Browse Items (1422 total)
Sort by:
-
Climate, agriculture, and farmer's mental health: Unravelling the nexus in Wayanad, Kerala
A sizable majority of the population works in the primary sector in Kerala's Wayanad district, where agriculture is the backbone of the local economy. However, dynamic issues including climate change, fluctuating soil quality, crop diseases, and related economic consequences pose difficulties for this industry. The complicated linkages between agricultural practices and climate change are discussed using qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 15 Wayanad farmers. Agricultural productivity and revenue are strongly impacted by unpredictable rainfall, which is exacerbated by strong winds, natural disasters, wildlife intrusions, and crop diseases. The failure of farmers to adjust to these climate changes is a remarkable finding, frequently brought on by fear and unstable financial situations. This resistance causes anxiety, a sense of powerlessness, and a sense of responsibility for circumstances that are out of their control. In order to help farmers manage the unforeseeable effects of climate change, the study emphasizes the urgent need for policy initiatives in areas like Wayanad. Cooperative farming and knowledge-sharing platforms are examples of strategies that could improve farmers' psychological resilience and general well-being. Given that agriculture accounts for a substantial portion of the region's income and that resources and knowledge are scarce, climate change has a considerable impact on agricultural outputs and farmers' psychological well-being. 2025 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved including those for text and data mining AI training and similar technologies. -
Clinical implications of chromosomal polymorphisms in congenital disorders
Alterations in the DNA sequence are generally seen in the general population at >1%, and these alterations can be deletions or insertions. Classically, chromosomal polymorphisms (CPMs) are alterations with no significant phenotypic distinctions. However, few studies have shown that the presence of CPM can lead to congenital disabilities, which can be fatal. These variants in the DNA can happen in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The human genome is considered full of SNPs, and they are responsible for causing pathological phenotypes and provide insight into pathogenesis, a therapeutic approach to the pathology. About 100 million SNPs are observed in humans for an average of 300 nucleotides. These polymorphisms are detected by using molecular techniques. These polymorphisms are not just restricted to the coding region. The CPMs are first recognized on the chromosomes through molecular techniques, followed by detection of the polymorphism. The CMPs are generally the SNPs, deletions/duplications, and presence of microsatellite DNAs. Here we have summarized the implications of CMPs in a few congenital disorders and the method of diagnosis. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. -
Clinical Intelligence: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Healthcare and Biomedical Advancements
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is showing a remarkable impact in the healthcare and biomedical domains, leveraging its ability to learn complex decision-making policies from raw data through trial-and-error interactions. DRL can effectively extract the characteristic information in the environment, propose effective behavior strategies, and correct errors that occurred during the training process. Targeted toward healthcare professionals, researchers, and technology enthusiasts, this chapter begins with notable applications of DRL in healthcare, including personalized treatment recommendations, clinical trial optimization, disease diagnosis, robotic surgery and assistance, mental health support systems, chronic disease management and scheduling, and a few more. It also delves on challenges such as data privacy, interpretability, regulatory compliance, validation, and the need for domain expertise to ensure safe and effective deployment. Next, the chapter seamlessly transitions into DRL algorithms contributing to the biomedical field which are gaining traction due to their potential to provide timely and personalized interventions. Over time, the research community has proposed several methods and algorithms within the field of deep reinforcement learning that help agents learn optimal policies from rich data. Healthcare data is often complex, high-dimensional, and unstructured, such as medical images, genomics data, and patient records. The healthcare-suitable DRL algorithms such as Q-learning, SARSA, Bayesian, actor-critic, reinforcement learning (RL), Deep-Q-Networks (DQN), and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are highlighted. In addition, the section offers guidelines for the application of DRL to healthcare and biomedical problems, aiming at providing indications to the designer of new applications in order to choose among different RL methods. Furthermore, a case study is included to fully realize the revolutionary benefits of DRL in healthcare environments, aiming to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The case study presents a remarkable impact on categories such as precision medicine, dynamic treatment regime, medical imaging, diagnostic systems, control systems, chat-bots and advanced interfaces, and healthcare management systems. 2024 Scrivener Publishing LLC. -
Cloud Virtualization with Data Security: Challenges and Opportunities
In recent years, Cloud Computing is emerging as a torrid research area for both academicians and industrialists. It provides effective ways to handle and store the data in advanced system processing applications. Furthermore, it also leverages a radical change in the way the users access and use the available resources. Despite the hype, it also has the challenge of slow data transition from present physical storage to the cloud based platform. This is mainly due to the security challenges associated with the Cloud Computing applications. Hence, data protection has become very critical and always requires an efficient and effective security protocol into the existence. So, the security and reliability of the cloud platform would definitely attract more researchers to this platform. This article discusses an overview of Cloud paradigm and the different virtualization techniques adopted to overcome the security issues associated with the cloud computing platform. Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. -
