Afghanistan is located at the convergence of Central, Middle and South Asian regions, one of the ... more Afghanistan is located at the convergence of Central, Middle and South Asian regions, one of the most world prime geographical locations. Its strategic location and abundant mineral resources have always attracted international community including India. Hence Indian objectives to develop relations with Afghanistan are manifold and decades old. Indian foreign policy is devised by many factors like its bitter relations with Pakistan and its desire of access route to Central Asian Republics by limiting Pakistan’s reach that has serious implications for Pakistan. In view of its past experience, Pakistan perceives Indian extended desire to engage in Afghanistan as a deliberate strategy of using the later as a battleground to show its power and use influence against Pakistan. Terrorist incidents in Balochistan provide evidence and links with Indian RAW activities organized in Afghan areas. So, Indian intention to invest in Afghanistan for infrastructure rebuilding is not as simple as it ...
Expectiles have gained considerable attention in recent years due to wide applications in many ar... more Expectiles have gained considerable attention in recent years due to wide applications in many areas. In this study, the k-nearest neighbours approach, together with the asymmetric least squares loss function, called ex-kNN, is proposed for computing expectiles. Firstly, the effect of various distance measures on ex-kNN in terms of test error and computational time is evaluated. It is found that Canberra, Lorentzian, and Soergel distance measures lead to minimum test error, whereas Euclidean, Canberra, and Average of (L1,L∞) lead to a low computational cost. Secondly, the performance of ex-kNN is compared with existing packages er-boost and ex-svm for computing expectiles that are based on nine real life examples. Depending on the nature of data, the ex-kNN showed two to 10 times better performance than er-boost and comparable performance with ex-svm regarding test error. Computationally, the ex-kNN is found two to five times faster than ex-svm and much faster than er-boost, particu...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The burning of crop residue in the open field has become a significant concern for climate change... more The burning of crop residue in the open field has become a significant concern for climate change mitigation efforts worldwide. This practice has led to air quality impairment, smog, haze, heat waves, and different health problems. These could be avoided by adopting sustainable crop residue management practices (SCRMPs) and enabling farmers to engage in SCRMPs. Assessing the health effects at the household level is critical for understanding this problem and finding a solution. Using the primary dataset of 420 farmers from Punjab, Pakistan, we estimated the incurred impacts and costs of crop residue burning. We calculated the health and environmental benefits associated with adopting SCRMPs by comparing the two groups of farmers (adopters and non-adopters). Furthermore, we used a propensity score matching technique to measure the causal impact of SCRMPs adoption on health costs. The findings showed that a surprisingly large number of farmers are all aware of the adverse effects of r...
Lentinula edodes (shiitake mushroom) is the medicinal macro-fungus popular in Japan and China. It... more Lentinula edodes (shiitake mushroom) is the medicinal macro-fungus popular in Japan and China. It is the second most well- known edible fungus in the global market after Agaricus bisporus Because of presence of dietary fibers, vitamins, proteins, minerals and carbohydrates, shiitake mushroom have significant nutritional worth. It is commonly cultivated in winter season and known as “elixir of life”. Bioactive compounds such as polysaccharides, amino acid derivatives, sterols, glycoproteins, chitin and sulfurous compounds are all extracted from shiitake mushrooms. Some of these are lentinans, eritadenine and KS-2-α- mannan peptide etc. Shiitake mushroom is used therapeutically to cure cancers, cardiovascular disorders, viral and fungal infections, hepatitis, hypertension and hepatic disorders. Shiitake mushroom have also grown in popularity as a result of their unusual and well-liked flavor.
The use of face masks has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic started in order to ... more The use of face masks has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic started in order to to curb the spread of the disease. Additionally, breakthrough infections caused by the Delta and Omicron variants have further increased the importance of wearing a face mask, even for vaccinated individuals. However, the use of face masks also induces attenuation in speech signals, and this change may impact speech processing technologies, e.g., automated speaker verification (ASV) and speech to text conversion. In this paper we examine Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems against the speech samples in the presence of three different types of face mask: surgical, cloth, and filtered N95, and analyze the impact on acoustics and other factors. In addition, we explore the effect of different microphones, and distance from the microphone, and the impact of face masks when speakers use ASV systems in real-world scenarios. Our analysis shows a significant deterioration in performance ...
