The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of ultrasound-assisted osmotic dehydration and coating treatments before frying on the mass transfer kinetics of fried kiwis. Fick’s second law was used for modeling of deep fat frying phenomena. Results showed that ultrasound pretreatment had a strong effect on decreasing oil uptake and improved moisture removal from the tissue during dehydration by formation of micro channels on the outer surface of the samples and it might lead to better deposition of coating at the sample’s surface. The effective moisture loss and oil uptake diffusivity for fried kiwi slice were in the range of 2.38–5.52 × 10^-8 m² / s and 1.33–3.36 × 10^-8 m² / s, respectively.

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Culling of male day-old chicks in layer production is a big global ethical issue. As gender differences exist in the activity of human fetuses, such a physiological difference may also be true for chick embryos. Hence, this study investigated embryo (ROSS 308) gender differences based on this body motility. A near-infrared (NIR) sensor was used to measure embryo motility and separated it in frequency domain. Principal component (PC) scores from body motility strength (i.e., signal power in frequency domain) were used for gender classification using machine learning approach. The formation of sex organ and hormonal differences to be the reason for the male to be significantly more active (p < 0.05). The findings could contribute to resolving animal welfare issue.

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Insect pests are one of the major factors which affect crop yield in agriculture. In this paper classification of yellow stem borer, brown planthopper, leaf folder, and green leafhopper pests in the paddy field were investigated using AlexNet neural network algorithm. Various deep learning frameworks (Caffe, TensorFlow, and Torch) and optimization algorithms in NVIDIA DIGITS platform were exploited for comparing the pest classification accuracy. TensorFlow-stochastic gradient descent model performed better compared to other models and achieved 96.9 % validation accuracy. This approach for classification can help detect invasive pests in the paddy field and can be implemented in real-time.

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To confirm the spectral absorbance associated with differences in yolk ratio would provide a means to determine the sex of broiler eggs, we measured light transmission (200–955 nm) through ROSS 308 broiler eggs (n = 269) prior to incuba- tion. Statistical analysis demonstrated that male eggs had a significantly higher absorbance (500–654 nm) than female eggs. Similarly, eggs with a higher yolk ratio had significantly higher absorbance than eggs with a lower yolk ratio, sug- gesting that the yolk ratio plays an important role in sex-related spectral absorbance differences. Moreover, a supervised logistic regression classifier model based on these wavelengths determined the sex of eggs with an accuracy of 76 %.

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