An experimental study was carried out on a Lysimeter with the aim of partially meeting WRs (Water Requirements) of the Okra crop through SWT (Shallow Water Table) while maintaining the SWT at various levels below the ground surface. Under the study, CWR (Crop Water Requirement), yield, water productivity, salt accrual and contribution of SWTs towards meeting the CWR are assessed. The study was designed in accordance with the principles of CRD (Complete Randomized Design) with three treatments and four replications. The treatments; viz. T1, T2, and T3 consisted of maintaining the WTDs (Water Table Depths) at 45, 60 and 75 cm, respectively, below the ground surface. The crop was irrigated with a good quality water having ECw = 0.50 dS m-1 and pH = 7.3. The results of the study showed that the crop consumed the maximum amount of water under T1 treatment, followed by T2 and then by T3 treatment. Accordingly, the contribution of SWTs towards the CWR is 94.8, 93.2 and 42.9% of the total CWR under the T1, T2, and T3 treatments, respectively. Maximum yield is attained under T3 treatment, followed by T2 treatment and then by T1 treatment. Likewise, maximum water productivity is achieved under T3 treatment, followed by T2 treatment and then by T1 treatment. The dry bulk density (?d) of the soil, under T1 and T2 treatments, increased slightly; however, it remained unchanged under the T3 treatment. The ECse (Electrical Conductivity) of the soil increased, whereas, the pH value of the soil decreased under all the treatments. Statistically, significant difference (p < 0.05) is observed in CWR, yield, water productivity, contribution of SWT towards crop water use, plant height and weight of the Okra pod; whereas, the difference in ?d, ECse, pH and length of the pod is observed as not significant (p > 0.05) under the three treatments. Accordingly, to make profitable use of SWTs, improve WUE and productivity, and maintain soil fertility, the depth of SWT be controlled at 75 cm for growing of the Okra crop. Adapting to this guideline will help in availing the maximum contribution of SWTs towards meeting the CWR and achieve the larger aim of water conservation.

The edit distance between two sequences is the minimum number of weighted transformation-operations that are required to transform one string into the other. The weighted transformation-operations are insert, remove, and substitute. Dynamic programming solution to find edit distance exists but it becomes computationally intensive when the lengths of strings become very large. This work presents a novel parallel algorithm to solve edit distance problem of string matching. The algorithm is based on resolving dependencies in the dynamic programming solution of the problem and it is able to compute each row of edit distance table in parallel. In this way, it becomes possible to compute the complete table in min(m,n) iterations for strings of size m and n whereas state-of-the-art parallel algorithm solves the problem in max(m,n) iterations. The proposed algorithm also increases the amount of parallelism in each of its iteration. The algorithm is also capable of exploiting spatial locality while its implementation. Additionally, the algorithm works in a load balanced way that further improves its performance. The algorithm is implemented for multicore systems having shared memory. Implementation of the algorithm in OpenMP shows linear speedup and better execution time as compared to state-of-the-art parallel approach. Efficiency of the algorithm is also proven better in comparison to its competitor.

Programming is one of the career rewarding skills; however, learning programming skill is extremely hard and arduous as supported by several studies. The first programming language has an everlasting impact on the programmer’s program’s development abilities. In most of the universities the imperative paradigm is used for introductory programming courses and generally C language is used as a base language of a first programming course. The C language is a leading programming language and extensively utilized for commercial applications. The majority of the programming languages are highly motivated from the C language, yet its intrinsic complexities and non-pedagogic origin evidently makes it hard and a complex choice for a first programming course. This paper proposed a rational and realizable solution that can make a C language a suitable choice for a first the course of programming.

Clustered WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) is a hierarchical network structure that conserves energy by distributing the task of sensing and data transfer to destination among the non-CH (Cluster-Head) and CH (Cluster Head) node in a cluster. In clustered MWSN (Mobile Wireless Sensor Network), cluster maintenance to increase at a reception at the destination during communication operation is difficult due to the movement of CHs and non-CH nodes in and out of the cluster. To conserve energy and increased data transfer to the destination, it is necessary to find the duration after which sensor node’s role should be changed from CH to non-CH and vice-versa. In this paper, we have proposed an energy independent round time scheme to identify the duration after which re-clustering procedure should be invoked for changing roles of sensor nodes as CHs and associated nodes to conserve energy and increased data delivery. This depends on the dissemination interval of the sensor nodes rather than sensor node’s energy. We have also provided a complete analytical estimate of network energy consumption with energy consumed in every phase of a around.

