Consumer Attitude towards TV Advertising Based Upon Consumer Age & Gender

Mass media has always been a useful way for marketers to attract consumers towards their products. But since the market is highly differentiated today the term “target market” is used widely. TV being the highly used media for advertisements even in the 21st century is part of this research showing how the consumers in Pakistan show their attitude towards TV advertisement, Consumers of old age group and young age group are both equally important as both are increasing in number today worldwide and that has made many researchers to focus their studies on different age groups and their attitudes to evaluate the importance each group gives to how they perceive the advertising. Also the result is tested if the gender of the consumer changes the attitude. The findings indicate old age group of consumers are relatively more interested in TV ads as compared to the young generation and gender has little significance in one’s attitude towards advertising. Keywords: Consumer Attitude, TV Advertising, Consumer Age Groups, Consumer Genders, Pakista

Demographic and Geographic Influence of the Country-of-Origin Image on Consumer Purchase Decision

Purpose–The main purpose of this study is to explore the influence of the country-of-origin image of the product on consumer purchase decision. Methodology–This research is done in five major cities of Pakistan (i.e. Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Faisalabad and Multan) for automobiles, TV sets, mobile phones and cosmetics products. Structured questionnaires and cluster sampling are used. Responses are collected from 459 consumers from five major cities of Pakistan using convenience sampling method whereas SPSS 14.0 version is used for data analysis. Research limitations/implications–Personal interviews were conducted from the customers where it is very difficult to approach all the consumer classes of Pakistan. People of Pakistan are bit hesitant to give proper information. Limited access to data is available in archives. Conclusion–The country-of-origin image has a significant and positive effect on consumer purchase decision in Pakistan. Keywords: Country-of-Origin, Consumer Purchase Decision, Pakistan. Research Type: Research Pape

EEG based Major Depressive disorder and Bipolar disorder detection using Neural Networks: A review

Mental disorders represent critical public health challenges as they are leading contributors to the global burden of disease and intensely influence social and financial welfare of individuals. The present comprehensive review concentrate on the two mental disorders: Major depressive Disorder (MDD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD) with noteworthy publications during the last ten years. There is a big need nowadays for phenotypic characterization of psychiatric disorders with biomarkers. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals could offer a rich signature for MDD and BD and then they could improve understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms underling these mental disorders. In this review, we focus on the literature works adopting neural networks fed by EEG signals. Among those studies using EEG and neural networks, we have discussed a variety of EEG based protocols, biomarkers and public datasets for depression and bipolar disorder detection. We conclude with a discussion and valuable recommendations that will help to improve the reliability of developed models and for more accurate and more deterministic computational intelligence based systems in psychiatry. This review will prove to be a structured and valuable initial point for the researchers working on depression and bipolar disorders recognition by using EEG signals.Comment: 29 pages,2 figures and 18 Table

Waste Management and Prediction of Air Pollutants Using IoT and Machine Learning Approach

