Concrete is widely used in construction materials since early 1800's. It has been known that concrete is weak in tension, so it requires some addition materials to have ductile behavior and enhance its tensile strength and strain capacity to improve their uses. In this study reactive powder concrete (RPC) was used with steel fiber by using different types of cement; (Ordinary Portland cement (OPC) and/or Portland- Limestone cement (PLC)) with three types of mixtures (OPC at the first mix, 50 % OPC and 50 % PLC at the second mix and PLC at the third mix). The behavior of RPC with steel fibers on compressive strength and tensile strength of concrete with different ages of curing (7, 14, 28 and 60) days and shrinkage have been studied. The clo

In this work we present a technique to extract the heart contours from noisy echocardiograph images. Our technique is based on improving the image before applying contours detection to reduce heavy noise and get better image quality. To perform that, we combine many pre-processing techniques (filtering, morphological operations, and contrast adjustment) to avoid unclear edges and enhance low contrast of echocardiograph images, after implementing these techniques we can get legible detection for heart boundaries and valves movement by traditional edge detection methods.

Tremendous efforts have been exerted to understand first language acquisition to facilitate second language learning. The problem lies in the difficulty of mastering English language and adapting a theory that helps in overcoming the difficulties facing students. This study aims to apply Thomasello's theory of language mastery through usage. It assumes that adults can learn faster than children and can learn the language separately, and far from academic education. Tomasello (2003) studied the stages of language acquisition for children, and developed his theory accordingly. Some studies, such as: (Ghalebi and Sadighi, 2015, Arvidsson, 2019; Munoz, 2019; Verspoor and Hong, 2013) used this theory when examining language acquisition. Thus,

In this paper, a fast lossless image compression method is introduced for compressing medical images, it is based on splitting the image blocks according to its nature along with using the polynomial approximation to decompose image signal followed by applying run length coding on the residue part of the image, which represents the error caused by applying polynomial approximation. Then, Huffman coding is applied as a last stage to encode the polynomial coefficients and run length coding. The test results indicate that the suggested method can lead to promising performance.

The futuristic age requires progress in handwork or even sub-machine dependency and Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides the necessary BCI procession. As the article suggests, it is a pathway between the signals created by a human brain thinking and the computer, which can translate the signal transmitted into action. BCI-processed brain activity is typically measured using EEG. Throughout this article, further intend to provide an available and up-to-date review of EEG-based BCI, concentrating on its technical aspects. In specific, we present several essential neuroscience backgrounds that describe well how to build an EEG-based BCI, including evaluating which signal processing, software, and hardware techniques to use. Individu

Metaheuristics under the swarm intelligence (SI) class have proven to be efficient and have become popular methods for solving different optimization problems. Based on the usage of memory, metaheuristics can be classified into algorithms with memory and without memory (memory-less). The absence of memory in some metaheuristics will lead to the loss of the information gained in previous iterations. The metaheuristics tend to divert from promising areas of solutions search spaces which will lead to non-optimal solutions. This paper aims to review memory usage and its effect on the performance of the main SI-based metaheuristics. Investigation has been performed on SI metaheuristics, memory usage and memory-less metaheuristics, memory char