This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not&l... more This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not<br> deal with the problems having ambiguity, impreciseness, or indeterminacy. An important life-time<br> distribution called Beta distribution from classical statistics is proposed by considering the<br> indeterminate environment and named the new proposed distribution as neutrosophic beta<br> distribution. Various distributional properties like mean, variance, moment generating function, r-th<br> moment order statistics that includes smallest order statistics, largest order statistics, joint order<br> statistics, and median order statistics are derived. The parameters of the proposed distribution are<br> estimated via maximum likelihood method. Proposed distribution is applied on two real data sets<br> and goodness of fit is assessed through AIC and BIC criteria's. The estimates of the proposed<br> distribution suggested a better ...
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2017
A coexistence decision-making (CDM) system for efficient TV whitespace (TVWS) sharing among white... more A coexistence decision-making (CDM) system for efficient TV whitespace (TVWS) sharing among whitespace objects (WSOs) is introduced in this paper. The proposed system is considered versatile in functionality as it jointly takes care of three distinct channel allocation features: (a) optimizing system quality of service (QoS) performance metrics, (b) improving TVWS utility, and (c) satisfying WSO channel demands. Regarding system QoS performance metrics, the TVWS sharing problem is defined as an optimization problem with an aim to maximize the system throughput and minimize unfairness in allocation. Supporting the WSOs channel demands in a TVWS sharing problem is a multifold task which requires elaborate consideration in different aspects of the system performance. To this end, the variations of the SNR of wireless frequency channels which result in variable throughput gain of the WSOs are also taken care of in the proposed CDM system. A fast channel allocation algorithm is then desi...
Objective: To review and report the results in pure endoscopic endonasal trans-sphenoidal surger... more Objective: To review and report the results in pure endoscopic endonasal trans-sphenoidal surgery done at our unit for pituitary adenomas (PAs) in last 8 years. Material and Methods: We reviewed 403 consecutive patients who underwent pure endoscopic endonasal trans-sphenoidal surgery for newly diagnosed pituitary adenomas between August 2012 and July 2020 at our neurosurgical unit. Endocrinological, demographic features and outcomes, their complications, and duration of stay in hospital were assessed in these patients who were operated in our neurosurgical Unit. The Mean Follow-up on average was 3.5 months. Results: 403 consecutive cases were reviewed. Majority of cases were in the 4th decade of life at presentation. 227 (56%) were non-functioning pituitary tumors and 176 (44%) were hormone secreting pituitary adenomas. Thirty-one (7.7%) complications were observed in 28 post-operative patients. The most frequently observed complication was diabetes insipidus (temporary in 19 (5%...
Toxocara (T) vitulorum is a nematode, which residues in the small intestines of Bubalus and Bos s... more Toxocara (T) vitulorum is a nematode, which residues in the small intestines of Bubalus and Bos species. The present study was conducted from January to March 2008 in Multan district, Pakistan to determine the prevalence of T. vitulorum in cattle and buffalo in relation with species, age and sex of the host. Small intestines of (n=282) buffalo were examined (n=180) were found positive and prevalence of T. vitulorum was recorded as 63.83% while intestines of cattle found positive (n=54) out of (n=144) and its prevalence was 37.50%. The data was analyzed statistically by using Chi- square and there was a significant difference (P<0.01) in buffalo and cattle indicating that prevalence of T. vitulorum is species dependent. Cattle and buffalo were divided into three different age groups. In group A, cattle and buffalo were ≥1 year of age, in group B between 1-5 years of age and in group C ≤5 years of age. Prevalence of T. vitulorum was 72.09% (186/258) in group A, 18.18% (12/66) in gr...
Objective: The anterior approach for More than one level Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy has been... more Objective: The anterior approach for More than one level Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy has been established for long times, having excellent Outcomes and post-operative results. But operative difficulties, invasiveness and other operative threats increase when more than one level are encountered. Materials and Methods: Total ninety patients with Two, Three or Four-level Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy were included who had anterior decompression and fusion. They were categorized into 3 special Groups, the Two-stage group (sixty-five sufferers), the three-level Group (20 sufferers) and the four-level group (five patients). Clinical and radiographic tests such as fusion frequency and Neck Disability Index (NDI) score, blood loss, stay in the hospital, surgical time, cervical lordosis, cervical movement range (ROM) and complications have been measured between different procedures. Results: No statistical variations were observed among the 3 categories in the Neck Disability Index Ran...
