National Institute of Technology, Meghalaya

About: National Institute of Technology, Meghalaya is a education organization based out in Shillong, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Control theory & Electric power system. The organization has 503 authors who have published 1062 publications receiving 6818 citations. The organization is also known as: NIT Meghalaya & NITM.

Stability switching and hydra effect in a predator-prey metapopulation model.

Abstract: A metapopulation model is investigated to explore how the spatial heterogeneity affects predator-prey interactions. A Rosenzweig-MacArthur (RM) predator-prey model with dispersal of both the prey and predator is formulated. We propose such a system as a well mixed spatial model. Here, partially mixed spatial models are defined in which the dispersal of only one of the communities (prey or predator) is considered. In our study, the spatial heterogeneity is induced by dissimilar (unbalanced) dispersal rates between the patches. A large difference between the predator dispersal rates may stabilize the unstable positive equilibrium of the model. The existence of two ecological phenomena are found under independent harvesting strategy: stability switching and hydra effect. When prey or predator is harvested in a heterogenious environment, a positive stable steady state becomes unstable with increasing the harvesting effort, and a further increase in the effort leads to a stable equilibrium. Thus, a stability switching happens. Furthermore, the predator biomass (at stable state) in both the patches (and hence total predator stock) increases when the patch with a higher predator density is harvested; resulting a hydra effect. These two phenomena do not occur in the non-spatial RM model. Hence, spatial heterogeneity induces stability switching and hydra effect.

Blockchain Based Smart Healthcare System for Chronic –Illness Patient Monitoring

Abstract: Chronic disease exists over a period of time and it is very crucial because it can affect the health of disability people more. Normally people think that they are not suffering or affected by the disease because they do not have symptoms. But it does not necessarily mean a person with no symptom has no chronic disease. This paper presents design and prototype implementation of a blockchain system which remotely monitors patient health records. The patient monitoring system is a big challenge and other security threats arises as the health care data transferred from one to another and authorization to create and read transactions, is a major concern related to data loss. The data loss of the patient protected health information which are generated from the devices should be handled carefully. So in this paper we proposed a solidity based smart contract run over a Ethereum virtual machine to facilitate the secure analysis and storing of transactions from and to the sensors. Using the Ethereum protocol, based on a private blockchain and writing the smart contracts to keep track of the patient health information. We have created an automatic system through which the sensors collects the data, then communicates with the decentralized application via the smart contract. The method inside the smart contract collects data when they are called, also reads and writes transactions of all events on the Ethereum virtual network. This solidity based smart contract system along with injected web3, metamask, and truffle environment would support alert transaction to the patient and medical professionals.

Shaking Table Tests to Evaluate the Seismic Performance of Soil Nailing Stabilized Embankments

Abstract: A series of shaking table tests will be carried out on 0.4 m high instrumented soil nailed embankments. The important parameters considered in this study consist of a combination of three ...

Glycation of human serum albumin affects its binding affinity towards (−)-epigallocatechin gallate

Abstract: Reducing sugars can modify protein structures in vivo via non-enzymatic methods were identified in different cases of diabetes and glycemia. The synthesis and characterization of glycated analogue of human serum albumin (HSA) has been reported recently by our group (Singha Roy et al. in J Biomol Struct Dyn 2015. doi: 10.1080/07391102.2015.1094749 ). The current paper is focused on the interaction of (−)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a major green tea component with the glycated HSA. The interaction of EGCG with the glycated HSA has been carried out using steady-state fluorescence and circular dichroism experiments. The quenching constants (k q ) were found in the order of 1013 M−1 s−1, indicating the presence of static quenching mode in the interaction. The binding constants of EGCG–HSA complex was found to be decreased from 7.63 × 104 (Maiti et al. in Proteins Struct Funct Bioinform 64:355–362, 2006) to 3.27 × 104 M−1 at 293 K after glycation of HSA. The changes in entropy (∆S°) of the interaction of EGCG has been altered from +16.23 (with native HSA) to +34.84 J/K mol (with glycated HSA) which may offer a stabilization in α-helix of the glycated HSA during binding. EGCG has shown its affinity to the site 1 (subdomain IIA) of the glycated HSA. Energy transfer parameters revealed the possibility of non-radiative energy transfer from donor Trp 214 to acceptor EGCG.

A copyright protection scheme for digital images based on shuffled singular value decomposition and visual cryptography.

Abstract: This paper proposes a new watermarking algorithm based on the shuffled singular value decomposition and the visual cryptography for copyright protection of digital images. It generates the ownership and identification shares of the image based on visual cryptography. It decomposes the image into low and high frequency sub-bands. The low frequency sub-band is further divided into blocks of same size after shuffling it and then the singular value decomposition is applied to each randomly selected block. Shares are generated by comparing one of the elements in the first column of the left orthogonal matrix with its corresponding element in the right orthogonal matrix of the singular value decomposition of the block of the low frequency sub-band. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme clearly verifies the copyright of the digital images, and is robust to withstand several image processing attacks. Comparison with the other related visual cryptography-based algorithms reveals that the proposed method gives better performance. The proposed method is especially resilient against the rotation attack.