Passive Aeroelastic Tailoring

The Passive Aeroelastic Tailoring (PAT) project was tasked with investigating novel methods to achieve passive aeroelastic tailoring on high aspect ratio wings. The goal of the project was to identify structural designs or topologies that can improve performance and/or reduce structural weight for high-aspect ratio wings. This project considered two unique approaches, which were pursued in parallel: through-thickness topology optimization and composite tow-steering

Development of a DSS to Estimate the Sales for the Retailing Industry in Taiwan

An algorithm is constructed in this study to estimate the market sizes of daily commodity in Taiwan based on the sampled sales information provided by retailer chains. Though retailer chains provide sampled sales information from only small portions of their retailing stores, they expect to receive more valuable processed information from that. As result of this research, a DSS is proposed to compute value-added information from this joint sales information database, namely the estimation information. Through certain public accessible data such number of stores by each chain and retailers’ financial reports, the sampled sales information can be transferred to the market size information of each item in Taiwan. Two similar algorithms are constructed for convenient stores and supermarkets/hypermarkets separately. A simple integration method is used to combine these results. Finally, a DSS is built based on these estimation algorithms and is implemented successfull

Kondo Signatures of a Quantum Magnetic Impurity in Topological Superconductors

We study the Kondo physics of a quantum magnetic impurity in two-dimensional topological superconductors (TSCs), either intrinsic or induced on the surface of a bulk topological insulator, using a numerical renormalization group technique. We show that, despite sharing the p+ip pairing symmetry, intrinsic and extrinsic TSCs host different physical processes that produce distinct Kondo signatures. Extrinsic TSCs harbor an unusual screening mechanism involving both electron and orbital degrees of freedom that produces rich and prominent Kondo phenomena, especially an intriguing pseudospin Kondo singlet state in the superconducting gap and a spatially anisotropic spin correlation. In sharp contrast, intrinsic TSCs support a robust impurity spin doublet ground state and an isotropic spin correlation. These findings advance fundamental knowledge of novel Kondo phenomena in TSCs and suggest experimental avenues for their detection and distinction

Trends in Research about COVID-19 Vaccine Documented through Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

Due to COVID-19, people’s lives have changed greatly. In accordance with former experience, an efficacious vaccine is the most effective way to curb the pandemic; thus, many researchers have published related publications in the short term. Hence, this study aims at using bibliometric analysis and visualization to document research trends regarding COVID-19 vaccines, and offer some directions and suggestions for future research. Initially, all eligible publications were downloaded from Web of Science on 1 January 2022. Subsequently, some publications published before December 2019 were removed since COVID-19 did not occur before that date. Finally, Microsoft Excel is used for bibliometric analysis to analyze publication date, author, affiliation, country, publication title, publisher, research area, document type, and language, and visualized software (VOSviewer) is used to visualize author, affiliation, country, and keywords. After analyzing a total of 17,392 publications, the results show that the overall research trend was upward. Moreover, the prominent authors, institutions, and countries inclined towards regional cooperation instead of international cooperation. Furthermore, the most popular research areas were immunology and medicine (general and internal). Ultimately, COVID-19, vaccine, and SARS-CoV-2 were the top 3 keywords. In conclusion, this study shows the approximate research trend for COVID-19 vaccine during the completely first two years of the pandemic. The research focuses moved from safety, effectiveness, and immunology at the early stage to the optimal allocation strategies for COVID-19 vaccine, and eventually to public attitudes and acceptance towards COVID-19 vaccination

Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning

Game solving is a similar, yet more difficult task than mastering a game. Solving a game typically means to find the game-theoretic value (outcome given optimal play), and optionally a full strategy to follow in order to achieve that outcome. The AlphaZero algorithm has demonstrated super-human level play, and its powerful policy and value predictions have also served as heuristics in game solving. However, to solve a game and obtain a full strategy, a winning response must be found for all possible moves by the losing player. This includes very poor lines of play from the losing side, for which the AlphaZero self-play process will not encounter. AlphaZero-based heuristics can be highly inaccurate when evaluating these out-of-distribution positions, which occur throughout the entire search. To address this issue, this paper investigates applying online fine-tuning while searching and proposes two methods to learn tailor-designed heuristics for game solving. Our experiments show that using online fine-tuning can solve a series of challenging 7x7 Killall-Go problems, using only 23.54% of computation time compared to the baseline without online fine-tuning. Results suggest that the savings scale with problem size. Our method can further be extended to any tree search algorithm for problem solving. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/neurips2023-online-fine-tuning-solver.Comment: Accepted by the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023

A preliminary study on the dynamic friction behavior of a one-third scale-down vertical cylindrical cask

In Taiwan, the capacities of spent fuel pools for temporary storage in nuclear power plant will reach depletion soon, and the site of final disposal facility is still to be decided. Therefore, the installation of dry-type interim storage facilities is urgent. The dry storage systems in Taiwan utilize a freestanding cask and design to non-anchored to the foundation pad. It is necessary to establish the simulation techniques for the non-anchored structure, such as the dry storage cask, for the reasonable assessment of its seismic behavior when the earthquake hit. This study is cast a 1/3 scale-down pedestal specimen of the INER-dry storage cask system, which were conducted to acquire the actual friction coefficient at the cask/pad interface as well as the effect of normal stress and sliding rate on it. Based on the results of cyclic loading testing, the cyclic frequency almost had no influence on the friction coefficient but the friction coefficient increased with the normal stress increased. Apparent rocking of the cask was induced at a higher friction coefficient, while sliding dominated the cask motion at a lower one. In addition, the cast motions were almost purely sliding and the range of the friction coefficient was between 0.60 and 0.73 under various compositions of dry storage cask system

A Local-Pattern Related Look-Up Table

This paper describes a Relevance-Zone pattern table (RZT) that can be used to replace a traditional transposition table. An RZT stores exact game values for patterns that are discovered during a Relevance-Zone-Based Search (RZS), which is the current state-of-the-art in solving L&D problems in Go. Positions that share the same pattern can reuse the same exact game value in the RZT. The pattern matching scheme for RZTs is implemented using a radix tree, taking into consideration patterns with different shapes. To improve the efficiency of table lookups, we designed a heuristic that prevents redundant lookups. The heuristic can safely skip previously queried patterns for a given position, reducing the overhead to 10% of the original cost. We also analyze the time complexity of the RZT both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show the overhead of traversing the radix tree in practice during lookup remain flat logarithmically in relation to the number of entries stored in the table. Experiments also show that the use of an RZT instead of a traditional transposition table significantly reduces the number of searched nodes on two data sets of 7x7 and 19x19 L&D Go problems.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Games (under review

Seismic analysis of the condensate storage tank in a nuclear power plant

Following the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima Japan, seismic capacity evaluation has become a crucial issue in combination building safety. Condensate storage tanks are designed to supplies water to the condensate transfer pumps, the control rod drive hydraulic system pumps, and the condenser makeup. A separate connection to the condensate storage tank is used to supply water for the high pressure coolant injection system, reactor core isolation cooling system, and core spray system pumps. A condensate storage tank is defined as a seismic class I structure, playing the important role of providing flow to the operational system and the required static head for the suction of the condensate transfer pumps and the normal supply pump. According to the latest nuclear safety requirements, soil structure interaction must be considered in all seismic analyses. This study aims to rebuild the computer model of condensate storage tanks in Taiwan using the SAP 2000 program in conjunction with the lumped mass stick model and to evaluate the soil structure interaction by employing the SASSI 2000 program. The differences between the results with the soil structure interaction and spring model are compared via natural frequency and response spectrum curves. This computer model enables engineers to rapidly evaluate the safety margin of condensate storage tank following the occurrence of earthquakes or tsunamis