Computer vision is the prerequisite of chess playing robot in a natural environment. In this pape... more Computer vision is the prerequisite of chess playing robot in a natural environment. In this paper, a new method is presented for recognition of Chinese chessman with higher precision and less computing expense. Firstly, the noise is removed from the captured image by Gaussian filter. Secondly, the chess circles are detected by Hough circle transform, and the chess color is detected using the HSV color model, then the detected red and black character pixels are expanded by dilation. Thirdly, the positions of chessman are estimated based on detected circles and dilated regions, then chess positions are adjusted to their proper places. Finally, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and nearest neighbor matching are both employed, together with sorting matching numbers, to recognize the chess characters. We have tested 100 sets of chessman and each set contained 12 different Chinese characters with random rotation, then compare with the traditional approach. Experimental results ind...
The problem of providing massive connectivity in Internet-of-Things (IoT) with a limited number o... more The problem of providing massive connectivity in Internet-of-Things (IoT) with a limited number of available resources motivates the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) solutions. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the signature-based NOMA (S-NOMA) schemes as potential candidates for IoT. The signature in S-NOMA represents the way the data stream of an active device is spread over available resources in a non-orthogonal manner. It can be designed based on device-specific codebook structures, delay patterns, spreading sequences, interleaving patterns, and scrambling sequences. Additionally, we present the detection algorithms employed to decode each device's data from non-orthogonally superimposed signals at the receiver. The bit error rate of different S-NOMA schemes is simulated in impulsive noise environments, which can be important in machine-type communications. Simulation results show that the performance of the S-NOMA schemes degrades under such condit...
This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not d... more This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not deal with the problems having ambiguity, impreciseness, or indeterminacy. An important life-time distribution called Beta distribution from classical statistics is proposed by considering the indeterminate environment and named the new proposed distribution as neutrosophic beta distribution. Various distributional properties like mean, variance, moment generating function, r-th moment order statistics that includes smallest order statistics, largest order statistics, joint order statistics, and median order statistics are derived. The parameters of the proposed distribution are estimated via maximum likelihood method. Proposed distribution is applied on two real data sets and goodness of fit is assessed through AIC and BIC criteria’s. The estimates of the proposed distribution suggested a better fit than the classical form of Beta distribution and recommended to use when the data in the i...
Afghanistan is located at the convergence of Central, Middle and South Asian regions, one of the ... more Afghanistan is located at the convergence of Central, Middle and South Asian regions, one of the most world prime geographical locations. Its strategic location and abundant mineral resources have always attracted international community including India. Hence Indian objectives to develop relations with Afghanistan are manifold and decades old. Indian foreign policy is devised by many factors like its bitter relations with Pakistan and its desire of access route to Central Asian Republics by limiting Pakistan’s reach that has serious implications for Pakistan. In view of its past experience, Pakistan perceives Indian extended desire to engage in Afghanistan as a deliberate strategy of using the later as a battleground to show its power and use influence against Pakistan. Terrorist incidents in Balochistan provide evidence and links with Indian RAW activities organized in Afghan areas. So, Indian intention to invest in Afghanistan for infrastructure rebuilding is not as simple as it ...
Expectiles have gained considerable attention in recent years due to wide applications in many ar... more Expectiles have gained considerable attention in recent years due to wide applications in many areas. In this study, the k-nearest neighbours approach, together with the asymmetric least squares loss function, called ex-kNN, is proposed for computing expectiles. Firstly, the effect of various distance measures on ex-kNN in terms of test error and computational time is evaluated. It is found that Canberra, Lorentzian, and Soergel distance measures lead to minimum test error, whereas Euclidean, Canberra, and Average of (L1,L∞) lead to a low computational cost. Secondly, the performance of ex-kNN is compared with existing packages er-boost and ex-svm for computing expectiles that are based on nine real life examples. Depending on the nature of data, the ex-kNN showed two to 10 times better performance than er-boost and comparable performance with ex-svm regarding test error. Computationally, the ex-kNN is found two to five times faster than ex-svm and much faster than er-boost, particu...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The burning of crop residue in the open field has become a significant concern for climate change... more The burning of crop residue in the open field has become a significant concern for climate change mitigation efforts worldwide. This practice has led to air quality impairment, smog, haze, heat waves, and different health problems. These could be avoided by adopting sustainable crop residue management practices (SCRMPs) and enabling farmers to engage in SCRMPs. Assessing the health effects at the household level is critical for understanding this problem and finding a solution. Using the primary dataset of 420 farmers from Punjab, Pakistan, we estimated the incurred impacts and costs of crop residue burning. We calculated the health and environmental benefits associated with adopting SCRMPs by comparing the two groups of farmers (adopters and non-adopters). Furthermore, we used a propensity score matching technique to measure the causal impact of SCRMPs adoption on health costs. The findings showed that a surprisingly large number of farmers are all aware of the adverse effects of r...