Clustering Faculty Members fortheBetterment ofResearch Outcomes: A Fuzzy Multi-criteria Decision-Making Approach inTeam Formation
From a talent-pool of people, choosing an efficient team is tough. Faculty members of a higher education institution constitute the talent-pool. Teams have to be formed from them so that research output of each team is maximum. Amongst numerous research skills, thirteen are identified as most desirable skills. The level of these thirteen skills, viz., concept articulation, formatting according to templates/style sheets, identifying the relevant literature, initiative, logical reasoning, patience, problem formulation/problem finding, proof reading skills/identifying mistakes in written communication, searching/browsing skills/quick search techniques, sense of positive criticism, statistical knowledge, the ability to stay calm, and written communication skills, varies from person to person. Historical ranking of these skills and self-evaluation of the level of acquisition of these skills is used along with the years of experience, educational qualification, gender, marital status, etc., to rank individual faculty members. The fuzzy ranking of the faculty members thus obtained is used to cluster them into teams that are efficient in complementary skills. Each team thus formed is involved in collaborative research leading to research publication. The model is successfully implemented in a university department with 40 faculty members. 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. -
Co- Integration and Causality between Macroeconomics Variables and Bitcoin
The fintech sector has been booming for the past decade, especially with the unprecedented expansion in cryptocurrency innovation. Many countries and their central banks are working to accommodate cryptocurrency in a regulated format into their financial system anywise. This research paper investigates the long-run and short-run relationship between Bitcoin (INR) and the macroeconomic variables of the Indian economy, such as two major stock indices (NSE and BSE), money supply M1, foreign exchange rate (INR/US dollar), and indicators of inflation rate (CPI and WPI). For this purpose, monthly data of the variables from October 2014 to December 2020 are considered. The Johansen co-integration approach depicts the long-run association between Bitcoin and the economic variables, whilst VECM and the Wald coefficient reveal no short-run causality between the variables. The Granger Causality test shows a one-way causal relationship of NSE, BSE and WPI to Bitcoin. Hence, it concluded that stock indices and inflation have a cogent effect and exert on bitcoin prices. The findings will be helpful for policy-makers and investors alike, for an outlook to strategize and explore this everchanging digital instrument. 2024 CRC Press. -
COBOTS: Vital role in significant domains
The term COBOT refers to "collaborative robot, " which is created by combining humans and robots to increase the efficacy and efficiency of industrial processes. Cobots have extensive applications in various sectors, including healthcare, motoring, production, electronics, space exploration, logistics, and astronomy. Industry 5.0 is a development that aims to combine human specialists' creativity with accurate, intelligent, and efficient technologies to revolutionize manufacturing processes worldwide. Therefore, in the age of Industry 5.0, there is a great demand for Cobots with high, quick advancement, and low costs. Industry evolution, fundamentals of Cobots, how they differ from robots, key features, basic components, the significant role of Cobots in Industry 5.0, challenges and limitations, future scope, and ethical aspects of Cobots are covered in this chapter. This book chapter is a comprehensive manual for academic researchers and corporate executives to learn about Cobots completely. 2024, IGI Global. All rights reserved. -
Cognitive synergy: Enhancing late career engagement with ergonomic solutions
The chapter explores the intricate relationship between cognitive ergonomics and late career employees, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities of an aging workforce. It combines research findings and case studies to understand how cognitive aging affects job performance and satisfaction. A central theme is the importance of technology training and support for older workers. As technology advances, organizations must ensure their older employees have the skills to navigate these changes. This includes training in new software and tools, and ongoing support. Flexible work arrangements are also crucial, reducing stress and fatigue from long commutes and rigid schedules. Health screenings and age-friendly workplaces are key. Regular health screenings and access to healthcare can address physical and cognitive challenges. Designing workspaces and processes for older workers fosters inclusivity and diversity. In conclusion, the chapter offers recommendations for organizations to leverage the late career workforce. 2024 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. -
Community Resilience and Crisis Management: Stakeholders Perspective of the Tourism Industry
The tourism industry is very vulnerable and has been extensively impacted by varied types of crisis. An attempt is made to precipitate and reflect on the nature of tourism disasters indicating an imperative need for an integrated approach to deal with crisis with disaster planning and a response system. Destinations at crisis impacts humankind causing environmental impacts and economic downfall and largely impacts the local community to recover from the disaster. This chapter examines varied impacts affecting the tourism industry and addressed negative impacts like the Economic crisis and loss of brand image in the post-crisis situation. The conceptual framework indicates Community Resilience model towards destination development and Resilience Building. The role of key stakeholders supporting e-governance and financial resilience pertaining to tourism business is further examined. The chapter explores mechanisms to re-establish the brand image during the restoration phase and have indicated possible strategies and suggestions in the recovery phase of an affected region. Disaster risk reduction is a significant and major phenomenon in handling all kinds of crisis management, therefore this chapter will be an essential reading for tourism education and destination managers who are engaged in destination crisis planning and disaster management. The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022. -
Community-based educational intervention on emotion regulation, self-esteem, and behavioural problems among school children
Recently, there has been a trend where higher education institutions are designing and implementing community-based educational interventions for underprivileged children in the community. It is important to understand whether these interventions are useful to the children in improving their psychosocial development. In this chapter, the author discusses the learnings from an explanatory sequential mixed methods study which aimed at assessing the impact of community educational intervention provided by a higher educational institution on self-esteem, emotional regulation and bbehavioralproblems among adolescents in rural Karnataka. The study included 250 adolescents who were beneficiaries of community educational intervention and another 250 who were non-beneficiaries. Besides this, the chapter also highlights the qualitative results grounded in the focus group discussions to understand the stakeholder's perspective on community educational interventions. Finally, the author demonstrates the processes and mechanisms of change and presents a critical discussion from the quantitative and qualitative data analytic lens. The author anticipates that community educational interventions provided by higher educational institutions are extremely impactful. Several critical factors of stakeholders, institutional, and rural communities might bring change and sustainability in benefits among rural adolescents. 2024 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. -
Comparative Analysis of Different Machine Learning Prediction Models for Seasonal Rainfall and Crop Production in Cultivation
Agriculture is one of the strengths of India, from the last few years, gradually the agriculture growth is going downwards in other side the population growth is upwards. Reason for agricultural downward growth depends on so many parameters. The rainfall is one of the main parameters which affects the crop yield. Because of this, the farmers are also facing the loss. If they know this information in prior, the farmers can plan accordingly the type of crop suited for the particular season and it helps the farmer to get good profit out of it. Machine learning scientific and statistical methods are used for predicting the rain fall and crop yield. Kharif and Rabi are two seasons taken for analysis. The regressor predicting models are constructed to predict the seasonal rainfall and crop yield. This study primarily focuses on seasonal crop production prediction, which is dependent on rainfall. The different types of machine learning regression method are used to achieve better results. The performance of comparison models is evaluated using different metrics. Finally, the linear regression and Bayesian linear regression models comparatively produce the best result in terms of accuracy for rainfall prediction. The boosted decision tree regression model is achieving the better result for crop prediction. 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. -
Comparative Analysis of Various Ensemble Approaches for Web Page Classification
The amount of data available on web pages is enormous, and extracting the relevant information and classifying them is an important task. Web page classification finds applications in web content filtering, maintaining and expanding web directories, building efficient crawlers, etc. Machine Learning methods known for their well-established classification approaches have proved to be effective in web page classification. The present work uses ensemble methods like Bagging Meta Estimator, Random Forest, Adaptive boosting, Gradient Tree boosting, Extreme Gradient boosting and stacking to improve single classifiers results. One dataset is manually created to classify web pages into IoT projects and non-IoT projects. Another publicly available dataset is used to classify publications- and conference-related web pages. The advantage of the Ensemble methods over single classifiers has been validated, and various parameters to tune the Ensemble classifiers have been presented and analysed, with accuracy being the metric for performance. Features like learning rate, number of estimators, and maximum number of features have been tuned besides other parameters, and a comparison has been presented. 2023 Scrivener Publishing LLC. -
Comparing Strategies for Post-Hoc Explanations in Machine Learning Models
Most of the machine learning models act as black boxes, and hence, the need for interpreting them is rising. There are multiple approaches to understand the outcomes of a model. But in order to be able to trust the interpretations, there is a need to have a closer look at these approaches. This project compared three such frameworksELI5, LIME and SHAP. ELI5 and LIME follow the same approach toward interpreting the outcomes of machine learning algorithms by building an explainable model in the vicinity of the datapoint that needs to be explained, whereas SHAP works with Shapley values, a game theory approach toward assigning feature attribution. LIME outputs an R-squared value along with its feature attribution reports which help in quantifying the trust one must have in those interpretations. The R-squared value for surrogate models within different machine learning models varies. SHAP trades-off accuracy with time (theoretically). Assigning SHAP values to features is a time and computationally consuming task, and hence, it might require sampling beforehand. SHAP triumphs over LIME with respect to optimization of different kinds of machine learning models as it has explainers for different types of machine learning models, and LIME has one generic explainer for all model types. 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. -
Composites based on natural polymers
