Prediction of fruit rot disease incidence in Arecanut based on weather parameters

Received: July 19th, 2022 ; Accepted: October 20th, 2022 ; Published: November 22nd, 2022 ; Correspondence: [email protected] occurrence of pests and diseases in arecanut crops has always been an important factor affecting the total production of arecanut. Arecanut is always dependent on environmental factors during its growth. Thus monitoring and early prediction of the occurrence of the disease would be very helpful for prevention and therefore more crop production. Here, we propose artificial intelligence-based deep learning models for fruit rot disease prediction. Historical data on fruit rot incidence in representative areas of arecanut production in Udupi along with historical weather data are the parameters used to develop region-specific models for the Udupi district. The fruit rot disease incidence score value is predicted using recurrent neural network variants (i.e., Vanilla LSTM, Vanilla GRU, stacked LSTM, and Bidirectional LSTM) for the first time. The predictive performance of the proposed models is evaluated by mean square error (MSE) along with the 5-fold cross-validation technique. Further, compared to other deep learning and machine learning models, the Vanilla LSTM model gives 1.5 MSE, while the Vanilla GRU model gives 1.3 MSE making it the best prediction model for arecanut fruit rot disease

Comparative antioxidant and antimicrobial studies of cold and hot bark hydromethanolic extract of Couroupita guianensis Aubl

Couroupita guianensis, known by its common name as cannon ball tree, belongs to Lecythidaceae family, native of south and central America, India and Sri lanka. It’s been in use in traditional medicine and worshipped as sacred tree in india. With the importance of tree in various medicinal aspects as per the reports the present investigation was carried to access the phytochemical components, free radical scavenging and antimicrobial activity of cold and hot hydromethanolic extracts from the barks of medicinally important Couroupita guanensis. Phytochemical screening revealed the presence of total antioxidants, flavonoids, phenols and phytosterols in both cold and hot extracts. Quantitative estimations of the phytochemicals revealed the presence of high contents of total antioxidant activity (598.4 µg/ml), phenol content activity of (417.52 µg/ml) and phytosterols of (133.92 µg/ml) in cold hydromethanolic extracts compared to the hot hydromethanolic extract. The presence of high flavonoid content (417.52 µg/ml) was recorded in hot extract compared to the cold extract. Hot extract gave more scavenging activity with IC50 value (33.5 µg/ml). ABTS radical scavenging activity was found to be more in cold extract with IC50 values (24. µg/ml). Antimicrobial assay showed activity with B. cereus (13.00±0.00mm) and S.aureus (15.00±0.00mm) bacteria showed maximum zone of inhibition compared to the hot extract whereas C. albicans (13.00±O.00mm) showing maximum zone of inhibition compared to the cold extract and was not sensitive to any other fungal forms tested. This investigation pays way to consider Couroupita guianensis, with highly potential antioxidant and antimicrobial components, be used in pharmaceutical companies for the development of phytomedicine for the therapy and treatments

A Novel way of Improving CPU Utilization In Cloud

Cloud computing is the collection of best software practices derived from dis-tributed computing systems like cluster and grid. Emerging as a superior design amongst them. Cloud not only has the capability of batch processing and massive massive parallel data computation like its parents but also, things hitherto was not imagined. The main concentration of our work is on IaaS(Infrastructure as a service) aspect of cloud. Wherein, the customer avails the computation resource over simple web interface. though the cloud has most of the good design choices of its parents, certain drawbacks of them have crept in. This may be the result of the lack of ecient preexisting tools or naive implementation/setup of system at certain layer. In our work, we've optimized the performance by identifying some of those implementation choices making the overall system more ecient. This thesis is an extension of the work on Nephele. Which is a parallel data processing framework(still experimental). Nephele facilitates on demand alloacation of resource by deducing few infor-mations from the users. Using these informations, Nephele splits the overall job to smaller stages and resource for the same is allocated. By doing so, unnecessary resource allocation like in conventional systems is being avoided. thus, eventually increasing the CPU utilization. In our proposal, we deduce few more informations from the user which helps in making more optimal scheduling of the resources

Effect of adjuvants and nitrogen sources on in vitro shoot regeneration and clonal propagation of medicinally important plant Eryngium foetidum L

In vitro regeneration of medicinally important plant Eryngium foetidum L. was established by developing a protocol for successful faster clonal propogation. Young leaves of the plant were taken and cultured on 1x MS medium supplemented with different concentrations and combinations of 6- Benzyl amino purine (BAP), 1-Napthylacetic acid (NAA) and Kinetin (Kin). Leaves cultured on 2mg/L BAP and 1mg/L NAA showed better response in short duration of time when compared to other concentrations and combinations. Induced shoots obtained from standardized media were used as explant and cultured on 1x MS medium containing 2mg/L BAP and 1mg/L NAA fortified with 10% of different nitrogen sources like  tryptone, peptone, beef extract, yeast extract and adjuvants like coconut milk, tomato juice and banana pulp to observe the growth response. It was observed that media containing 10% coconut milk and 10% peptone showed better result when compared to other adjuvants and nitrogen sources. The well developed plantlets were hardened and successfully transferred to the field with 85% survival rate

