Distance-based weighted sparse representation to classify motor imagery EEG signals for BCI applications

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interface systems (BCIs) are highly in need for a large number of real-time applications such as hands and touch-free...     

Recent epidemiological status of malaria in Calcutta Municipal Corporation area, West Bengal

In Calcutta, Plasmodium falciparum cases and death due to malaria show remarkably increasing trend since 1990. The incidence of P. falciparum malaria has increased more than eleven folds in 1996 in comparison to 1990, with 0, 0, 0, 3, 7, 52 and 17 deaths in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996 respectively. Situation is more serious than what it is projected in official records as annual blood examination rate (ABER) in Calcutta Municipal area is poor, varying from 1.5 to 3.9 in 1993 and 1996 respectively. This is further evident from the fact that in a study area in 19 months (January 1995 to July 1996) the slide positivity rate (SPR) was 47.94% on an average 28.72% suffer from P. falciparum infection (as low as 0.5% in June 1996 and as high as 71.5% in November 1996). For the first time resistance of P. falciparum to chloroquine has been noted at RII and RIII level. The response of the same parasite strain to sulfa-pyrimethamine combination drug is very much promising. Fresh infection is occurring in all the months of the year and the favourable period is from July to November 1995 that is corroborating with Container index and Breteau index related to the vector mosquito Anopheles. Susceptibility status of An. stephensi indicates that the mosquito species has acquired resistance to DDT, BHC, propoxure and malathion but is still susceptible to fenthion and deltamethrin.     

Multifunctional greener additives for lubricating oil

In an anticipation to produce biodegradable additives with multifunctional performance for a cost‐effective lubricant composition, copolymers are synthesized by incorporating rice bran oil, peanut oil, β‐pinene in the backbone of isodecyl acrylate through microwave irradiation method using AIBN (azobisisobutyronitrile) as radical initiator. The prepared polymers are characterized by spectral techniques (IR, NMR) and SEC‐GPC analysis, thermal stability was determined by thermogravimetric analysis. Performance of the polymers as antiwear (AW), pour point depressant (PPD), viscosity modifier/viscosity index improver (VII) in different mineral base oils (SN1 and SN2) were done by standard ASTM methods. Biodegradability test of the polymers was carried out by disk diffusion (DD) and soil burial test methods. The copolymers of rice bran oil showed better viscosity index values and AW property, whereas the copolymers of peanut oil found to be most effective as PPD. Copolymers with higher concentration of green units showed better performance as viscosity modifier, pour point depressant and AW performance along with excellent biodegradability. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2017. © 2017 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Design and Implementation of Routing Algorithm to Enhance Network Lifetime in WBAN

Today’s era is the era of smart and remote applications exploiting advancement in sensors, cloud, Internet of things etc. Major application is in healthcare monitoring and support using wireless body area network (WBAN) in which sensor nodes sense vital physiological parameters and send to server through sink i.e. smart phone nowadays for seamless monitoring. The most significant issue in such applications is energy efficiency which leads to enhanced network life time that ensures uninterrupted seamless services. From source to sink data transmission may occur considering three different scenarios: source to sink single hop direct data transmission irrespective of in-between node distance, source to sink multi hop data transmission in which transmission range of source node is fixed at a threshold to find next forwarder node and transmission range of source node is incremented by affixed value until data gets transmitted to sink. In this work WBAN having different network configurations based on fixed or random positions of nodes have been simulated. Different scenarios with fixed and varying number of nodes are framed and simulated using MATLAB 2020a for performance evaluation of proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, path loss etc. due to data transmission from source to sink. Experimental results show that incremental approach is better than direct one in terms of energy consumption, path loss and network lifetime. While selecting transmission range of a source node, it is considered to keep Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) lower to reduce impact on human tissue.

     

An Embedding Based IR Model for Disaster Situations

Twitter (http://twitter.com) is one of the most popular social networking platforms. Twitter users can easily broadcast disaster-specific information, which, if effectively mined, can assist in relief operations. However, the brevity and informal nature of tweets pose a challenge to Information Retrieval (IR) researchers. In this paper, we successfully use word embedding techniques to improve ranking for ad-hoc queries on microblog data. Our experiments with the ‘Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness’ (SMERP) dataset provided at an ECIR 2017 workshop show that these techniques outperform conventional term-matching based IR models. In addition, we show that, for the SMERP task, our word embedding based method is more effective if the embeddings are generated from the disaster specific SMERP data, than when they are trained on the large social media collection provided for the TREC (http://trec.nist.gov/) 2011 Microblog track dataset.     

Dual‐band multifunctional metasurface for absorption and polarization conversion

In this paper, a multifunctional metasurface capable of switching between an absorber and a polarization converter is presented. The active metasurface comprises diamond‐shaped unit cells embedded with PIN diodes. The characteristic of the design lies in its capability of exhibiting multifunctionality at the same frequency of operation. The structure behaves as an absorber and linear polarization converter around 15 and 17 GHz when the PIN diode is switched ON and OFF, respectively. The working principle is demonstrated with the help of simulated results. Finally, the design is fabricated and measured, and it is seen that the results are in accordance with that of the simulated ones, establishing the concept behind switchability of absorber and polarization converter.     

Biometric-based cryptography for digital content protection without any key storage

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The traditional digital data security mechanisms follow either cryptography or authentication. The primary point of contention with these mechanisms remains...