The smart city concept has attracted high research attention in recent years within diverse application domains, such as crime suspect identification, border security, transportation, aerospace, and so on. Specific focus has been on increased automation using data driven approaches, while leveraging remote sensing and real-time streaming of heterogenous data from various resources, including unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance cameras, and low-earth-orbit satellites. One of the core challenges in exploitation of such high temporal data streams, specifically videos, is the trade-off between the quality of video streaming and limited transmission bandwidth. An optimal compromise is needed between video quality and subsequently, rec

The quality of drinking water is considered among the most urgent issues worldwide nowadays. Ensuring safe water for human consumption remains the highest priority, while challenges also persist in meeting the water quality needs for industrial and agricultural uses. Most of the relevant studies lack accuracy in assessing water quality. Therefore, this study aims to forecast the quality of drinking water along the Tigris River in Iraq following a new approach. A developed forecasting model that utilizes the gravitational search algorithm (GSA) was deployed. The heuristic optimization tool was utilized for the prediction of the water quality index (WQI) in the research area. Out of twelve water stations, 575 samples were gather

Th paper scientifically deals with the Syrian crisis events erupted in 2011 using the historical descriptive and analytical approaches. The importance of the paper comes from the serious crisis that occurred in a region rich of historical crises, and natural resources attracting the attention of the major countries. The paper aims to show the Syrian crisis, its importance to Russia, the United States, and the regional countries, its impact on Russia economically and politically after the intervention, and Russia’s achievements on a global level holding the influential power on international decisions and other global events. The new Russian strategy has proven its worth in preserving its strategic interests as it could help the Syrian

The cathodic deposition of zinc from simulated chloride wastewater was used to characterize the mass transport properties of a flow-by fixed bed electrochemical reactor composed of vertical stack  of stainless steel nets, operated in batch-recycle mode. The electrochemical reactor employed potential value in such a way that the zinc reduction occurred under mass transport control. This potential was determined by hydrodynamic voltammetry using a borate/chloride solution as supporting electrolyte on stainless steel rotating disc electrode. The results indicate that mass transfer coefficient (K_m) increases with increasing of flow rate (Q) where .The electrochemical reactor proved to be efficient in removing zinc and was abl

In this work magnetite/geopolymer composite (MGP) were synthesized using a chemical co-precipitation technique. The synthesized materials were characterized using several techniques such as: “X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), vibrating sample-magnetometer (VSM), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) and Barrentt-Joyner-Halenda (BJH)” to determine the structure and morphology of the obtained material. The analysis indicated that metal oxide predominantly appeared at the shape of the spinel structure of magnetite, and that the presence of nano-magnetite had a substantial impact on the surface area and pore st

In this study, the flexural performance of a new composite beam–slab system filled with concrete material was investigated, where this system was mainly prepared from lightweight cold-formed steel sections of a beam and a deck slab for carrying heavy floor loads as another concept of a conventional composite system with a lower cost impact. For this purpose, seven samples of a profile steel sheet–dry board deck slab (PSSDB/PDS) carried by a steel cold-formed C-purlins beam (CB) were prepared and named “composite CBPDS specimen”, which were tested under a static bending load. Specifically, the effects of the profile steel sheet (PSS) direction (parallel or perpendicular to the span of the specimen) using different C-purlins c