Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non Tuberculosis Mycobacterium, E. coli and E. faecalis from Biofilm in Drinking Water Distribution Systems from Selected Sites of Addis Ababa

The decline in microbial quality of drinking water may be attributed to many factors among which the presence of biofilm within the distribution system is the major cause of contamination. Drinking water distribution systems provide an oligotrophic environment, for post-treatment recovery and regrowth of microorganisms including the opportunistic Nontuberculosis Mycobacterium (NTM). The aim was to look for opportunistic non tuberculosis mycobacterium and indicator organisms of fecal contamination from biofilm in drinking water distribution pipeline from selected sites of Addis Ababa.A total of 40 biofilm samples were collected from two sub-cities of Addis Ababa. Biofilm samples were taken from the inner surfaces of the get valve and water meter. For the detection ofE. coliandE. faecalis,diluted biofilm samples were filtered, then it was incubated on respective culture media. For non-tuberculosis mycobacterium, the homogenized biofilm sediment was processed using the standard SD bio line method, whereby, The processed sediment was inoculated to appropriate solid and liquid culture media. The DNA extraction was conducted by chemical lysis followed by PCR amplification, from the grown colonies on LJ media (Löwenstein–Jensen). The identification of Mycobacterium species was performed by reverse hybridization using a membrane strip and an enzymatic color reaction.From the total biofilm samples, 14 out of 40 (35%) were positive for mycobacteria species.M. gordoneawas the most prevalent specie of Mycobacterium, whereby 8/14 (57.1%) of the isolates were from this species followed byM. fortuitum1/14 (7.14%). About (35.7%) 5/14 of the genus Mycobaterium were unidentified species. Indicator organisms of fecal contamination (E. coliandE. faecalis)were found in 3/40(7.5%) and 6/40(15%) respectively. There was no statistically significant association between nontuberculosis mycobacterium and the indicator organisms atpvalue of 0.01. The study has highlighted that the occurrence of NTM in drinking water distribution in a significant proportion.M. gordonaewas found to be the most dominant species of nontuberculosis mycobacterium found in the distribution line biofilm samples.
EFFECT OF SUPPLIER APPRAISAL ON PERFORMANCE OF MANUFACTURING FIRMS IN NAIROBI COUNTY , KENYA

With the increased organization performance concerns and awareness among several stakeholders in the manufacturing firms as well as interest groups such as consumer groups, manufacturing sector organizations may find it appropriate to adopt supplier appraisal practices. This study is guided by the lean supplier competence model, shareholders theory, strategic theory and grey system theory. The study is guided by the following objectives, the supplier appraisal criteria, the supplier development, supplier appraisal practices and supplier appraisal approach. The research objectives and research questions set out and the scope of study limited to manufacturing firms in Nairobi County, Kenya. The study used descriptive research design. Data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics where regression analysis was used to establish the effect of independent variables on the dependent variable. The population census was 455 respondents drawn from manufacturing firms Nairobi county with a sample size population of 213. The data was analyzed with SPSS version 23. Non-probability sampling technique was used. As such, since the purposive nonprobability sampling technique would be appropriate. Questionnaires were used to collect both primary and secondary data. Data collected was validated, edited, coded and then analyzed qualitatively. Descriptive statistics such as percentages and frequencies was used to summarize the data. Data presentation methods include tables, charts and figures. It was established that most of the supplier appraisal indicators have positive impact on performance of the firm. The study findings showed that the four variables had a significant influence on performance of the firms. The study recommended that a similar research should be conducted with an aim at investigating the effects of supplier appraisal on performance with other variables or of other firms in other sectors, including the service industry in the Kenyan market. The study indicated that there has been limited amount of research on effects of supplier appraisal on performance of manufacturing firms in Kenya. Thus, the findings of this study serve as a basis for future studies on supplier appraisal.
Framework for Hypervisor in Grid

In the recent years, the role of virtualization has become vital in the grid computing community to bridge the gap between computation resource configuration and job requirements. The venture of virtualization in the grid computing environment has set another challenge to monitor and manage the virtual machines in the grid. To solve this problem of monitoring the virtual machines we propose a Virtual Information System which will provide the complete information about the virtual parameters of the machine. This information would be better useful for Grid management system to enhance the management of virtual resources.
Chapter 2 Brain – Computer Interfaces

