ANN for Parkinson’s Disease Prediction

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms generally come on slowly over time. Early in the disease, the most obvious are shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking. Doctors do not know what causes it and finds difficulty in early diagnosing the presence of Parkinson’s disease. An artificial neural network system with back propagation algorithm is presented in this paper for helping doctors in identifying PD. Previous research with regards to predict the presence of the PD has shown accuracy rates up to 93% [1]; however, accuracy of prediction for small classes is reduced. The proposed design of the neural network system causes a significant increase of robustness. It is also has shown that networks recognition rates reached 100%

The analysis of Iran universities’ 2003-2004 entrance examination to detect biased items

Item bias or differential item function (DIF) refers to the situation in which the probability of correct responses to an item for examinees with equal ability measured by test but belong to different groups are not equal. The existence of bias in items decreases the validity of the test. In this study the range of item difficulty among surveyed groups, has been used as a method for detecting the item bias in Persian literature subtest as part of the Entrance Examination to Universities of Iran in 2003-2004. For this purpose, report cards of 5000 (each group of 1000 examinees) participants in this examination from three provinces i.e. Yazd, Azerbaijan Sharghi and Kurdistan as sample groups were analyzed using the computerized program, BILOG-MG. Out of 25, two items, numbers 9 and 10 showed bias between gender groups and both were in favour of female group and were identified as biased items. Of this number, four items numbers 2, 7, 9, and 12 showed bias among linguistic groups

Improvements of the reception facilities in Democratic Yemen

As a result of the restrictions imposed by MARPOL 73/78 on operational discharges, it has become essential for ships to retain all or a greater proportion of oily waste on board. In turn, this calls for the provision of adequate port reception facilities. The objective of this paper is to assist in providing for an adequate number of reception facilities for oily wastes in Democratic Yemen Ports and controlling their operation. The paper begins with tracing the development of the different requirements and regulations controlling the discharge of oily waste from ships and the provision of reception facilities in ports since 1954. Then Chapter 3 covers the Guidelines on the provision of adequate reception facilities in ports as prepared by the Maritime Environment Protection Committee. The importance of the Gulf of Aden as a main route of shipping, the impact of pollution in this area in general, and the activities in the country related to the oil industry are all covered in Chapter 4. The reception facilities available in Democratic Yemen and the adequacy of these facilities are discussed in Chapter 5. The conclusions and recommendations which form Chapter 6 are based on the following: a) to process the effluent such that it is purified and separated to comply with the provision of the MARPOL 73/78 Convention. b) to cope with the estimated traffic and throughputs of effluent, c) to have the required storage capacity, d) to have suitable connections to the discharging vessels to ensure complete transfer of the effluent ashore. e) to have a good controlling process over the adequacy of the facilities and their operation

The impact of education on economic growth: The case of Malaysia

This paper studies the relationship between education and economic growth in Malaysia. We examine the relationship between educational variables and gross domestic product (GDP). This paper focuses on human capital as a one of determinant of economic growth. The problem statement of this study was that, does the education attainment of the population can help to increase the economic growth? Our main result suggest that there exists a co-integrating relationship between education as measured by enrollments rates in primary, secondary and higher education and the GDP per capita. Malaysian annual data were collected over twenty six-year period starting from 1980 up to 2005. The Methodology employed is the standard co-integration analysis

Preprint: Using RF-DNA Fingerprints To Classify OFDM Transmitters Under Rayleigh Fading Conditions

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of Internet connected devices capable of interacting with the physical world and computer systems. It is estimated that the IoT will consist of approximately fifty billion devices by the year 2020. In addition to the sheer numbers, the need for IoT security is exacerbated by the fact that many of the edge devices employ weak to no encryption of the communication link. It has been estimated that almost 70% of IoT devices use no form of encryption. Previous research has suggested the use of Specific Emitter Identification (SEI), a physical layer technique, as a means of augmenting bit-level security mechanism such as encryption. The work presented here integrates a Nelder-Mead based approach for estimating the Rayleigh fading channel coefficients prior to the SEI approach known as RF-DNA fingerprinting. The performance of this estimator is assessed for degrading signal-to-noise ratio and compared with least square and minimum mean squared error channel estimators. Additionally, this work presents classification results using RF-DNA fingerprints that were extracted from received signals that have undergone Rayleigh fading channel correction using Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) equalization. This work also performs radio discrimination using RF-DNA fingerprints generated from the normalized magnitude-squared and phase response of Gabor coefficients as well as two classifiers. Discrimination of four 802.11a Wi-Fi radios achieves an average percent correct classification of 90% or better for signal-to-noise ratios of 18 and 21 dB or greater using a Rayleigh fading channel comprised of two and five paths, respectively.Comment: 13 pages, 14 total figures/images, Currently under review by the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

