Investigation on the use of ensemble learning and big data in crop identification.

The agriculture sector in Egypt faces several problems, such as climate change, water storage, and yield variability. The comprehensive capabilities of Big Data (BD) can help in tackling the uncertainty of food supply occurs due to several factors such as soil erosion, water pollution, climate change, socio-cultural growth, governmental regulations, and market fluctuations. Crop identification and monitoring plays a vital role in modern agriculture. Although several machine learning models have been utilized in identifying crops, the performance of ensemble learning has not been investigated extensively. The massive volume of satellite imageries has been established as a big data problem forcing to deploy the proposed solution using big data technologies to manage, store, analyze, and visualize satellite data. In this paper, we have developed a weighted voting mechanism for improving crop classification performance in a large scale, based on ensemble learning and big data schema. Built upon Apache Spark, the popular DB Framework, the proposed approach was tested on El Salheya, Ismaili governate. The proposed ensemble approach boosted accuracy by 6.5%, 1.9%, 4.4%, 4.9%, 4.7% in precision, recall, F-score, Overall Accuracy (OA), and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) metrics respectively. Our findings confirm the generalization of the proposed crop identification approach at a large-scale setting.

Recent Advances in Biodegradable Polymers and Their Biological Applications: A Brief Review.

The rising significance of the field of biopolymers has driven the rapid progress of this distinctive class of polymeric materials in the past decades. Biodegradable polymers have acquired much attention because they play an essential role in humans' lives due to their specific tunable electrical conductivity and biodegradability characteristics, making them fascinating in many applications. Herein, we debated the recent progress in developing biodegradable polymers and their applications. Initially, we introduce the basics of conducting and biodegradable polymers, trailed by debates about the effective strategies currently used to develop biopolymers. Special importance will focus on the uses of biodegradable polymers in drug delivery and tissue engineering, as well as wound healing, demonstrating the recent findings, and uses of several biodegradable polymers in modern biological uses. In this review, we have provided comprehensive viewpoints on the latest progress of the challenges and future prospects involving biodegradable polymers' advancement and commercial applications.

Improved anti-biofouling resistances using novel nanocelluloses/cellulose acetate extracted from rice straw based membranes for water desalination.

Cellulose and Nanocellulose acetate (NCA) have attractive novel properties like excellent mechanical properties, rich hydroxyl groups for modification, and natural properties with environmental friendliness. Cellulose was extracted from rice straw wastes as an extra value, then it had been further transformed into NCA using the acidic hydrolysis technique. The structural, crystalline, morphological, were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1HNMR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning microscopy, respectively. The particle size of the Nanocellulose extracted from rice straw was about 22 nm with a spherical shape. Development membranes were prepared with different concentrations of NCA to improve the performance and the anti-biofouling properties of cellulose acetate reverse osmosis (RO) membranes using a phase inversion technique. The structural of membranes were characterized by FTIR, water contact angle measurements, while the anti-biofouling properties were studied by static protein adsorption. The results indicated the development membrane features a lower contact angle accomplished with exhibits pore-forming ability and enhanced hydrophilicity of prepared membrane, furthermore the development cellulose acetate reverse osmosis (CA-RO) membranes with 40:60% RNCA:CA produced a salt rejection of 97.4% and a water flux of 2.2 L/m2 h. the development membrane have resists effectively protein adsorption and microbial growth showed from the results of Static protein adsorption.