An HCI Speech-Based Architecture for Man-To-Machine and Machine-To-Man Communication in Yorùbá Language

Man communicates with man by natural language, sign language, and/or gesture but communicates with machine via electromechanical devices such as mouse, and keyboard.  These media of effecting Man-To-Machine (M2M) communication are electromechanical in nature. Recent research works, however, have been able to achieve some high level of success in M2M using natural language, sign language, and/or gesture under constrained conditions. However, machine communication with man, in reverse direction, using natural language is still at its infancy. Machine communicates with man usually in textual form. In order to achieve acceptable quality of end-to-end M2M communication, there is need for robust architecture to develop a novel speech-to-text and text-to-speech system. In this paper, an HCI speech-based architecture for Man-To-Machine and Machine-To-Man communication in Yorùbá language is proposed to carry Yorùbá people along in the advancement taking place in the world of Information Technology. Dynamic Time Warp is specified in the model to measure the similarity between the voice utterances in the sound library. In addition, Vector Quantization, Guassian Mixture Model and Hidden Markov Model are incorporated in the proposed architecture for compression and observation. This approach will yield a robust Speech-To-Text and Text-To-Speech system. Keywords: Yorùbá Language, Speech Recognition, Text-To-Speech, Man-To-Machine, Machine-To-Ma

SIMULATED ANNEALING FOR SOLVING THE TRAVELLING SALESMAN PROBLEM

In this paper we considered the use of Simulated Annealing for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) which is NP-Complete. The algorithm searches solutions for the global minimum by perturbing existing solutions and replace if the new solution is better than the existing solution. The annealing process is controlled by some algorithmic parameters and thus the solution relies on the parameters set. Different parameters were used to know the best set of parameters. Generally the algorithm was tested and proved to be a good solver of TSP

Student Web Self-Service Portal for a Tertiary Institution

The optimum condition for students to study is in an environment where they can access virtually all they need to know about courses, lecturers, locate places (for fresh and prospective students), validate staff identity, access past examination questions easily, identify vacant student hostels within and outside the school premises. Some of the reasons for students’ failure can be attributed to finding accommodation within or outside the school premises. Also, fresh students find it difficult to locate specific places in the university environment and some students find it very difficult to interact with staff. This paper presents a student self-service portal to address some of these challenges. Unified Modeling Language (UML) was used to model the system. The model was implemented using Microsoft C#, Microsoft ASP.net, Microsoft SQL Server, and Google Map. The proposed system was tested and the result obtained during the execution shows that the system is capable of addressing some of the challenges confronted by students.Keywords: Web Self-Service, Portal, Students, SQL, Unified Modeling Language (UML)

In vivo effects of four medicinal plants on nematodes of goat

Medicinal plants are very cheap and accessible to rural people for treating ruminant’s diseases. The aim of this study was to investigate in vivo effects of four medicinal plants (Vernonia amgydalina, Ocimum grattisimum, Nicotiana tabacum and Talinum triangulare) on nematodes of goat. The ethanolic extracts of these medicinal plants were made and the dose used for the goats include 1 and 2 g/kg for Vernonia amgydalina, 1 and 2g/kg for Ocimum grattisimum, 0.5 and 1 g/kg for Nicotiana tabacum and 0.5 and 1 g/kg for Talinum triangulare. The goats were infected with L3 stage larval of nematodes of Trichostrongyle sp, Haemonchus contortus, Bunostomum and Strongloides sp and after the build up of worm after some days, they were treated using in vivo assay through oral administration of the plants extracts. The faecal samples were collected 3, 7 and 11 days and examined quantitatively through McMaster Counting technique for the number of parasites. The results showed that only 2g/kg of Vernonia amgydalina and 1g/kg of Talinum triangulare showed decreased of 91.6% and and 69% in the mean egg per gram (epg) output of the faecal sample. But other medicinal plants did not show any decrease in epg. This indicates that Vernonia amgydalina and Talinum triangulare could be used as antihelmintic plants to treat goat diseases thus helping to improve the health status of the goat

