Abstract

The invention provides a method for manufacturing supported noble metal based alloy catalysts with a high degree of alloying and a small crystallite size. The method involves using polyol solvents as reaction medium and comprises a two-step reduction process in the presence of a support material. In the first step, the first metal (transition metal; eg Co, Cr, Ru) is activated by increasing the reaction temperature to 80 to 160 C. In the second step, the second metal (noble metal; eg Pt, Pd, Au) is added and the slurry is heated to the boiling point of the polyol solvent in a range of 160 to 300 C. The catalysts manufactured according to the method are used as electrocatalysts for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC), direct-methanol fuel cells (DMFC) or as gas phase catalysts for CO oxidation or exhaust gas purification.

Abstract

The combination of molecular dynamics simulation and neutron scattering techniques has emerged as a highly synergistic approach to elucidate the atomistic details of the structure, dynamics, and functions of biological systems. Simulation models can be tested by calculating neutron scattering structure factors and comparing the results directly with experiments. If the scattering profiles agree, the simulations can be used to provide a detailed decomposition and interpretation of the experiments, and if not, the models can be rationally adjusted. Comparison with neutron experiment can be made at the level of the scattering functions or, less directly, of structural and dynamical quantities derived from them. Here, we examine the combination of simulation and experiment in the interpretation of SANS and inelastic scattering experiments on the structure and dynamics of proteins and other biopolymers.

Abstract

An analytical approach is developed for reconstructing site-specific methyl-bearing protein side-chain conformational energy surfaces from NMR methyl axis order parameters (Oaxis2). Application of an enhanced sampling algorithm (adaptive biasing force) to molecular dynamics simulation of a protein, calcium-bound calmodulin, reveals a nonlinear correlation between Oaxis2 and the populations of rotamer states of protein side-chains, permitting the rotamer populations to be extracted directly from Oaxis2. The analytical approach yields side-chain conformational distributions that are in excellent agreement with those obtained from the enhanced-sampling MD results.

Abstract

A model of crop specific virtual labs is proposed to improve practical agricultural education by considering the agricultural educa-tion system in India. In agricultural education, the theoretical concepts are being imparted through class room lectures and laboratory skills are imparted in the dedicated laboratories. Further, practical agricultural education is being imparted by exposing the students to the field prob-lems through Rural Agricultural Work Experience Program (RAWEP),experiential learning and internships. In spite of these efforts, there isa feeling that the level of practical skills exposed to the students is not up to the desired level. So we have to devise the new ways and means to enhance the practical knowledge and skills of agricultural students to understand the real-time crop problems and provide the corrective stepsat the field level. Recent developments in ICTs, thus, provide an oppor-tunity to improve practical education by developing virtual crop labs.The virtual crop labs contain a well organized, indexed and summarized digital data (text, photograph, and video). The digital data corresponds to farm situations reflecting life cycles of several farms of different crops cultivated under diverse farming conditions. The practical knowledge of the students could be improved, if we systematically expose them to virtual crop labs along with course teaching. We can employ cloud com-puting platform to store huge amounts of data and render to students and other stakeholders in an online manner

Abstract

Cool roofs, cool pavements, and urban vegetation reduce cooling energy use in buildings, lower local air pollution, and decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from urban areas. To promote widespread and large-scale implementation of cool roofs to moderate urban heat-island phenomenon, more awareness and understanding of cool roof benefits at the local level is needed. As part of an investigation of strategies to mitigate urban heat-island effects, field data gathered from a monitoring project on cool roofs in India were reviewed. An innovative field-based analytical method was developed to quantify cooling energy savings resulting from the installation of cool roofs on commercial buildings. For buildings monitored in the Metropolitan Hyderabad region, the measured annual energy savings from roof-whitening of previously black roofs ranged from 20 to 22 kWh/m2 of roof area, corresponding to a cooling …

Abstract

We evaluate differences in clear-sky upwelling shortwave radiation reaching the top of the atmosphere in response to increasing the albedo of roof surfaces in an area of India with moderately high aerosol loading. Treated (painted white) and untreated (unpainted) roofs on two buildings in northeast India were analyzed on five cloudless days using radiometric imagery from the IKONOS satellite. Comparison of a radiative transfer model (RRTMG) and radiometric satellite observations shows good agreement (R 2= 0.927). Results show a mean increase of~ 50 W m− 2 outgoing at the top of the atmosphere for each 0.1 increase of the albedo at the time of the observations and a strong dependence on atmospheric transmissivity.

