Academic Digital Library for institutions, students, and solo learners

Discovery

Content search and filters

This is the first search surface for the seven content types. Next we will connect full-text search and metadata-specific filters.

Results 1,892

Periodicals

A Review of the Artificial Neural Network Models for Water Quality Prediction

Water quality prediction plays an important role in environmental monitoring, ecosystem sustainability, and aquaculture. Traditional prediction methods cannot capture the nonlinear and non-stationarity of water quality well. In recent years, the rapid development of artificial neural networks (ANNs) has made them a hotspot in water quality prediction. We have conducted extensive investigation and analysis on ANN-based water quality prediction from three aspects, namely feedforward, recurrent, and hybrid architectures. Based on 151 papers published from 2008 to 2019, 23 types of water quality variables were highlighted. The variables were primarily collected by the sensor, followed by specialist experimental equipment, such as a UV-visible photometer, as there is no mature sensor for measurement at present. Five different output strategies, namely Univariate-Input-Itself-Output, Univariate-Input-Other-Output, Multivariate-Input-Other(multi), Multivariate-Input-Itself-Other-Output, and Multivariate-Input-Itself-Other (multi)-Output, are summarized. From results of the review, it can be concluded that the ANN models are capable of dealing with different modeling problems in rivers, lakes, reservoirs, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), groundwater, ponds, and streams. The results of many of the review articles are useful to researchers in prediction and similar fields. Several new architectures presented in the study, such as recurrent and hybrid structures, are able to improve the modeling quality of future development.

Architecture & Planning2020Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Periodicals

CropDeep: The Crop Vision Dataset for Deep-Learning-Based Classification and Detection in Precision Agriculture

Intelligence has been considered as the major challenge in promoting economic potential and production efficiency of precision agriculture. In order to apply advanced deep-learning technology to complete various agricultural tasks in online and offline ways, a large number of crop vision datasets with domain-specific annotation are urgently needed. To encourage further progress in challenging realistic agricultural conditions, we present the CropDeep species classification and detection dataset, consisting of 31,147 images with over 49,000 annotated instances from 31 different classes. In contrast to existing vision datasets, images were collected with different cameras and equipment in greenhouses, captured in a wide variety of situations. It features visually similar species and periodic changes with more representative annotations, which have supported a stronger benchmark for deep-learning-based classification and detection. To further verify the application prospect, we provide extensive baseline experiments using state-of-the-art deep-learning classification and detection models. Results show that current deep-learning-based methods achieve well performance in classification accuracy over 99%. While current deep-learning methods achieve only 92% detection accuracy, illustrating the difficulty of the dataset and improvement room of state-of-the-art deep-learning models when applied to crops production and management. Specifically, we suggest that the YOLOv3 network has good potential application in agricultural detection tasks.

Architecture & Planning2019Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Periodicals

The Internet of Things: Impact and Implications for Health Care Delivery

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of wireless, interrelated, and connected digital devices that can collect, send, and store data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. The IoT promises many benefits to streamlining and enhancing health care delivery to proactively predict health issues and diagnose, treat, and monitor patients both in and out of the hospital. Worldwide, government leaders and decision makers are implementing policies to deliver health care services using technology and more so in response to the novel COVID-19 pandemic. It is now becoming increasingly important to understand how established and emerging IoT technologies can support health systems to deliver safe and effective care. The aim of this viewpoint paper is to provide an overview of the current IoT technology in health care, outline how IoT devices are improving health service delivery, and outline how IoT technology can affect and disrupt global health care in the next decade. The potential of IoT-based health care is expanded upon to theorize how IoT can improve the accessibility of preventative public health services and transition our current secondary and tertiary health care to be a more proactive, continuous, and coordinated system. Finally, this paper will deal with the potential issues that IoT-based health care generates, barriers to market adoption from health care professionals and patients alike, confidence and acceptability, privacy and security, interoperability, standardization and remuneration, data storage, and control and ownership. Corresponding enablers of IoT in current health care will rely on policy support, cybersecurity-focused guidelines, careful strategic planning, and transparent policies within health care organizations. IoT-based health care has great potential to improve the efficiency of the health system and improve population health.