Brain–computer interfaces are a new technology that could help to restore useful function to people severely disabled by a wide variety of devastating neuromuscular disorders and to enhance functions in healthy individuals. The first demonstrations of brain–computer interface (BCI) technology occurred in the 1960s when GreyWalter used the scalp-recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) to control a slide projector in 1964 [1] and when Eberhard Fetz taught monkeys to control a meter needle (and thereby earn food rewards) by changing the firing rate of a single cortical neuron [2, 3]. In the 1970s, Jacques Vidal developed a system that used the scalp-recorded visual evoked potential (VEP) over the visual cortex to determine the eye-gaze direction (i.e., the visual fixation point) in humans, and thus to determine the direction in which a person wanted to move a computer cursor [4, 5]. At that time, Vidal coined the term “brain–computer interface. ” Since then and into the early 1990s, BCI research studies continued to appear only every few years. In 1980, Elbert et al. showed that people could learn to control slow cortical potentials (SCPs) in scalp-recorded EEG activity and could use that control to adjust the
Memristor : A Promising Emerging Nanoelectronic Device

Continued dimensional and functional scaling of Complementary Metal-OxideSemiconductor (CMOS) technology is driving information processing into a broadening spectrum of new applications. Many of these applications are enabled by performance gains and/or increased complexity realized by scaling. The performance of the components and the final application can be measured in many different ways; higher speed, higher density, lower power, more functionality, etc. Traditionally, though, dimensional scaling had been adequate to bring about these performance merits but it is no longer so. Since dimensional scaling of CMOS will eventually approach fundamental limits, several new alternative information processing devices and architectures for existing or new functions are being explored to sustain the historical integrated circuit scaling cadence and the reduction of cost/function in the next decades [1]. CMOS logic and memory together form the predominant majority of semiconductor device production. Today the semiconductor industry is facing two classes of difficult challenges related to extending integrated circuit technology to new applications and to beyond the end of CMOS dimensional scaling. One class relates to pushing CMOS beyond its ultimate density and functionality by integrating a new high-speed, highly-dense, and low-power memory technology onto the CMOS platform. The other class is to extend information processing substantially beyond that attainable by CMOS, using an innovative combination of new devices, interconnect and architectural approaches for extending CMOS and eventually inventing a new information processing platform technology. Difficult challenges gating the development of emerging research devices are therefore divided into two parts: (i) those related to memory technologies, and (ii) those related to information processing or logic devices.
USING LOCOMOTION SCORING TO PUT TOGETHER A PROGRAM TO REDUCE LAMENESS ON THE DAIRY

A recent economic analysis estimated that each clinically lame cow costs the dairy producer approximately $300 (C. L. Guard, Cornell University as quoted in Shearer et al., 2005). Costs associated with lameness include decreased milk production (Warnick et al., 2001; Hernandez et al., 2002b; Juarez et al., 2003), reduced fertility (Sprecher et al., 1997; Hernandez et al., 2002a: Melendez et al., 2002), increased culling risk (Collick et al., 1989; Sprecher et al., 1997; Booth et al., 2004), treatment costs and increased labor requirements. Surveys indicate that incidence of lameness on dairies varies between 4 and 55 cases per 100 cows per year and is dependent upon farm, location and time of year (Clarkson et. al., 1996; Whitaker et al., 2000; Booth et al., 2004). Clearly, lameness is a costly disease and reducing its incidence will have a very favorable impact on dairy profitability.
Connecting Social Media to E-Commerce Product Recommendation using Top-K

: Now a days online shopping has achieved a tremendous popularity within very less amount of time. Recently few ecommerce websites has been developed their functionalities to a extent such that they recommend the product for their users referring to the connectivity of the users to the social media and provide direct login from such social media such as facebook, Twitter, whatsapp. Recommend the users that are totally new to the website client novel solution for cross-site cold-start product recommendation that aims for recommending products from e-commerce websites. In specific propose learning both users and products feature representations from data collected from e-commerce websites using recurrent Top-K to transform user’s social networking features into user embeddings. The survey paper develops a Top-k approach which can manipulate the learnt user implanting for cold-start product recommendation.
Promoting Effort Attributions to EFL Students

Attribution describes an explanation that learners provide for the progress of their second language learning and reasons they attribute to their success or failure in the process of learning a target language. This paper explicates three practical ways to promote effort attributions based in Dornyei’s (2001) motivational teaching framework to the learning process of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. The explications are elaborated with relevant literature and my reflective learning experiences as a language learner in Indonesia. This paper will be an interest of EFL teachers who are looking for practical ways in enhancing motivation and academic achievements of their students. In essence, this paper encourages constructive collaboration between parents and EFL teachers in taking an active role to promote the effort attributions to students.
Insecticidal activity of Peganum harmala seed extract against tomato fruit borer [ Helicoverpa armigera ( Hubner ) ]

The present work describes the insecticidal activity of aqueous, ethanol and benzene extract of Peganum harmala L. seeds along with one synthetic chemical, cypermethrin against tomato fruit borer [Helicoverpa armigera (Hubner)] (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae). Seeds extract have shown pronounced effect on larval mortality, the data collected after 24 hours. High rate mortality percentage of Helicoverpa armigera larva caused by cypermethrin 25% EC (100%), followed by Harmal seed benzene extract30, 20% (80.00%),(73.33%), Harmal seed ethanol extract30, 20%( 66.67%), (60.00%), Harmal seed aqueous extract 30%(46.67) and Harmal seed aqueous extract 20%(40.00%), which was lest effective among all the treatments.
Effects of left ventricular ejection fraction on morbidity and mortality in major abdominal surgery

