110 research outputs found
Evaluation of Machine and Deep Learning Models for Predicting Water Distillate Rate
No full textFreshwater scarcity has become a critical global challenge due to rapid population growth and environmental pollution caused by industrial and urban expansion. Solar stills offer a sustainable solution by desalinating impure water using solar energy, making them valuable for domestic, industrial, and academic applications. However, traditional methods for optimizing solar still performance face significant limitations, including time-consuming experimental data collection, computational inaccuracies, and high development costs. To address these challenges, this study leverages machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to predict the distilled water production rate of solar stills before physical construction or modification. A heat pump solar still (HPSS) was used as the test case, with meteorological data serving as key input features for model training. The results demonstrate that data preprocessing, particularly normalization, enhances prediction accuracy. Among the tested models, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Random Forest (RF) delivered the best performance, with RF emerging as the most robust, balancing low error rates (with 62.8% MSE reduction) and high R-squared values. Additionally, solar radiation was identified as the most influential factor in predicting distillate output. This research highlights the potential of AI-driven predictive modeling to optimize solar desalination systems and improve freshwater production efficiency
Derivatives combining the fragment of pyrazinamide and 4-aminosalicylic acid as antimycobacterial compounds
No full textCharles University Faculty of Pharmacy in Hradec Králové Department of Pharmaceutical chemistry and Pharmaceutical analysis Author: Petr Šlechta Supervisor: doc. PharmDr. Jan Zitko, Ph.D. Consultant: MSc. Ghada Basem Bouz, Ph.D. Title of diploma thesis: Derivatives combining the fragment of pyrazinamide and 4-aminosalicylic acid as antimycobacterial compounds According to WHO, tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death from a single infectious organism worldwide and the number of cases with drug resistant TB is still increasing, creating the need for new antituberculotics. Therefore, we report design, synthesis and antimicrobial evaluation of a series of hybrid compounds combining different pyrazinamide derivates and p- aminosalicylic acid as potential antituberculotic agents. The compounds were prepared by mixing different pyrazinecarboxylic acids, after activation by 1,1'-carbonyldiimidazole, with p- aminosalicylic acid in dimethylsulfoxide as a solvent. Obtained compounds were in vitro tested for their antimycobacterial activity against M. tuberculosis H37Rv, M. tuberculosis H37Ra and four other mycobacterial strains. Prepared compounds were also in vitro screened for antibacterial, antifungal, and cytotoxic (HepG2) activity. Most compounds showed antimycobacterial activity in range of..
The Arab Intellectual as a Woman: The Writings of Ghada Samman
No full textGhada Samman (b. 1942) is a prominent literary figure with an established legacy across the Arabic-speaking world. Through her widely-acclaimed writings, the Syrian author, journalist, and critic occupies a unique position in Arab intellectual circles as a woman who combines a commitment to the peoples’ causes with an innovative literary style vividly capturing the estrangement faced by the modern Arab subject. Samman has spent her life in exile, first in Beirut and eventually settling in Paris when the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) escalated. She has published 10 poetry books, 6 short story collections, 5 novels, and 20 collections of essays. However, despite her influential writings, Samman is relatively unknown outside of the Arabic-speaking world and a negligible portion of her corpus has been translated into English. My presentation posits the reason for this exclusion being that the Anglophone world does not know where to place Samman as she refuses the mould of “women’s writing” to which the Western academy is accustomed. Hers is the broad, interdisciplinary concern of the intellectual, writing on themes of exile, diatribes against capitalism and classism, the liberation of sexuality from prescribed norms, as well as how patriarchal hegemonies victimise both men and women. Even in the Arabic-speaking world she has pushed back against reductive labelling of her work, writing in a 1987 article: ‘My allegiance is to my freedom and my faith in a woman’s ability to write great human literature. There’s no need to call it “feminist” when its defence of women is part and parcel of its defence of all who are oppressed in Arab societies.’ My presentation will explore the life and work of Ghada Samman from the position of an Arab intellectual rather than a limited (and expected) reading of her as a woman writer exclusively concerned with “women’s issues”
Ladder Bottom-up Convolutional Bidirectional Variational Autoencoder for Image Translation of Dotted Arabic Expiration Dates