Architecture & Planning2020JMIR Publications
Periodicals

Towards Scalable Multi-Domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset

Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with possibly overlapping functionality. Furthermore, some of these services have little to no training data available. Existing public datasets for task-oriented dialogue do not sufficiently capture these challenges since they cover few domains and assume a single static ontology per domain. In this work, we introduce the the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, containing over 16k multi-domain conversations spanning 16 domains. Our dataset exceeds the existing task-oriented dialogue corpora in scale, while also highlighting the challenges associated with building large-scale virtual assistants. It provides a challenging testbed for a number of tasks including language understanding, slot filling, dialogue state tracking and response generation. Along the same lines, we present a schema-guided paradigm for task-oriented dialogue, in which predictions are made over a dynamic set of intents and slots, provided as input, using their natural language descriptions. This allows a single dialogue system to easily support a large number of services and facilitates simple integration of new services without requiring additional training data. Building upon the proposed paradigm, we release a model for dialogue state tracking capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs, while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

Architecture & Planning2020
Periodicals

Stock Market Analysis: A Review and Taxonomy of Prediction Techniques

Stock market prediction has always caught the attention of many analysts and researchers. Popular theories suggest that stock markets are essentially a random walk and it is a fool’s game to try and predict them. Predicting stock prices is a challenging problem in itself because of the number of variables which are involved. In the short term, the market behaves like a voting machine but in the longer term, it acts like a weighing machine and hence there is scope for predicting the market movements for a longer timeframe. Application of machine learning techniques and other algorithms for stock price analysis and forecasting is an area that shows great promise. In this paper, we first provide a concise review of stock markets and taxonomy of stock market prediction methods. We then focus on some of the research achievements in stock analysis and prediction. We discuss technical, fundamental, short- and long-term approaches used for stock analysis. Finally, we present some challenges and research opportunities in this field.

Architecture & Planning2019Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Periodicals

Serverification of Molecular Modeling Applications: The Rosetta Online Server That Includes Everyone (ROSIE)

The Rosetta molecular modeling software package provides experimentally tested and rapidly evolving tools for the 3D structure prediction and high-resolution design of proteins, nucleic acids, and a growing number of non-natural polymers. Despite its free availability to academic users and improving documentation, use of Rosetta has largely remained confined to developers and their immediate collaborators due to the code's difficulty of use, the requirement for large computational resources, and the unavailability of servers for most of the Rosetta applications. Here, we present a unified web framework for Rosetta applications called ROSIE (Rosetta Online Server that Includes Everyone). ROSIE provides (a) a common user interface for Rosetta protocols, (b) a stable application programming interface for developers to add additional protocols, (c) a flexible back-end to allow leveraging of computer cluster resources shared by RosettaCommons member institutions, and (d) centralized administration by the RosettaCommons to ensure continuous maintenance. This paper describes the ROSIE server infrastructure, a step-by-step 'serverification' protocol for use by Rosetta developers, and the deployment of the first nine ROSIE applications by six separate developer teams: Docking, RNA de novo, ERRASER, Antibody, Sequence Tolerance, Supercharge, Beta peptide design, NCBB design, and VIP redesign. As illustrated by the number and diversity of these applications, ROSIE offers a general and speedy paradigm for serverification of Rosetta applications that incurs negligible cost to developers and lowers barriers to Rosetta use for the broader biological community. ROSIE is available at http://rosie.rosettacommons.org.

Architecture & Planning2013Public Library of Science
Periodicals

Examining the debt implications of the Belt and Road Initiative from a policy perspective

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) hopes to deliver trillions of dollars in infrastructure financing to Asia, Europe, and Africa. If the initiative follows Chinese practices to date for infrastructure financing, which often entail lending to sovereign borrowers, then BRI raises the risk of debt distress in some borrower countries. This paper assesses the likelihood of debt problems in the 68 countries identified as potential BRI borrowers. We conclude that eight countries are at particular risk of debt distress based on an identified pipeline of project lending associated with BRI.Because this indebtedness also suggests a higher concentration in debt owed to official and quasi-official Chinese creditors, we examine Chinese policies and practices related to sustainable financing and the management of debt problems in borrower countries. Based on this evidence, we offer recommendations to improve Chinese policy in these areas. The recommendations are offered to Chinese policymakers directly, as well as to BRI’s bilateral and multilateral partners, including the IMF and World Bank.

