Water resistant, biodegradable and flexible corn starch/carboxymethyl cellulose composite film for slow-release fertilizer coating materials.

The inherent limitations of Cornstarch (CS) and Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC) membranes, such as brittleness, fragility, and water solubility, limit their use in controlled-release fertilizers. This study reports on the synthesis of crosslinked CMC/CS-20-E composite membranes using the casting technique, with epichlorohydrin (ECH) as the crosslinking agent in an acidic environment to crosslink CS and CMC. The synthesized composite film demonstrates remarkable water resistance, as evidenced by the insignificant alteration in its morphology and structure post 72 h of water immersion.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning for automatic disease diagnosis.

Motivation: Disease diagnosis-oriented dialog system models the interactive consultation procedure as the Markov decision process, and reinforcement learning algorithms are used to solve the problem. Existing approaches usually employ a flat policy structure that treat all symptoms and diseases equally for action making. This strategy works well in a simple scenario when the action space is small; however, its efficiency will be challenged in the real environment.