This study aims to examine the ability of free floating aquatic plants to remove phosphorus and to predict the reduction of phosphorus from rice mill wastewater using soft computing techniques. A mesocosm study was conducted at the mill premises under normal conditions, and reliable results were obtained. Four aquatic plants, namely water hyacinth, water lettuce, salvinia, and duckweed were use...

A separable spin glass model whose exchange integral takes the form Jij-J(ilj2+12jl) which was solved by van Hemmen et al. [12] using large deviation theory [14] is rigorously treated. The almost sure convergence criteria associated with the cumulant generating function C(t) with respect to the quenched random variables (is carefully investigated, and it is proved that the related excluded null...

This note extends some results of Nishiyama [Ann. Probab. 28 (2000) 685–712]. A maximal inequality for stochastic integrals with respect to integer-valued random measures which may have infinitely many jumps on compact time intervals is given. By using it, a tightness criterion is obtained; if the so-called quadratic modulus is bounded in probability and if a certain entropy condition on the pa...

Wildfire ignition distributionmodels are powerful tools for predicting the probability of ignitions across broad areas, and identifying their drivers. Several approaches have been used for ignition-distribution modelling, yet the performance of different model types has not been compared. This is unfortunate, given that conceptually similar speciesdistributionmodels exhibit pronounced differenc...

A five-year drought in California led to a significant increase in tree mortality in the Sierra Nevada forests from 2012 to 2016. Landscape level monitoring of forest health and tree dieback is critical for vegetation and disaster management strategies. We examined the capability of multispectral imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) in detecting and explaining ...

Passwords are currently the dominant authentication mechanism in computing systems. However, users are unwilling or unable to retain passwords with a large amount of entropy. This reality is exacerbated by the increasing ability of systems to mount offline attacks. In this paper, we evaluate the degree to which the previous statements are true and attempt to ascertain the point at which passwor...

We address the problem of estimating the pose of humans using RGB image input. More specifically, we are using a random forest classifier to classify pixels into joint-based body part categories, much similar to the famous Kinect pose estimator [11], [12]. However, we are using pure RGB input, i.e. no depth. Since the random forest requires a large number of training examples, we are using comp...

Urban sprawl (US), propelled by rapid population growth leads to the shrinkage of productive agricultural lands and pristine forests in the suburban areas and, in turn, adversely affects the provision of ecosystem services. The quantification of US is thus crucial for effective urban planning and environmental management. Like many megacities in fast growing developing countries, Chennai, the c...