Khalifa University

About: Khalifa University is a education organization based out in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Adsorption. The organization has 3752 authors who have published 10909 publications receiving 141629 citations.

Road Traffic Injury as a Major Public Health Issue in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: A Review.

Abstract: Injury was the largest single cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and death in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia I 2013. The vast majority of injury-related fatalities are deaths caused by road traffic. Measures to control this serious public health issue, which has significant consequences for both Saudi families and the Saudi economy as a whole, have been underway for years but with little success. Most attempts at intervening revolve around attempts for enforce stricter traffic laws and by installing automated traffic monitoring systems that will catch law breakers on camera and issue tickets and fines. While there has been much research on various factors that play a role in the high rate of road traffic injury in The Kingdom (e.g., driver behavior, animal collisions, disobeying traffic and pedestrian signals, environmental elements), virtually no attention has been given to examining why Saudi drivers behave the way that they do. This review provides a thorough account of the present situation in Saudi Arabia and discusses how health behavior theory can be used to gain a better understanding of driver behavior.

Natural antioxidants-based edible active food packaging: An overview of current advancements

Abstract: Advanced food packaging technology ensures food safety from pollutants and microbial pathogens, extending the shelf-life period of the preserved foods. However, conventional fossil-based polymer food packaging film is currently challenged with several inherent and extraneous plights with a growing demand for its replacement. Biodegradable polymers are derived from various natural biomass sources, beneficial for developing edible active packaging films, clinching the safety and sustainability of food shelf-life. Numerous natural antioxidants, nanofillers, and antimicrobial agents have been used to incorporate these biopolymer matrices to augment the characteristics properties (oxidation resistance, antimicrobial activity, mechanical and barrier properties) of the resulting hybrid active food packaging films. This review summarizes the recent advances in the application and developments of natural antioxidant-based edible food packaging films. The effect of natural antioxidants and nanofillers on the performance of composite films is also discussed critically. The controlled release and migration characteristics of the active components from the active film to food are also emphasized. The review also points out the current challenges concerning these active packaging film's safety, economic, and environmental aspects. Ultimately, the potential scope for edible active films in the food packaging industry is addressed.

Additive manufacturing-enabled shape transformations via FFF 4D printing

Abstract: Fused-filament-fabrication (FFF) is a commonly used and commercially successful additive-manufacturing method for thermoplastics. Depending on the FFF process parameters, the internal-strains along print direction, thermal-gradient across layers, and anisotropy introduced during layer-by-layer build-up can significantly affect the macroscopic properties, dimensional stability, and structural performance of the final part. Conversely, these factors can be optimized to result in unique, controllable thermally actuated shape-transformations. This work aims at quantifying and understanding the underlying mechanisms that drive the thermally actuated shape-transformation in three commonly used thermoplastics fabricated by the FFF method namely, poly-lactic-acid (PLA), high-impact-polystyrene (HIPS), and acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS). Initially, the release of internal-strains is analyzed for unidirectionally printed samples experimentally and computationally, employing a thermoviscoelastic-viscoplastic constitutive model. Subsequently, two basic initial (as-printed) configurations, namely, a beam and a circular-disc are chosen to study the 1D to 2D and 2D to 3D shape-transformations, respectively. The effect of process parameters such as the printing speed, print path, and infill density on the shape transformation behavior is investigated systematically. Finally, the results are applied to demonstrate shape-transformations for application in morphing-structures and/or as an alternative, simplified process in fabricating curved-components.

Is Saki #delicious?: The Food Perception Gap on Instagram and Its Relation to Health

Abstract: Food is an integral part of our life and what and how much we eat crucially affects our health. Our food choices largely depend on how we perceive certain characteristics of food, such as whether it is healthy, delicious or if it qualifies as a salad. But these perceptions differ from person to person and one person's "single lettuce leaf" might be another person's "side salad". Studying how food is perceived in relation to what it actually is typically involves a laboratory setup. Here we propose to use recent advances in image recognition to tackle this problem. Concretely, we use data for 1.9 million images from Instagram from the US to look at systematic differences in how a machine would objectively label an image compared to how a human subjectively does. We show that this difference, which we call the "perception gap", relates to a number of health outcomes observed at the county level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that image recognition is being used to study the "misalignment" of how people describe food images vs. what they actually depict.