The COVID-19 pandemic has strained testing capabilities worldwide. There is an urgent need to find economical and scalable ways to test more people. We present Tapestry, a novel quantitative nonadaptive pooling scheme to test many samples using only a few tests. The underlying molecular diagnostic test is any real-time RT-PCR diagnostic panel approved for the detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In cases where most samples are negative for the virus, Tapestry accurately identifies the status of each individual sample with a single round of testing in fewer tests than simple two-round pooling. We also present a companion Android application BYOM Smart Testing which guides users through the pipetting steps required to perform the combinatorial pooling. The results of the pooled tests can be fed into the application to recover the status and estimated viral load for each individual sample. NOTE: This protocol has been validated with in vitro experiments that used synthetic RNA and DNA fragments and additionally, its expected behavior has been confirmed using computer simulations. Validation with clinical samples is ongoing. We are looking for clinical collaborators with access to patient samples. Please contact the corresponding author if you wish to validate this protocol on clinical samples.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable and mobile sensors has gained momentum in last few years, in various fields, such as, healthcare, surveillance, education, entertainment. Nowadays, Edge Computing has emerged to reduce communication latency and network traffic. Edge devices are resource constrained devices and cannot support high computation.In literature, various models have been developed for HAR. In recent years, deep learning algorithms have shown high performance in HAR, but these algorithms require lot of computation making them inefficient to be deployed on edge devices. This paper, proposes a Lightweight Deep Learning Model for HAR requiring less computational power, making it suitable to be deployed on edge devices. The performance of proposed model is tested on the participant's six daily activities data. Results show that the proposed model outperforms many of the existing machine learning and deep learning techniques.

We propose 'Tapestry', a novel approach to pooled testing with application to COVID-19 testing with quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) that can result in shorter testing time and conservation of reagents and testing kits. Tapestry combines ideas from compressed sensing and combinatorial group testing with a novel noise model for RT-PCR used for generation of synthetic data. Unlike Boolean group testing algorithms, the input is a quantitative readout from each test and the output is a list of viral loads for each sample relative to the pool with the highest viral load. While other pooling techniques require a second confirmatory assay, Tapestry obtains individual sample-level results in a single round of testing, at clinically acceptable false positive or false negative rates. We also propose designs for pooling matrices that facilitate good prediction of the infected samples while remaining practically viable. When testing n samples out of which k n are infected, our method needs only O(k log n) tests when using random binary pooling matrices, with high probability. However, we also use deterministic binary pooling matrices based on combinatorial design ideas of Kirkman Triple Systems to balance between good reconstruction properties and matrix sparsity for ease of pooling. A lower bound on the number of tests with these matrices for satisfying a sufficient condition for guaranteed recovery is k √ n. In practice, we have observed the need for fewer tests with such matrices than with random pooling matrices. This makes Tapestry capable of very large savings at low prevalence rates, while simultaneously remaining viable even at prevalence rates as high as 9.5%. Empirically we find that single-round Tapestry pooling improves over two-round Dorfman pooling by almost a factor of 2 in the number of tests required. We describe how to combine combinatorial group testing and compressed sensing algorithmic ideas together to create a new kind of algorithm that is very effective in deconvoluting pooled tests. We validate Tapestry in simulations and wet lab experiments with oligomers in quantitative RT-PCR assays. An accompanying Android application Byom Smart Testing makes the Tapestry protocol straightforward to implement in testing centres, and is made available for free download. Lastly, we describe use-case scenarios for deployment.

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With the growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the data generated through these devices is also increasing. By 2030, it is been predicted that the number of IoT devices will exceed the number of human beings on earth. This gives rise to the requirement of middleware platform that can manage IoT devices, intelligently store and process gigantic data generated for building smart applications such as Smart Cities, Smart Healthcare, Smart Industry, and others. At present, market is overwhelming with the number of IoT middleware platforms with specific features. This raises one of the most serious and least discussed challenge for application developer to choose suitable platform for their application development. Across the literature, very little attempt is done in classifying or comparing IoT middleware platforms for the applications. This paper categorizes IoT platforms into four categories namely: publicly traded, open source, developer friendly and end-to-end connectivity. Some of the popular middleware platforms in each category are investigated based on general IoT architecture. Comparison of IoT middleware platforms in each category, based on basic, sensing, communication and application development features is presented. This study can be useful for IoT application developers to select the most appropriate platform according to their application requirement.

A molecular-level kinetic model for the hydroprocessing of methyl laurate was constructed. The reaction network was deduced using experimental observations in the context of the delplot method for the discernment of product rank. The resulting 45 species and 83 reactions were used to construct the set of material balances in the kinetic model. Kinetic parameters of the model were determined by minimizing the difference between model outputs and experimental data for methyl laurate hydroprocessing. Differences in reactivity as a result of catalyst metal composition were modeled via the catalyst family concept. The model results show good agreement with the experimental results for a range of process conditions.

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