Lentinula edodes (shiitake mushroom) is the medicinal macro-fungus popular in Japan and China. It... more Lentinula edodes (shiitake mushroom) is the medicinal macro-fungus popular in Japan and China. It is the second most well- known edible fungus in the global market after Agaricus bisporus Because of presence of dietary fibers, vitamins, proteins, minerals and carbohydrates, shiitake mushroom have significant nutritional worth. It is commonly cultivated in winter season and known as “elixir of life”. Bioactive compounds such as polysaccharides, amino acid derivatives, sterols, glycoproteins, chitin and sulfurous compounds are all extracted from shiitake mushrooms. Some of these are lentinans, eritadenine and KS-2-α- mannan peptide etc. Shiitake mushroom is used therapeutically to cure cancers, cardiovascular disorders, viral and fungal infections, hepatitis, hypertension and hepatic disorders. Shiitake mushroom have also grown in popularity as a result of their unusual and well-liked flavor.
The use of face masks has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic started in order to ... more The use of face masks has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic started in order to to curb the spread of the disease. Additionally, breakthrough infections caused by the Delta and Omicron variants have further increased the importance of wearing a face mask, even for vaccinated individuals. However, the use of face masks also induces attenuation in speech signals, and this change may impact speech processing technologies, e.g., automated speaker verification (ASV) and speech to text conversion. In this paper we examine Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems against the speech samples in the presence of three different types of face mask: surgical, cloth, and filtered N95, and analyze the impact on acoustics and other factors. In addition, we explore the effect of different microphones, and distance from the microphone, and the impact of face masks when speakers use ASV systems in real-world scenarios. Our analysis shows a significant deterioration in performance ...
This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not&l... more This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not<br> deal with the problems having ambiguity, impreciseness, or indeterminacy. An important life-time<br> distribution called Beta distribution from classical statistics is proposed by considering the<br> indeterminate environment and named the new proposed distribution as neutrosophic beta<br> distribution. Various distributional properties like mean, variance, moment generating function, r-th<br> moment order statistics that includes smallest order statistics, largest order statistics, joint order<br> statistics, and median order statistics are derived. The parameters of the proposed distribution are<br> estimated via maximum likelihood method. Proposed distribution is applied on two real data sets<br> and goodness of fit is assessed through AIC and BIC criteria's. The estimates of the proposed<br> distribution suggested a better ...
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2017
A coexistence decision-making (CDM) system for efficient TV whitespace (TVWS) sharing among white... more A coexistence decision-making (CDM) system for efficient TV whitespace (TVWS) sharing among whitespace objects (WSOs) is introduced in this paper. The proposed system is considered versatile in functionality as it jointly takes care of three distinct channel allocation features: (a) optimizing system quality of service (QoS) performance metrics, (b) improving TVWS utility, and (c) satisfying WSO channel demands. Regarding system QoS performance metrics, the TVWS sharing problem is defined as an optimization problem with an aim to maximize the system throughput and minimize unfairness in allocation. Supporting the WSOs channel demands in a TVWS sharing problem is a multifold task which requires elaborate consideration in different aspects of the system performance. To this end, the variations of the SNR of wireless frequency channels which result in variable throughput gain of the WSOs are also taken care of in the proposed CDM system. A fast channel allocation algorithm is then desi...
Objective: To review and report the results in pure endoscopic endonasal trans-sphenoidal surger... more Objective: To review and report the results in pure endoscopic endonasal trans-sphenoidal surgery done at our unit for pituitary adenomas (PAs) in last 8 years. Material and Methods: We reviewed 403 consecutive patients who underwent pure endoscopic endonasal trans-sphenoidal surgery for newly diagnosed pituitary adenomas between August 2012 and July 2020 at our neurosurgical unit. Endocrinological, demographic features and outcomes, their complications, and duration of stay in hospital were assessed in these patients who were operated in our neurosurgical Unit. The Mean Follow-up on average was 3.5 months. Results: 403 consecutive cases were reviewed. Majority of cases were in the 4th decade of life at presentation. 227 (56%) were non-functioning pituitary tumors and 176 (44%) were hormone secreting pituitary adenomas. Thirty-one (7.7%) complications were observed in 28 post-operative patients. The most frequently observed complication was diabetes insipidus (temporary in 19 (5%...