A comparative kinetic study on β-amylase and its antioxidant property in germinated and non germinated seeds of Glycine max. L

Enzyme activity plays a key role in each stage of plant development starting from the initial seed germination responses. A comparative analysis of beta amylase activity was performed, isolated from germinated and non germinated Glycine max seeds, which was partially purified by dialysis. The optimum pH and temperature for germinated seeds was found to be 4.5 and 370 C and that for non germinated seeds were 5.5 and 750 C respectively. MnCl2 and CoCl2 exhibited marked activating effect on the enzyme, while HgCl2 was a potent inhibitor for both seeds. The Km and Vmax value for β-amylase with soluble starch as substrate was found to be 3.03mg/ml and 6.6micromol/min/ml for germinated seed and for non germinated seeds it was found to be 5mg/m and 10micromole/min/ml respectively. The molecular weight of partially purified enzyme was 57±1kDa on SDS PAGE with 1.918 fold purification and 27.98% yield for germinated seeds and for non germinated seeds the purification fold was 1.507 with 26.65% yield. The enzyme showed highest amount of total antioxidant activity of 304µg/ml in partially purified germinated seed. For ABTS free radical scavenging activity, partially purified enzyme from germinated seed showed the highest of 76.09% activity with an IC50 value of 58.20µg/ml. Germinated seeds have highest enzymatic activity which can be considered for several industrial purposes

A rare cause of recurrent pneumonia: Scimitar syndrome

Scimitar syndrome is characterized by partial or total anomalous pulmonary venous return from the right lung along with hypoplasia ofthe lung. This syndrome has varied presentations, from an asymptomatic state to severe pulmonary hypertension and/or heart failure.Newer diagnostic modalities have improved our understanding of this rare syndrome and hence providing newer treatment options tobe tried. Here, we present a case of a 4-year-old child with recurrent pneumonia with Scimitar syndrome. We are reporting this case inview of the rarity of this syndrome and its presentation as recurrent pneumonia

The Importance of Multimodal Emotion Conditioning and Affect Consistency for Embodied Conversational Agents

Previous studies regarding the perception of emotions for embodied virtual agents have shown the effectiveness of using virtual characters in conveying emotions through interactions with humans. However, creating an autonomous embodied conversational agent with expressive behaviors presents two major challenges. The first challenge is the difficulty of synthesizing the conversational behaviors for each modality that are as expressive as real human behaviors. The second challenge is that the affects are modeled independently, which makes it difficult to generate multimodal responses with consistent emotions across all modalities. In this work, we propose a conceptual framework, ACTOR (Affect-Consistent mulTimodal behaviOR generation), that aims to increase the perception of affects by generating multimodal behaviors conditioned on a consistent driving affect. We have conducted a user study with 199 participants to assess how the average person judges the affects perceived from multimodal behaviors that are consistent and inconsistent with respect to a driving affect. The result shows that among all model conditions, our affect-consistent framework receives the highest Likert scores for the perception of driving affects. Our statistical analysis suggests that making a modality affect-inconsistent significantly decreases the perception of driving affects. We also observe that multimodal behaviors conditioned on consistent affects are more expressive compared to behaviors with inconsistent affects. Therefore, we conclude that multimodal emotion conditioning and affect consistency are vital to enhancing the perception of affects for embodied conversational agents

Air-Abrasion in Dentistry: A Short Review of the Materials and Performance Parameters

The selection of abrasive material and parameters of the Air-Abrasion device for a particular application is a crucial detail. However, there are no standard recommendations or manuals for choosing these details; the operator must depend on his experience and knowledge of the procedure to select the best possible material and set of parameters. This short review attempts to identify some of the effects that the selection of material and parameters could have on the performance of the Air-Abrasion procedure for a particular application. The material and parameter data are collected from various studies and categorized according to the most popular materials in use right now. These studies are then analyzed to arrive at some inferences on the performance of Air-Abrasion materials and parameters. This review arrives at a few conclusions on the effectiveness of a material and parameter set, and that there is potential for developments in the area of standardizing parameter selection; also, there is scope for further studies on Bio-Active Glass as an alternative to the materials currently used in Air-Abrasion

Utility and Impact of Agromet Advisory Services among Farmers in Mandya District, Karnataka

Weather is one of the foremost factors affecting the agriculture production and crop productivity. The effective weather information and advisory services to the farmers aid in decision-making of day-to-day agricultural operations right from the selection of crops to post harvest in order to avoid crop losses. Total 105 AAS bulletins were prepared and disseminated to the farmers in 2021 by District Agromet Unit (DAMU) established at Krishi Vigyan Kendra, V C farm, Mandya. A random sample survey was conducted for 175 farmers (25 per block) in 2021 to assess the effectiveness, impact and usefulness of Agromet Advisory Services from each block in Mandya District, Karnataka and analyzed the data using the Dynamic Feedback System of IMD. The study revealed that 48 percent of farmers preferred weather forecast before going for fertilizer application, 65 percent for spraying operations and 75 percent for harvesting operations.  A total of 69 percent farmers were satisfied, 18 percent were partially satisfied and 13 percent were not satisfied with the advisory. The study indicated that the farmers focused more on the weather forecast for spraying & harvesting operations compared to other activities of farming