Development of Novel Techniques to Study Nonlinear Active Noise Control

Active noise control has been a field of growing interest over the past few decades. The challenges thrown by active noise control have attracted the notice of the scientific community to engage them in intense level of research. Cancellation of acoustic noise electronically in a simple and efficient way is the vital merit of the active noise control system. A detailed study about existing strategies for active noise control has been undertaken in the present work. This study has given an insight regarding various factors influencing performance of modern active noise control systems. The development of new training algorithms and structures for active noise control are active fields of research which are exploiting the benefits of different signal processing and soft- computing techniques. The nonlinearity contributed by environment and various components of active noise control system greatly affects the ultimate performance of an active noise canceller. This fact motivated to pursue the research work in developing novel architectures and algorithms to address the issues of nonlinear active noise control. One of the primary focus of the work is the application of artificial neural network to effectively combat the problem of active noise control. This is because artificial neural networks are inherently nonlinear processors and possesses capabilities of universal approximation and thus are well suited to exhibit high performance when used in nonlinear active noise control. The present work contributed significantly in designing efficient nonlinear active noise canceller based on neural network platform. Novel neural filtered-x least mean square and neural filtered-e least mean square algorithms are proposed for nonlinear active noise control taking into consideration the nonlinear secondary path. Employing Legendre neural network led the development of a set new adaptive algorithms such as Legendre filtered-x least mean square, Legendre vi filtered-e least mean square, Legendre filtered-x recursive least square and fast Legendre filtered-x least mean square algorithms. The proposed algorithms outperformed the existing standard algorithms for nonlinear active noise control in terms of steady state mean square error with reduced computational complexity. Efficient frequency domain implementation of some the proposed algorithms have been undertaken to exploit its benefits. Exhaustive simulation studies carried out have established the efficacy of the proposed architectures and algorithms

Detection of Ascosphaera apis, causing chalkbrood disease in the colonies of European honey bee, Apis mellifera in West Bengal, India

The decline of honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) populations is of great concern around the world. Among the several key drivers, dissemination of pests and pathogens is potential one. Chalkbrood is very common fungal disease of honey bee, caused due to Ascosphaera apis. In the present study, survey was conducted regarding the prevalence of diseases in A. mellifera beekeeping in Gangetic plains of West Bengal, India. Results confirmed the occurrence of chalkbrood disease in different apiaries, where dead and mummified bee larvae with cotton like chalky white or greyish-black covering were found as physical symptoms of the disease. From three surveyed apiaries, a total of 16 hives out of 113 hives were found to be infected with the diseases; and 46 frames out of 132 frames from the infected 16 hives were found to be affected by the pathogen. Microscopic examination reflected that nearly 87% of the samples collected from the infected frame were found to be positive for the spore of Ascosphaera. The fungus associated with the disease was isolated on Potato Dextrose Agar medium, pure cultured and its genomic DNA was isolated to perform PCR and based on 18s rDNA sequencing by using specific primer pair of ITS-1 and ITS-4, the fungus was identified as Ascosphaera apis. Keywords: 18s rDNA, Bees, Necrotrophs, Phylogen

ANTIBIOGRAM PROFILING OF HELICOBACTER PYLORI STRAINS AND THE EFFICACY OF BRASSICA CAPITATA AGAINST RESISTANT STRAINS ISOLATED FROM THE PATIENTS SUFFERING FROM GASTRODUODENAL DISEASES IN GUWAHATI, ASSAM

  Objective: Helicobacter pylori resistance toward commonly used antibiotics is increasing leading to the treatment failure; hence, our aim is to determine the antibiogram susceptibility pattern of H. pylori strains isolated from Guwahati, Assam (Northeast India) and also to test the efficacy of the Brassica capitata against the multi and dual drug-resistant strains of North and Northeast India.Methods: Minimum inhibitory concentration of different antibiotics was determined by agar dilution method. Disc diffusion method was used to check the efficacy of B. capitata against clarithromycin (CLR), metronidazole (MTZ), and levofloxacin (LEV)-resistant H. pylori strains.Results: All the H. pylori strains were 100% sensitive to CLR, tetracycline, amoxicillin, and furazolidone. 72.8% of the strains were sensitive toward MTZ and 54.5% were sensitive toward LEV. B. capitata showed good efficacy against the resistant strains of H. pylori of North and Northeast India.Conclusion: Most of the H. pylori strains from Northeast India were sensitive toward the commonly used antibiotics for the treatment regime. B. capitata is effective against H. pylori infection, suggesting its potential as an alternative therapy, and opens the way for further studies on identification of novel antimicrobial targets of B. capitata