Research regarding MAT (Mobile Application Testing) in Pakistan is hard to discover and to the best of our knowledge, no work has been done in surveying MAT in Pakistan. In this work, we have examined the current trend and status of MAT in Pakistan. Main objective was to investigate to what extent MAT is currently applied in Pakistan software companies and what experience the companies have with using MAT. Furthermore, efforts were made to find out what testers think about MAT, e.g. issue, advantages and disadvantages of MAT, what factors affects MAT and how they plan to improve MAT. In order to achieve our objectives, we used a comprehensive online survey so we converted our research questions into correspondence survey questions. We served a questionnaire of the survey to 66 testing relevant officials of leading software companies in different cities of Pakistan to develop a model study about general trend and status of MAT which can be generalized all over Pakistan. We received 56 replies in total after over 2 months. After that, we used SPSS tool to analyze the replies of this questionnaire. Cross-Tabulation Analysis and Pearson Chi-square tests have been computed to examine the results. We found some interesting results on current status and practice of MAT in Pakistan software companies.

De-noising of the medical images is very difficult task. To improve the overall visual representation we need to apply a contrast enhancement techniques, this representation provide the physicians and clinicians a good and recovered diagnosis results. Various de-noising and contrast enhancements methods are develops. However, some of the methods are not good in providing the better results with accuracy and efficiency. In our paper we de-noise and enhance the medical images without any loss of information. We uses the curvelet transform in combination with ridglet transform along with CS (Cuckoo Search) algorithm. The curvlet transform adapt and represents the sparse pixel informations with all edges. The edges play very important role in understanding of the images. Curvlet transform computes the edges very efficiently where the wavelets are failed. We used the CS to optimize the de-noising coefficients without loss of structural and morphological information. Our designed method would be accurate and efficient in de-noising the medical images. Our method attempts to remove the multiplicative and additive noises. Our proposed method is proved to be an efficient and reliable in removing all kind of noises from the medical images. Result indicates that our proposed approach is better than other approaches in removing impulse, Gaussian, and speckle noises.

Looming water scarcity could be curtailed with intelligent water losses control. Present study was designed to assess the relative effect of watercourse lining in prospect of seepage minimization. Qualitative as well as quantitative analysis was undertaken using water conveyance efficiency, annual water saving, increase in cropping intensities, time and land saving along with labor saving indictors over Gadeji minor in Sindh, Pakistan. Primary data was collected from field measurements while secondary data was gathered from NPIW (National Program for Improvement of Watercourses), Irrigation Department, personal interviews and site survey. The analysis revealed that lining of 30% initial portion of watercourses resulted average annual water saving of 10.32 hectare-m. Similarly, the cropping intensity increased 15% in Rabi and 14% in Kharif seasons. Crop yield increased by 17% for wheat crop, 14% for cottoncrop, 12% for sugarcane, 17% for chilies, 11% for onion crop and 20% for rice crop after lining the selected watercourses. Thus, it is concluded that watercourse lining has noticeable effect for seepage control which yielded a significant water saving. In future, economic viability of watercourse lining may be assessed for obtaining optimum benefits.

A novel hybrid design based electronic voting system is proposed, implemented and analyzed. The proposed system uses two voter verification techniques to give better results in comparison to single identification based systems. Finger print and facial recognition based methods are used for voter identification. Cross verification of a voter during an election process provides better accuracy than single parameter identification method. The facial recognition system uses Viola-Jones algorithm along with rectangular Haar feature selection method for detection and extraction of features to develop a biometric template and for feature extraction during the voting process. Cascaded machine learning based classifiers are used for comparing the features for identity verification using GPCA (Generalized Principle Component Analysis) and K-NN (K-Nearest Neighbor). It is accomplished through comparing the Eigen-vectors of the extracted features with the biometric template pre-stored in the election regulatory body database. The results of the proposed system show that the proposed cascaded design based system performs better than the systems using other classifiers or separate schemes i.e. facial or finger print based schemes. The proposed system will be highly useful for real time applications due to the reason that it has 91% accuracy under nominal light in terms of facial recognition.

DSM (Demand Side Management) is a short term and comparatively low cost solution for energy starved countries. Replacement of IB (Incandescent Bulbs) with CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) has proved its success throughout the world. The same solution, at larger scale, was proposed to Pakistan to mitigate power shortage on short term basis. Accordingly in year 2008, ADB (Asian Development Bank) conducted a study and it was found that replacement of conventional IB with 30 million CFL will result into series of benefits for the stake holders and above all the Environment. The study, unfortunately didn’t take enough consideration of effect of CFLs on the power system being nonlinear device and so the power quality issues remained a secondary consideration. The focus of this paper remains on the effect of such non-linear load on consumers, it also envisages the erratic behaviour of such large penetration of CFLs on direct single phase, three phase, digital as well as electromechanical energy meters, under different loading conditions e.g. resistive load, SMPS (Switch Mode Power Supply), half and full-wave rectifiers. It also reflects harmonic pollution caused by CFLs, their effect on power system quality and the registration ability of electromechanical as well as digital energy meters. To this end Harmonic spectrum was recorded up to the 31st harmonic.