Polymers are composed of macromolecules of high molecular weight formed by the repeated union of small molecules known as monomers. Polymer materials over other materials such as metals and ceramics, are of light weight and hence extensively used. The use of renewable raw materials can provide a substantial activity for a sustainable society and environment. Natural polymer composites can provide an alternative to increasingly scarce raw materials from plants and animals. 2017 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. -
Composting for a sustainable future: Turning waste into nutrient-rich soil
As the worldwide waste management problem has risen, composting has gained popularity. It turns organic trash into nutrient-rich soil for agriculture, landscaping, and environmental rehabilitation. This chapter on composting, "Composting for a Sustainable Future: Turning Waste into Nutrient-Rich Soil," is comprehensive. It covers decomposition science, composting methods, materials, and procedures. Composting's agricultural, landscaping, and environmental remediation benefits are also covered. The chapter also examines composting's role in climate change mitigation, its obstacles, and remedies. Decomposition can help people, businesses, and communities live more sustainably. It urges decomposition and trash reduction and provides information about tools to start composting, a simple yet efficient solution to worldwide waste management. 2024, IGI Global. All rights reserved. -
Comprehending algorithmic bias and strategies for fostering trust in artificial intelligence
Fairness is threatened by algorithm bias, systematic and unfair disparities in machine learning results. Amazon's AI-driven hiring tool favoured men. AI promised data-driven, impartial decision-making, but it has revealed sector-wide prejudice, perpetuating systematic imbalances. The algorithm's bias is data and design. Biassed historical data and feature selection and pre-processing can bias algorithms. Development is harmed by human biases. Algorithm prejudice impacts money, education, employment, and crime. Diverse and representative data collection, understanding complicated "black box" algorithms, and legal and ethical considerations are needed to address this bias. Despite these issues, algorithm bias elimination techniques are emerging. This chapter uses secondary data to study algorithm bias. Algorithm bias is defined, its origins, its prevalence in data, examples, and issues are discussed. The chapter also tackles bias reduction and elimination to make AI a more reliable and impartial decision-maker. 2024, IGI Global. All rights reserved. -
Comprehensive Data Analysis of Anticorrosion, Antifouling Agents, and the Efficiency of Corrosion Inhibitors in CO2 Pipelines
This study explores the various methods that are being proposed for their anticorrosion and antifouling capabilities and also reviews the unique properties that make them suitable for such applications. Special attention has also been given to the problem of corrosion in CO2 pipelines, considering the corrosion inhibitors currently being used and performing statistical analysis about if and how various factors such as temperature, flow velocity, pH, and CO2 pressure affect the rate of corrosion of the CO2 pipelines. Tests including ANOVA, correlation, and graph analyses were conducted to explore their relationships, and suitable conclusions were drawn for the data collected. 2024 Scrivener Publishing LLC. -
Computational Aspects of Business Management with Special Reference to Monte Carlo Simulation
Business management is concerned with organizing and efficiently utilizing resources of a business, including people, in order to achieve required goals. One of the main aspects in this process is planning, which involves deciding operations of the future and consequently generating plans for action. Computational models, both theoretical and empirical, help in understanding and providing a framework for such a scenario. Statistics and probability can play an important role in empirical research as quantitative data is amenable for analysis. In business management, analysis of risk is crucial as there is uncertainty, vagueness, irregularity, and inconsistency. An alternative and improved approach to deterministic models is stochastic models like Monte Carlo simulations. There has been a considerable increase in application of this technique to business problems as it provides a stochastic approach and simulation process. In stochastic approach, we use random sampling to solve a problem statistically and in simulation, there is a representation of a problem using probability and random numbers. Monte Carlo simulation is used by professionals in fields like finance, portfolio management, project management, project appraisal, manufacturing, insurance and so on. It equips the decision-maker by providing a wide range of likely outcomes and their respective probabilities. This technique can be used to model projects which entail substantial amounts of funds and have financial implications in the future. The proposed chapter will deal with concepts of Monte Carlo simulation as applied to Business Management scenario. A few specific case studies will demonstrate its application and interpretation. 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG. -
Computational Model for Hybrid Job Scheduling in Grid Computing
Grid computing the job scheduling is the major issue that needs to be addressed prior to the development of a grid system or architecture. Scheduling is the users job to apropos resources in the grid environment. Grid computing has got a very wide domain in its application and thus induces various research opportunities that are generally spread over many areas of distributed computing and computer science. The cardinal point of scheduling is being attaining apex attainable performance and to satisfy the application requirements with computing resources at exposure. This paper posits techniques of using different scheduling techniques for increasing the efficacy of the grid system. This hybrid scheduler could enable the grid system to reduce the execution time. This paper also proposes an architecture which could be implemented ensuring the optimal results in the grid environment. This adaptive scheduler would possibly combine the pros of two scheduling strategies to produce a hybrid scheduling strategy which could cater the ever changing workload encountered by the gird system. The main objective of the proposed system is to reduce to overall job execution time and processor utilization time. 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.