Adoption of Blockchain technology in food supply chain management

Blockchain, in general, used as a synonym for Bitcoin is more than that. Recently, Blockchain is expanding its application in various segments other than cryptocurrency, and Supply Chain is major among them. Introducing Blockchain in Food Supply Chain enhances building trust among stakeholders and consumers. With all the opportunities enabled by Blockchain, many companies are still skeptical about its adoption. This research aims at addressing the factors affecting the adoption of Blockchain by a firm in the Food Supply Chain industry. The factors viz. size of the firm, IT investment, number of stakeholders within the supply chain, and perception of risk of early adoption are the independent variables, and the adoption of Blockchain is the dependent variable. In later sections, Blockchain and its current and potential applications in the food industry are discussed in detail, followed by proposing the expected relation between these independent and dependent variables. A survey should be further conducted to test and examine the correlations statistically

The Impact of Active Aerodynamics on Motorcycles Using Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations

Motorcycles are mostly utilized by commuters whose requirements are cheap and affordable transportation from point A to point B. Motorcycles also provide means to tour various places and have a leisure time for the majority of motorcyclists. Unfortunately, with pros also come cons such as accidents which are disabling or life-taking. According to motorcycle crash statistics produced every year, the majority of motorcycle crashes are caused due to facing unexpected obstacles in the path causing collisions due to insufficient braking time. Thus, this thesis serves as a mean to overcome this issue and provide a technological solution to the world of motorcyclists. The thesis initially covers the introduction to the history of Computational Fluid Dynamics and Simulations. Consequently, the modeling aspects of the motorcycle and the active aerodynamics concepts are studied and explained in detail in conjunction with the usage of PTC Creo 3.0. The subsequent chapters explain the Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations setup, processing and post processing of the results utilizing ANSYS Workbench and its modules Design Modeller, Mesh, FLUENT and Post Process. Finally, the rapid prototyping using Stratasys UPrint 3D Printing and wind tunnel validation aspects of the project are discussed leading to key conclusions and discussions. This thesis is aimed to be an innovation to help protect motorcyclists from fatalities and also stands as a means to demonstrate engineering capabilities in producing real-world solutions through low-cost and viable simulation sciences

BIOCHEMICAL AND CELLULAR MECHANISMS OF RETINA AND RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIUM APOPTOSIS

Oxidative stress, intense light exposure and oxygen imbalances such as hypoxic or hyperoxic conditions perturb mitochondria, nuclear function and further lead to cellular damage of retina and retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. Our major aim is to understand the various biochemical and proteomic events that occur during the progression of retina and RPE cell death. The comprehensive objectives of this dissertation are to understand the functional aspects of protein expression, posttranslational modifications, protein or lipid binding changes, phenotypic, morphological alterations and their regulation during the retina and RPE apoptosis under oxidative stress. The entire study is divided into four chapters Chapter 1 contains introduction and background on apoptotic signaling in retina and RPE cells. In chapter 2, we demonstrated that the oxidative stress biomarker prohibitin shuttles between mitochondria and nucleus as an anti-apoptotic molecule and acts as a transcriptional regulator by altering its lipid binding affinity and by posttranslational modifications during oxidative damage to the retina and RPE. In chapter 3, we demonstrated that oxidative and photo-oxidative stress induced nitric oxide regulates the RPE apoptosis by altering serine/threonine protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) catalytic subunit, vimentin phosphorylation and Bcl xL expression regulation in the RPE cells in vitro. In chapter 4, we further analyzed the differential expression of prohibitin in the retina and RPE during oxidative stress, diabetic retinopathy (DR) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) condition. Our analysis of postmortem retinas reveals that prohibitin is significantly increased in aged and AMD retina, and decreased in retinas of human diabetic retinopathy and RPE of AMD. Our study demonstrates that prohibitin levels determine the apoptotic signaling in the retina and RPE during retinal degenerative disease progression

Multi-label Open-set Audio Classification

Current audio classification models have small class vocabularies relative to the large number of sound event classes of interest in the real world. Thus, they provide a limited view of the world that may miss important yet unexpected or unknown sound events. To address this issue, open-set audio classification techniques have been developed to detect sound events from unknown classes. Although these methods have been applied to a multi-class context in audio, such as sound scene classification, they have yet to be investigated for polyphonic audio in which sound events overlap, requiring the use of multi-label models. In this study, we establish the problem of multi-label open-set audio classification by creating a dataset with varying unknown class distributions and evaluating baseline approaches built upon existing techniques.Comment: Published at the Workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events, 2023 (DCASE 2023

To evaluate the role of MRI in infants with suspected hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy and prognosticating neurological outcome at end of one year

Background: Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is one the common causes of neonatal fatality due to perinatal asphyxia. The long-term outcomes of HIE are impaired mental and motor development, hearing loss, recurrent seizures and cerebral palsy. MRI is increasingly becoming the gold standard in diagnosis of HIE as it involves no radiation and can be performed during a neonates physiological sleep. To evaluate the role of MRI in infants with suspected hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy in prognosticating neurological outcomes at end of one year.Methods: A total of 50 patients were included in the study who underwent MRI of brain. A clinical follow up was done at the end of one year.Results: The sensitivity of MRI in prognosticating clinical outcome was 72% and specificity was 71% while PPV and NPV was 86% and 50% respectively.Conclusions: MRI is a useful modality to assess early changes in HIE and it can prognosticate clinical outcome