In vitro anthelmintic activity of three medicinal plants

In vitro anthelmintic assay of three medicinal plants was conducted to investigate which plants were anthelmintic. In vitro anthelmintic activity of all the three medicinal plants were carried out using earthworm at 50, 100, 200mg/ml of plant extracts from Vernonia amygdalina, Ocimum grattisimum and Talinum triangulare. Results showed that 200mg/ml was effective concentration for all the medicinal plants. Vernonia amygdalina showed faster anthelmintic than Ocimum grattisimum and Talinum triangulare. The plants can be used /employed in pharmaceutical industry to be used as anthelmintic drugs for treating livestocks affected with helminths

Development of Fingerprint Biometric Attendance System for Non-Academic Staff in a Tertiary Institution

Institutions, companies and organisations where security and net productivity is vital, access to certain areas must be controlled and monitored through an automated system of attendance. Managing people is a difficult task for most of the organizations and maintaining the attendance record is an important factor in people management. When considering the academic institute, taking the attendance of non-academic staff on daily basis and maintaining the records is a major task. Manually taking attendance and maintaining it for a long time adds to the difficulty of this task as well as wastes a lot of time. For this reason, an efficient system is proposed in this paper to solve the problem of manual attendance. This system takes attendance electronically with the help of a fingerprint recognition system, and all the records are saved for subsequent operations. Staff biometric attendance system employs an automated system to calculate attendance of staff in an organization and do further calculations of monthly attendance summary in order to reduce human errors during calculations. In essence, the proposed system can be employed in curbing the problems of lateness, buddy punching and truancy in any institution, organization or establishment. The proposed system will also improve the productivity of any organization if properly implemented. Keywords: Institution, Attendance, Biometric, Fingerprin

Improving dermatology classifiers across populations using images generated by large diffusion models

Dermatological classification algorithms developed without sufficiently diverse training data may generalize poorly across populations. While intentional data collection and annotation offer the best means for improving representation, new computational approaches for generating training data may also aid in mitigating the effects of sampling bias. In this paper, we show that DALL$\cdot$E 2, a large-scale text-to-image diffusion model, can produce photorealistic images of skin disease across skin types. Using the Fitzpatrick 17k dataset as a benchmark, we demonstrate that augmenting training data with DALL$\cdot$E 2-generated synthetic images improves classification of skin disease overall and especially for underrepresented groups.Comment: NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Synthetic Data for Empowering ML Researc

The Association Between Persistent Poverty and Melanoma Mortality in Texas: A Retrospective Study Using Texas Cancer Registry Data

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp22/1123/thumbnail.jp

HISTOLOGICAL AND BIOCHEMICAL EFFECTS OF ARTEETHERTM ON THE LIVER OF WISTAR RATS

ArteetherTM is among the recent drugs that are used to combat choroquine-resistant malarial parasites. This study examined the effects of arteetherTM on enzyme biomarkers of the liver, serum protein concentrations, and liver morphology. Twenty (20) adult albino Wistar rats weighing 200 – 250 g were randomly divided into four groups (A, B, C and D) of five animals each, and used in this study. Group A rats were given intramuscular (i. m.) arteetherTM (3 mg/kg b. w.) daily for 3 days. Group B rats received i. m. arteetherTM (6 mg/kg b. w.) daily for 3 days. Group C rats were given i. m. arteetherTM (3 mg/kg b. w.) daily for 3 days. The same dose was repeated at two-weekly intervals for 4 further weeks, while group D rats which received normal saline (0.9 % w/ v, 3 ml/kg b.w.), served as controls. At the end of the experiment, the body weights of the animals were determined and recorded. Serum levels of alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (ASP), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), total protein (TP) and albumin were assayed, and histological studies were performed. Results obtained show no significant difference (

Blood pressure control and left ventricular hypertrophy in hypertensive Nigerians