Architecture & Planning2019
Periodicals

Adaptive Transgenerational Plasticity in Plants: Case Studies, Mechanisms, and Implications for Natural Populations

Plants respond to environmental conditions not only by plastic changes to their own development and physiology, but also by altering the phenotypes expressed by their offspring. This transgenerational plasticity was initially considered to entail only negative effects of stressful parental environments, such as production of smaller seeds by resource- or temperature-stressed parent plants, and was therefore viewed as environmental noise. Recent evolutionary ecology studies have shown that in some cases, these inherited environmental effects can include specific growth adjustments that are functionally adaptive to the parental conditions that induced them, which can range from contrasting states of controlled laboratory environments to the complex habitat variation encountered by natural plant populations. Preliminary findings suggest that adaptive transgenerational effects can be transmitted by means of diverse mechanisms including changes to seed provisioning and biochemistry, and epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation that can persist across multiple generations. These non-genetically inherited adaptations can influence the ecological breadth and evolutionary dynamics of plant taxa and promote the spread of invasive plants. Interdisciplinary studies that join mechanistic and evolutionary ecology approaches will be an important source of future insights.

Architecture & Planning2011Frontiers Media
Periodicals

Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper, we consider the sum power minimization problem via jointly optimizing user association, power control, computation capacity allocation, and location planning in a mobile edge computing (MEC) network with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To solve the nonconvex problem, we propose a low-complexity algorithm with solving three subproblems iteratively. For the user association subproblem, the compressive sensing-based algorithm is accordingly proposed. For the computation capacity allocation subproblem, the optimal solution is obtained in closed form. For the location planning subproblem, the optimal solution is effectively obtained via one-dimensional search method. To obtain a feasible solution for this iterative algorithm, a fuzzy c-means clustering-based algorithm is proposed. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than the conventional approaches.

Architecture & Planning2019Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Periodicals

Largest GWAS of PTSD (N=20 070) yields genetic overlap with schizophrenia and sex differences in heritability

The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium-Posttraumatic Stress Disorder group (PGC-PTSD) combined genome-wide case–control molecular genetic data across 11 multiethnic studies to quantify PTSD heritability, to examine potential shared genetic risk with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder and to identify risk loci for PTSD. Examining 20 730 individuals, we report a molecular genetics-based heritability estimate ( h 2 SNP ) for European-American females of 29% that is similar to h 2 SNP for schizophrenia and is substantially higher than h 2 SNP in European-American males (estimate not distinguishable from zero). We found strong evidence of overlapping genetic risk between PTSD and schizophrenia along with more modest evidence of overlap with bipolar and major depressive disorder. No single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) exceeded genome-wide significance in the transethnic (overall) meta-analysis and we do not replicate previously reported associations. Still, SNP-level summary statistics made available here afford the best-available molecular genetic index of PTSD—for both European- and African-American individuals—and can be used in polygenic risk prediction and genetic correlation studies of diverse phenotypes. Publication of summary statistics for ∼ 10 000 African Americans contributes to the broader goal of increased ancestral diversity in genomic data resources. In sum, the results demonstrate genetic influences on the development of PTSD, identify shared genetic risk between PTSD and other psychiatric disorders and highlight the importance of multiethnic/racial samples. As has been the case with schizophrenia and other complex genetic disorders, larger sample sizes are needed to identify specific risk loci.

Architecture & Planning2017Springer Nature
Periodicals

An Update on the Impact of Climate Change in Viticulture and Potential Adaptations

Climate change will impose increasingly warm and dry conditions on vineyards. Wine quality and yield are strongly influenced by climatic conditions and depend on complex interactions between temperatures, water availability, plant material, and viticultural techniques. In established winegrowing regions, growers have optimized yield and quality by choosing plant material and viticultural techniques according to local climatic conditions, but as the climate changes, these will need to be adjusted. Adaptations to higher temperatures include changing plant material (e.g., rootstocks, cultivars and clones) and modifying viticultural techniques (e.g., changing trunk height, leaf area to fruit weight ratio, timing of pruning) such that harvest dates are maintained in the optimal period at the end of September or early October in the Northern Hemisphere. Vineyards can be made more resilient to drought by planting drought resistant plant material, modifying training systems (e.g., goblet bush vines, or trellised vineyards at wider row spacing), or selecting soils with greater soil water holding capacity. While most vineyards in Europe are currently dry-farmed, irrigation may also be an option to grow sustainable yields under increasingly dry conditions but consideration must be given to associated impacts on water resources and the environment.