[EN] Increasing waste generation has become a significant issue over the globe due to the rapid increase in urbanization and industrialization. In the literature, many issues that have a direct impact on the increase of waste and the improper disposal of waste have been investigated. Most of the existing work in the literature has focused on providing a cost-efficient solution for the monitoring of garbage collection system using the Internet of Things (IoT). Though an IoT-based solution provides the real-time monitoring of a garbage collection system, it is limited to control the spreading of overspill and bad odor blowout gasses. The poor and inadequate disposal of waste produces toxic gases, and radiation in the environment has adverse effects on human health, the greenhouse system, and global warming. While considering the importance of air pollutants, it is imperative to monitor and forecast the concentration of air pollutants in addition to the management of the waste. In this paper, we present and IoT-based smart bin using a machine and deep learning model to manage the disposal of garbage and to forecast the air pollutant present in the surrounding bin environment. The smart bin is connected to an IoT-based server, the Google Cloud Server (GCP), which performs the computation necessary for predicting the status of the bin and for forecasting air quality based on real-time data. We experimented with a traditional model (k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN) and logistic reg) and a non-traditional (long short term memory (LSTM) network-based deep learning) algorithm for the creation of alert messages regarding bin status and forecasting the amount of air pollutant carbon monoxide (CO) present in the air at a specific instance. The recalls of logistic regression and k-NN algorithm is 79% and 83%, respectively, in a real-time testing environment for predicting the status of the bin. The accuracy of modified LSTM and simple LSTM models is 90% and 88%, respectively, to predict the future concentration of gases present in the air. The system resulted in a delay of 4 s in the creation and transmission of the alert message to a sanitary worker. The system provided the real-time monitoring of garbage levels along with notifications from the alert mechanism. The proposed works provide improved accuracy by utilizing machine learning as compared to existing solutions based on simple approaches.This research work was funded by the Ministry of Education and the Deanship of Scientific Research, Najran University. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under code number NU/ESCI/19/001.Hussain, A.; Draz, U.; Ali, T.; Tariq, S.; Glowacz, A.; Irfan, M.; Antonino Daviu, JA.... (2020). Waste Management and Prediction of Air Pollutants Using IoT and Machine Learning Approach. Energies. 13(15):1-22. https://doi.org/10.3390/en13153930S1221315Lionetto, M. G., Guascito, M. R., Caricato, R., Giordano, M. E., De Bartolomeo, A. R., Romano, M. P., … Contini, D. (2019). Correlation of Oxidative Potential with Ecotoxicological and Cytotoxicological Potential of PM10 at an Urban Background Site in Italy. Atmosphere, 10(12), 733. doi:10.3390/atmos10120733Wiedinmyer, C., Yokelson, R. J., & Gullett, B. K. (2014). Global Emissions of Trace Gases, Particulate Matter, and Hazardous Air Pollutants from Open Burning of Domestic Waste. Environmental Science & Technology, 48(16), 9523-9530. doi:10.1021/es502250zYan, F., Zhu, F., Wang, Q., & Xiong, Y. (2016). Preliminary Study of PM2.5 Formation During Municipal Solid Waste Incineration. Procedia Environmental Sciences, 31, 475-481. doi:10.1016/j.proenv.2016.02.054Curtis, L., Rea, W., Smith-Willis, P., Fenyves, E., & Pan, Y. (2006). Adverse health effects of outdoor air pollutants. Environment International, 32(6), 815-830. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2006.03.012Gollakota, A. R. K., Gautam, S., & Shu, C.-M. (2020). Inconsistencies of e-waste management in developing nations – Facts and plausible solutions. Journal of Environmental Management, 261, 110234. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110234Anitha, A. (2017). Garbage monitoring system using IoT. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 263, 042027. doi:10.1088/1757-899x/263/4/042027Sirsikar, S., & Karemore, P. (2015). Review Paper on Air Pollution Monitoring system. IJARCCE, 218-220. doi:10.17148/ijarcce.2015.4147Tavares Neto, R. F., & Godinho Filho, M. (2013). Literature review regarding Ant Colony Optimization applied to scheduling problems: Guidelines for implementation and directions for future research. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 26(1), 150-161. doi:10.1016/j.engappai.2012.03.011Ali, T., Irfan, M., Alwadie, A. S., & Glowacz, A. (2020). IoT-Based Smart Waste Bin Monitoring and Municipal Solid Waste Management System for Smart Cities. Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, 45(12), 10185-10198. doi:10.1007/s13369-020-04637-wSilva, B. N., Khan, M., & Han, K. (2018). Towards sustainable smart cities: A review of trends, architectures, components, and open challenges in smart cities. Sustainable Cities and Society, 38, 697-713. doi:10.1016/j.scs.2018.01.053Gutierrez, J. M., Jensen, M., Henius, M., & Riaz, T. (2015). Smart Waste Collection System Based on Location Intelligence. Procedia Computer Science, 61, 120-127. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2015.09.170Carbon Monoxide Dangers in the Boiler Room www.pmmag.com/articles/97528-carbonmonoxide-danger-in-the-boiler-roomDe Vito, S., Massera, E., Piga, M., Martinotto, L., & Di Francia, G. (2008). On field calibration of an electronic nose for benzene estimation in an urban pollution monitoring scenario. Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical, 129(2), 750-757. doi:10.1016/j.snb.2007.09.060Guiry, J., van de Ven, P., & Nelson, J. (2014). Multi-Sensor Fusion for Enhanced Contextual Awareness of Everyday Activities with Ubiquitous Devices. Sensors, 14(3), 5687-5701. doi:10.3390/s140305687Ali, T., Draz, U., Yasin, S., Noureen, J., shaf, A., & Zardari, M. (2018). An Efficient Participant’s Selection Algorithm for Crowdsensing. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 9(1). doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2018.090154Ali, T., Noureen, J., Draz, U., Shaf, A., Yasin, S., & Ayaz, M. (2018). Participants Ranking Algorithm for Crowdsensing in Mobile Communication. ICST Transactions on Scalable Information Systems, 5(16), 154476. doi:10.4108/eai.13-4-2018.15447

