Sol-gel method was use to prepare Ag-SiO2 nanoparticles. Crystal structure of the nanocomposite was investigated by means of X-ray diffraction patterns while the color intensity was evaluated by spectrophotometry. The morphology analysis using atomic force microscopy showed that the average grain sizes were in range (68.96-75.81 nm) for all samples. The characterization of Ag-SiO2 nanoparticles were investigated by using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Ag-SiO2 NPs are highly stable and have significant effect on both Gram positive and negative bacteria. Antibacterial properties of the nanocomposite were tested with the use of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The results have shown antibacteri

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto

Activity recognition (AR) is a new interesting and challenging research area with many applications (e.g. healthcare, security, and event detection). Basically, activity recognition (e.g. identifying user’s physical activity) is more likely to be considered as a classification problem. In this paper, a combination of 7 classification methods is employed and experimented on accelerometer data collected via smartphones, and compared for best performance. The dataset is collected from 59 individuals who performed 6 different activities (i.e. walk, jog, sit, stand, upstairs, and downstairs). The total number of dataset instances is 5418 with 46 labeled features. The results show that the proposed method of ensemble boost-based classif

Triticale is being evaluated as a substitute for corn in animal feed and as a forage crop for Florida. Storage of triticale seed is difficult in Florida's hot and humid climate, and more information about the relationships between equilibrium moisture content (EMC) and equilibrium relative humidity (ERH) at constant temperature (sorption isotherms) of triticale is needed to develop improved storage methods. Therefore, the primary research objective was to measure the EMC for triticale seed at different ERH values at three different constant temperatures (5°C, 23°C, and 35°C) using six desiccation jars containing different saturated salt concentrations. The secondary objective was to determine the best fit equation describing these relati