Objective: Our aim in this study was to investigate the effects of Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF) on the clinical results of patients who underwent major abdominal procedures due to the malignancies of the gastrointestinal system (GIS). Methods: GIS malignancy procedures, which were electively performed in our clinic between 2013 and 2016, were included in the study. The patients were divided into 4 groups according to their LVEF and were classified as < 30% (Group 1), 30% to 44% (Group 2), 45% to 54% (Group 3) and > 55% (Group 4). Subgroup analysis was performed among the patients with and without peroperative events. In subgroup analysis, independent risk factors were determined using logistic regression analysis for peroperative events in patients undergoing surgery for GI malignancy. Results: A total of 220 patients were covered by the study, including 12 patients in Group 1, 13 patients in Group 2, 25 patients in Group 3, and 170 patients in Group 4. When Group 1 was evaluated, it was seen that 91.7% of the patients had a score of ASA 3 and 58.7% of the patients were on index 4 according to Lee’s Revised Cardiac Risk Index. No significant differences were observed among the groups with regards to preoperative laboratory results, BMI, and pulmonary function test values. No differences were found among the groups regarding diagnoses at the time of admission, surgical procedures performed, duration of operation, and blood transfusion during operation as well. Moreover, there were no significant differences between surgical or non-surgical postoperative complications and the mortality cases within 30 days after surgery. Mortality was seen in three patients and all these patients had an LVEF value higher than 44%. The subgroup multivariate analysis of perioperative complications revealed that diabetes mellitus (DM) (p: 0.017, OR: 2.457, CI: 0.194-0.853), duration of operation over 300 minutes (p: 0.001, OR: 2.68, CI: 0.204-0.682) and older than 65 years (p: 0.007, OR: 2.341, CI: 0.230-0.794) were independent risk factors. Conclusion: When assessed according to LVEF, there was no difference between groups in terms of morbidity and mortality according to Clavian Dindo Classification. We believe that major abdominal procedures for GIS malignancies with low LVEF can be performed with acceptable morbidity and mortality rates at experienced centers.
A Robustness Segmentation Approach for Skin Cancer Image Detection Based on an Adaptive Automatic Thresholding Technique

Two type of automatic techniques are suggested and assessed and compared to the division of skin lesions in dermoscopic images. That includes modern automatic methods which have been effectively utilized in numerous therapeutic imaging issues. Success or disappointment computer-aided diagnosis systems dependent on the division step thoroughness. Used two types of methods in this work to the automatic division include the k-means and automatic thresholding. Utilizing a dataset of 200 images as ground truth manually sectioned by the specialist dermatologist to assessed the segmentation methods with four different metrics. Through executed division methods, the automatic thresholding technique accomplished the best division execution.
Profiling on Social Media : An Ensemble Learning Model using Various Features Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2019

We describe our participation in the PAN 2019 shared task on author profiling, determine whether a tweet’s author is a bot or a human, and in case of human, identify author’s gender for English and Spanish datasets. In this paper, we investigate the complementarities of both stylometry methods and contentbased methods, putting forward various techniques for building flexible features. Acting as a complement to these methods, we investigate an ensemble learning method paves the way to improve the performance of AP tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the ensemble method by the combination of the stylometry methods and content-based methods can more accurately capture the author profiles than traditional methods. Our proposed model obtained 0.9333 and 0.8352 of accuracy in the bot and gender identification tasks for English test dataset respectively.
Wideband Speech Enhancement Using a Robust Noise Estimation

Introduction Noise is an unavoidable obstacle in communication systems, especially in hands-free communication where the background noise level is high due to the distance of the speaker from the microphone. In such systems the inclusion of speech enhancement becomes mandatory, provided that it does not introduce any additional distortions to the speech and the background noise. Especially now, different issues in widebandspeech enhancement are addressed. A good noise estimation combined with a suitable spectral subtraction rule plays a key role in obtaining a good subjective quality and intelligibility of the enhanced speech. In this paper the noise estimation method [1, 2] is considered, which already for telephoneband noisy speech shows degradation in performance when the background noise spectrum has a narrowband character (for, e.g., in cars where the noise has low-pass behavior). This effect becomes stronger for wideband noisy speech and hence leads to stronger degradation of the enhanced speech. With a modified noise estimation method an improvement in performance is observed for both narrowband and wideband background noise.
EEG BASED USER IDENTIFICATION METHODS USING TWO SEPARATE SETS OF FEATURES BASED ON DCT AND WAVELET 1

Brain activities may represented by EEG signals, which are set of measures using electrodes along the scalp, they are more secret, sensitive, and hard to steal and reproduce. They hold great potential to provide robust and secure biometric system for user identification and verification. This paper aims to present a comparison between our previous proposed feature set that based on Partitioned Fourier spectra and some new features sets proposed in this work. They established as simple, fast, and promising set of features for EEG-based identification system. The first introduced feature set is based on the energy distribution of DCT AC-components, and the second set is the statistical moments for three types of wavelet transforms. Each set of features is tested using normalized distance measures for matching stage. Each proposed method was tested using the publicly available EEG CSU dataset which was collected from seven healthy volunteers and the publicly available EEG Motor Movement/Imagery dataset which is relatively large dataset was collected from 109 healthy subjects. The attained identification results are encouraging with best recognition rate is (100%) for all proposed methods and for both datasets. All tested feature sets were extracted under the condition, which was adopted in our previous work, that is "they should extracted from EEG data belong to single task & signal channel". All achieved results are considered competitive when compared with the results of other recently published works. The adopted condition reduced the computational complexity and thus reduced the required processing time. Also, the wavelets based methods hold computational complexity less than DFT and DCT with recognition rates are more competitive to them.
Modified Koch Fractal Antenna for Ku and K-Band Applications

In this article, a modified Koch fractal Antenna for Ku and K-band utilizing satellite application is proposed. The design is based on the conventional microstrip antenna (MSA) and the advantage of fractal concepts. The proposed antenna is the combination of triangular shape of radiating patch and two iterations Koch snowflake is applied on each side. Modified Koch Antenna used Von Koch's snowflake concept with an additional notch generation in second iteration. Commercially available High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) is used here for simulation purpose. The suggested antenna is assembled on FR4 substrate with dielectric constant (εr) 4.4. The antenna covers 12.31 GHz, 13.18 GHz, 15.21 GHz and 19.7 GHz which is useful in uplinking and downlinking of satellite applications.
Effect of foliar fertilization with zinc and manganese sulfate on yield, dry matter accumulation, and zinc and manganese contents in leaf and seed of chickpea (Cicer arietinum)

To investigate the effects of zinc (Zn) and manganese (Mn) foliar fertilization on yield, dry matter accumulation, Zn and Mn concentrations in leaf and seed of chickpea cultivars, a field experiment was conducted in 2014. The experimental design was a split plot in randomized complete block with three replications. The phenological stages recorded were as follows: Emergence, flowering, 50% flowering, and harvest maturity. At harvest, economic yield and its components, biological yield, harvest index, stem, leaf, pod, seed, and total dry weight were measured. The Zn and Mn contents were determined by atomic absorption spectrometry. The results indicated that the spraying of Zn and Mn elements did not have a significant effect on the time from emergence to 50% flowering and the time from emergence to maturation. Spraying treatments had a significant effect on dry weight of stems, leaves, pods, seeds, and total plant. In all three cultivars, Zn spraying had the greatest effect on the plant height, number of pods per plant, number of seeds per plant, 100-seed weight, grain yield, biological yield, and dry weight of leaves, seeds, and total plant, while Mn spraying had the greatest effect on the increase in stem and pod dry weight and protein content.
Deploying Robots in Everyday Environments: Towards Dependable and Practical Robotic Systems

Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful introspection capabilities, which means that they cannot always deal with failures in a reasonable manner; in addition, manual diagnosis is often a tedious task that requires tech-nicians to have a considerable set of robotics skills. In this paper, we discuss our ongoing eﬀorts - in the context of the ROPOD 1 project - to address some of these problems. In particular, we (i) present our early eﬀorts at developing a robotic black box and consider some factors that complicate its design, (ii) explain our component and system monitoring concept, and (iii) describe the necessity for remote monitoring and experimentation as well as our initial attempts at performing those. Our preliminary work opens a range of promising directions for making robots more usable and reliable in practice - not only in the context of ROPOD, but in a more general sense as well.
Metrological Characterization and Semantic Annotation of Space-Aided Distributed Sensor System for Hydrogeological Disaster Management

In a disaster or generally in a critical event, the availability of innovative, space-based autonomous sensor network systems used as support for the “early warning" of the event, is strongly recommended. This paper deals with a discussion on behavioural development of such systems, devoted to improve the effectiveness of their "first response". It is envisioned how a suitable metrological characterization of sensors could be enhanced by a semantic characterization of raw data in order to enable logic-based inferences. The resulting system allows a robust improvement of performance and reliability with respect to competitor frameworks. Both ideas and approaches are now implementing in an off-the-shelf publisher/subscriber Message-Oriented Middleware named BEE-DDS in order to assess feasibility. Tests and experiments are underway.