Sorghum and pearl millet production in southern Africa

Sorghum and pearl millet are SADC's second and third most important cereal grains in terms of production area. Farmers in southern Africa annually sow over 1.9 million ha of sorghum and 0.9 million ha of pearl millet (Table 1). This compares with an aggregate production area of 12 million ha of maize. The area sown to sorghum and pearl millet in SADC has generally been increasing with the growth of smallholder farming populations

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Cooperative Passenger Inflow Control in Urban Mass Transit Network with Constraint on Capacity of Station

In urban mass transit network, when passengers’ trip demands exceed capacity of transport, the numbers of passengers accumulating in the original or transfer stations always exceed the safety limitation of those stations. It is necessary to control passenger inflow of stations to assure the safety of stations and the efficiency of passengers. We define time of delay (TD) to evaluate inflow control solutions, which is the sum of waiting time outside of stations caused by inflow control and extra waiting time on platform waiting for next coming train because of insufficient capacity of first coming train. We build a model about cooperative passenger inflow control in the whole network (CPICN) with constraint on capacity of station. The objective of CPICN is to minimize the average time of delay (ATD) and maximum time of delay (MTD). Particle swarm optimization for constrained optimization problem is used to find the optimal solution. The numeral experiments are carried out to prove the feasibility and efficiency of the model proposed in this paper

A novel nonparametric mixture model for the detection pattern of COVID-19 on Diamond Princess cruise

The outbreak of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship has attracted much attention. Motivated by the PCR testing data on the Diamond Princess, we propose a novel cure mixture nonparametric model to investigate the detection pattern. It combines a logistic regression for the probability of susceptible subjects with a nonparametric distribution for the detection of infected individuals. Maximum likelihood estimators are proposed. The resulting estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed approach is appropriate for practical use. Finally, we apply the proposed method to PCR testing data on the Diamond Princess to show its practical utility