A Hybrid Neuro-Fuzzy Approach for Heterogeneous Patch Encoding in ViTs Using Contrastive Embeddings & Deep Knowledge Dispersion

Vision Transformers (ViT) are commonly utilized in image recognition and related applications. It delivers impressive results when it is pre-trained using massive volumes of data and then employed in mid-sized or small-scale image recognition evaluations such as ImageNet and CIFAR-100. Basically, it converts images into patches, and then the patch encoding is used to produce latent embeddings (linear projection and positional embedding). In this work, the patch encoding module is modified to produce heterogeneous embedding by using new types of weighted encoding. A traditional transformer uses two embeddings including linear projection and positional embedding. The proposed model replaces this with weighted combination of linear projection embedding, positional embedding and three additional embeddings called Spatial Gated, Fourier Token Mixing and Multi-layer perceptron Mixture embedding. Secondly, a Divergent Knowledge Dispersion (DKD) mechanism is proposed to propagate the previous latent information far in the transformer network. It ensures the latent knowledge to be used in multi headed attention for efficient patch encoding. Four benchmark datasets (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100) are used for comparative performance evaluation. The proposed model is named as SWEKP-based ViT, where the term SWEKP stands for Stochastic Weighted Composition of Contrastive Embeddings & Divergent Knowledge Dispersion (DKD) for Heterogeneous Patch Encoding. The experimental results show that adding extra embeddings in transformer and integrating DKD mechanism increases performance for benchmark datasets. The ViT has been trained separately with combination of these embeddings for encoding. Conclusively, the spatial gated embedding with default embeddings outperforms Fourier Token Mixing and MLP-Mixture embeddings

Mortality and pulmonary complications in patients undergoing surgery with perioperative SARS-CoV-2 infection: an international cohort study

Background: The impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) on postoperative recovery needs to be understood to inform clinical decision making during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study reports 30-day mortality and pulmonary complication rates in patients with perioperative SARS-CoV-2 infection. Methods: This international, multicentre, cohort study at 235 hospitals in 24 countries included all patients undergoing surgery who had SARS-CoV-2 infection confirmed within 7 days before or 30 days after surgery. The primary outcome measure was 30-day postoperative mortality and was assessed in all enrolled patients. The main secondary outcome measure was pulmonary complications, defined as pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, or unexpected postoperative ventilation. Findings: This analysis includes 1128 patients who had surgery between Jan 1 and March 31, 2020, of whom 835 (74·0%) had emergency surgery and 280 (24·8%) had elective surgery. SARS-CoV-2 infection was confirmed preoperatively in 294 (26·1%) patients. 30-day mortality was 23·8% (268 of 1128). Pulmonary complications occurred in 577 (51·2%) of 1128 patients; 30-day mortality in these patients was 38·0% (219 of 577), accounting for 81·7% (219 of 268) of all deaths. In adjusted analyses, 30-day mortality was associated with male sex (odds ratio 1·75 [95% CI 1·28–2·40], p\textless0·0001), age 70 years or older versus younger than 70 years (2·30 [1·65–3·22], p\textless0·0001), American Society of Anesthesiologists grades 3–5 versus grades 1–2 (2·35 [1·57–3·53], p\textless0·0001), malignant versus benign or obstetric diagnosis (1·55 [1·01–2·39], p=0·046), emergency versus elective surgery (1·67 [1·06–2·63], p=0·026), and major versus minor surgery (1·52 [1·01–2·31], p=0·047). Interpretation: Postoperative pulmonary complications occur in half of patients with perioperative SARS-CoV-2 infection and are associated with high mortality. Thresholds for surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic should be higher than during normal practice, particularly in men aged 70 years and older. Consideration should be given for postponing non-urgent procedures and promoting non-operative treatment to delay or avoid the need for surgery. Funding: National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland, Bowel and Cancer Research, Bowel Disease Research Foundation, Association of Upper Gastrointestinal Surgeons, British Association of Surgical Oncology, British Gynaecological Cancer Society, European Society of Coloproctology, NIHR Academy, Sarcoma UK, Vascular Society for Great Britain and Ireland, and Yorkshire Cancer Research