The VIoT (Visual Internet of Things) connects virtual information world with real world objects using sensors and pervasive computing. For video surveillance in VIoT, ChD (Change Detection) is a critical component. ChD algorithms identify regions of change in multiple images of the same scene recorded at different time intervals for video surveillance. This paper presents performance comparison of histogram thresholding and classification ChD algorithms using quantitative measures for video surveillance in VIoT based on salient features of datasets. The thresholding algorithms Otsu, Kapur, Rosin and classification methods k-means, EM (Expectation Maximization) were simulated in MATLAB using diverse datasets. For performance evaluation, the quantitative measures used include OSR (Overall Success Rate), YC (Yule’s Coefficient) and JC (Jaccard’s Coefficient), execution time and memory consumption. Experimental results showed that Kapur’s algorithm performed better for both indoor and outdoor environments with illumination changes, shadowing and medium to fast moving objects. However, it reflected degraded performance for small object size with minor changes. Otsu algorithm showed better results for indoor environments with slow to medium changes and nomadic object mobility. k-means showed good results in indoor environment with small object size producing slow change, no shadowing and scarce illumination changes.

In the current era where multi-core technologies are very common in use, the existing web browsers are unable to fully utilize the capability of multi-core processors.The web browsers execute the JavaScript code locally in order to produce an efficient response of web pages. This responsiveness is however limited by the fact that the JavaScript code is uni-threaded, and consequently, the efficiency of the code degrades if it involves a large number of computations. In this paper, we propose a framework called JSOPT (JavaScript Optimizer) which generates an efficient JavaScript code to effectively utilize multi-core architectures. The framework uses a template containing constructs for communication & synchronization, and subsequently generates optimized code to be executed on the multi-core architectures. Multiple instances of templates are then generated with different implementations of the code and the best instance is selected to be incorporated in the library. With the optimized code generated using JSOPT, our results show a significant improvement in the performance of several benchmarks involving intensive computations based matrix operations on the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

This article deals with general formulae of parametric and non parametric bivariate subdivision scheme with four parameters. By assigning specific values to those parameters we get some special cases of existing tensor product schemes as well as a new proposed scheme. The behavior of schemes produced by the general formulae is interpolating, approximating and relaxed. Approximating bivariate subdivision schemes produce some other surfaces as compared to interpolating bivariate subdivision schemes. Polynomial reproduction and polynomial generation are desirable properties of subdivision schemes. Capability of polynomial reproduction and polynomial generation is strongly connected with smoothness, sum rules, convergence and approximation order. We also calculate the polynomial generation and polynomial reproduction of 9-point bivariate approximating subdivision scheme. Comparison of polynomial reproduction, polynomial generation and continuity of existing and proposed schemes has also been established. Some numerical examples are also presented to show the behavior of bivariate schemes.

Subgrade is a most important part of a pavement structure, which should have a reasonable stiffness modulus and shear strength. CBR (California Bearing Ratio) test is performed to evaluate stiffness modulus and shear strength of subgrade soils. However, CBR test is laborious and time consuming, particularly when soil is highly plastic like Jamshoro soil. In order to overcome this limitation, it may be appropriate to correlate CBR value of soil with its index properties like grain size analysis, Atterberg limits, and compaction characteristics such as MDD (Maximum Dry Density) and OMC (Optimum Moisture Content). This paper expresses the correlations between CBR value of Jamshoro soil and its index properties. SLRA (Single Linear Regression Analysis) and MLRA(Multiple Linear Regression) based Models were utilized. It is seen that MLRA gave better correlations up to R2 of about 0.984. It is observed that the Soaked CBR value can be predicted with confidence from LL (Liquid Limit), PI (Plasticity Index) and percent finer while the un-soaked CBR value can be obtained from LL, plasticity index and MDD.

The construction industry is viewed as the regulator of national economy globally. Its importance in Pakistan has increased greatly because of the involvement of international funding agencies in infrastructure projects. The feasibility of such projects is largely dependent upon the satisfaction of multiple stakeholders. Hence, it is important to explore the factors considered by different construction organizations in evaluating the failure of their projects. This study focuses on providing a rating of factors affecting construction project failures in the construction industry of Karachi. In addition to that, difference in perception between professionals belonging to different construction projects and organizational structures has also been evaluated. The results of this study show that factors related to project planning and management are rated higher by professionals in general. Secondly, it was also observed that client satisfaction and its related factors were rated higher by organizations with project based management structures.

