the candidate words. Using this approach, the obtained results are very interesting and promising

The Impact of Children on Parental Purchasing Behavior

Children have a major influence on their parents' purchases of similar products. Children are a dominant market for marketers to consider when making strategy choices since they are part of a family unit. This market is active in three ways: first, it is a large market in and of itself; second, it is a key influencer in facilitating purchasing decisions; and third, it is a possible future market. The focus of this research is on children's second position. They become the focal point of family expectations, and parents are more receptive to their recommendations when making purchases. This research study explains the effect of children on parental purchase behavior in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi using a survey as a data collection method. Parents are among the participants in this research. The relationship between parental purchase behavior (PPB) and age of child (AOC), importance of child (IOC), product category (PC), communication pattern (CP), and family orientation is revealed by multiple regression analysis (FO). The age of the child (AOC), family orientation (FO), and Product Category (PC) are the three most significant factors that affect parental buying behavior. The paper concludes that children have a major influence on their parents' decisions

Investigating Photochromic Behavior of Organic Dyes in Solution Form using Multilevel Factorial Design

Photochromic compounds, namely spiropyran, spirooxazine, and naphthopyran, have received much attention, because of their high potential applications in various industrial fields. The aim of this study is to understand the behavior of three photochromic dyes in solution form via statistical approach. The types of dyes and solvents were screened using multilevel factorial design. From the analysis of variance results, it was found that the types of dyes and solvents used as well as their interaction have significant effects on the absorbance and photostability. The naphthopyran compound displayed highest change in absorbance intensity, followed by spiropyran and spirooxazine, when dissolved in isopropanol separately. However, the spirooxazine is the most photostable dye compared to naphthopyran and spiropyran, with ethanol as the solvent. Copyright © 2021 by Authors, Published by BCREC Group. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

Study on photochromic behaviour of organic dyes in solution form using multilevel factorial design

Photochromic compounds, namely spiropyran, spirooxazine, and naphthopyran, have received much attention, be-cause of their high potential applications in various industrial fields. The aim of this study is to understand the be-havior of three photochromic dyes in solution form via statistical approach. The types of dyes and solvents were screened using multilevel factorial design. From the analysis of variance results, it was found that the types of dyes and solvents used as well as their interaction have significant effects on the absorbance and photostability. The naphthopyran compound displayed highest change in absorbance intensity, followed by spiropyran and spi-rooxazine, when dissolved in isopropanol separately. However, the spirooxazine is the most photostable dye com-pared to naphthopyran and spiropyran, with ethanol as the solvent.Copyright © 2021 by Authors, Published by BCREC Group. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).Keywords: Photochromism; spiropyran; spirooxazine; naphthopyran; factorial design; photostabilit

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century

Artificial neural network fusion: Application to Arabic words recognition

Abstract. The study of multiple classifier systems has become recently an area of intensive research in pattern recognition in order to improve the results of single classifiers. In this work, two types of features combination for handwritten Arabic literal words amount recognition, using neural network classifiers are discussed. Different parallel combination schemes are presented and their results compared with a single classifier benchmark using a complete feature set

Multi-classifier system for authorship verification task using word embeddings

© 2018 IEEE. Authorship Verification is considered as a topic of growing interest in research, which has shown excellent development in recent years. We want to know if an unknown document belongs to the documents set known to an author or not. Classical text classifiers often focus on many human designed features, such as dictionaries, knowledge bases and special tree kernels. Other studies use the N-gram function that often leads to the curse of dimensionality. Contrary to traditional approaches, this article proposes a new scheme of Machine Learning model based on fusion of three different architectures namely, Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent-Convolutional Neural Networks and Support Vector Machine classifiers without human-designed features. Word2vec based Word Embeddings is proposed to learn the best word representations for automatic authorship verification. Word Embeddings provides semantic vectors and extracts the most relevant information about raw text with a relatively small dimension. As well as the classifiers generally make different errors on the same learning samples which results in a combination of several points of view to maintain relevant information contained in different classifiers. The final decision of our system is obtained by combining the results of the three models using the voting method