MSIR@FIRE: A Comprehensive Report from 2013 to 2016

[EN] India is a nation of geographical and cultural diversity where over 1600 dialects are spoken by the people. With the technological advancement, penetration of the internet and cheaper access to mobile data, India has recently seen a sudden growth of internet users. These Indian internet users generate contents either in English or in other vernacular Indian languages. To develop technological solutions for the contents generated by the Indian users using the Indian languages, the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) was established and held for the first time in 2008. Although Indian languages are written using indigenous scripts, often websites and user-generated content (such as tweets and blogs) in these Indian languages are written using Roman script due to various socio-cultural and technological reasons. A challenge that search engines face while processing transliterated queries and documents is that of extensive spelling variation. MSIR track was first introduced in 2013 at FIRE and the aim of MSIR was to systematically formalize several research problems that one must solve to tackle the code mixing in Web search for users of many languages around the world, develop related data sets, test benches and most importantly, build a research community focusing on this important problem that has received very little attention. This document is a comprehensive report on the 4 years of MSIR track evaluated at FIRE between 2013 and 2016.Somnath Banerjee and Sudip Kumar Naskar are supported by Media Lab Asia, MeitY, Government of India, under the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics & IT. The work of Paolo Rosso was partially supported by the MISMIS research project PGC2018-096212-B-C31 funded by the Spanish MICINN.Banerjee, S.; Choudhury, M.; Chakma, K.; Kumar Naskar, S.; Das, A.; Bandyopadhyay, S.; Rosso, P. (2020). MSIR@FIRE: A Comprehensive Report from 2013 to 2016. 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The first cross-script code-mixed question answering corpus. In: Proceedings of the workshop on modeling, learning and mining for cross/multilinguality (MultiLingMine 2016), co-located with the 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). 2016.Banerjee S, Naskar SK, Rosso P, Bandyopadhyay S. Named entity recognition on code-mixed cross-script social media content. Comput Sistemas. 2017;21(4):681–92.Barman U, Das A, Wagner J, Foster J. Code mixing: a challenge for language identification in the language of social media. In: Proceedings of the first workshop on computational approaches to code switching. 2014. pp. 13–23.Bhardwaj P, Pakray P, Bajpeyee V, Taneja A. Information retrieval on code-mixed Hindi–English tweets. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. 2016.Bhargava R, Khandelwal S, Bhatia A, Sharmai Y. Modeling classifier for code mixed cross script questions. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Bhattacharjee D, Bhattacharya, P. Ensemble classifier based approach for code-mixed cross-script question classification. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Chakma K, Das A. CMIR: a corpus for evaluation of code mixed information retrieval of Hindi–English tweets. In: The 17th international conference on intelligent text processing and computational linguistics (CICLING). 2016.Choudhury M, Chittaranjan G, Gupta P, Das A. Overview of fire 2014 track on transliterated search. Proceedings of FIRE. 2014. pp. 68–89.Ganguly D, Pal S, Jones GJ. Dcu@fire-2014: fuzzy queries with rule-based normalization for mixed script information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the forum for information retrieval evaluation, ACM, 2014. pp. 80–85.Gella S, Sharma J, Bali K. Query word labeling and back transliteration for Indian languages: shared task system description. FIRE Working Notes. 2013;3.Gupta DK, Kumar S, Ekbal A. Machine learning approach for language identification and transliteration. In: Proceedings of the forum for information retrieval evaluation, ACM, 2014. pp. 60–64.Gupta P, Bali K, Banchs RE, Choudhury M, Rosso P. Query expansion for mixed-script information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, ACM, 2014. pp. 677–686.Gupta P, Rosso P, Banchs RE. Encoding transliteration variation through dimensionality reduction: fire shared task on transliterated search. In: Fifth forum for information retrieval evaluation. 2013.HB Barathi Ganesh, M Anand Kumar, KP Soman. Distributional semantic representation for information retrieval. 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In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. 2016.Anand Kumar M, Soman KP. Amrita-CEN@MSIR-FIRE2016: Code-mixed question classification using BoWs and RNN embeddings. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Majumder G, Pakray P. NLP-NITMZ@MSIR 2016 system for code-mixed cross-script question classification. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Mandal S, Banerjee S, Naskar SK, Rosso P, Bandyopadhyay S. Adaptive voting in multiple classifier systems for word level language identification. In: FIRE workshops, 2015. pp. 47–50.Mukherjee A, Ravi A , Datta K. Mixed-script query labelling using supervised learning and ad hoc retrieval using sub word indexing. In: Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, Bangalore, India, 2014.Pakray P, Bhaskar P. Transliterated search system for Indian languages. In: Pre-proceedings of the 5th FIRE-2013 workshop, forum for information retrieval evaluation (FIRE). 2013.Patel S, Desai V. Liga and syllabification approach for language identification and back transliteration: a shared task report by da-iict. In: Proceedings of the forum for information retrieval evaluation, ACM, 2014. pp. 43–47.Prabhakar DK, Pal S. Ism@fire-2013 shared task on transliterated search. In: Post-Proceedings of the 4th and 5th workshops of the forum for information retrieval evaluation, ACM, 2013. p. 17.Prabhakar DK, Pal S. Ism@ fire-2015: mixed script information retrieval. In: FIRE workshops. 2015. pp. 55–58.Prakash A, Saha SK. A relevance feedback based approach for mixed script transliterated text search: shared task report by bit Mesra. 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Necrotizing fasciitis caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa: a rare case report and recent concepts in diagnosis and management

