EADMS: A systemic approach to map emotions with Bloom's Affective Domain

The quality of education depreciates as in-person classes were quickly replaced with virtual classes amidst the global pandemic. With the rise of the virtual classroom environment, educators lose the opportunity to interact with students and tailor the teaching style that best suits them. Educators use students' facial expressions and emotional responses to the content to predict the understanding levels subjectively. This paper proposes the Emotion-Affective Domain Mapping System (EADMS) as an alternative tool. The EADMS captures students' facial data during online classes in the form of a video and uses AI to determine emotions like contempt, anger, fear, happiness, disgust, surprise, and neutral state of emotion. The system breaks the video recording into three parts: the start of the class, between class, and the end of class to retrieve facial data and translate it to emotional data. The emotional data is mapped with the 'Affective Domain' of Bloom's Taxonomy to generate a graphical chart that plots the understanding level over the three periods. The EADMS successfully extracted information from videos on the internet and was reasonably reliable when tested with one of the authors

A rule based expert system to advise on air-filtering plants for indoor spaces in UAE

The purpose of this study was the development of an expert system that is able to recommend types of plants for the removal of toxic substances in a given artificial ecosystem. The domain was restricted to office environments within the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A literature review revealed a significant gap in research related to systems that help select plants based on a given environment. This eventually led to the creation of the Plant Recommender Expert System (PRES). PRES utilizes a set of inputs (for example expected humidity, average temperature, light quality, etc.). The system will then recommend the type(s) of plants that should be purchased to suit the given environment conditions. Horticultural experts usually give recommendations for these types of problem domains but such an expert may not always be available, and so the concept here is to encode the expertise knowledge in an intelligent system to ensure uninterrupted availability of the expert knowledge. The system was evaluated using several case studies with known outcomes. The PRES suggested plants for environments that were described via a set of inputs in these trials. The initial phase, being a prototype of PRES was created with the aim of helping non-expert users leverage the natural air-detoxification properties of plants. While in its current configuration the system is not capable of learning, it can at a later stage be integrated with other AI methods such as the use of decision trees to create further rules or data driven approaches such as the use of Neural Networks for the classification of plants relevant to a given domain. However, the latter approach will first necessitate the creation of a relevant data set

Adaptalight: An inexpensive PAR sensor system for daylight harvesting in a Micro Indoor Smart Hydroponic System

Environmental changes and the reduction in arable land have led to food security concerns around the world, particularly in urban settings. Hydroponic soilless growing methods deliver plant nutrients using water, conserving resources and can be constructed nearly anywhere. Hydroponic systems have several complex attributes that need to be managed, and this can be daunting for the layperson. Micro Indoor Smart Hydroponics (MISH) leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technology to manage the complexities of hydroponic techniques, for growing food at home for everyday citizens. Two prohibitive costs in the advancement of MISH systems are power consumption and equipment expense. Reducing cost through harvesting ambient light can potentially reduce power consumption but must be done accurately to sustain sufficient plant yields. Photosynthetic Active Radiation (PAR) meters are commercially used to measure only the light spectrum that plants use, but are expensive. This study presents Adaptalight, a MISH system that harvests ambient light using an inexpensive AS7265x IoT sensor to measure PAR. The system is built on commonly found IoT technology and a well-established architecture for MISH systems. Adpatalight was deployed in a real-world application in the living space of an apartment and experiments were carried out accordingly. A two-phase experiment was conducted over three months, each phase lasting 21 days. Phase one measured the IoT sensor’s capability to accurately measure PAR. Phase two measured the ability of the system to harvest ambient PAR light and produce sufficient yields, using the calibrated IoT sensor from phase one. The results showed that the Adaptalight system was successful in saving a significant amount of power, harvesting ambient PAR light and producing yields with no significant differences from the control. The amount of power savings would be potentially greater in a location with more ambient light. Additionally, the findings show that, when calibrated, the AS7265x sensor is well suited to accurately measure PAR light in MISH systems

