RESEARCH ON THE ABILITY OF HANDLING AMMONIA CONTAMINATED AIR STREAM BY ACTIVATED CARBON MATERIALS FROM COCONUT FIBER (AC-1) AND PEANUT HUSK (AC-2), IMPREGNATED WITH ZnCl2

This research aimed to investigate the ability of handling ammonia emission from waste gas by adsorption methods. The absorbents were activated carbon materials, which were made from coconut fiber (AC-1) and peanut husk (AC-2), impregnated with ZnCl2. Both of these materials have shown their abilities to remove NH3 (over 90 % efficiency) at the concentration of about 9000 ppm, while the removal efficiency of commercial activated carbon (AC-3) was 70 %. At the inlet concentration of about 3000 ppm, the maximum ammonia removal efficiency was 96.23 % when using AC-1 and 97.74 % using AC-2. The saturation time of each activated carbon was also examined. At inlet concentration of 2800 – 3200 ppm with gas flow rate was 0.4 L.min-1 and 5 g in mass material, the ammonia removal efficiencies of AC-1 and AC-2 were maintained at 80 % lasting for 600 minutes, but the efficiency of AC-3 rapidly decreased to 30 %. In all experiments, the activated carbon that made from peanut husk (AC-2), impregnated with ZnCl2 showed higher performance than one made from coconut fiber (AC-1) and commercial activated carbon (AC-3)

The effectiveness of feature attribution methods and its correlation with automatic evaluation scores

Explaining the decisions of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is increasingly critical in many real-world, high-stake applications. Hundreds of papers have either proposed new feature attribution methods, discussed or harnessed these tools in their work. However, despite humans being the target end-users, most attribution methods were only evaluated on proxy automatic-evaluation metrics (Zhang et al. 2018; Zhou et al. 2016; Petsiuk et al. 2018). In this paper, we conduct the first user study to measure attribution map effectiveness in assisting humans in ImageNet classification and Stanford Dogs fine-grained classification, and when an image is natural or adversarial (i.e., contains adversarial perturbations). Overall, feature attribution is surprisingly not more effective than showing humans nearest training-set examples. On a harder task of fine-grained dog categorization, presenting attribution maps to humans does not help, but instead hurts the performance of human-AI teams compared to AI alone. Importantly, we found automatic attribution-map evaluation measures to correlate poorly with the actual human-AI team performance. Our findings encourage the community to rigorously test their methods on the downstream human-in-the-loop applications and to rethink the existing evaluation metrics.Comment: NeurIPS 2021; 10 pages of Main text; 28 pages of Appendi

High-Throughput Functional System for Encapsulated Networks of Model Cell Membranes

Synthetic lipid bilayers provide models of cell membranes to study biomolecular interactions and signal transduction. The droplet interface bilayer (DIB) is a highly versatile technique for assembling planar lipid membranes between water droplets in oil. The DIB method thus provides a unique capability for developing digital, droplet-based membrane platforms for rapid membrane characterization, drug screening and ion channel recordings. In this work, a new microfluidic system is presented that automates droplet generation, sorting, and sequential trapping in designated locations to enable rapid assembly of arrays of DIBs along with in situ electrical measurements. This platform provides repeatable processes for forming long-lasting bilayer arrays for numerous membrane-based applications. Studies on asymmetric lipid membranes are performed to understanding the effects of peptides on the disruption of asymmetric lipid membranes and intramembrane potential. In addition, an automated microfluidic array is applied to isolate and transform single cells to improve the ability to study gene transformation on an individual cell basis, with greater spatial and temporal resolution of each cell’s response

Distinguishing Antonyms and Synonyms in a Pattern-based Neural Network

Distinguishing between antonyms and synonyms is a key task to achieve high performance in NLP systems. While they are notoriously difficult to distinguish by distributional co-occurrence models, pattern-based methods have proven effective to differentiate between the relations. In this paper, we present a novel neural network model AntSynNET that exploits lexico-syntactic patterns from syntactic parse trees. In addition to the lexical and syntactic information, we successfully integrate the distance between the related words along the syntactic path as a new pattern feature. The results from classification experiments show that AntSynNET improves the performance over prior pattern-based methods.Comment: EACL 2017, 10 page

