Waldo: Batteryless Occupancy Monitoring with Reflected Ambient Light

Reliable and accurate room-level occupancy-tracking systems can enable many new advances in sensors and applications of modern smart buildings. This allows buildings to be more capable of adapting to the needs of their occupants in their day-to-day activities and better optimize certain resources, such as power and air conditioning, to do so. Unfortunately, existing occupancy-tracking systems are plagued by large size, high energy consumption, and, unsurprisingly, short battery lifetimes. In this paper, we present Waldo, a batteryless, room-level occupancy monitoring sensor that harvests energy from indoor ambient light reflections, and uses changes in these reflections to detect when people enter and exit a room. Waldo is mountable at the top of a doorframe, allowing for detection of a person and the direction they are traveling at the entry and exit point of a room. We evaluated the Waldo sensor in an office-style setting under mixed lighting conditions (natural and artificial) on both sides of the doorway with subjects exhibiting varying physical characteristics such as height, hair color, gait, and clothing. 651 number of controlled experiments were ran on 6 doorways with 12 individuals and achieved a total detection accuracy of 97.38%. Further, it judged the direction of movement correctly with an accuracy of 95.42%. This paper also evaluates and discusses various practical factors that can impact the performance of the current system in actual deployments. This work demonstrates that ambient light reflections provide both a promising low-cost, long-term sustainable option for monitoring how people use buildings and an exciting new research direction for batteryless computing

Repeating Spatial-Temporal Motifs of CA3 Activity Dependent on Engineered Inputs from Dentate Gyrus Neurons in Live Hippocampal Networks.

Anatomical and behavioral studies, and in vivo and slice electrophysiology of the hippocampus suggest specific functions of the dentate gyrus (DG) and the CA3 subregions, but the underlying activity dynamics and repeatability of information processing remains poorly understood. To approach this problem, we engineered separate living networks of the DG and CA3 neurons that develop connections through 51 tunnels for axonal communication. Growing these networks on top of an electrode array enabled us to determine whether the subregion dynamics were separable and repeatable. We found spontaneous development of polarized propagation of 80% of the activity in the native direction from DG to CA3 and different spike and burst dynamics for these subregions. Spatial-temporal differences emerged when the relationships of target CA3 activity were categorized with to the number and timing of inputs from the apposing network. Compared to times of CA3 activity when there was no recorded tunnel input, DG input led to CA3 activity bursts that were 7× more frequent, increased in amplitude and extended in temporal envelope. Logistic regression indicated that a high number of tunnel inputs predict CA3 activity with 90% sensitivity and 70% specificity. Compared to no tunnel input, patterns of >80% tunnel inputs from DG specified different patterns of first-to-fire neurons in the CA3 target well. Clustering dendrograms revealed repeating motifs of three or more patterns at up to 17 sites in CA3 that were importantly associated with specific spatial-temporal patterns of tunnel activity. The number of these motifs recorded in 3 min was significantly higher than shuffled spike activity and not seen above chance in control networks in which CA3 was apposed to CA3 or DG to DG. Together, these results demonstrate spontaneous input-dependent repeatable coding of distributed activity in CA3 networks driven by engineered inputs from DG networks. These functional configurations at measured times of activation (motifs) emerge from anatomically accurate feed-forward connections from DG through tunnels to CA3

Semantic Analysis Based Text Summarization

Automatic summarization has become an important part in the study of natural language processing since the advent of the 21st century, since a majority of the data online is textual. Summarization of text will lead to a reduction of data while maintaining the context of it. Having such summarization activity being done automatically also helps in reducing human effort. Summarization is the process of generation of the summary of input text by extracting the representative sentences from it. In this project, we present a novel technique for generating the summarization of domain specific text by using Semantic Analysis for text summarization, which is a subset of Natural Language Processing

Green synthesis of silver nanoparticles using Curcuma longa flower extract and antibacterial activity

Silver nanoparticles (AgNP's) possess inherent biological potentials that have obliged an alternative, eco-friendly, sustainable approach to "Green Synthesis." In the present study, we synthesized Green Silver Nanoparticles (GAgNP's) using Curcuma longa L. (C. longa) flower extract as a reducing and capping agent. The synthesized GAgNP's were characterized using UV-Visible spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), which confirmed their homogeneity and physical characteristics. The GAgNP's were found to contain crystalline silver through XRD, and the particles were confirmed to be homogeneous and spherical with a size of approximately 5 nm, as evidenced by UV-Visible spectroscopy, XRD, and HR-TEM. In addition, the biological potential of GAgNP's was evaluated for their antibacterial activities. GAgNP's showed significant activity and formed different sizes of inhibition zones against all selected bacteria: Mycobacterium smegmatis (M. smegmatis) (26 mm), Mycobacterium phlei (M. phlei), and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) (22 mm), Staphylococcus epidermidis (S. epidermidis) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (K. pneumoniae) (18 mm), and Escherichia coli (E. coli) (13 mm). The MIC value of GAgNP's was found to be between 625 ug/mL-39.06 ug/mL for different microbes tested. With further research, the green synthesis of GAgNP's using C. longa flower extracts could lead to the development of effective antibacterial treatments in the medical field

