the growing interest in using natural fibers as reinforcing agents of polymer-based composites is mainly due to their advantages such as lower cost, lower density, ease of preparation, lower energy requirements for processing, biodegradability, wide availability and relative non-abrasiveness over traditional reinforcing fibers such as glass and carbon. in this study, wood-plastic composite (wpc...

Recently, many areas of research on humanoid robots have been studied, such as motion control, man-machine interfaces, artificial intelligence (AI), and so on. Among them many research projects have tried to create artist robots, with the common objective of exploring new sensing, artificial intelligence, and manipulation techniques. The research described in this thesis explores new vision and...

We report the most recent advances in The Painting Fool project, where we have integrated machine vision capabilities from the DARCI system into the automated painter, to enhance its abilities before, during and after the painting process. This has enabled new art projects, including a commission from an Artificial Intelligence company, and we report on this collaboration, which is one of the f...

Astronomical optical interferometers sample the Fourier transform of the intensity distribution of a source at the observation wavelength. Because of rapid perturbations caused by atmospheric turbulence, the phases of the complex Fourier samples (visibilities) cannot be directly exploited. Consequently, specific image reconstruction methods have been devised in the last few decades. Modern poly...

“T call yourself a New Yorker you must have been to Harlem at least once. Every up-to-date person knows Harlem, and knowing Harlem generally means that one has visited a night club or two,” wrote novelist and editor Wallace Thurman, “....The music is good, the dancers are gay, and setting is conducive to joy” (1). In the 1920s, nightclubs, bars, and cabarets were much in vogue in most of the we...

Wood contains the majority of the nutrients in tropical trees, yet controls over wood nutrient concentrations and their function are poorly understood. We measured wood nutrient concentrations in 106 tree species in 10 forest plots spanning a regional fertility gradient in Panama. For a subset of species, we quantified foliar nutrients and wood density to test whether wood nutrients scale with ...

The possibility of using water insoluble fraction from biomass pyrolysis oil as additive in synthesis of Wood-Plastic novolac has been proved by using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and Fourier Transformed Infra Red (FT-IR) spectroscopy. Synthesis of novolac with different concentrations (10, 20 and 30 wt %) of water insoluble fraction were performed. It was found that mechanical p...