In this paper, FW (Food Waste) and SS (Sewage Sludge) were co-digested for biohydrogen production. After characterization both FW and SS were found as better option forbiohydrogen production. FW was rich in carbohydrate containing specially rice, which was added as more than 50% and easily hydrolyzable waste. FW is considered as an auxiliary substrate for biohydrogen production and high availability of carbohydrate in FW makes it an important substrate for the production of biohydrogen. On the contrary, SS was rich in protein and has a high pH buffering capacity, which makes it appropriate for codigestion. Adequate supplementation of inorganic salts, the addition of hydrogen producing inoculums, protein enrichment and pH buffering capacity of SS and carbohydrate content in FW increases the hydrogen production potential. Various experiments were performed by considering different mixing ratios like 90:10, 80:20, 70:30, 60:40 and 50:50 of FW and SS. The 50:50 and 90:10 mixing ratio of FW and SS were found as best among all other co-digested ratios. The maximum specific hydrogenyield 106.7 mL/gVS added was obtained at a waste composition of 50:50 followed by 92.35 mL/gVSadded from 90:10 of FW to SS. The optimum pH and temperature for operating this process werein the range of 5.5-6.5 and 35°C. The production of clean energy and waste utilization in anaerobic co-digestion process makes biohydrogen generation a promising and novel approach to fulfilling the increasing energy needs as a substitute for fossil fuels.

Mechanical properties of DP (Dual Phase) steels are greatly influenced by the microstructural features such as grain size, morphology and martensite volume fraction (Vm%). These microstructural features can be altered by changing the soaking time and temperature within intercritical zone. Present study aims to study the effect of intercritical annealing temperature and soaking time on Vm% and its effects on mechanical properties of plain low carbon steel grade (AISI 1020) steel having ferritemartensitemicrostructure. Nine DP steel specimens with various amount of martensite were produced via intercritical heat treatment. Mechanical properties including TS (Tensile Strength), hardness and toughness were characterized and co-related with martensite volume fraction. It was found that increasing the intercritical annealing temperature and soaking time increases the Vm%. The optimum TS and hardness were found at 64Vm% and then decrease with further increase in Vm%. The toughness was found to have linear relationship with Vm%.

Four core samples of outcrop type shale from Mancos, Marcellus, Eagle Ford, and Barnett shale formations were studied to evaluate the productivity performance and reservoir connectivity at elevated temperature and pressure. These laboratory experiments were conducted using hydrostatic permeability system with helium as test gas primarily to avoid potential significant effects of adsorption and/or associated swelling that might affect permeability. It was found that the permeability reduction was observed due to increasing confining stress and permeability improvement was observed related to Knudsen flow and molecular slippage related to Klinkenberg effect. Through the effective permeability of rock is improved at lower pore pressures, as 1000 psi. The effective stress with relatively high flow path was identified, as 100-200 nm, in Eagle Ford core sample. However other three samples showed low marginal flow paths in low connectivity.

In the present world, wireless communication is becoming immensely popular for plethora of applications. Technology has been advancing at an accelerated rate leading to make communication reliable. Still, there are issues need to be address to minimize errors in the transmission. This research study expounds on the rapid convergence of the signal. Convergence is considered to be an important aspect in wireless communication. For rapid convergence, two ambiguities should be addressed; Eigenvalue spread and sparse identification or sparsity of the signal. Eigen value spread is defining as the ratio of minimum to maximum Eigenvalue, whereas sparsity is defining as the loosely bounded system. In this research, two of these attributes are investigated for MAA (Multi-Array Antenna) signal using the cascading of Wavelet and Krylov processes. Specifically, the MAA signal is applied in the research because nowadays there are many physical hindrances in the communication path. These hurdles weaken the signal strength which in turn effects the quality of the reception. WT (Wavelet Transform) is used to address the Eigenvalue problem and the Krylov sequence is used to attempt the sparse identification of the MAA signal. The results show that the convergence of the MMA signal is improved by applying Wavelet transform and Krylov Subspace.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology in which text image is used to understand and write text by machines. The work on languages containing isolated characters such as German, English, French and others is at its peak. The OCR and ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) research in Sindhi script is currently at in starting stages and not sufficient work have been cited in this area even though Sindhi language is rich in culture and history. This paper presents one of the initial steps in recognizing Sindhi handwritten characters. The isolated characters of Sindhi script written by the subjects have been recognized. The various subjects were asked to write Sindhi characters in unconstrained form and then the written samples were collected and scanned through a flatbed scanner. The scanned documents were preprocessed with the help of binary conversion, removing noise by pepper noise and the lines were segmented with the help of horizontal profile technique. The segmented lines were used to extract characters from scanned pages.This character segmentation was done by vertical projection. The extracted characters have been used to extract features so that the characters can be classified easily. Zoning was used for the feature extraction technique. For the classification, neural network has been used. The recognized characters converted into editable text with an average accuracy of 85%.