TREATMENT EFFICIENCY OF PIGGERY WASTEWATER BY SURFACE AND HORIZONTAL SUBSURFACE FLOW CONSTRUCTED WETLANDS

Constructed wetlands have been used to treat various types of wastewaters such as urban runoff, acid mine drainage, municipal, industrial, and livestock wastewaters. This study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of two constructed wetlands (surface and horizontal subsurface flows) for piggery wastewater treatment after biogas process. The wetland plant Phragmites australis Cav. was used in 45 days for the experiments. The CWs were designed to treat up to 100 liters/day with the hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 3 days. Parameters including pH, COD, TSS, NH4+-N, total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) were measured. The pH of the CWs system was in the range of 6.7 to 7.3. The results showed that the horizontal subsurface flow CW had better treatment performance compared to the surface flow system. The removal efficiency of TP, TSS, COD, TN and NH4+-N by surface flow CW was 80, 60, 66, 60 and 65%, respectively while those by horizontal subsurface flow system was 86, 78, 74.6, 67.1 and 74.2%, respectively. The water quality of the effluents of both two CWs met the Vietnamese standards for livestock wastewater (QCVN62/2016-BTNMT, column B)

Marketing Research on Smoke Alarms in the Vietnamese Consumer Market

The principles of fire safety are to prevent fires, protect human life and avoid unwanted property loss in the occurrence of fire. Among the fire safety equipment, a smoke alarm is indispensable for such value. Therefore, in many countries, smoke alarm installation in every household is mandatory. In Vietnam, the number of fires has been increasing in the recent years. The damages and deaths caused by fires are obviously measurable, and it needs to be realized that such consequence can easily be reduced as well. However, Vietnamese consumers have not been aware of the device. This matter induced me to do this research. The main objective of this study is to identify the Vietnamese consumer demand for smoke alarm products. The sub-objective of this thesis is to create an awareness of fire safety and the necessity of having smoke alarms installed. In this the-sis, both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used. In order to reach the research objective, all aspects related to the subject were looked into. Indepth interviews with Ho Chi Minh City Fire Department and two companies in the fire safety sector were conducted. Data collection from the consumers was done in 3 phases: face-to-face interviews with seven persons, after that a questionnaire was developed; in the end a company was established to approach the consumers through its marketing scheme. The result of the study showed that Vietnamese consumers were not willing to buy smoke alarms even though the price was seen to be inexpensive. The biggest reason is that the consumers still do not perceive the value of the product. Howev-er, the business opportunity is still there because this fact is believed to be changed in future under external influences. Thus, recommendations have been given to both interested parties. From the fire department’s side, smoke alarm installation in households should be looked into and it might be made obligatory if people are familiar with the simplicity and utility of it. From a business perspective, marketing communication activities can be conducted differently and prepo-sitioning smoke alarm might also be effective.Principerna för brandsäkerhet är att förebygga bränder, skydda människoliv och undvika förlust av egendom i händelse av brand. Bland de brandsäkerhetsutrustningar som finns tillgängliga är brandvarnaren oumbärlig för detta syfte. Installation av brandvarnare i hushåll är obligatorisk i många länder. I Vietnam har antalet bränder ökat under de senaste åren. De skador och dödsfall orsakade av bränder är uppenbarligen mätbara, och det måste förstås att en sådan konsekvens kan lätt reduceras. Vietnamesiska konsumenter har dock inte varit medvetna eller fått information om brandvarnare. Det är här forskningsproblemet för denna avhandling uppstår. Huvudsyftet med denna studie är att identifiera de vietnamesiska konsumenternas efterfrågan på brandvarnare. Ett annat syfte med denna avhandling är att skapa medvetenhet om brandsäkerhet samt nödvändigheten av att ha brandvarnare installerade. I denna avhandling användes både kvalitativ och kvantitativ forskningsmetod. För att nå forskningsmålet undersöktes alla aspekter relateratde till ämnet. Djupgående intervjuer med Ho Chi Minh City brandkår samt två företag inom brandsäkerhetssektorn gjordes. Datainsamling från konsumenterna gjordes i tre steg: intervjuer med 7 personer genomfördes. Efteråt utformades ett frågeformulär och till slut grundades ett företag för att kunna marknadsföra brandvarnare till konsumenter och därmed erhålla tillförlitliga resultat. Resultatet av studien visade att vietnamesiska konsumenter inte är villiga att köpa brandvarnare, även om priset ansågs vara billigt. Den största orsaken är att konsumenterna fortfarande inte uppfattar värdet av produkten. Affärsmöjligheten finns dock fortfarande kvar, eftersom denna uppfattning tros ändras i framtiden p.g.a yttre påverkan. Därför har rekommendationer getts till båda parter. Till brandkåren gavs rådet att obligatorisk installation av brandvarnare i hushåll bör ses över och kan genomföras om människor bekantar sig med enkelheten och nyttan av brandvarnare. Från ett affärsmässigt perspektiv kan marknadsföringsaktiviteter utföras annorlunda samt preposition av brandvarnare kan även visa sig vara effektivt