Architecture & Planning2019Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Periodicals

Financial literacy, financial advice, and financial behavior

In this survey, we review the voluminous body of literature on the measurement and the determinants of financial literacy. Wherever possible, we supplement existing findings with recent descriptive evidence of German households’ financial literacy levels based on the novel Panel on Household Finances dataset, a large-scale survey administered by the Deutsche Bundesbank and representative of the financial situation of households in Germany. Prior research not only documents generally low levels of financial literacy but also finds large heterogeneity in financial literacy across the population, suggesting that economically vulnerable groups are placed at further disadvantage by their lack of financial knowledge. In addition, we assess the literature evaluating financial education as a means to improve financial literacy and financial behavior. Our survey suggests that the evidence with respect to the effectiveness of the programs is rather disappointing. We also review the role of individuals’ financial literacy for the use of professional financial advice and assess whether expert intervention can serve as a substitute to financial literacy. We conclude by discussing several directions for future research.

Architecture & Planning2017Springer Science+Business Media
Periodicals

RA-UNet: A Hybrid Deep Attention-Aware Network to Extract Liver and Tumor in CT Scans

Automatic extraction of liver and tumor from CT volumes is a challenging task due to their heterogeneous and diffusive shapes. Recently, 2D deep convolutional neural networks have become popular in medical image segmentation tasks because of the utilization of large labeled datasets to learn hierarchical features. However, few studies investigate 3D networks for liver tumor segmentation. In this paper, we propose a 3D hybrid residual attention-aware segmentation method, i.e., RA-UNet, to precisely extract the liver region and segment tumors from the liver. The proposed network has a basic architecture as U-Net which extracts contextual information combining low-level feature maps with high-level ones. Attention residual modules are integrated so that the attention-aware features change adaptively. This is the first work that an attention residual mechanism is used to segment tumors from 3D medical volumetric images. We evaluated our framework on the public MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation dataset and tested the generalization on the 3DIRCADb dataset. The experiments show that our architecture obtains competitive results.

Architecture & Planning2020Frontiers Media
Periodicals

MetaCell: analysis of single-cell RNA-seq data using K-nn graph partitions

scRNA-seq profiles each represent a highly partial sample of mRNA molecules from a unique cell that can never be resampled, and robust analysis must separate the sampling effect from biological variance. We describe a methodology for partitioning scRNA-seq datasets into metacells: disjoint and homogenous groups of profiles that could have been resampled from the same cell. Unlike clustering analysis, our algorithm specializes at obtaining granular as opposed to maximal groups. We show how to use metacells as building blocks for complex quantitative transcriptional maps while avoiding data smoothing. Our algorithms are implemented in the MetaCell R/C++ software package.

Architecture & Planning2019BioMed Central
Periodicals

Measuring sleep quality in older adults: a comparison using subjective and objective methods

Sleep quality decreases with aging and thus sleep complaints are prevalent in older adults, particularly for those with cognitive impairment and dementia. For older adults, emerging evidence suggests poor sleep quality increases risk of developing cognitive impairment and dementia. Given the aging population-and the impending economic burden associated with increasing numbers of dementia patients-there is pressing need to improve sleep quality among older adults. As such, research efforts have increased focus on investigating the association between age-related sleep changes and cognitive decline in older adults. Sleep quality is a complex construct to evaluate empirically, and yet the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) is commonly used in studies as their only measure of sleep quality. Furthermore, the PSQI may not be the best sleep quality measure for older adults, due to its reliance on the cognitive capacity to reflect on the past month. Further study is needed to determine the PSQI's validity among older adults. Thus, the current study examined sleep quality for 78 community dwelling adults 55+ to determine the PSQI's predictive validity for objective sleep quality (as measured by actigraphy). We compared two subjective measures of sleep quality-the PSQI and Consensus Sleep Diary (CSD)-with actigraphy (MotionWatch 8©; camntech). Our results suggest perceived sleep quality is quite different from objective reality, at least for adults 55+. Importantly, we show this difference is unrelated to age, gender, education, or cognitive status (assessed using standard screens). Previous studies have shown the PSQI to be a valuable tool for assessing subjective sleep quality; however, our findings indicate for older adults the PSQI should not be used as a substitute for actigraphy, or vice versa. Hence, we conclude best practice is to include both subjective and objective measures when examining sleep quality in older adults (i.e., the PSQI, CSD, and actigraphy).

Architecture & Planning2015Frontiers Media
Periodicals

Complete classification of reflexive polyhedra in four dimensions

Four dimensional reflexive polyhedra encode the data for smooth Calabi-Yau threefolds that are hypersurfaces in toric varieties, and have important applications both in perturbative and in non-perturbative string theory. We describe how we obtained all 473,800,776 reflexive polyhedra that exist in four dimensions and the 30,108 distinct pairs of Hodge numbers of the resulting Calabi-Yau manifolds. As a byproduct we show that all these spaces (and hence the corresponding string vacua) are connected via a chain of singular transitions.