Toxocara (T) vitulorum is a nematode, which residues in the small intestines of Bubalus and Bos s... more Toxocara (T) vitulorum is a nematode, which residues in the small intestines of Bubalus and Bos species. The present study was conducted from January to March 2008 in Multan district, Pakistan to determine the prevalence of T. vitulorum in cattle and buffalo in relation with species, age and sex of the host. Small intestines of (n=282) buffalo were examined (n=180) were found positive and prevalence of T. vitulorum was recorded as 63.83% while intestines of cattle found positive (n=54) out of (n=144) and its prevalence was 37.50%. The data was analyzed statistically by using Chi- square and there was a significant difference (P<0.01) in buffalo and cattle indicating that prevalence of T. vitulorum is species dependent. Cattle and buffalo were divided into three different age groups. In group A, cattle and buffalo were ≥1 year of age, in group B between 1-5 years of age and in group C ≤5 years of age. Prevalence of T. vitulorum was 72.09% (186/258) in group A, 18.18% (12/66) in gr...
Objective: The anterior approach for More than one level Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy has been... more Objective: The anterior approach for More than one level Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy has been established for long times, having excellent Outcomes and post-operative results. But operative difficulties, invasiveness and other operative threats increase when more than one level are encountered. Materials and Methods: Total ninety patients with Two, Three or Four-level Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy were included who had anterior decompression and fusion. They were categorized into 3 special Groups, the Two-stage group (sixty-five sufferers), the three-level Group (20 sufferers) and the four-level group (five patients). Clinical and radiographic tests such as fusion frequency and Neck Disability Index (NDI) score, blood loss, stay in the hospital, surgical time, cervical lordosis, cervical movement range (ROM) and complications have been measured between different procedures. Results: No statistical variations were observed among the 3 categories in the Neck Disability Index Ran...
Computer vision is the prerequisite of chess playing robot in a natural environment. In this pape... more Computer vision is the prerequisite of chess playing robot in a natural environment. In this paper, a new method is presented for recognition of Chinese chessman with higher precision and less computing expense. Firstly, the noise is removed from the captured image by Gaussian filter. Secondly, the chess circles are detected by Hough circle transform, and the chess color is detected using the HSV color model, then the detected red and black character pixels are expanded by dilation. Thirdly, the positions of chessman are estimated based on detected circles and dilated regions, then chess positions are adjusted to their proper places. Finally, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and nearest neighbor matching are both employed, together with sorting matching numbers, to recognize the chess characters. We have tested 100 sets of chessman and each set contained 12 different Chinese characters with random rotation, then compare with the traditional approach. Experimental results ind...
The problem of providing massive connectivity in Internet-of-Things (IoT) with a limited number o... more The problem of providing massive connectivity in Internet-of-Things (IoT) with a limited number of available resources motivates the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) solutions. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the signature-based NOMA (S-NOMA) schemes as potential candidates for IoT. The signature in S-NOMA represents the way the data stream of an active device is spread over available resources in a non-orthogonal manner. It can be designed based on device-specific codebook structures, delay patterns, spreading sequences, interleaving patterns, and scrambling sequences. Additionally, we present the detection algorithms employed to decode each device's data from non-orthogonally superimposed signals at the receiver. The bit error rate of different S-NOMA schemes is simulated in impulsive noise environments, which can be important in machine-type communications. Simulation results show that the performance of the S-NOMA schemes degrades under such condit...
This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not d... more This research is an extension of classical statistics distribution theory as the theory did not deal with the problems having ambiguity, impreciseness, or indeterminacy. An important life-time distribution called Beta distribution from classical statistics is proposed by considering the indeterminate environment and named the new proposed distribution as neutrosophic beta distribution. Various distributional properties like mean, variance, moment generating function, r-th moment order statistics that includes smallest order statistics, largest order statistics, joint order statistics, and median order statistics are derived. The parameters of the proposed distribution are estimated via maximum likelihood method. Proposed distribution is applied on two real data sets and goodness of fit is assessed through AIC and BIC criteria’s. The estimates of the proposed distribution suggested a better fit than the classical form of Beta distribution and recommended to use when the data in the i...
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Papers by muhammad raza