The aviation industry is expected to grow at a rate of 4-5% in the next 20 years. Such a growth rate may have important impacts on local air quality, climate change and community noise. This work assesses selected technologies and operational procedures aimed at improving the environmental performance of future airplanes. Two different studies are presented: estimating turbine durability benefi...

F or millennia, early human civilizations observed phenotypic changes in animals and plants and used these for domestication (1). In recent decades, scientists around the world induced random mutations, mainly in crop plants, to widen the mutation spectra to be used for extensive screening for varieties useful for agriculture and science (2). As mutagens, ethyl methanesulfonate, radiation, Agro...

Various domains require hierarchical classification. In medicine, learning partial diagnoses can be helpful when time and information constraints are present. Hierarchical neural networks provide a good means to perform partial diagnosis. We implemented a hierarchical backpropagation-based model for the domain of thyroid diseases, and compared the results against those of nonhierarchical networ...