Lean Production - Identification of essential KPIs in a medical production process and design of a visual interface

Introduction: Rockwell Automation needs to understand how a lean company wants to visualize different KPIs. Ambu wants to see the value of using such visualization in their company and the effect it might have.Thus the two parts fulfill each other's needs and are the perfect match. Purpose: The purpose of the master thesis is to identify essential KPIs in a medical production process and design a visual interface. Method: The study was made in a case study approach and the data were treated in a qualitative approach. Theory: A theory study within the topic lean and KPI was done as a foundation to formulate the interview sessions. Empirics: The empirics were gathered through the interviews made with the respondents at Ambu. Those were then analyzed by the theory section. General Conclusions: Advises to Rockwell Automation: It's easy to develop dashboards using VantagePoint. Using animations, the KPIs are visualized in a very good way Perfect tool for lean companies Easy to drill down in each level and can be adapted to different roles Can be accessed through the web -- worldwide connection Information can be shared between colleagues in different places in the world The cell phone - a future possibility Gantt Schemes must be made as a standard in VantagePoint In each drill level it is important to have a big overview Improvements in the heatmap graphic and making heatmaps a standard in VantagePoint Dashboards are mostly used in the tactical level & down to the operational level Advises to Ambu: The dashboard implementation is an important element of building up a lean company Due to continuous improvement, the performance of different operations must be measured and visualized. Investment in such software makes difference, which must be seen in a long termmanner KPIs are dynamic, thus investing in a dashboard it must be dynamic Investing in a dashboard will add value to the staff at Amb

On-line implementation of an adaptive speed filter and its experimental demonstration

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Sensorless speed estimation in induction machines is important for numerous applications like speed control and fault detection. Sensors are expensive and they are not reliable enough to be used in rugged industrial environments. In this work, a previously developed neural network speed filter is implemented for on-line induction motor speed estimation. The speed filter is constructed using a combination of five neural networks. A neural networks framework developed in this work is used to construct the speed filter. The filter uses the three motor terminal voltages, the line currents, and the RMS of on-line current as inputs to estimate the speed. The data are preprocessed by a set of LabVIEW modules before they are sent to the neural networks. The preprocessed data are used by the neural networks to compute the induction motor speed. The output from the neural networks is then scaled to obtain the motor speed estimate. The filter is implemented and tested using both off-line and on-line collected data. The filter is also tested with unbalanced power supply and faulty motors to study its generalization capability. The filter had an average estimation error between 0.1% to 0.3% for the data collected off-line. For the data obtained from on-line setup, the average estimation at steady state is 0.15%. This research demonstrates the feasibility of using adaptive file-based software sensors instead of hardware sensors thereby significantly reducing implementation costs and improving overall system robustness. The neural networks framework developed in this work adds flexibility and scalability in further improving the developed induction motor speed filter

PERFORMANCE OF A NEW PACKING ELEMENT FOR PACKED COLUMN USING AIR-WATER SYSTEM

Packed tower is a continuous contact equipment widely used for gas absorption, distillation and liquid-liquid extraction. It consists of a cylindrical shell filled with a suitable packing material to provide a large interfacial area of contact between the phases. Since its inception, packing has shown great progress and improvement in its design and performance. The aim of this experiment is to develop a new type of packing element for packed tower. The design concept for the new packing is by making a rigid structure that holds the soft, flexible structure. This flexible structure should be fine and thin in order to give maximum mass transfer area while the rigid structure is to provide the strength to the packing element. The new packing is developed by using simple apparatus consist of plastic tightener attached to a metal rod. The metal rod provides the strength to the packings while the plastic tightener provides the mass transfer area. Physical characteristics of the developed packing were measured and used to calculate the geometric surface area, void fraction and equivalent spherical diameter. After the new packing is completed, experiments were carried on self-developed pilot plant using air and water as the medium. Water is fed from the top of the column while air is fed from the bottom. Air and water will counter-currently in contact. Two methods were used to analyze the pressure drop and mass transfer performance; pressure drop and mass transfer test. For pressure drop, two test was conducted, the dry pressure drop and the wet pressure drop. The mass transfer performance was analyzed by evaluating the change in moisture content of the outlet gas. The entire test was set against the result of same experiment for 10 spherical marbles as reference. For the experiment set-up, air-water counter current flow system that replicates a real packed column was constructed to test the new packing element using pipe. The packing characteristics of the developed packing such as geometric surface area, void fractions, and equivalent spherical diameter of packing particle was compared with other packing elements used in the industry. Data from experiments conducted shows that packing is able to gives low pressure drops and increase mass transfer. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the developed has potential for further research