The main goal was to optimise the thermal conditions within a diving suit and improve the user’s comfort. The wet diving suit consisted of (i) an external neoprene layer with air bubbles as additional insulation, and (ii) internal textile clothing to improve the insulation effect. Both layers were connected as a composite because the friction coefficient is very high. The core temperature shoul...

BACKGROUND Infection with Trichomonas vaginalis is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in humans. The prevalence of infection in Iran has been reported between 2 to 8%, depending on deferent socio-cultural conditions. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of T. vaginalis in women referred to gynecologic clinics in Hamadan city, West of Iran. METHODS This descrip...

Distillers byproducts are excellent feed resources for feedlot cattle. Distillers byproducts are normally available for use in feedlot finishing diets in two forms, dried distillers and wet distillers byproducts (WDB). In general, there are two nutritional philosophies regarding their use in feedlot finishing diets. Distillers byproducts can be fed at 6 to 15% of the diet dry matter, serving pr...

This paper presents the development of a condition monitoring method for wet friction clutches which might be useful for automatic transmission applications. The method is developed based on quantifying the change of the relative rotational velocity signal measured between the input and output shaft of a clutch. Prior to quantifying the change, the raw velocity signal is preprocessed to capture...

Varicella gangrenosa, in which gangrenous ulceration of the skin and/or deeper tissues is seen, is a rare but alarming complication of Varicella infection. An early surgical intervention is generally advised, especially in case of sepsis and/or the presence of large necrotic lesions. We describe a case of a previously healthy 12-month-old boy presenting with sepsis due to Varicella gangrenosa. ...

Condensation on superhydrophobic nanostructured surfaces offers new opportunities for enhanced energy conversion, efficient water harvesting, and high performance thermal management. These surfaces are designed to be Cassie stable and favor the formation of suspended droplets on top of the nanostructures as compared to partially wetting droplets which locally wet the base of the nanostructures....

We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any (PO)MDP can be transformed into an “equivalent” POMDP in which all state transitions (given the current state and action) are deterministic. This reduces the...

We present an active-perception strategy to optimize the temperature program of metal-oxide sensors in real time, as the sensor reacts with its environment. We model the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where actions correspond to measurements at particular temperatures, and the agent is to find a temperature sequence that minimizes the Bayes risk. We validate ...

In recent years, with the spread of the household robots, the necessity to enhance the communication capabilities of those robot to people has been increasing. The objective of this study is to build a framework for a dialogue system dealing with multimodal information that a robot observes. We have applied partially observable Markov Decision Process to modeling multimodal interaction between ...

This paper introduces timeline trees, which are partial models of partially observable environments. Timeline trees are given some specific predictions to make and learn a decision tree over history. The main idea of timeline trees is to use temporally abstract features to identify and split on features of key events, spread arbitrarily far apart in the past (whereas previous decision-tree-base...