No full textThis paper proposes an approach of Ladder Bottom-up Convolutional Bidirectional Variational Autoencoder (LCBVAE) architecture for the encoder and decoder, which is trained on the image translation of the dotted Arabic expiration dates by reconstructing the Arabic dotted expiration dates into filled-in expiration dates. We employed a customized and adapted version of Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network CRNN model to meet our specific requirements and enhance its performance in our context, and then trained the custom CRNN model with the filled-in images from the year of 2019 to 2027 to extract the expiration dates and assess the model performance of LCBVAE on the expiration date recognition. The pipeline of (LCBVAE+CRNN) can be then integrated into an automated sorting systems for extracting the expiry dates and sorting the products accordingly during the manufacture stage. Additionally, it can overcome the manual entry of expiration dates that can be time-consuming and inefficient at the merchants. Due to the lack of the availability of the dotted Arabic expiration date images, we created an Arabic dot-matrix True Type Font (TTF) for the generation of the synthetic images. We trained the model with unrealistic synthetic dates of 60,000 images and performed the testing on a realistic synthetic date of 3000 images from the year of 2019 to 2027, represented as yyyy/mm/dd. In our study, we demonstrated the significance of latent bottleneck layer with improving the generalization when the size is increased up to 1024 in downstream transfer learning tasks as for image translation. The proposed approach achieved an accuracy of 97% on the image translation with using the LCBVAE architecture that can be generalized for any downstream learning tasks as for image translation and reconstruction.* Corresponding author E-mail address: ghadasoliman@orangecom Received: 14 April 2024; Accepted: 28 August 2024; Published: 30 September 202
Ġāda as-Sammān fī riḥlātihā aw kayfa yuṣbiḥu al-ǧasad ḥaqībat safar
No full textIn a book entitled "The Body is a Suitcase" Ghada as-Samman publishes narratives from places visited by her in the years 1964-1976. In the form of essays and reportages she describes European and Arab cities, including many capitals. These materials that resulted finally in the abovementioned 520-page book had been earlier published separately in two Lebanese journals and one of them also in a Kuwaiti journal. In her works as-Samman do not focuses on descriptions of visited places but she shows noteworthy and often surprising phenomena or cases that should be interesting for the curious Arab reader. She picks untypical traditions and titbits referring to the daily life of the European societies and correlates them with Arabian traditions. The aim of this paper is to analyse the concept of journey in terms of Ghada as-Samman works and destabilisation as a consequence of the journey. Ghada as-Samman herself declares that destabilisation instigates the people to think. Therefore, during her journey she contemplates many important issues relevant to the cultural and political life of Arabs. Language used by the author is very colourful so in this paper it also forms an area of investigation. It is worth noticing that sometimes as-Samman’s works are full of metaphors and beautiful expressions adeptly and tastefully used by the author. On the other hand, some of her essays are written in simple language and can be understood directly – the conclusion is that Ghada Samman’s main goal was to make her works get to the broadest audience possible
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Middle Eastern Studies Newsletter 2010-2011, No. 34
No full textNew Ancient Israel and the Near East program; interview with Ghada Abdel Aal, author of I Want to Get Married! The Jil Jadid graduate student conference in Arabic literature and linguistics; a visit by Adonis; Arabic House co-op; Intensive Persian language summer institute; teacher study abroad; outreach lecture series; the new push for Turkish studies.Middle Eastern Studie
Remote sensing-based automatic detection of shoreline position: A case study in apulia region
No full textRemote sensing and satellite imagery have become commonplace in efforts to monitor and model various biological and physical characteristics of the Earth. The land/water interface is a continually evolving landscape of high scientific and societal interest, making the mapping and monitoring thereof particularly important. This paper aims at describing a new automated method of shoreline position detection through the utilization of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images derived from European Space Agency satellites, specifically the operational SENTINEL Series. The resultant delineated shorelines are validated against those derived from video monitoring systems and in situ monitoring; a mean distance of 1 and a maximum of 3.5 pixels is found.</p
Palestine in London: Palestinian and Jewish Lifeworlds after the Foundation of the State of Israel