Necrotizing fasciitis caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an extremely rare and life threatening bacterial soft tissue infection. Here we report a case study of fully established necrotizing fasciitis associated with monomicrobial pseudomonas infection in a 34 years old male. The patient presented with painful, necrosed areas of skin and soft tissue over right gluteal region which rapidly progressed to right upper back. Aggressive supportive measures and early debridement lead to a full recovery with no functional deficits

VI Jornades IET "Bretxa salarial i desigualtats de gènere en el mercat de treball"

Quantitative structure–property relationship (QSPR) models used for prediction of property of untested chemicals can be utilized for prioritization plan of synthesis and experimental testing of new compounds. Validation of QSPR models plays a crucial role for judgment of the reliability of predictions of such models. In the QSPR literature, serious attention is now given to external validation for checking reliability of QSPR models, and predictive quality is in the most cases judged based on the quality of predictions of property of a single test set as reflected in one or more external validation metrics. Here, we have shown that a single QSPR model may show a variable degree of prediction quality as reflected in some variants of external validation metrics like <i>Q</i>²_F1, <i>Q</i>²_F2, <i>Q</i>²_F3, CCC, and <i>r_m</i>² (all of which are differently modified forms of predicted variance, which theoretically may attain a maximum value of 1), depending on the test set composition and test set size. Thus, this report questions the appropriateness of the common practice of the “classic” approach of external validation based on a single test set and thereby derives a conclusion about predictive quality of a model on the basis of a particular validation metric. The present work further demonstrates that among the considered external validation metrics, <i>r_m</i>² shows statistically significantly different numerical values from others among which CCC is the most optimistic or less stringent. Furthermore, at a given level of threshold value of acceptance for external validation metrics, <i>r_m</i>² provides the most stringent criterion (especially with Δ<i>r</i>_<i>m</i>² at highest tolerated value of 0.2) of external validation, which may be adopted in the case of regulatory decision support processes

Prevention of Maternal and Neonatal Death/Infections with a Single Oral Dose of Azithromycin in Women in Labour in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries (A-PLUS): A Study Protocol for a Multinational, Randomised Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial

INTRODUCTION: Maternal and neonatal infections are among the most frequent causes of maternal and neonatal mortality, and current antibiotic strategies have been ineffective in preventing many of these deaths. A randomised clinical trial conducted in a single site in The Gambia showed that treatment with an oral dose of 2 g azithromycin versus placebo for all women in labour reduced certain maternal and neonatal infections. However, it is unknown if this therapy reduces maternal and neonatal sepsis and mortality. In a large, multinational randomised trial, we will evaluate the impact of azithromycin given in labour to improve maternal and newborn outcomes. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: This randomised, placebo-controlled, multicentre clinical trial includes two primary hypotheses, one maternal and one neonatal. The maternal hypothesis is to test whether a single, prophylactic intrapartum oral dose of 2 g azithromycin given to women in labour will reduce maternal death or sepsis. The neonatal hypothesis will test whether this intervention will reduce intrapartum/neonatal death or sepsis. The intervention is a single, prophylactic intrapartum oral dose of 2 g azithromycin, compared with a single intrapartum oral dose of an identical appearing placebo. A total of 34 000 labouring women from 8 research sites in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America will be randomised with a one-to-one ratio to intervention/placebo. In addition, we will assess antimicrobial resistance in a sample of women and their newborns. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study protocol has been reviewed and ethics approval obtained from all the relevant ethical review boards at each research site. The results will be disseminated via peer-reviewed journals and national and international scientific forums. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT03871491 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03871491?term=NCT03871491&draw=2&rank=1)

Production of He-4 and (4) in Pb-Pb collisions at root(NN)-N-S=2.76 TeV at the LHC

Results on the production of He-4 and (4) nuclei in Pb-Pb collisions at root(NN)-N-S = 2.76 TeV in the rapidity range vertical bar y vertical bar <1, using the ALICE detector, are presented in this paper. The rapidity densities corresponding to 0-10% central events are found to be dN/dy4(He) = (0.8 +/- 0.4 (stat) +/- 0.3 (syst)) x 10(-6) and dN/dy4 = (1.1 +/- 0.4 (stat) +/- 0.2 (syst)) x 10(-6), respectively. This is in agreement with the statistical thermal model expectation assuming the same chemical freeze-out temperature (T-chem = 156 MeV) as for light hadrons. The measured ratio of (4)/He-4 is 1.4 +/- 0.8 (stat) +/- 0.5 (syst). (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe