A system for traffic violation detection

This paper describes the framework and components of an experimental platform for an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) aimed at providing drivers with a feedback about traffic violations they have committed during their driving. The system is able to detect some specific traffic violations, record data associated to these faults in a local data-base, and also allow visualization of the spatial and temporal information of these traffic violations in a geographical map using the standard Google Earth tool. The test-bed is mainly composed of two parts: a computer vision subsystem for traffic sign detection and recognition which operates during both day and nighttime, and an event data recorder (EDR) for recording data related to some specific traffic violations. The paper covers firstly the description of the hardware architecture and then presents the policies used for handling traffic violations

Detection of kdr and ace-1 mutations in wild populations of Anopheles arabiensis and An. melas in a residual malaria transmission area of Senegal.

In the central western Senegal, malaria transmission has been reduced low due to the combination of several effective control interventions. However, despite this encouraging achievement, residual malaria transmission still occurring in few areas, mainly ensured by An. arabiensis and An. melas. The resurgence or the persistence of the disease may have originated from the increase and the spread of insecticide resistance genes among natural malaria vectors populations. Therefore, assessing the status and mechanisms of insecticides resistance among targeted malaria vectors is of highest importance to better characterize factors underlying the residual transmission where it occurs. Malaria vectors were collected from three selected villages using nocturnal human landing catches (HLC) and pyrethrum spray collections (PSC) methods. An. gambiae s.l. specimens were identified at the species level then genotyped for the presence of kdr-west (L1014F), kdr-east (L1014S) and ace-1R mutations by qPCR. An. arabiensis (69.36%) and An. melas (27.99%) were the most common species of the Gambiae complex in the study area. Among An. arabiensis population, the allelic frequency of the kdr-east (22.66%) was relatively higher than for kdr-west mutation (9.96%). While for An. melas populations, the overall frequencies of both mutations were very low, being respectively 1.12% and 0.40% for the L1014S and L1014F mutations. With a global frequency of 2%, only the heterozygous form of the G119S mutation was found only in An. arabiensis and in all the study sites. The widespread occurrence of the kdr mutation in both An. arabiensis and An. melas natural populations, respectively the main and focal vectors in the central-western Senegal, may have contributed to maintaining malaria transmission in the area. Thus, compromising the effectiveness of pyrethroids-based vector control measures and the National Elimination Goal. Therefore, monitoring and managing properly insecticide resistance became a key programmatic intervention to achieve the elimination goal where feasible, as aimed by Senegal. Noteworthy, this is the first report of the ace-1 mutation in natural populations of An. arabiensis from Senegal, which need to be closely monitored to preserve one of the essential insecticide classes used in IRS to control the pyrethroids-resistant populations

Decentralized adaptive suboptimal LQ control in Microsoft Excel VBA

Suboptimal linear quadratic (LQ) control has been popular very much because of its very good results in several tasks of control. It allows us to implement it on many systems even on unstable systems which it stabilizes. Adaptation enlarges the area of the usage especially in the case when standard controllers with fixed parameters gives unsatisfactory results. In this paper, the main attention is dedicated to the usage of the modified instrumental variable technique as the identification part of the self-tuning controllers, and to the implementation in Microsoft Excel. So this approach was verified by simulation in Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) on two input two output (TITO) systems. © 2019, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature