A hierarchically adaptable spatial regression model to link aggregated health data and environmental data

Health data and environmental data are commonly collected at different levels of aggregation. A persistent challenge of using a spatial regression model to link these data is that their associations can vary as a function of aggregation. This results into ecological fallacy if association at one aggregation level is used for inferencing at another level. We address this challenge by presenting a hierarchically adaptable spatial regression model. In essence, the model extends the spatially varying coefficient model to allow the response to be count data at larger aggregation levels than that of the covariates. A Bayesian hierarchical approach is used for inferencing the model parameters. Robust inference and optimal prediction over geographical space and at different spatial aggregation levels are studied by simulated data sets. The spatial associations at different spatial supports are largely different, but can be efficiently inferred when prior knowledge of the associations is available. The model is applied to study hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) in Da Nang city, Viet Nam. Decrease in vegetated areas corresponds with elevated HFMD risks. A study to the identifiability of the parameters shows a strong need for a highly informative prior distribution. We conclude that the model is robust to the underlying aggregation levels of the calibrating data for association inference and it is ready for application in health geography

The regularity and exponential decay of solution for a linear wave equation associated with two-point boundary conditions

This paper is concerned with the existence and the regularity of global solutions to the linear wave equation associated with two-point type boundary conditions. We also investigate the decay properties of the global solutions to this problem by the construction of a suitable Lyapunov functional.Comment: 18 page

Existence, blow-up and exponential decay estimates for a nonlinear wave equation with boundary conditions of two-point type

This paper is devoted to study a nonlinear wave equation with boundary conditions of two-point type. First, we state two local existence theorems and under suitable conditions, we prove that any weak solutions with negative initial energy will blow up in finite time. Next, we give a sufficient condition to guarantee the global existence and exponential decay of weak solutions. Finally, we present numerical resultsComment: 2

The potential of combining UAV and remote sensing in supporting precision mapping of irrigation systems for paddy land in urban agricultural areas: study case in the Hoa Vang district, Danang city, Central Vietnam

This research was carried out to test the potential of combining unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing (RS) to support precision mapping of irrigation systems for paddy land. The study area is an urban/agricultural area of Central Vietnam. The Sentinel-2A imagery acquired on 30 June 2018 was interpreted according an object-based classification method aiming to map paddy land and irrigation systems for the Hoa Vang district; the total accuracy was 91.33% with a Kappa coefficient of 0.87. However, with the spatial resolution from the Sentinel-2A images (20 meters x 20 meters) it was difficult to classify paddy land and water from other objects within small and scattered parcel areas. This research was designed on five experimental flying zones, collecting 2,085 images by the UAV. With the very high spatial resolution data of the UAV, it was possible to clearly identify the boundaries of paddy land parcels, water sources such as rivers and lakes, and other objects such as canals and concrete irrigation systems. This classification derived from the orthogonal images from the five experimental zones using an object-based classification method, correcting the interpretation results of the Sentinel 2A images. Outcomes indicate that, the combination of UAV and RS can be applied to support precision mapping of irrigation systems for paddy land in urban agricultural areas.Nghiên cứu này được thực hiện nhằm thử nghiệm khả năng kết hợp giữa UAV với viễn thám trong hỗ trợ độ chính xác của bản đồ hệ thống nước tưới cho đất trồng lúa ở vùng nông nghiệp đô thị tại Miền trung Việt Nam. Ảnh viễn thám Sentinel- 2A thu nhận vào 30/6/2018 đã được giải đoán bằng phương pháp định hướng đối hướng để thành lập bản đồ hệ thống nguồn nước tưới cho huyện Hòa Vang vào năm 2018, với kết quả độ chính xác tổng số là 91,33% và hệ số kappa là 0,87. Mặc dù với kết quả giải đoán có độ chính xác cao nhưng với độ phân giải không gian của ảnh Sentinel-2A là 20m x 20m rất khó để phân loại được các vùng đất lúa có diện tích nhỏ và phân bố phân tán. Nghiên cứu này đã thiết kế 5 khu vực bay thử nghiệm với 2.085 ảnh để thu thập dữ liệu từ UAV. Có thể thấy rằng dữ liệu ảnh từ UAV với độ phân giải siêu cao có thể nhận diện và phân biệt được một cách rõ ràng không chỉ ranh giới của các thửa đất lúa, hệ thống nguồn nước như sông hồ, mà còn cả những đối tượng kênh mương thủy lợi nhỏ. Kết quả giải đoán các ảnh bay chụp bằng UAV sử dụng dụng phương pháp định hướng đối tượng, nghiên cứu này đã hiệu chỉnh được kết quả giải đoán ảnh Sentinel 2A. Kết quả cho thấy việc kết hợp dữ liệu viễn thám với UAV là hoàn toàn có khả năng sử dụng để hỗ trợ độ chính xác thành lập bản đồ hệ thống nguồn nước cho đất trồng lúa ở vùng nông nghiệp đô thị

