An affordable automotive hybrid transmission

It is estimated that there are more than 70 automobile models on the road today that use hybrid transmission technology for improving the efficiency of automobile transportation. Most of these transmissions are of the electric hybrid type and are expensive to purchase, and costly to maintain. The original purchase price for a vehicle with an electric hybrid transmission is approximately $8k more than a comparable vehicle without a hybrid transmission and the replacement cost for electric batteries is about$3k every five to ten years with an associated disposal problem for the batteries themselves. This situation has resulted in hybrid vehicle technology being accessible to the few who are able to afford the vehicles and who normally consider themselves to be "energy buffs". By and large, hybrid vehicle technology has not been made accessible to the common automobile owner. This technology is aimed at developing a hybrid vehicle transmission that: 1) reduces the first time buying cost of the vehicle by thousands of dollars, and 2) eliminates the need for replacing expensive and environmentally dangerous batteries thus reducing maintenance costs. It so happens that this technology also eliminates conventional disc brakes that wear out and need replacement. Furthermore, this technology eliminates the reverse gear in the mechanical transmission path thus reducing the cost associated with designing and building this part of the mechanical transmission. This technology will rapidly expand the use of energy-efficient automotives as an affordable hybrid-transmission will be made available for every consumer. With over 60 million vehicles produced every year worldwide this idea will have a tremendous impact on worldwide energy consumption and the environment