Abstract

This study evaluates improvement in energy efficiency of an air conditioned building block employing energy conservation measures (ECMs) recommended by Indian Energy Conservation Building Code 2007 (ECBC) through a prescriptive route. First part evaluates energy savings by implementing five ECMs of envelope independently and two combinations of ECMs keeping constant thermostat setting throughout the year. In the second part of the study same ECMs are considered to the subject building model allowing thermostat settings as per thermal adaptation resulting from change in outdoor temperature. Actual measurements were taken and simulation model was fine-tuned. Annual energy consumption of building is used to evaluate the effect of individual ECMs and their combinations on both part of the study, i.e. fixed thermostat and adaptive thermostat settings. The simulation result shows that together …

Abstract

In this paper we are proposing neural network based feature transformation framework for developing emotion independent speaker identification system. Most of the present speaker recognition systems may not perform well during emotional environments. In real life, humans extensively express emotions during conversations for effectively conveying the messages. Therefore, in this work we propose the speaker recognition system, robust to variations in emotional moods of speakers. Neural network models are explored to transform the speaker specific spectral features from any specific emotion to neutral. In this work, we have considered eight emotions namely, Anger, Sad, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Neutral, Sarcastic and Surprise. The emotional databases developed in Hindi, Telugu and German are used in this work for analyzing the effect of proposed feature transformation on the performance of speaker identification system. In this work, spectral features are represented by mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and speaker models are developed using Gaussian mixture models. Performance of the speaker identification system is analyzed with various feature mapping techniques. Results have demonstrated that the proposed neural network based feature transformation has improved the speaker identification performance by 20 %. Feature transformation at the syllable level has shown the better performance, compared to sentence level.

Abstract

Recognition based graphical passwords are inherently vulnerable to shoulder surfing attacks because of their visual mode of interaction. In this paper, we propose and evaluate two novel shoulder-surfing defense techniques for recognition based graphical passwords. These techniques are based on WYSWYE (Where You See is What You Enter) strategy, where the user identifies a pattern of password images within a presented grid of images and replicates it onto another grid. We conducted controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate the usability and security of the proposed techniques. Both the schemes had high login success rates with no failures in authentication. More than seventy percent of participants successfully logged on to the system in their first attempt in both the schemes. The participants were satisfied with the schemes and were willing to use it in public places. In addition, both the schemes were significantly secure against shoulder surfing than normal unprotected recognition based graphical passwords. The login efficiency improved with practice in one of the proposed scheme. We believe, WYSWYE strategy has considerable potential and can easily be extended to other types of authentication systems such as text passwords and PINS.

Abstract

Perfectly reliable message transmission (PRMT) is one of the fundamental problems in distributed computing. It allows a sender to reliably transmit a message to a receiver in an unreliable network, even in the presence of a computationally unbounded adversary. In this article, we study the inherent trade-off between the three important parameters of the PRMT protocols, namely, the network connectivity (n), the round complexity (r), and the communication complexity by considering the following generic question (which can be considered as the holy grail problem) in the context of the PRMT protocols. Given an n-connected network, a message of size ℓ (to be reliably communicated) and a limit c for the total communication allowed between the sender and the receiver, what is the minimum number of communication rounds required by a PRMT protocol to send the message, such that the communication complexity of the protocol is O(c)? We answer this interesting question by deriving a nontrivial lower bound on the round complexity. Moreover, we show that the lower bound is tight in the amortized sense, by designing a PRMT protocol whose round complexity matches the lower bound. The lower bound is the first of its kind, that simultaneously captures the inherent tradeoff between the three important parameters of a PRMT protocol.