Background : Hypertension is a disease characterized by end-organ complications, leading to high morbidity and mortality in many cases. People with untreated or uncontrolled hypertension often run the risk of developing complications directly associated with the disease. Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) has been shown to be a significant risk factor for adverse outcomes both in patients with hypertension and in the general population. We investigated the prevalence and pattern of LVH in a treated hypertensive population at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria, using non-hypertensive subjects as control. Design and Setting : A prospective observational study performed at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. Methods : Patients had 6 visits, when at least one blood pressure measurement was recorded for each hypertensive subject and average calculated for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) separately. The values obtained were used for stratification of the subjects into controlled and uncontrolled hypertension. Subjects also had echocardiograms to determine their left ventricular mass. Results : LVH was found in 14 (18.2%) of the normotensive group, 40 (20.8%) of the uncontrolled hypertensive group and 14 (24.1%) of the controlled hypertensive group when left ventricular mass (LVM) was indexed to body surface area (BSA). When LVM was indexed to height, left ventricular hypertrophy was found in none of the subjects of the normotensive group, while it was found present in 43 (22.4%) and 14 (24.1%) subjects of the uncontrolled and controlled hypertensive groups, respectively. Significant difference in the prevalence of LVH was detected only when LVM was indexed to height alone. Conclusion : Clinic blood pressure is an ineffective way of assessing BP control. Thus in apparently controlled hypertensive subjects, based on office blood pressure, cardiac structural changes do remain despite antihypertensive therapy. This population is still at risk of cardiovascular events.arri\ue8re-plan: l\u2019hypertension est une maladie caract\ue9ris\ue9e par l\u2019orgue de fi n complications menant \ue0 \ue9lev\ue9 de morbidit\ue9 et mortalit\ue9 dans de nombreux cas. Personnes avec l\u2019hypertension non trait\ue9e ou non contr\uf4l\ue9e souvent risquent de d\ue9velopper complications directement associ\ue9es \ue0 la maladie. Laiss\ue9 ventriculaire hypertrophie (LVH) a \ue9t\ue9 d\ue9montr\ue9 un facteur de risque signifi catif pour les effets n\ue9gatifs r\ue9sultats tant chez les patients atteints de l\u2019hypertension et de la population g\ue9n\ue9rale. Nous avons a enqu\ueat\ue9 sur la pr\ue9valence et le mod\ue8le de LVH dans un trait\ue9 hypertendues population au University College Hospital, \ue0 l\u2019aide Ibadan, Nigeria non-hypertendues des sujets comme contr\uf4le. conception et la confi guration: A \ue9ventuel \ue9tude d\u2019observation effectu\ue9e \ue0 la University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. m\ue9thodes: Patients avaient six visites o\uf9 au moins un sang mesure de pression a \ue9t\ue9 enregistr\ue9e pour chaque sujet hypertendues et moyenne calcul\ue9s s\ue9par\ue9ment pour SBP et DBP. Les valeurs obtenues ont \ue9t\ue9 utilis\ue9es pour stratifi cation des sujets dans l\u2019hypertension contr\uf4l\ue9e et incontr\uf4l\ue9e. Sujets ont \ue9galement echocardiograms pour d\ue9terminer leur masse ventriculaire gauche. r\ue9sultats: LVH a \ue9t\ue9 trouv\ue9 en 14(18.2%) de la groupe normotensive, 40(20.8%) de groupe de hypertendues non contr\uf4l\ue9es et 14(24.1%) de hypertendues contr\uf4l\ue9e groupe lorsque quitt\ue9 masse ventriculaire (LVM) a \ue9t\ue9 index\ue9e \ue0 corps surface (BSA). Lorsque LVM a \ue9t\ue9 index\ue9 \ue0 hauteur, laiss\ue9 ventriculaire hypertrophie a \ue9t\ue9 trouv\ue9 dans aucun du groupe normotensive, bien qu\u2019il a \ue9t\ue9 constat\ue9 pr\ue9sents dans les 43(22.4%) et 14(24.1%) de hypertendues non ma\ueetris\ue9e et contr\uf4l\ue9e groupes respectivement. \uc9tait de diff\ue9rence signifi cative dans la pr\ue9valence de la LVH d\ue9tect\ue9s uniquement lorsque LVM a \ue9t\ue9 index\ue9 \ue0 hauteur alone. conclusion: clinique art\ue9rielle est un moyen ineffi cace de mesurer le contr\uf4le de BP. Ainsi en sujet hypertendues apparemment contr\uf4l\ue9e bas\ue9e sur la pression art\ue9rielle de bureau, des changements structurels cardiaques restent malgr\ue9 th\ue9rapie antihypertensive. Cette population est toujours \ue0 risque de maladies cardiovasculaires \ue9v\ue9nements