Design and Development of a MOOC on Information Handling Skills in Teaching, Learning and Research: A Case study

This paper is a case study of designing; creating and implementing a MOOC course on ‘Information Handling Skills in Teaching, Learning and Research’ at the central library, PJTSAU, Hyderabad, India funded by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research under World Bank funded project on National Agricultural Higher Education Project. The authors explain about the components of planning and designing a MOOC course with detailed information about various issues, procedures, standards, and technical aspects such as hardware and software specifications. This paper also describes the importance of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their advantages over the traditional teaching methods. It provides exhaustive details about MOOCs, their characteristics, formats, standards, technology involved including the software and hardware for creating and hosting the video lessons over the Internet. The paper also lists out various Government and private agencies involved in creating and offering MOOCs in India. This paper also provides some standard guidelines on how to execute a MOOC programme effectively

Blended Multi-Modal Deep ConvNet Features for Diabetic Retinopathy Severity Prediction

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the major causes of visual impairment and blindness across the world. It is usually found in patients who suffer from diabetes for a long period. The major focus of this work is to derive optimal representation of retinal images that further helps to improve the performance of DR recognition models. To extract optimal representation, features extracted from multiple pre-trained ConvNet models are blended using proposed multi-modal fusion module. These final representations are used to train a Deep Neural Network (DNN) used for DR identification and severity level prediction. As each ConvNet extracts different features, fusing them using 1D pooling and cross pooling leads to better representation than using features extracted from a single ConvNet. Experimental studies on benchmark Kaggle APTOS 2019 contest dataset reveals that the model trained on proposed blended feature representations is superior to the existing methods. In addition, we notice that cross average pooling based fusion of features from Xception and VGG16 is the most appropriate for DR recognition. With the proposed model, we achieve an accuracy of 97.41%, and a kappa statistic of 94.82 for DR identification and an accuracy of 81.7% and a kappa statistic of 71.1% for severity level prediction. Another interesting observation is that DNN with dropout at input layer converges more quickly when trained using blended features, compared to the same model trained using uni-modal deep features.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, published in Electronics MDPI journa

Interactions between metal oxides and biomolecules: from fundamental understanding to applications

Metallo-oxide (MO) based bioinorganic nanocomposites promise unique structures, physico-chemical properties and novel bio-chemical functionalities and within the last decade, investment in research on materials such as ZnO, TiO2, SiO2 and GeO2 has significantly increased. Besides traditional approaches, the synthesis, shaping, structural patterning and post-processing chemical functionalization of the materials surface is inspired by strategies which mimic processes in nature. Would such materials deliver new technologies? Answering this question requires the merging of historical knowledge and current research from different fields of science. Practically, we need an effective defragmentation of the research area. From our perspective, the superficial accounting of material properties, chemistry of the surfaces and the behaviour of biomolecules next to such surfaces is a problem. This is particularly of concern when we wish to bridge between technologies in vitro and biotechnologies in vivo. Further, besides the potential practical technological efficiency and advantages such materials might exhibit, we have to consider the wider long-term implications of material stability and toxicity. In this contribution we present a critical review of recent advances in the chemistry and engineering of MO based biocomposites highlighting the role of interactions at the interface and the techniques by which these can be studied. At the end of the article we outline the challenges which hamper progress in research and extrapolate to developing and promising directions including additive manufacturing and synthetic biology that could benefit from molecular level understanding of interactions occurring between inanimate (abiotic) and living (biotic) materials

AWARENESS OF AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS AMONG THE POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH SCHOLARS OF PROF.JAYASHANKAR TELANGANA STATE AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY, HYDERABAD: A CASE STUDY

A study has been undertaken to know the awareness, satisfaction level, purpose and problems faced by the postgraduate research scholars of Professor Jayashankar Telengana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU) while accessing agricultural information systems (AIS). The study has been conducted using a questionnaire with 217 and 101 research scholars undergoing Master and Doctoral research programmes at PJTSAU, Hyderabad. It is found that 100 per cent of the respondents are aware about the AIS. It has been found that 74% of research scholars are using AIS for research purpose, 52 % for educational purpose and followed by current information (16%), to update Knowledge (12%) and writing papers for publication (8%). It is also noted that majority of students are not facing problems while seeking information from Agricultural Information Systems. This highlights the findings of the study and also suggested to conduct regular awareness user awareness programmes, provide high bandwidth Internet connectivity and to provide more e-resources

PHOTOACOUSTIC SPECTROSCOPY - LEAF SURFACE ABSORPTION SPECTRA

Nous avons observé que les spectres photoacoustiques des surfaces adaxiales de feuilles vertes présentaient des signaux plus importants que ceux des surfaces abaxiales. L'intensité des signaux à 545 et 675 nm des feuilles à pigments violets décroissent lorsque la fréquence augmente de 20 à 50 Hz. Cependant le rapport de ces signaux varie en sens inverse ce qui renseigne sur la répartition en profondeur de ces pigments.We have compared the acoustic spectra of adaxial surfaces of green leaves and observed higher signal intensities from adaxial surface. The intensities of signals at 545 nm and 675 nm in purple pigmented leaf were found to decrease with increase in acoustic frequency from 20Hz to 50Hz. However the signal ratio at 545 nm to 675 nm was found to increase with increase in frequency, indicating the depth profile of the purple pigment