Structural and Optoelectronic Properties of CdSe Tetrapod Nanocrystals for Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cell Applications

Semiconducting CdSe tetrapod nanoparticles were prepared, and their structural and optical properties were examined. The surface capping molecule, octylphosphonic acid, was replaced with butylamine after the particle synthesis. The exchange of surface ligands changed the physical properties of the nanocrystals, which resulted in a slight decrease in the nanoparticles size. The effects of changing surface ligands of CdSe tetrapod nanocrystals on the structural and optoelectronic properties were investigated, and it was found that the surfactant of nanoparticles could affect the device performance by enhancing the charge carrier separation at the active layer interfaces. Power conversion efficiency of the bulk heterojunction solar cells having the structure of glass/ITO/PEDOT:PSS/(CdSe + PCPDTBT)/Al was improved from 1.21% to 1.52% with the use of ligand-exchanged nanoparticles

Treatment of landfill leachate through struvite precipitation and nitrogen removal bacteria and poly-phosphate bacteria (in-pots experiment)

Abstract— Landfill leacheate is a type of wastewater which contains large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, therefore it needed to be treated before releasing to directly to the environment. The combination between struvite precipitation and nitrogen removal and poly-P bacteria into wastewater for landfill leachate treatment has been found to be a cost-effective practive, a viable technology in terms of environmental protection and sustainability, especially in the developing-countries. For optimum struvite crystallization from landfill leachate, the Mg:PO4 molar ratio as (1.2:1) was used, the pH of reaction was adjusted to 9 and the sample was stirred continously during 40 minutes. The supernatant sample was then added 1% nitrogen removal bacteria (Pseudomonas stutzeri D3b strain) and 1% poly-P bacteria (Kurthia sp. TGT1013L strain), 5 g glucose/L and aeration 12/24h during 3 days, ammonium concentration reduced significantly from 1076 mg/L to 1.5 mg/L and orthophosphate concentration decreased noticeably from 24.91 mg/L to 7.6 mg/L

DEVELOPMENT OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE AND LARGE-SCALE VIETNAMESE AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEMS

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems convert human speech into the corresponding transcription automatically. They have a wide range of applications such as controlling robots, call center analytics, voice chatbot. Recent studies on ASR for English have achieved the performance that surpasses human ability. The systems were trained on a large amount of training data and performed well under many environments. With regards to Vietnamese, there have been many studies on improving the performance of existing ASR systems, however, many of them are conducted on a small-scaled data, which does not reflect realistic scenarios. Although the corpora used to train the system were carefully design to maintain phonetic balance properties, efforts in collecting them at a large-scale are still limited. Specifically, only a certain accent of Vietnam was evaluated in existing works. In this paper, we first describe our efforts in collecting a large data set that covers all 3 major accents of Vietnam located in the Northern, Center, and Southern regions. Then, we detail our ASR system development procedure utilizing the collected data set and evaluating different model architectures to find the best structure for Vietnamese. In the VLSP 2018 challenge, our system achieved the best performance with 6.5% WER and on our internal test set with more than 10 hours of speech collected real environments, the system also performs well with 11% WE