Isodon rugosus as potential source of phytopharmacological agents: A review

This piece of writing is aimed to attract the concern of readers and researchers toward the natural bioactive compounds hidden in the depth of natural life. Plant based bioactive compounds have become first choice as a potential source of pharmacological agents. Families of bioactive compounds such as flavonoids, polyphenols, carotenoids, diterpenes, sterols and vitamins enlist the class of naturally occurring families of organic compounds that are widely utilized for the maintenance of natural life. Isodon rugosus is one of the richest plants of Lamiaceae family which contain plenty of biological active compounds. In this review we will focus on labeling and exploring the biological importance of Isodon rugosus. Isodon rugosus plays meaningful role by performing biological activities such as antibacterial, antioxidant, antifungal, anticancer, insecticidal, analgesic and ethnobotanical activities. The strong bioactive potential of Isodon rugosus may act as a key factor to researchers for doing further research work on entire plant to introduce it in pharmacological agents to make the life more sustainable

An emotion and memory model for social robots : a long-term interaction

In this thesis, we investigate the role of emotions and memory in social robotic companions. In particular, our aim is to study the effect of an emotion and memory model towards sustaining engagement and promoting learning in a long-term interaction. Our Emotion and Memory model was based on how humans create memory under various emotional events/states. The model enabled the robot to create a memory account of user's emotional events during a long-term child-robot interaction. The robot later adapted its behaviour through employing the developed memory in the following interactions with the users. The model also had an autonomous decision-making mechanism based on reinforcement learning to select behaviour according to the user preference measured through user's engagement and learning during the task. The model was implemented on the NAO robot in two different educational setups. Firstly, to promote user's vocabulary learning and secondly, to inform how to calculate area and perimeter of regular and irregular shapes. We also conducted multiple long-term evaluations of our model with children at the primary schools to verify its impact on their social engagement and learning. Our results showed that the behaviour generated based on our model was able to sustain social engagement. Additionally, it also helped children to improve their learning. Overall, the results highlighted the benefits of incorporating memory during child-Robot Interaction for extended periods of time. It promoted personalisation and reflected towards creating a child-robot social relationship in a long-term interaction

Rate of penetration (ROP) enhancement in shales through osmotic processes

textShales and other clay-bearing rocks make up 70% to 80% of all formations drilled globally. In addition, according to the US Energy Information Administration, as of June 2013, approximately 26% of the technically recoverable hydrocarbon resources of the United States were in the form of shale tight oil and shale gas. Accordingly, there has been an increasing focus on efficient drilling of deep and tight shale formations. However, serious drilling problems such as bit balling and wellbore instability are encountered while drilling shale, especially in deep, high-pressure wells. Most of these drilling problems are not caused by the mechanical strength of the rock but by the chemically reactive nature of such formations, causing rock cuttings to stick to the bit. Such an undesirable effect decreases the rate of penetration (ROP) and has a damaging effect on the wellbore. Previous approaches to this problem were based on either improving the drilling hydraulics or the polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) bit design, or modifying the mud chemistry. This thesis introduces a new approach to prevent adherence of shale cuttings to the bit by taking advantage of the phenomenon of chemical osmosis. Chemical osmosis occurs when fluid movement is governed by chemical potential gradients. Drilling with a high salinity/ low water activity drilling mud gives inception to movement of water out of shale cuttings toward the drilling bit due to the difference of water activity between the shale and the drilling fluid. While previous studies showed that the movement of water out of shales also helps to mechanically stabilize them, this study suggests that such a dehydration of formation rock cuttings also prevents shale cuttings from sticking to the bit, resulting in higher rates of penetration. It is also suggested that the same mechanism is responsible for achieving the ROP benefits from high salinity formate muds, which enabled three times faster drilling than the oil-based mud at high densities during the deep trek testing in 2002. Support for the proposed mechanism is provided by an extensive set of laboratory measurements, ranging from simple hot-rolling tests that measure accretion tendencies of shale on steel to realistic drilling tests on full-scale equipment and actual PDC bits under downhole conditions. Results from the drilling tests indicate that both low and high salinity formate muds outperform the corresponding weight water-based muds in the Mancos shale, by yielding 50% to 60% higher ROP especially at a higher weight on bit (WOB; i.e., corresponding to greater depths). Results from field trials with formate muds for ROP enhancement in Canada indicate significantly enhanced drilling rates with respect to those of oil/synthetic mud causing an approximately 50% reduction in average drilling time, thereby supporting the merits of chemical osmosis for ROP enhancement.Petroleum and Geosystems Engineerin

Exploring Factors Affecting User Trust Across Different Human-Robot Interaction Settings and Cultures