Architecture & Planning2000
Periodicals

Sex-stratified Genome-wide Association Studies Including 270,000 Individuals Show Sexual Dimorphism in Genetic Loci for Anthropometric Traits

Given the anthropometric differences between men and women and previous evidence of sex-difference in genetic effects, we conducted a genome-wide search for sexually dimorphic associations with height, weight, body mass index, waist circumference, hip circumference, and waist-to-hip-ratio (133,723 individuals) and took forward 348 SNPs into follow-up (additional 137,052 individuals) in a total of 94 studies. Seven loci displayed significant sex-difference (FDR<5%), including four previously established (near GRB14/COBLL1, LYPLAL1/SLC30A10, VEGFA, ADAMTS9) and three novel anthropometric trait loci (near MAP3K1, HSD17B4, PPARG), all of which were genome-wide significant in women (P<5×10(-8)), but not in men. Sex-differences were apparent only for waist phenotypes, not for height, weight, BMI, or hip circumference. Moreover, we found no evidence for genetic effects with opposite directions in men versus women. The PPARG locus is of specific interest due to its role in diabetes genetics and therapy. Our results demonstrate the value of sex-specific GWAS to unravel the sexually dimorphic genetic underpinning of complex traits.

Architecture & Planning2013Public Library of Science
Periodicals

Grid'5000: A Large Scale And Highly Reconfigurable Experimental Grid Testbed

Large scale distributed systems such as Grids are difficult to study from theoretical models and simulators only. Most Grids deployed at large scale are production platforms that are inappropriate research tools because of their limited reconfiguration, control and monitoring capabilities. In this paper, we present Grid'5000, a 5000 CPU nation-wide infrastructure for research in Grid computing. Grid'5000 is designed to provide a scientific tool for computer scientists similar to the large-scale instruments used by physicists, astronomers, and biologists. We describe the motivations, design considerations, architecture, control, and monitoring infrastructure of this experimental platform. We present configuration examples and performance results for the reconfiguration subsystem.

Architecture & Planning2006SAGE Publishing
Periodicals

A Review on Virtual Reality Skill Training Applications

This study aimed to discuss the research efforts in developing virtual reality (VR) technology for different training applications. To begin with, we describe how VR training experiences are typically created and delivered using the current software and hardware. We then discuss the challenges and solutions of applying VR training to different application domains, such as first responder training, medical training, military training, workforce training, and education. Furthermore, we discuss the common assessment tests and evaluation methods used to validate VR training effectiveness. We conclude the article by discussing possible future directions to leverage VR technology advances for developing novel training experiences.

Architecture & Planning2021Frontiers Media
Periodicals

Algorithms for collision-free navigation of mobile robots in complex cluttered environments: a survey

SUMMARY We review a range of techniques related to navigation of unmanned vehicles through unknown environments with obstacles, especially those that rigorously ensure collision avoidance (given certain assumptions about the system). This topic continues to be an active area of research, and we highlight some directions in which available approaches may be improved. The paper discusses models of the sensors and vehicle kinematics, assumptions about the environment, and performance criteria. Methods applicable to stationary obstacles, moving obstacles and multiple vehicles scenarios are all reviewed. In preference to global approaches based on full knowledge of the environment, particular attention is given to reactive methods based on local sensory data, with a special focus on recently proposed navigation laws based on model predictive and sliding mode control.

Architecture & Planning2014Cambridge University Press
Periodicals

Neonatal Morbidities of Fetal Growth Restriction: Pathophysiology and Impact

Being born small lays the foundation for short-term and long-term implications for life. Intrauterine or fetal growth restriction describes the pregnancy complication of pathological reduced fetal growth, leading to significant perinatal mortality and morbidity, and subsequent long-term deficits. Placental insufficiency is the principal cause of FGR, which in turn underlies a chronic undersupply of oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. The neonatal morbidities associated with FGR depend on the timing of onset of placental dysfunction and growth restriction, its severity, and the gestation at birth of the infant. In this review, we explore the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in the development of major neonatal morbidities in FGR, and their impact on the health of the infant. Fetal cardiovascular adaptation and altered organ development during gestation are principal contributors to postnatal consequences of FGR. Clinical presentation, diagnostic tools and management strategies of neonatal morbidities are presented. We also present information on the current status of targeted therapies. A better understanding of neonatal morbidities associated with FGR will enable early neonatal detection, monitoring and management of potential adverse outcomes in the newborn period and beyond.

Architecture & Planning2019Frontiers Media