Indian Institute of Technology Indore

About: Indian Institute of Technology Indore is a education organization based out in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Fading & Support vector machine. The organization has 1606 authors who have published 4803 publications receiving 66500 citations.

Has expansion of mobile phone and internet use spurred financial inclusion in the SAARC countries

Abstract: Exclusion from the mainstream financial world is a burden on the poor of many countries. The proliferation of new mobile and online financial services, such as e-banking, money transfers, and payment processing has the potential to provide access to basic financial products and services to financially excluded people. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the growth of mobile phone and Internet use on financial inclusion in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries from 2004 to 2014. We applied principal component analysis to construct a financial inclusion index that served as a proxy variable for the accessibility of financial services in the SAARC countries. Using three different models-the fixed effect, random effect, and panel correction standard errors models-this study discovered a positive and significant relationship between the growth of financial inclusion and expansion of both mobile phone and Internet services. Moreover, an empirical study of the control variables showed that the levels of income and education were positively associated with financial inclusion, whereas the size of the rural population and unemployment were negatively related to financial inclusion. In addition, the empirical estimates posit a unidirectional causal flow from the growth of mobile and Internet services to expanded financial inclusion in the SAARC countries.

Performance Analysis of Multi-Antenna Multiuser Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Systems for Mobile Services Delivery

Abstract: Satellite communication systems need to be integrated with emerging cooperative relaying techniques to provide seamless connectivity and high-speed broadband access for mobile users in future wireless networks. In this paper, we study a multi-antenna multiuser hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay network (HSTRN) employing opportunistic user scheduling with outdated channel state information (CSI) and amplify-and-forward relaying with co-channel interference (CCI). By adopting Shadowed-Rician fading for satellite links and Nakagami- ${m}$ fading for terrestrial links, we derive novel and accurate expressions for outage probability and ergodic capacity of the proposed HSTRN, and further examine its achievable diversity order. More importantly, we conduct the performance analysis by taking both uncorrelated and correlated Shadowed-Rician fading channels into account and show that the antenna correlation at the satellite does not affect the overall system diversity order. Our derived analytical expressions provide efficient tools to characterize the impact of CCI, outdated CSI, and antenna correlation on the system performance of HSTRN with an arbitrary number of satellite antennas, number of interferers, number of users, and integer values of the per-hop fading severity parameters. Our results provide useful guidelines in the design of futuristic HSTRNs for satellite mobile communications.

An Update on Antiviral Therapy Against SARS-CoV-2: How Far Have We Come?

Abstract: COVID-19 pandemic has spread worldwide at an exponential rate affecting millions of people instantaneously. Currently, various drugs are under investigation to treat an enormously increasing number of COVID-19 patients. This dreadful situation clearly demands an efficient strategy to quickly identify drugs for the successful treatment of COVID-19. Hence, drug repurposing is an effective approach for the rapid discovery of frontline arsenals to fight against COVID-19. Successful application of this approach has resulted in the repurposing of some clinically approved drugs as potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 candidates. Several of these drugs are either antimalarials, antivirals, antibiotics or corticosteroids and they have been repurposed based on their potential to negate virus or reduce lung inflammation. Large numbers of clinical trials have been registered to evaluate the effectiveness and clinical safety of these drugs. Till date, a few clinical studies are complete and the results are primary. WHO also conducted an international, multi-country, open-label, randomized trials-a solidarity trial for four antiviral drugs. However, solidarity trials have few limitations like no placebos were used, additionally any drug may show effectiveness for a particular population in a region which may get neglected in solidarity trial analysis. The ongoing randomized clinical trials can provide reliable long-term follow-up results that will establish both clinical safety and clinical efficacy of these drugs with respect to different regions, populations and may aid up to worldwide COVID-19 treatment research. This review presents a comprehensive update on majorly repurposed drugs namely chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, lopinavir-ritonavir, favipiravir, ribavirin, azithromycin, umifenovir, oseltamivir as well as convalescent plasma therapy used against SARS-CoV-2. The review also summarizes the data recorded on the mechanism of anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of these repurposed drugs along with the preclinical and clinical findings, therapeutic regimens, pharmacokinetics, and drug-drug interactions.

Performance of laser surface textured high speed steel cutting tool in machining of Al7075-T6 aerospace alloy

Abstract: Texturing the rake face of the cutting tools has recently emerged as a promising and environment friendly method for reducing friction during machining. Laser surface texturing has been the most commonly used method for fabricating textures on the cutting tool. This paper reports the experimental study of fabricating an array of micro scale dimples on the rake face of high speed steel cutting tool using a pulsed Nd:YAG laser. The effect of the laser parameters like wavelength and fluence on the dimensions and form of individual dimples were studied. Analysis of results show that uniform circular shaped dimples with very little spatter can be obtained using low fluence levels at wavelength of 355 nm. An array of micro scale dimples were then fabricated on the cutting tool using the optimized parameter levels. A very low textured area density was used in order to understand the process of chip flow over the textures and study the effect of machining on individual dimples. This textured cutting tool was then used in orthogonal dry machining of Al7075-T6 aerospace alloy and compared with the performance of conventional tools. Use of textured cutting tools resulted in reduction of both cutting and thrust forces. The tool-chip contact length is also less in the case of textured tool. The results show that textured high speed steel tools can significantly improve the metal cutting process while dry machining ductile workpieces.