Evaluation of appendicitis risk prediction models in adults with suspected appendicitis

Background Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. The aim of this study was to determine whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify patients presenting to hospital in the UK with acute right iliac fossa (RIF) pain who are at low risk of appendicitis. Methods A systematic search was completed to identify all existing appendicitis risk prediction models. Models were validated using UK data from an international prospective cohort study that captured consecutive patients aged 16–45 years presenting to hospital with acute RIF in March to June 2017. The main outcome was best achievable model specificity (proportion of patients who did not have appendicitis correctly classified as low risk) whilst maintaining a failure rate below 5 per cent (proportion of patients identified as low risk who actually had appendicitis). Results Some 5345 patients across 154 UK hospitals were identified, of which two‐thirds (3613 of 5345, 67·6 per cent) were women. Women were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery with removal of a histologically normal appendix (272 of 964, 28·2 per cent) than men (120 of 993, 12·1 per cent) (relative risk 2·33, 95 per cent c.i. 1·92 to 2·84; P < 0·001). Of 15 validated risk prediction models, the Adult Appendicitis Score performed best (cut‐off score 8 or less, specificity 63·1 per cent, failure rate 3·7 per cent). The Appendicitis Inflammatory Response Score performed best for men (cut‐off score 2 or less, specificity 24·7 per cent, failure rate 2·4 per cent). Conclusion Women in the UK had a disproportionate risk of admission without surgical intervention and had high rates of normal appendicectomy. Risk prediction models to support shared decision‐making by identifying adults in the UK at low risk of appendicitis were identified

Severity Grading and Early Retinopathy Lesion Detection through Hybrid Inception-ResNet Architecture

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a diabetes disorder that disturbs human vision. It starts due to the damage in the light-sensitive tissues of blood vessels at the retina. In the beginning, DR may show no symptoms or only slight vision issues, but in the long run, it could be a permanent source of impaired vision, simply known as blindness in the advanced as well as in developing nations. This could be prevented if DR is identified early enough, but it can be challenging as we know the disease frequently shows rare signs until it is too late to deliver an effective cure. In our work, we recommend a framework for severity grading and early DR detection through hybrid deep learning Inception-ResNet architecture with smart data preprocessing. Our proposed method is composed of three steps. Firstly, the retinal images are preprocessed with the help of augmentation and intensity normalization. Secondly, the preprocessed images are given to the hybrid Inception-ResNet architecture to extract the vector image features for the categorization of different stages. Lastly, to identify DR and decide its stage (e.g., mild DR, moderate DR, severe DR, or proliferative DR), a classification step is used. The studies and trials have to reveal suitable outcomes when equated with some other previously deployed approaches. However, there are specific constraints in our study that are also discussed and we suggest methods to enhance further research in this field

Energy Based Performance analysis of AODV Routing Protocol under TCP and UDP Environments

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a combination of wireless nodes that share resources and information. One of the major issues in MANET is to minimize the energy consumption of wireless nodes. Higher energy consumption nodes minimize the network life while lower energy consumption nodes increase the network life. Various routing protocols have been proposed for energy saving. Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is an energy efficient routing protocol. In this paper, the energy based performance of AODV routing protocol is evaluated under Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) by using different simulation scenarios. NS2 has been used for simulation purposes. An energy model is defined in which power for receiving and transmitting one packet, initial energy, sleep power, idle power, transition power and transition time values are kept constant for different simulation scenarios. The simulation results show that AODV routing protocol consumes less energy in TCP environment as compared to UDP environment

Flame Retardant Nanocomposites of Polystyrene-Modified Sepiolite Clay

Flame retardancy is the property that is highly demanded when it comes to deal with plastics in different industries. In this research general purpose polystyrene (GPPS) and modified sepiolite clay are melt blended together to fabricate flame retardant nanocomposites. Structural analysis were performed with the help of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques. Morphological analysis of the fabricated nanocomposites were carried out using scanning electron microscope (SEM). As a result of better clay dispersion in polymer matrix and intermolecular interactions, mechanical properties are also improved. The standard procedure (ASTM D4986-20) was followed for observing the flame retardancy of the fabricated nanocomposites. Tangible decrease is noted upto 48% in burning rate of the optimum sample which reflects improvement in flame retardancy