Writing – Page 2 – Yours truly, Yasmin

Recognizing Your Face in the Crowd

Originally published 6 August 2015 on MIT Technology Review – Arab Edition.

Researchers at KAUST are developing an algorithm that can accurately recognize faces.

Recognizing faces is something we do every day at work, at home, or in public areas. People can recognize familiar faces quite well even with significant changes in the lighting, in the orientation of the head, when someone is wearing sunglasses, when a hairstyle has changed, when facial hair increases or decreases, when makeup is applied, at different distances and more, says researcher Matthew Turk from University of California. Automatic face recognition by computers on the other hand, is still a work in progress.

While it achieves good results in well-controlled environments, performance is rather poor in less constrained ones (also referred to as “in the wild” recognition) due to these variations. “Recognizing the face of an uncooperative person, or someone in surveillance video is much more difficult than doing so in a controlled setting where the person wants to be recognized (in order to log into a computer or gain access to a secure area, for example),” says Turk.

An algorithm to recognize faces
Researchers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) came up with a method to accurately simplify the matrix of faces by minimizing the maximum distance of a pair of faces from the same person and maximizing the minimum distance between a pair of faces from different people using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), a state-of-the-art feature extraction algorithm.

Ammonia Production Set to Grow with Food Demand

Originally published 30 June 2015 on IHS Engineering360.

Ammonia is the basic building block of nitrogen fertilizers, one of the most widely used agricultural fertilizers in the world.

Global population roughly doubled from approximately 3 billion in the early 1960s to around 6 billion at the turn of the 21st century. Between now and 2050, population is expected to grow by another 3 billion, according to the United Nations.

Feeding such a population will involve a combination of advancements, including relying on increased plant nutrition, introducing new technologies and cultivating more marginal land. As a result, ammonia’s role in food production is likely to grow in importance.

“Demand for fertilizers, the majority of which are ammonia based is driven by the need for food, which in turn is driven by the size and wealth of the population,” says Bala Suresh, senior consultant and director of IHS Chemical.

In recent years, a number of improvements have occurred in ammonia manufacturing processes that both increased energy efficiency and reduced operating costs. These production gains are being achieved through development and implementation of better process conditions and more efficient equipment design. In the past decade, ammonia process technologies have been commercialized worldwide by major licensors such as Haldor Topsøe, Ammonia Casale, Uhde and KBR.

Ammonia Market Overview

Ammonia production in the U.S. is set to increase significantly, mainly due to the abundant availability of cheaper shale-based natural gas raw material, says Suresh. Most of the announced capacity expansion projects are connected to downstream products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Demand from these products also helps to drive ammonia production.

Crop prices also exert an understandably big impact fertilizer demand. “Crop price, like corn to fertilizer prices, has had a steady correlation,” says Suresh. In 2014, crop prices fell and farmers cut their application of fertilizers. In general, higher crop prices encourage farmers to apply more fertilizers to increase productivity and, consequently, increase their income. Lower crop prices tend to have an opposite effect.

Read more at
IHS Engineering360, June 2015.

Changing Regulations and Energy Costs Impact the Global Chlor-alkali Industry

Originally published 21 April 2015 on IHS Engineering360.

The term “chlor-alkali” refers to the manufacturing of chlorine (chlor) and a strong base, typically sodium hydroxide (alkali), two chemicals that are simultaneously produced by the electrolysis of brine (a solution of salt in water). These two chemicals are the main products of the chlor-alkali industry. Both are produced in a fixed stoichiometric ratio: for each unit of chlorine produced, 1.13 units of sodium hydroxide are produced.

In terms of chlor-alkali production, energy consumption has always been a strong driver to cost. It is among the highest energy consuming processes due to its dependency on energy intensive electrochemical technology. The cost of electricity makes up around 40-60% of the operating cash costs, and therefore has an influence in the production cycle.

IHS Quarterly recently reported that, “one plant can consume as much electricity as a small country” and energy can account for up to 70% of chlor-alkali variable costs. As a result, engineers have been trying to lower that figure while maintaining production requirements in order to increase overall profit.

Membrane cell technology was found to lower operating costs by an average of around 6%. However, additional caustic soda conccentration steps must be provided, leading to additional energy (steam) requirements.

During the last half of the 19th century, chlorine was almost solely used in the textile and paper industry. Today, that industry amounts to roughly 3% of chlorine demand. The main end-use is for chlorinated compounds such as PVC that account for roughly 34% of the market. Further uses are in water treatment, chlorinated intermediates, inorganic and organic chemicals, among others.

“The ratio of chlorine demand between end users varies greatly between regions,” says George Eisenhauer, Director at IHS Chemicals. “Unlike chlorine, sodium hydroxide (also known as caustic soda) has multiple end uses, with none dominant like PVC.”

Read more at
IHS Engineering360, April 2015.

Risks of bariatric surgery lessened by new guidelines

Originally published 16 March 2015 on Nature Middle East.

Saudi research highlights safer option for weight reduction procedures among children.

A defined clinical pathway that leads to fewer complications and does not result in stunted growth for children who need bariatric surgery, has been developed by Saudi researchers.A 2013 survey showed 23% of Saudi school children are overweight with 9% classified as obese. Among pre-school children, about 15% are overweight and 6% obese. The Saudi Journal of Obesity reported that local studies show a rising trend of obesity.Bariatric surgery is usually considered when a child is not responding to alternative weight management programs.Now researchers from King Saud University (KSU) in Saudi Arabia are proposing a standardised weight management (WM) protocol that includes bariatric surgery within a clinical pathway for optimum results.

“We have strict criteria to offer bariatric surgery to children and adolescents regardless of their age, which include Body Mass Index (BMI) of 35 with obesity related co-morbidities, or BMI of 40,” researcher Aayed Alqahtani from KSU, tells Nature Middle East. “For younger children BMI is not very accurate and we substitute it with what is called BMI percentile in which we require the patient to be more than 99th – or super obese – to be eligible for surgery even if their absolute BMI is less than 35,” he adds.

Shining a burst of light on melanin interactions

Originally published 16 March 2015 on Nature Middle East.

Researchers at King Saud University in Riyadh will use attosecond laser technology to take a closer look at melanin and how it works.

The first experiment at a brand new laboratory aims to reveal the microscopic mechanisms that allow melanin to protect skin against hazardous UV radiation.

Attosecond Science Laboratory (ASL) at the King Saud University (KSU) will be the first in the Arab world to use cutting-edge attosecond laser technology able to generate ultrashort pulses of light, lasting just a few billionths of a billionth of a second, that can capture images of otherwise invisible electrons within atoms.

The researchers will first fire a femtosecond laser pulse that simulates sunshine, followed by another probe attosecond pulse to track the effect of the first burst of light on the system. A spectroscopic system will then capture the interaction of light with matter and analyse it.

The lead researcher, Adil Haseeb, wants to better understand the conductivity and photoconductivity responses of melanin in different physical states: solid, paste, and liquid.

“More specifically, how does this molecule prevent UV photons from breaking bonds and changing molecular structure and hence function?” says co-researcher Ferenc Krausz. “Electrons in the melanin molecule have to play a fundamental role in these mechanisms.

Read more at
Nature Middle East, March 2015.