Asymptotics and local constancy of characters of p-adic groups

In this paper we study quantitative aspects of trace characters $\Theta_\pi$ of reductive $p$-adic groups when the representation $\pi$ varies. Our approach is based on the local constancy of characters and we survey some other related results. We formulate a conjecture on the behavior of $\Theta_\pi$ relative to the formal degree of $\pi$, which we are able to prove in the case where $\pi$ is a tame supercuspidal. The proof builds on J.-K.~Yu's construction and the structure of Moy-Prasad subgroups.Comment: Proceedings of Simons symposium on the trace formul

Operation of a microwave proton source in pulsed mode

Initial beam operation of the cw radio-frequency-quadrupole (RFQ) built for the Low Energy Demonstration Accelerator (LEDA) project requires the injection into the RFQ of a 75-keV, pulsed, H{sup +} beam with a rise and fall time less than 10 microseconds and a pulse width from 0.1 to 1 millisecond at a repetition rate up to 10 Hz. The ion source for the accelerator is a microwave proton source driven by a 2.45-GHz magnetron. Pulsed beam for the RFQ is accomplished by modulation of the magnetron tube current. The magnetron provides microwave pulses to the ion source, and a medium-bandwidth, extraction power supply produces the H{sup +} ion beam using a four-electrode extractor. A similar ion source with a three-element extractor operating at 50 kV has also been tested with this magnetron modulator. The authors report the results of modulating the ion-source microwave power and extracting a pulsed proton beam using both a triode and a tetrode extractor

Charge Fluctuations on Membrane Surfaces in Water

We generalize the predictions for attractions between over-all neutral surfaces induced by charge fluctuations/correlations to non-uniform systems that include dielectric discontinuities, as is the case for mixed charged lipid membranes in an aqueous solution. We show that the induced interactions depend in a non-trivial way on the dielectric constants of membrane and water and show different scaling with distance depending on these properties. The generality of the calculations also allows us to predict under which dielectric conditions the interaction will change sign and become repulsive

Risicobeperking van ziekten en plagen bij energiezuinige maatregelen

This study gives an overview on the impact of climatic conditions, e.g. moisture deficit and CO2, on the plant defense system in the greenhouse. Higher CO2 dosages or increased moisture levels have a strong influence on the pest control. Partly, by direct effects on biological control agents and partly through effects on the plant quality. The outcome depends on the prey-predator system

'Rooie led' verhoogt de afweer (licht en het effect op meeldauw)

De auteurs Jantineke Hofland (WageningenvUR Glastuinbouw) & Luc Stevens (PRI) hebben dit artikel geschreven m.m.v. Els ten Dam en Rozemarijn de Vries

Physiological differences between sugar beet varieties susceptible, tolerant or resistant to the beet cyst nematode, Heterodera schachtii (Schmidt) under uninfested conditions

The beet cyst nematode (BCN) is a problem to sugar beet growers around the world and can cause severe yield losses. Recently, varieties of sugar beet have been developed which are either tolerant to damage caused by BCN, or alternatively are resistant to BCN. Little is understood about these varieties and how they may have different physiological characteristics when compared with varieties of sugar beet that are susceptible to BCN. This study assessed a range of nine varieties, which were tolerant, susceptible or resistant to BCN, in pot and hydroponic tank investigations to measure differences in their canopy, early rooting and yield traits in the absence of BCN. Two field experiments, using four varieties which were susceptible, resistant or tolerant to BCN, then followed to test the hypothesis that increasing the plant population density (PPD) allows a BCN resistant variety to achieve a greater yield. In the pot and hydroponic experiments, it became clear that the varieties had different growth habits. The resistant variety yielded the least sugar and had the smallest canopy per plant. In the field experiments, which were not infested with BCN, in both years the resistant variety also showed a delayed canopy expansion compared to the other varieties. The rate of expansion could be increased by increasing the PPD. In 2016 this increased PPD resulted in higher yields of the resistant variety. However, due to better canopy development in the following year, a yield penalty was found in 2017 at higher PPDs. Understanding how different varieties need different PPDs may make resistant varieties a more economical option to cultivate in the future. However, the levels of impurities, particularly sodium impurities, in the resistant plants may still make them a less favourable choice to grow. The light tolerant varieties showed a distinct increased rooting and canopy expansion rate compared to the other variety types, while the tolerant varieties showed similar rooting and canopy traits to the susceptible varieties but had different yield responses to increased seed rate