Research on the overall architecture of Internet of Things middleware for intelligent industrial parks

With the continuous development of the Internet of Things technology and the proposal of “Made in China 2025”, the construction of IoT applicat     

A study on the flow characteristics of butterfly valve with baffles

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - In the industry, globe valves, which are commonly used to precise control the flow rate along with opening and closing flow in pipes, are technically...     

Visualizing for the Non‐Visual: Enabling the Visually Impaired to Use Visualization

The majority of visualizations on the web are still stored as raster images, making them inaccessible to visually impaired users. We propose a deep‐neural‐network‐based approach that automatically recognizes key elements in a visualization, including a visualization type, graphical elements, labels, legends, and most importantly, the original data conveyed in the visualization. We leverage such extracted information to provide visually impaired people with the reading of the extracted information. Based on interviews with visually impaired users, we built a Google Chrome extension designed to work with screen reader software to automatically decode charts on a webpage using our pipeline. We compared the performance of the back‐end algorithm with existing methods and evaluated the utility using qualitative feedback from visually impaired users.     

Combination of vegetable soup and glucan demonstrates synergistic effects on macrophage-mediated immune responses

Vegetable soup (VS), a plant-based functional food, has been used as a traditional folk medicine and is attracting attention for its ability to enhance the immune response. β-Glucan, a well-established and effective immunomodulator, has synergistic effects when used in combination with some bioactive compounds. In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the synergistic immunomodulatory effects of the combination of VS and β-glucan on macrophage-mediated immune responses. β-Glucan was demonstrated to synergistically enhance the VS-stimulated immune response, including the production of interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-α, and nitric oxide, mainly through the mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway in macrophages. In addition, this combination has the potential for further development in functional foods with immune-enhancing activity.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10068-021-00888-x.     

High hydrostatic pressure extract of Siegesbeckia orientalis inhibits adipogenesis through the activation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway

Food Science and Biotechnology - St. Paul’s Wort (Siegesbeckia orientalis L.) confers anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, anti-infertility, and immunosuppressive properties....     

Small‐Sized High‐Power PIN Diode Switch with Defected Ground Structure for Wireless Broadband Internet

This letter presents a small‐sized, high‐power single‐pole double‐throw (SPDT) switch with defected ground structure (DGS) for wireless broadband Internet application. To reduce the circuit size by using a slow‐wave characteristic, the DGS is used for the quarter‐wave (°/4) transmission line of the switch. To secure a high degree of isolation, the switch with DGS is composed of shunt‐connected PIN diodes. It shows an insertion loss of 0.8 dB, an isolation of 50 dB or more, and power capability of at least 50 W at 2.3 GHz. The switch shows very similar performance to the conventional shunt‐type switch, but the circuit size is reduced by about 50% simply with the use of DGS patterns.     

Frequency Insertion Strategy for Channel Assignment Problem

This paper presents a new heuristic method for quickly finding a good feasible solution to the channel assignment problem (CAP). Like many other greedy-type heuristics for CAP, the proposed method also assigns a frequency to a call, one at a time. Hence, the method requires computational time that increases only linear to the number of calls. However, what distinguishes the method from others is that it starts with a narrow enough frequency band so as to provoke violations of constraints that we need to comply with in order to avoid radio interference. Each violation is then resolved by inserting frequencies at the most appropriate positions so that the band of frequencies expands minimally. An extensive computational experiment using a set of randomly generated problems as well as the Philadelphia benchmark instances shows that the proposed method perform statistically better than existing methods of its kind and even yields optimum solutions to most of Philadelphia benchmark instances among which two cases are reported for the first time ever, in this paper. Won-Young Shin was born in Busan, Korea in 1978. He received B.S. in industrial engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in 2001 and M.S in operation research and applied statistics from POSTECH in 2003. Since 2003 he has been a researcher of Agency for Defense Development (ADD) in Korea. He is interested in optimization of communication system and applied statistics. Soo Y. Chang is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He teaches linear programming, discrete optimization, network flows and operations research courses. His research interests include mathematical programming and scheduling. He has published in several journals including Discrete Applied Mathematics, Computers and Mathematics with Application, IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, and so on. He is a member of Korean IIE, and ORMSS. Jaewook Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics with honors from Seoul National University, and the Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in applied mathematics in 1993 and 1999, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of industrial engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). His research interests include nonlinear systems, neural networks, nonlinear optimization, and their applications to data mining and financial engineering. Chi-Hyuck Jun was born in Seoul, Korea in 1954. He received B.S. in mineral and petroleum engineering from Seoul National University in 1977, M.S. in industrial engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1979 and Ph.D. in operations research from University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Since 1987 he has been with the department of industrial engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and he is now a professor and the department head. He is interested in performance analysis of communication and production systems. He has published in several journals including IIE Transactions, IEEE Transactions, Queueing Systems and Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. He is a member of IEEE, INFORMS and ASQ.     

Identification of the adverse effect of nitrate on the phosphate release rate and improvement of EBPR process models.

The adverse effect of nitrate on the phosphate release rate in the anaerobic phase was observed and was hardly explainable with conventional EBPR process models. Four possible mechanisms were proposed including substrate competition, reduced fermentation, parallel reaction and sequential reaction. Batch experiments were designed and conducted to identify the dominant mechanism. Results showed that the sequential reaction was the only possible mechanism where only denitrification occurred if any nitrate existed in the anaerobic phase. Then the phosphate release following after the nitrate was completely removed. Nitrate inhibition effect was added into the PHA storage rate to incorporate the sequential reaction in the conventional ASM3 plus EAWAG bio-P module (ASM3 + P). Nitrate inhibition coefficient, K(I,NO,PAO) was found to be as low as 0.05 mg/L. This correlated well with experimental observation where no also meant that the anaerobic compartment of a continuous flow reactor could be seriously affected by the residual nitrate contained in the sludge recycle flow. This phenomenon caused overestimation of the phosphate uptake rate and consequently underestimation of PO4(3-) -P concentration. This problem was resolved by incorporation of a nitrate inhibition term in the ASM3 + P for more accurate simulation of the EBPR process.     

Structure, properties, and thermal stability of nanocrystallite Fe-Ti-N soft magnetic films

We deposited Fe-Ti-N magnetic films with a high sputtering power of 7 W/cm/sup 2/. When the composition of the films was in the range of Fe-Ti(3.9 at.%)-N(8.8 at.%) to Fe-Ti(3.3 at.%)-N(13.5 at.%), the films were composed of /spl alpha/' and Ti/sub 2/N precipitates. With the addition of nitrogen, 4/spl pi/M/sub s/ became higher than that of pure iron, reaching a maximum of 23.8 kG. At the same time, H/sub c/ was reduced to a minimum of 1.12 Oe. The best films can meet the needs of the recording head in dual-element giant magnetoresistive/inductive heads, yielding high storage density (10 Gb/in/sup 2/). The incorporation of N in /spl alpha/-Fe brought about the /spl alpha/' phase with its higher saturation magnetization. Ti additions inhibited the equilibrium decomposition /spl alpha/'/spl rarr//spl alpha/+/spl gamma/'. Because H/sub C//sup D//spl prop/D/sup 6/, where D is average grain diameter, grain size control is very important. The nitrogen induces severe distortion of the /spl alpha/' lattice, which can cause the grains to break into pieces and reduce the grain size. High sputtering power also led to the formation of fine grains, with diameter in the order of 14 nm. Probably Ti/sub 2/N is preferentially precipitated on the grain boundary, pinning the grain boundary and stabilizing the grain size during high-temperature heat treatment. The temperature limit for stability of the structure and its associated low coercivity was not less than 520/spl deg/C.