No full textThe article is based on Ghada Karmi’s autobiography published in 2002 and deals with the problem of forced migration and the establishment of a new life and a new identity in London. Expelled with her family from Jerusalem in 1948, Ghada describes her desire and attempts to become integrated in British society. Confronted with racism directed at the new wave of immigrants in the 1960’s, her newly-developed British identity was questioned from outside while her Palestinian identity was weakened and the Arab culture conveyed by her parents had no real meaning for her generation. The author argues that it was precisely this problem of living in a Zwischenwelt (intermediate world) that made Ghada’s generation receptive to political ideologies imported from the Middle East, such as the Panarabism of Nasser or a secular Palestinian identity symbolised by Arafat.The article is based on Ghada Karmi’s autobiography published in 2002 and deals with the problem of forced migration and the establishment of a new life and a new identity in London. Expelled with her family from Jerusalem in 1948, Ghada describes her desire and attempts to become integrated in British society. Confronted with racism directed at the new wave of immigrants in the 1960’s, her newly-developed British identity was questioned from outside while her Palestinian identity was weakened and the Arab culture conveyed by her parents had no real meaning for her generation. The author argues that it was precisely this problem of living in a Zwischenwelt (intermediate world) that made Ghada’s generation receptive to political ideologies imported from the Middle East, such as the Panarabism of Nasser or a secular Palestinian identity symbolised by Arafat
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ShelfLife@Texas October 2010 Blog Archive
No full textCONTENTS: Booking it This Weekend -- Faculty Book Celebration Honors L. Michael White’s “Scripting Jesus” -- Winners of the Fourteenth Annual Hamilton Book Awards Sponsored by the University Co-operative Society -- Playwright-in-Residence’s Work Featured -- Author Ghada Abdel Aal Discusses Best-Selling Book “I Want to Get Married!” || WORKS MENTIONED IN CONTENTS: “Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite” by L. Michael White -- “Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans” by Shirley E. Thompson -- “Making the Scene: A History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States” by Oscar G. Brockett -- “Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008” by Huaiyin Li -- “Music in the Hispanic Caribbean” by Robin D. Moore -- “Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality” by Richard R. Valencia -- "The Happy Ones" by Julie Marie Myatt -- "I Want to Get Married!" by Ghada Abdel AalDivision of Campus and Community Engagemen
Clustering satellite data to define eutrophication monitoring zones based on chlorophyll-a concentration
No full textOSPAR's Commission has been battling eutrophication since the problem was first established in the 1950s. To battle eutrophication, an important factor is to monitor it. Five indicators are used together to assess the status of eutrophication, determined by the Common Procedure. These are the chlorophyll-a concentration, the turbidity, the nitrate and phosphorus concentration, the oxygen levels and the biological water quality. All five indicators need to be known to obtain the final eutrophication status. However, just looking at the chlorophyll-a concentration on its own is also a good measure. This thesis focuses only on the chlorophyll-a concentration as an indicator for eutrophication.To monitor the North Sea, the OSPAR's Commission has established eutrophication monitoring zones. The aim of this study is to determine eutrophication monitoring zones based on available satellite data of the chlorophyll-a concentration in the Dutch part of the North Sea. The zones are defined using four clustering algorithms: K-means clustering, Hierarchical clustering, Random Forest clustering and HDBSCAN. The results from these clustering algorithms are compared to both each other and to the previously defined eutrophication zones. First, the case study region is split into two areas: the coastal area, which lies closer to the shore, and the offshore area, which lies farther away from the shore. The best result for this separation was generated by K-means clustering with two clusters. Afterwards, the eutrophication zones are determined separately in the offshore area and the coastal area. The clustering results are ranked based on four criteria. The first criterion is correspondence to OSPAR's previously defined eutrophication monitoring zones. The second criterion is the similarity of the clusters to the zones that are visible in the data. The third criterion is the performance determined by validation metrics. This criterion was considered less important because of the lack of ability to capture the goals of the research. The last criterion is confirmation through the HDBSCAN clustering. This was added later during the study when it was found that HDBSCAN yielded very accurate results. Due to how HDBSCAN works these accurate results were not usable directly, as the number of clusters this yields it too high, but they were usable for verification. The best results were found through random forest clustering with respectively nine and five clusters for the offshore and coastal areas.Subsequently, the zones derived from clustering were compared to other data to see whether the determined monitoring zones also hold over time. This appeared to be the case. Moreover, the distribution of the chlorophyll-a concentration for each zone is determined. Additionally, the trend of the chlorophyll-a concentration of one determined monitoring zone is analysed over time. Lastly, the defined eutrophication monitoring zones are compared to other defined zones within the Dutch North Sea coast. These other zones were fishery policies, marine protected areas, spatial planning, and bathymetry. The comparison validated the defined monitoring zones
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