연판정 오류정정을 위한 낮은 복잡도의 블록 터보부호 복호화 연구

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2016. 8. 성원용.As the throughput needed for communication systems and storage devices increases, high-performance forward error correction (FEC), especially soft-decision (SD) based technique, becomes essential. In particular, block turbo codes (BTCs) and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes are considered as candidate FEC codes for the next generation systems, such as beyond-100Gbps optical networks and under-20nm NAND flash memory devices, which require capacity-approaching performance and very low error floor. The BTCs have definite strengths in diversity and encoding complexity because they generally employ a two-dimensional structure, which enables sub-frame level decoding for the row or column code-words. This sub-frame level decoding gives a strong advantage for parallel processing. The BTC decoding throughput can be improved by applying a low-complexity algorithm to the small level decoding or by running multiple sub-frame decoding modules simultaneously. In this dissertation, we develop high-throughput BTC decoding software that pursuits these advantages. The first part of this dissertation is devoted to finding efficient test patterns in the Chase-Pyndiah algorithm. Although the complexity of this algorithm linearly increases according to the number of the test patterns, it naively considers all possible patterns containing least reliable positions. As a result, consideration of one more position nearly doubles the complexity. To solve this issue, we first introduce a new position selection criterion that excludes some of the selected ones having a relatively large reliability. This technique excludes the selection of sufficiently reliable positions, which greatly reduces the complexity. Secondly, we propose a pattern selection scheme considering the error coverage. We define the error coverage factor that represents the influence on the error-correcting performance and compute it by analyzing error events. Based on the computed factor, we select the patterns with the greedy algorithm. By using these methods, we can flexibly balance the complexity and the performance. The second part of this dissertation is developing low-complexity soft-output processing methods needed for BTC decoding. In the Chase-Pyndiah algorithm, the soft-output is updated in two different ways according to whether competing code-words exist on the updating positions or not. If the competing code-words exist, the Euclidean distance between the soft-input signal and the code-words that are generated from the test patterns is used. However, the cost of distance computation is very high and linearly increases with the sub-frame length. We identify computationally redundant positions and optimize the computing process by ignoring them. If the competing ones do not exist, the reliability factor that should be pre-determined by an extensive search is demanded. To avoid this, we propose adaptive determination methods, which provides even better error-correcting performance. In addition, we investigate the Pyndiah's soft-output computation and find its drawbacks that appear during the approximation process. To remove the drawbacks, we replace the updating method of the positions that are expected to be seriously damaged by the approximation with the reliability factor-based one, which is much simpler, even though they have the competing words. This dissertation also develops a graphics processing unit (GPU) based BTC decoding program. In order to hide the latency of arithmetic and memory access operations, this software applies the kernel structure that processes multiple BTC-words and allocates multiple sub-frames to each thread-block. Global memory access optimization and data compression, which demands less shared memory space, are also employed. For efficient mapping of the Chase-Pyndiah algorithm onto GPUs, we propose parallel processing schemes employing efficient reduction algorithms and provide step-by-step parallel algorithms for the algebraic decoding. The last part of this dissertation is devoted to summarizing the developed decoding method and comparing it with the decoding of the LDPC convolutional code (CC), which is currently reported as the most powerful candidate for the 100Gbps optical network. We first investigate the complexity reduction and the error rate performance improvement of the developed method. Then, we analyze the complexity of the LDPC-CC decoding and compare it with the developed BTC decoding for the 20% overhead codes. This dissertation is intended to develop high-throughput SD decoding software by introducing complexity reduction techniques for the Chase-Pyndiah algorithm and efficient parallel processing methods, and to emphasize the competitiveness of the BTC. The proposed decoding methods and parallel processing algorithms verified in the GPU-based systems are also applicable to hardware-based ones. By implementing hardware-based decoders that employ the developed methods in this dissertation, significant improvements on the throughputs and the energy efficiency can be obtained. Moreover, thanks to the wide rate coverage of the BTC, the developed techniques can be applied to many high-throughput error correction applications, such as the next-generation optical network and storage device systems.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Turbo Codes 1 1.2 Applications of Turbo Codes 4 1.3 Outline of the Dissertation 5 Chapter 2 Encoding and Iterative Decoding of Block Turbo Codes 7 2.1 Introduction 7 2.2 Encoding Procedure of Shortened-Extended BTCs 9 2.3 Scheduling Methods for Iterative Decoding 9 2.3.1 Serial Scheduling 10 2.3.2 Parallel Scheduling 10 2.3.3 Replica Scheduling 11 2.4 Elementary Decoding with Chase-Pyndiah Algorithm 13 2.4.1 Chase-Pyndiah Algorithm for Extended BTCs 13 2.4.2 Reliability Computation of the ML Code-Word 17 2.4.3 Algebraic Decoding for SEC and DEC BCH Codes 20 2.5 Issues of Chase-Pyndiah Algorithm 23 Chapter 3 Complexity Reduction Techniques for Code-Word Set Generation of the Chase-Pyndiah Algorithm 24 3.1 Introduction 24 3.2 Adaptive Selection of LRPs 25 3.2.1 Selection Constraints of LRPs 25 3.2.2 Simulation Results 26 3.3 Test Pattern Selection 29 3.3.1 The Error Coverage Factor of Test Patterns 30 3.3.2 Greedy Selection of Test Patterns 33 3.3.3 Simulation Results 34 3.4 Concluding Remarks 34 Chapter 4 Complexity Reduction Techniques for Soft-Output Update of the Chase-Pyndiah Algorithm 37 4.1 Introduction 37 4.2 Distance Computation 38 4.2.1 Position-Index List Based Method 39 4.2.2 Double Index Set-Based Method 42 4.2.3 Complexity Analysis 46 4.2.4 Simulation Results 47 4.3 Reliability Factor Determination 49 4.3.1 Refinement of Distance-Based Reliability Factor 51 4.3.2 Adaptive Determination of the Reliability Factor 51 4.3.3 Simulation Results 53 4.4 Accuracy Improvement in Extrinsic Information Update 54 4.4.1 Drawbacks of the Sub-Optimal Update 55 4.4.2 Low-Complexity Extrinsic Information Update 58 4.4.3 Simulation Results 59 4.5 Concluding Remarks 61 Chapter 5 High-Throughput BTC Decoding on GPUs 64 5.1 Introduction 64 5.2 BTC Decoder Architecture for GPU Implementations 66 5.3 Memory Optimization 68 5.3.1 Global Memory Access Reduction 68 5.3.2 Improvement of Global Memory Access Coalescing 68 5.3.3 Efficient Shared Memory Control with Data Compression 70 5.3.4 Index Parity Check Scheme 73 5.4 Parallel Algorithms with the CUDA Shuffle Function 77 5.5 Implementation of Algebraic Decoder 78 5.5.1 Galois Field Operations with Look-Up Tables 78 5.5.2 Error-Locator Polynomial Setting with the LUTs 81 5.5.3 Parallel Chien Search with the LUTs 84 5.6 Simulation Results 85 5.7 Concluding Remarks 89 Chapter 6 Competitiveness of BTCs as FEC codes for the Next-Generation Optical Networks 91 6.1 Introduction 91 6.2 The Complexity Reduction of the Modified Chase-Pyndiah Algorithm 92 6.2.1 Summary of the Complexity Reduction 92 6.2.2 The Error-Correcting Performance 94 6.3 Comparison of BTCs and LDPC-CCs 97 6.3.1 Complexity Analysis of the LDPC-CC Decoding 97 6.3.2 Comparison of the 20% Overhead BTC and LDPC-CC 100 6.4 Concluding Remarks 101 Chapter 7 Conclusion 102 Bibliography 105 국문 초록 113Docto

