Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Natural antibodies (nAbs) are most commonly defined as immunoglobulins present in the absence of pathological conditions or deliberate immunizations. Occurrence of nAbs in germ- and antigen-free mice suggest that their production is driven, at least in part, by self-antigens. Accordingly, nAbs are constituted of natural autoantibodies (nAAbs), and can belong to the IgM, IgG, or IgA subclasses. These nAbs provide immediate protection against infection while the adaptive arm of the immune system mounts a specific and long-term response. Beyond immediate protection from infection, nAbs have been shown to play various functional roles in the immune system, which include clearance of apoptotic debris, suppression of autoimmune and inflammatory responses, regulation of B cell responses, selection of the B cell repertoires, and regulation of B cell development. These various functions of nAbs are afforded by their reactivity, which is broad, cross-reactive, and shown to recognize evolutionarily fixed epitopes shared between foreign and self-antigens. Furthermore, nAbs have unique characteristics that also contribute to their functional roles and set them apart from antigen-specific antibodies. In further support for the role of nAbs in the protection against infections and in the maintenance of immune homeostasis, the therapeutic preparation of polyclonal immunoglobulins, intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), rich in nAbs is commonly used in the replacement therapy of primary and secondary immunodeficiencies and in the immunotherapy of a large number of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Here, we review several topics on nAbs features and functions, and therapeutic applications in human diseases. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

World University root node

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Fulltext

Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology

Natural Antibodies: from First-Line Defense Against Pathogens to Perpetual Immune Homeostasis

Cellular and Molecular Immunology

Anti-IgE IgG autoantibodies isolated from therapeutic normal IgG intravenous immunoglobulin induce basophil activation

This study presents a passive islanding detection technique based on the approach of total variation filtering (TVF) for inverter-based distributed generation under noisy environment. Contamination of noise in the signal makes the islanding detection threshold less reliable. Therefore, the modal voltage signal is analysed through TVF-based decomposition procedure and several statistical features are obtained from its output. For decision making, the features are compared with the pre-specified threshold. To tackle the challenge of islanding detection in the presence of the high-quality factor load, phase angle of the positive sequence voltage is considered as the second level of detection criterion. The proposed scheme is validated on IEEE 34-bus standard distribution system. The scheme is tested under islanding as well as all possible non-islanding network disturbances. Hardware-in-loop results are also presented in support of the theory. A comparative analysis of the proposed algorithm with the well-established S-transform is presented. The proposed scheme is found to be working effectively and can detect islanding condition within three cycles of its inception.

Department of Electrical Engineering

IET ENERGY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

Islanding detection using total variation-based signal decomposition techniqueInspec keywordsOther keywords

In this paper, a new model-based fault detection and localization algorithm is proposed for cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel converter to localize the open-circuit faults without the use of any additional sensors. Using DC bus voltages, switching states and grid voltage, grid current is estimated and compared with the measured grid current. Any significant deviations in the estimated and actual grid current of the CHB trigger an open circuit (OC) fault. Upon open circuit fault detection, the modulation scheme is altered from phase-shifted unipolar SPWM to phase-shifted bipolar SPWM for fault localization. At selected time instants, the change in measured grid current for a period of 5Ts (Ts being the step time of controller) is calculated and compared with the estimated change in grid current from the system model. The above-mentioned comparisons are used to localize the open-circuit faults in the CHB. The proposed method is verified on a scale-down CHB prototype and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2020 IEEE.

ECCE 2020 - IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition

A New Model-Based Fault Detection and Localization Scheme for Cascaded H-bridge Multilevel Converter

Locally recoverable codes (LRCs) are known to reduce the repair locality, i.e., the number of nodes accessed during node repair, in distributed storage systems. Regenerating codes, on the other hand, offer a decreased repair bandwidth, which is the repair traffic incurred during node repairs. Locally regenerating codes (LRGCs), which are constructed via intertwining regenerating codes of smaller block lengths, simultaneously offer a small repair locality and repair bandwidth. In this letter, we construct a family of LRGCs where the constituent codes are bandwidth-efficient, minimum bandwidth cooperative regenerating codes. The newly constructed LRGCs are optimal with respect to both minimum distance and rate. © 1997-2012 IEEE.

Department of Data Science

IEEE Communications Letters

Codes with minimum bandwidth cooperative local regeneration

An (a, b, τ) streaming code is a packet-level erasure code that can recover under a strict delay constraint of τ time units, from either a burst of b erasures or else of a random erasures, occurring within a sliding window of time duration w. While rate-optimal constructions of such streaming codes are available for all parameters {a, b, τ, w} in the literature, they require in most instances, a quadratic, O(τ2) field size. In this work, we make further progress towards field size reduction and present rate-optimal O(τ) field size streaming codes for two regimes: (i) gcd(b, τ + 1 - a) ≥ a (ii) τ + 1 a + b and b mod a 0, a - 1. © 2020 IEEE.

IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings

Staggered Diagonal Embedding Based Linear Field Size Streaming Codes

Pastures are complex land covers with a variety of land use systems. This land cover occupies large areas in the globe and is mainly used for livestock production. Brazil is one of the largest livestock producers and has extensive pasture areas. We analyzed the pasture land cover change of the São Paulo State between the years 2000 to 2015. São Paulo was chosen as study case due to its large industrial and agricultural importance and its expressive land cover changes over past decades. It was analyzed land covers databases generated by the Brazilian Annual Land Use and Land Cover Mapping Project (MapBiomas Project) - Collection 4. Transition matrix was generated to analyze the land cover change during the period. Gain, loss, total change, net change and swap were calculated in terms of area. Total pasture area decreased but continues the largest land cover of the São Paulo State; with 79.5% of persistence in the area. Main changes were from losses of pastures and gains in agriculture. Most of the changes to pasture came from other non vegetated areas and grassland categories. These results demonstrated the relevance of pastures areas in land cover change dynamics to address land use policy and plan future land use scenarios. © 2020 IEEE.

Environmental Sciences and Sustainable Engineering Centre (ESSENCE)

2020 IEEE Latin American GRSS and ISPRS Remote Sensing Conference, LAGIRS 2020 - Proceedings

Pasture Land Cover Change in São Paulo State, Brazil

We have designed three-dimensional numerical simulations of a soft spheres model, with size polidispersity and in athermal conditions, to study the transient shear banding that occurs during yielding of jammed soft solids. We analyze the effects of different types of drag coefficients used in the simulations and compare the results obtained using Lees-Edwards periodic boundary conditions with the case in which the same model solid is confined between two walls. The specific damping mechanism and the different boundary conditions indeed modify the load curves and the velocity profiles in the transient regime. Nevertheless, we find that the presence of a stress overshoot and of a related transient banding phenomenon, for large enough samples, is a robust feature for overdamped systems, where their presence do not depend on the specific drag used and on the different boundary conditions. © 2020 American Physical Society.

Department of Physics

Physical Review E

Computational study of transient shear banding in soft jammed solids

We search for dynamical substructures in the LAMOST DR3 very metal-poor (VMP) star catalog. After cross-matching with Gaia DR2, there are ∼3300 VMP stars with available high-quality astrometric information that have halo-like kinematics. We apply a method based on the self-organizing map StarGO to find groups clustered in the 4D space of orbital energy and angular momentum. We identify 57 dynamically tagged groups (DTGs), which we label DTG-1 to DTG-57. Most of them belong to existing massive substructures in the nearby halo, such as the Gaia Sausage or Sequoia. The stream identified by Helmi et al. is recovered, but the two disjointed portions of the substructure appear to have distinct dynamical properties. The very retrograde substructure Rg5 found previously by Myeong et al. is also retrieved. We report six new DTGs with highly retrograde orbits, two with very prograde orbits, and 12 with polar orbits. By mapping other data sets (APOGEE halo stars, and catalogs of r-process-enhanced and carbon-enhanced metal-poor [CEMP] stars) onto the trained neuron map, we can associate stars with detailed chemical abundances with the DTGs and look for associations with chemically peculiar stars. The highly eccentric Gaia Sausage groups contain representatives of both debris from the satellite itself (which is α-poor) and the Splashed Disk, sent up into eccentric halo orbits from the encounter (and which is α-rich). The new prograde substructures also appear to be associated with the Splashed Disk. The DTGs belonging to the Gaia Sausage host two relatively metal-rich r-II stars and six CEMP stars in different subclasses, consistent with the idea that the Gaia Sausage progenitor is a massive dwarf galaxy. Rg5 is dynamically associated with two highly r-process-enhanced stars with [Fe/H] ∼ -3. This finding indicates that its progenitor might be an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy that has experienced r-process enrichment from neutron star mergers. © 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Astrophysical Journal

Dynamical Relics of the Ancient Galactic Halo

Intensive row crop agriculture on loess mantled hillslopes in the upper Midwest, USA, accelerates soil erosion and the loss of organic matter by increasing soil aggregate breakdown, changing surface roughness patterns, and leaving soil exposed to rainfall and wind for much of the year. There is a knowledge gap, however, in relating how the dynamics of soil erosion on hillslopes control landscape heterogeneity in terms of particle size, surface soil organic chemistry and reactivity. Simulated rainfall experiments on intensively managed hillslopes in the Clear Creek, IA watershed, USA, revealed that tillage-induced, oriented roughness controls the amount and organic geochemistry of soil particles mobilized downhill. The average discharge rate of mobilized sediment was nearly 30-fold higher when the tillage orientation was parallel to the runoff direction compared to when the tillage orientation (i.e. contour tillage) was perpendicular to the runoff direction. Mobilized particles under contour tillage were higher in organic carbon (OC) content and were relatively less decomposed, based on lignin chemistry, compared to analogous particles under the parallel tillage orientation. Contour tillage increased deposition of denser particles within the furrows and increased the release of the finer, lighter, and organic-rich material during over-spilling and contour breach. Our findings have important implications for understanding how the interaction of tillage practices and event-based erosion influences the spatial heterogeneity of soil geochemistry and potentially soil health across agricultural landscapes as well as understanding what controls the geochemical signature of soil erosion into streams. © 2020