Trust is one of the necessary factors for building a successful human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper investigated how human trust in robots differs across HRI scenarios in two cultures. We conducted two studies in two countries: Saudi Arabia (study 1) and the United Kingdom (study 2). Each study presented three HRI scenarios: a dog robot guiding people with sight impairments, a teleoperated robot in healthcare, and a manufacturing robot. Study 1 shows that participants' trust perception score (TPS) was significantly different across the three scenarios. However, Study 2 results show a slightly significant variation in TPS across the scenarios. We also found that the relevance of trust for a given task is an indicator of a participant's trust. Furthermore, the findings showed that trust scores or factors affecting users' trust vary across cultures. The findings identified novel factors that might affect human trust, such as controllability, usability and risk. The findings direct the HRI community to consider a dynamic and evolving design for modelling human-robot trust because factors affecting humans' trust are evolving and will vary across different settings and cultures

ENTITY EXTRACTION USING STATISTICAL METHODS USING INTERACTIVE KNOWLEDGE MINING FRAMEWORK

There are various kinds of valuable semantic information about real-world entities embedded in web pages and databases. Extracting and integrating these entity information from the Web is of great significance. Comparing to traditional information extraction problems, web entity extraction needs to solve several new challenges to fully take advantage of the unique characteristic of the Web. In this paper, we introduce our recent work on statistical extraction of structured entities, named entities, entity facts and relations from Web. We also briefly introduce iKnoweb, an interactive knowledge mining framework for entity information integration. We will use two novel web applications, Microsoft Academic Search (aka Libra) and EntityCube, as working examples

Women Health in Rural Pakistan in Millennium Development Goals Perspectives

This aim of this research was to study the situation of different Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) indicators at the gross root level in Mardan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. For this primary data were collected with the help of pre-designed questionnaires through face to face interview from 60 randomly households head. The data was analysed by using descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests. Main finding revealed that majority and statistically significant respondents not using any contraceptive methods. Majority of the respondents have no deliveries in their homes ended in last 3 years and there was no significant difference in the percent distribution of the respondents in the selected villages regarding this. Maternal health care, births attendant status and immunization of children against EPI are not up to the mark. Knowledge about HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, DM is at maximum. The study recommends for social campaign/awareness, births control at the household’s level, training of more skillful persons having specialty in the maternal health care, immunization of children of less than 2 years about the different contagious diseases. Keywords: Maternal health, HIV/AIDS preventions, MDG

Comparative Study of Conventional Electrocautery Versus Ultrasonic Dissector in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is very commonly performed for removal of gallstones. In routine, ultrasonic devices are used for laparoscopy involving the deeper operating fields, while electrosurgical devices are preferred for LC. However, nowadays both of these devices are used for LC. The objective of this study was to compare the surgical outcomes of ultrasonic dissector over conventional electrocautery in patients planned for LC. Material and Methods: This non-randomized clinical trial was conducted in general surgery unit, Jinnah hospital Lahore. The study duration was 15th January 2015 to 31st December 2016. In group A (n=100), patients were operated through three-port standard laparoscopic cholecystectomy and conventional electrosurgical cautery was used for dissection. While in group B (n=50), patients were operated through single incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) and Harmonic dissector was used for sealing of cystic artery and cystic duct. SPSS version 23 was used for data analysis. Complications between electrocautery and ultrasonic dissector were compared using chi-square test/Fischer exact test and operative time was compared using student’s t-test with p-value ≤ 0.05 considered as statistically significant.Results: Out of 150 patients planned for laparoscopic cholecystectomy, 33 (22%) were males and 117 (78%) females. The mean age was 40±6.45 years with an age range of 12-80 years. In group A, intraoperative gall bladder perforation was found in 5 patients whereas in group B, there was only one patient with perforation. A total of 4 cases were converted to open cholecystectomy in group A due to difficult dissection in Calot’s triangle as compared to 1 case in group B. In group A, 3 cases had postoperative bile leakage in the drain. In two patients it settled over a period of 3 days. About 03 cases had wound infection in group A and 1 in group B. Mean operative time in group A was 42.2±8.93 minutes versus 35.7±4.85 minutes in group B (p-value 0.001).Conclusion: In this study, the rate of post-operative complications was similar between the two groups, but operative time was significantly shorter in the group B. Harmonic dissector enabled easy dissection of tissues with good hemostasis and less trafficking of instrument, avoiding use of clips and sutures during minimal invasive surgery

Error resilient packet-switched video telephony with adaptive rateless coding and reference picture selection.

Providing high-quality video for packet-switched wireless video telephony on hand-held devices is a challenging task due to packet loss, limited available bandwidth, and complexity constraints. We propose a low-complexity channel-adaptive error resilience technique that combines application-layer forward error correction (FEC) with rateless codes, retransmission, and reference picture selection. Experimental results for H.264 video sequences show that the proposed technique achieves significant peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and percentage degraded video duration (PDVD) improvements over previous techniques in networks involving two wireless links