Adrenocortical carcinoma with contralateral renal metastases and tumor thrombus: A case report

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare aggressive malignancy. ACC with renal vein or inferior vena cava (IVC) thrombus is very rare. ACC with contralateral renal metastasis with renal vein thrombus has never been reported. Here we report first such case in the literature where a 40-year-old male presented with right flank pain and weight loss. Definitive reoperative diagnosis failed to be established. Intraoperatively, there was right adrenal mass with left renal vein thrombus invading its wall and extending upto IVC. Right adrenalectomy with left radical nephrectomy with thrombectomy was done. On cut specimen, there was a small mass lesion in the left kidney (upper pole). The diagnosis of ACC with left renal metastasis and renal vein tumor thrombus was confirmed by pathological and immune-histochemical examination. We faced various perioperative challenges in our case. Care must be taken in  preoperative diagnostics, intraoperative planning, and postoperative management as ACC may present with contralateral renal metastasis and tumor thrombus.&nbsp

Use of Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing For Sizing of Hydrogen Blisters In LPG Wash Water Vessel In INDMAX Unit

Equipments operating in sour environment containing H2S are prone to deterioration by wet H2S damage mechanism. INDMAX unit (patented FCCU) produces LPG which contains H2S, cyanide as impurities. To remove these impurities LPG is treated with caustic wash and subsequently water wash in series operation. Due to presence of wet H2S environment in the water wash vessel, nascent hydrogen is produced which diffuses in to the wall of the vessel. Due to presence of laminations in the CS shell these hydrogen atoms combined to form hydrogen molecule which exerts severe internal pressure greater than the yield strength of the CS wall inside the laminations resulting in formation of hydrogen blister. This paper describes the use of phased array UT (PAUT) technique for detection of lamination and sizing of hydrogen blisters in the LPG wash water vessel. Fitness for purpose study was carried out for safe operation of this vessel

Examining public sentiments and attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination: infoveillance study using Twitter posts

Background: A global rollout of vaccinations is currently underway to mitigate and protect people from the COVID-19 pandemic. Several individuals have been using social media platforms such as Twitter as an outlet to express their feelings, concerns, and opinions about COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination programs. This study examined COVID-19 vaccine–related tweets from January 1, 2020, to April 30, 2021, to uncover the topics, themes, and variations in sentiments of public Twitter users. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine key themes and topics from COVID-19 vaccine–related English tweets posted by individuals, and to explore the trends and variations in public opinions and sentiments. Methods: We gathered and assessed a corpus of 2.94 million COVID-19 vaccine–related tweets made by 1.2 million individuals. We used CoreX topic modeling to explore the themes and topics underlying the tweets, and used VADER sentiment analysis to compute sentiment scores and examine weekly trends. We also performed qualitative content analysis of the top three topics pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination. Results: Topic modeling yielded 16 topics that were grouped into 6 broader themes underlying the COVID-19 vaccination tweets. The most tweeted topic about COVID-19 vaccination was related to vaccination policy, specifically whether vaccines needed to be mandated or optional (13.94%), followed by vaccine hesitancy (12.63%) and postvaccination symptoms and effects (10.44%) Average compound sentiment scores were negative throughout the 16 weeks for the topics postvaccination symptoms and side effects and hoax/conspiracy. However, consistent positive sentiment scores were observed for the topics vaccination disclosure, vaccine efficacy, clinical trials and approvals, affordability, regulation, distribution and shortage, travel, appointment and scheduling, vaccination sites, advocacy, opinion leaders and endorsement, and gratitude toward health care workers. Reversal in sentiment scores in a few weeks was observed for the topics vaccination eligibility and hesitancy. Conclusions: Identification of dominant themes, topics, sentiments, and changing trends about COVID-19 vaccination can aid governments and health care agencies to frame appropriate vaccination programs, policies, and rollouts. [Abstract copyright: ©Ranganathan Chandrasekaran, Rashi Desai, Harsh Shah, Vivek Kumar, Evangelos Moustakas. Originally published in JMIR Infodemiology (https://infodemiology.jmir.org), 15.04.2022.