Relationship between core self-evaluation and innovative work behavior: mediating effect of affective organizational commitment and moderating effect of organizational learning capacity

Focusing on employees, this study examined the respective mediating and moderating effects of affective organizational commitment and organizational learning capacity in the relationship between core self-evaluation and innovation work behavior. We collected data via an online survey from 330 office workers at midsize and large companies in a metropolitan area of South Korea. The results of analyzing the data using PROCESS macro were as follows: (1) core self-evaluation was positively related to innovative work behavior; (2) the relationship was mediated by affective organizational commitment; (3) the relationship was buffered by organizational learning capacity, such that a higher level of organizational learning capacity diminished the impact of core self-evaluation on innovative wok behavior; and (4) the conditional effect of core self-evaluation on innovative work behavior existed only in the group of a low level of organizational learning capacity. Based on these findings, we suggested implications for theory building, research, and practice

Towards standardizing Korean Grammatical Error Correction: Datasets and Annotation

Research on Korean grammatical error correction (GEC) is limited compared to other major languages such as English and Chinese. We attribute this problematic circumstance to the lack of a carefully designed evaluation benchmark for Korean. Thus, in this work, we first collect three datasets from different sources (Kor-Lang8, Kor-Native, and Kor-Learner) to cover a wide range of error types and annotate them using our newly proposed tool called Korean Automatic Grammatical error Annotation System (KAGAS). KAGAS is a carefully designed edit alignment & classification tool that considers the nature of Korean on generating an alignment between a source sentence and a target sentence, and identifies error types on each aligned edit. We also present baseline models fine-tuned over our datasets. We show that the model trained with our datasets significantly outperforms the public statistical GEC system (Hanspell) on a wider range of error types, demonstrating the diversity and usefulness of the datasets.Comment: Add affiliation and email addres

Inkjet-Printed Silver Gate Electrode and Organic Dielectric Materials for Bottom-Gate Pentacene Thin-Film Transistors

An inkjet-printed silver electrode and a spin-coated cross-linked poly(4-vinylphenol)(PVP) dielectric layer were used as a gate electrode and a gate insulator for a bottom-gate pentacene thin-film transistor (TFT), respectively. The printing and the curing conditions of the printed silver electrode were optimized and tested on various substrates, such as glass, silicon, silicon dioxide, polyethersulfone, polyethyleneterephthalate, polyimide and polyarylate, to produce a good sheet resistance of 0.2 $\sim$ 0.4 $\Omega$/$\square$ and a good surface roughness of 2.38 nm in RMS value and 20.14 nm in peak-to-valley (P2V) value, which are very similar to those of conventionally-sputtered indium-tin-oxide (ITO) or thermally-evaporated silver electrodes. The coated PVP layer of metal/PVP/metal devices showed a good insulation property of 10.4 nA/$\rm cm^{2}$ at 0.5 MV/cm. The PVP layer further reduced the surface roughness of the gate electrode to provide a good interface to the pentance layer. The pentacene TFT with a structure of glass/printed silver/PVP/pentacene/Au showed a good saturation region mobility of 0.13 $\rm cm^{2}$/Vs and a good on/off ratio of larger than 10$^{5}$, which are similar to the performance of a pentacene TFT with a conventional ITO gate electrode.This work was supported by \SystemIC2010" project of Korea Ministry of Knowledge Economy and by the Seoul R&BD Program (CRO70048)

Higher serotonin transporter availability in early-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder patients undergoing escitalopram treatment: A [C-11]DASB PET study

Objective: Early-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (EOCD) and late-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (LOCD) are distinct subtypes of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD patients are treated with serotonin reuptake inhibitors, but the difference in serotonin transporter (SERT) availability between medicated EOCD and LOCD is unexplored yet. Methods: Six EOCD and 6 LOCD patients were enrolled. They underwent serial [C-11]DASB positron emission tomography scans during maintenance therapy with escitalopram, and their plasma concentration of escitalopram was measured simultaneously with the scan. Then, the drug-free binding potential of SERT was calculated by pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modelling. Results: In comparison with LOCD patients, SERT availability was significantly higher in the putamen of EOCD patients (U = 4, p = .026), but not in the caudate nucleus (U=14, p=.589), thalamus (U = 16, p = .818), and dorsal raphe nucleus (U = 7, p = .093). Binding potential of putamen showed a negative correlation (r = -.580, p = .048) with age of onset of the disease, but not with the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale scores. Conclusions: These findings indicate that the earlier the age of onset of OCD, the less serotonergic pathology there is and that this difference remains even after long-term serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment. Clinically, it might suggest that nonserotonergic treatments would be a better option for EOCD patients.N

Perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness in a Korean context: An indigenous qualitative study

Multinational corporations (MNCs) across the world have sent an increasing number of managers abroad to leverage unprecedented opportunities in the era of globalization. However, their failure rate has been above 33% for decades, resulting in substantial costs (Puck, Kittler, & Wright, 2008). One of the primary reasons for this failure is a lack of understanding of the national and organizational cultures within the host countries (Festing & Maletzky, 2011). For example, while a number of MNCs have entered the Korean market, several such as Yahoo, Motorola, and Walmart have failed and withdrawn due to the companies’ lack of adjustment to the Korean cultural context (Choe, 2006; Woo, 2013). In spite of the significance of culturally embedded practices, most researchers who have explored management and leadership in Asian countries, whether they were Western or indigenous researchers, have implemented studies using extant Western management and leadership theories derived within the Western cultural context (Leung, 2007; Tsui, 2006). Numerous scholars have claimed that this could be problematic because the findings of such studies may not be applicable to non-Western countries (Li, 2012; Liden & Antonakis, 2009), and may fail to provide insights and understanding of novel contexts or to reveal indigenous aspects of management and leadership (Tsui, 2007). Consequently, there have been increasing calls for indigenous management and leadership research within Asian countries (see Li et al., 2014; Lyles, 2009; Tsui, 2004; Wolfgramm, Spiller, & Voyageur, 2014). Over the past 30 years, managerial effectiveness and leadership effectiveness have been substantially neglected areas of management research (Noordegraaf & Stewart, 2000; Yukl, Gordon, & Taber, 2002). In addition, there has been little agreement on what specific behaviors distinguish effective managers from ineffective ones. Furthermore, more research is needed to examine the managerial and leadership behaviors that are critical for shaping the performance of individuals, groups and organizations (see Borman & Brush, 1993; Cammock, Nilakant & Dakin, 1995; Mumford, 2011; Noordegraaf & Stewart, 2000; Yukl et al., 2002). While most of the research related to managerial and leadership effectiveness has been conducted in the U.S., the few notable non-U.S. studies include that of Cammock et al. (1995) in New Zealand who developed a behavioral lay model of managerial effectiveness using the repertory grid technique. Another notable exception is the cumulative series of perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness studies conducted by Hamlin with various indigenous co-researchers in Western and non-Western countries (see Hamlin & Patel, 2012; Ruiz, Wang, & Hamlin, 2013) using Flanagan’s (1954) critical incident technique (CIT)

Creating Spaces for Intersubjectivity: A Sustainable Vision for Democratic Citizenship Education

Responding to the multiculturalist critiques of deliberative democratic education, Amy Gutmann and Sigal Ben-Porath suggested a more inclusive version of deliberative democratic education that emphasizes toleration, public recognition, and mutual respect. Despite its benefits and possibilities, however, their concept of democratic education fails to embrace poststructuralist ideas regarding democratic education. In the pursuit of a sustainable vision for democratic citizenship education, this study sought to conceptualize hybrid spaces wherein an ontology of plurality is woven into Gutmann and Ben-Porath’s idea of deliberative democratic education. By proposing an alternative way to integrate poststructuralist ideas such as intersubjective accounts of self-identity and human agency into the current practice of deliberative democratic education, the authors seek to promote continued dialogue on the purposes and possibilities of education for a more sustainable and democratic society

Creating Spaces for Intersubjectivity: A Sustainable Vision for Democratic Citizenship Education

Responding to the multiculturalist critiques of deliberative democratic education, Amy Gutmann and Sigal Ben-Porath suggested a more inclusive version of deliberative democratic education that emphasizes toleration, public recognition, and mutual respect. Despite its benefits and possibilities, however, their concept of democratic education fails to embrace poststructuralist ideas regarding democratic education. In the pursuit of a sustainable vision for democratic citizenship education, this study sought to conceptualize hybrid spaces wherein an ontology of plurality is woven into Gutmann and Ben-Porath’s idea of deliberative democratic education. By proposing an alternative way to integrate poststructuralist ideas such as intersubjective accounts of self-identity and human agency into the current practice of deliberative democratic education, the authors seek to promote continued dialogue on the purposes and possibilities of education for a more sustainable and democratic society