The arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin to power in the Russian Federation is an important factor in delineating a new approach to Russian policy towards regions that have great strategic importance affecting its national security. Therefore, NATO's progress eastward towards these regions prompts Russia to delineate a new strategy to confront this progress as well as preserving its control in the near neighboring regions represented by the countries of Eastern Europe, especially after the changes that occurred in those regions following the color revolutions that swept the region, such as the first application of this Russian policy in 2014, through the annexation of Crimea, and the latest military operations in Ukraine i

Based on collections made during March to September 2012. A totals of 58 species belong to 33 genera were identified from extra north to extra south of Erbil governorate, among them 30 species are registered as a new record to flora of Iraq. Most attention was paid to the most common and abundant lichens that present almost in most locations, which were Collema cristatum, Diploschistes scruposus, Lecanora dispersa, Lecanora murales, Pertusaria flavicunda, Placidium lacinulatum, Thelomma californicum and Verrucaria Maura.

In this paper, Touchard polynomials (TPs) are presented for solving Linear Volterra integral equations of the second kind (LVIEs-2k) and the first kind (LVIEs-1k) besides, the singular kernel type of this equation. Illustrative examples show the efficiency of the presented method, and the approximate numerical (AN) solutions are compared with one another method in some examples. All calculations and graphs are performed by program MATLAB2018b.

Random throwing of industrial waste has a significant impact on the environment unless it takes into account the conditions of engineered destroying and/or re-used. Taking the advantage of re-using waste materials in engineering projects represents a well-planned project in order to resolve a lot of engineering problems for some difficult soils. The objective of this study was to evaluate the capability and effects of Rubber Shreds (RS) from scrap torn belts towards improving the shear strength of soft clay. A direct shear tests were conducted on soft clay-RS mixture. The following parameters were investigated to study the influence of RS content, water content, normal stress, and dilation ratio. From experimental test results it was fou

A content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a technique used to retrieve images from an image database. However, the CBIR process suffers from less accuracy to retrieve images from an extensive image database and ensure the privacy of images. This paper aims to address the issues of accuracy utilizing deep learning techniques as the CNN method. Also, it provides the necessary privacy for images using fully homomorphic encryption methods by Cheon, Kim, Kim, and Song (CKKS). To achieve these aims, a system has been proposed, namely RCNN_CKKS, that includes two parts. The first part (offline processing) extracts automated high-level features based on a flatting layer in a convolutional neural network (CNN) and then stores these features in a

Software testing is a vital part of the software development life cycle. In many cases, the system under test has more than one input making the testing efforts for every exhaustive combination impossible (i.e. the time of execution of the test case can be outrageously long). Combinatorial testing offers an alternative to exhaustive testing via considering the interaction of input values for every t-way combination between parameters. Combinatorial testing can be divided into three types which are uniform strength interaction, variable strength interaction and input-output based relation (IOR). IOR combinatorial testing only tests for the important combinations selected by the tester. Most of the researches in combinatorial testing appli

In this work, laboratory experiments were carried out to verify direct contact membrane distillation system’s performance in highly saline water desalination. The study included the investigation of various operating conditions, like feed flow rate, temperature and concentration of NaCl solution and their impact on the permeation flux were discussed. 16 cm² of a flat sheet membrane module with commercial poly-tetra-fluoroethylene (PTFE) membrane, which has 0.22 μm pore size, 96 µm thickness and 78% average porosity, was used. A high salt rejection factor was obtained greater than 99.9%, and the permeation flux up to 17.27 kg/m².h was achieved at 65°C for hot feed side and 20°C for cold side stream.

The invention relates to a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) for determining a measuring position of a probe. The AACMM isdepends on the robotkinematics (forward and reverse) in their measurementprinciple, i.e., using the AACMM links and joint angles todetermine the exact workspace or part coordinates. Hence, themeasurements are obtained using an AACMM will be extremely accurate and precise since that ismerely dependent on rigid structural parameters and the only source of measurement error is due to human operators. In this paper, a new AACMM design was proposed. The new AACMM design addresses common issues such as solving the complex kinematics, overcoming the workspace limitation, avoiding singularity, and eliminating the effects of

Steganography is a technique of concealing secret data within other quotidian files of the same or different types. Hiding data has been essential to digital information security. This work aims to design a stego method that can effectively hide a message inside the images of the video file.  In this work, a video steganography model has been proposed through training a model to hiding video (or images) within another video using convolutional neural networks (CNN). By using a CNN in this approach, two main goals can be achieved for any steganographic methods which are, increasing security (hardness to observed and broken by used steganalysis program), this was achieved in this work as the weights and architecture are randomized. Thus,