512 research outputs found
Debris Flow Risk Assessment and Land-Use Planning – A Case Study of Jhonglun Hot Spring Area
The Jhonglun Scenic Area in Chiayi County, is famous for its hot spring, the region was hit by debris flow with tremendous losses and resulted with dramatic change of the landscape during Typhoon Morakot in 2009. The most effective strategy for reducing natural hazard risks is through land-use planning. Following the concept of Risk=Hazard*Exposure*Vulnerability, this study conducted risk identification through the collection of landslide inventory and history debris flow hazard mapping of Chiayi DF051 potential debris flow torrent. Together with elements at risk information from field investigations, the risk analysis was conducted with several return periods debris flow simulation to recognize the possible economic losses and fatalities by debris flow. The identified high risk areas in Jhonglun Scenic Area were compared to the current special district planning to understand the spatial distribution of high risk areas. The result shows that some of the designated zones were among the areas with high debris flow risks, which further indicates that land-use planning should consider the consequences of natural hazards. The result of this study provides one of the first steps for land use planning restrictions within the potential debris flow region
Disordered Fe vacancies and superconductivity in potassium-intercalated iron selenide (K2-xFe4+ySe5)
The parent compound of an unconventional superconductor must contain unusual
correlated electronic and magnetic properties of its own. In the high-Tc
potassium intercalated FeSe, there has been significant debate regarding what
the exact parent compound is. Our studies unambiguously show that the
Fe-vacancy ordered K2Fe4Se5 is the magnetic, Mott insulating parent compound of
the superconducting state. Non-superconducting K2Fe4Se5 becomes a
superconductor after high temperature annealing, and the overall picture
indicates that superconductivity in K2-xFe4+ySe5 originates from the Fe-vacancy
order to disorder transition. Thus, the long pending question whether magnetic
and superconducting state are competing or cooperating for cuprate
superconductors may also apply to the Fe-chalcogenide superconductors. It is
believed that the iron selenides and related compounds will provide essential
information to understand the origin of superconductivity in the iron-based
superconductors, and possibly to the superconducting cuprates
Knowledge-Enriched Visual Storytelling
Stories are diverse and highly personalized, resulting in a large possible
output space for story generation. Existing end-to-end approaches produce
monotonous stories because they are limited to the vocabulary and knowledge in
a single training dataset. This paper introduces KG-Story, a three-stage
framework that allows the story generation model to take advantage of external
Knowledge Graphs to produce interesting stories. KG-Story distills a set of
representative words from the input prompts, enriches the word set by using
external knowledge graphs, and finally generates stories based on the enriched
word set. This distill-enrich-generate framework allows the use of external
resources not only for the enrichment phase, but also for the distillation and
generation phases. In this paper, we show the superiority of KG-Story for
visual storytelling, where the input prompt is a sequence of five photos and
the output is a short story. Per the human ranking evaluation, stories
generated by KG-Story are on average ranked better than that of the
state-of-the-art systems. Our code and output stories are available at
https://github.com/zychen423/KE-VIST.Comment: AAAI 202
V2PSense: Enabling Cellular-based V2P Collision Warning Service Through Mobile Sensing
The C-V2X (Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything) technology
is developing in full swing. One of its mainstream services
can be the Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) service. It can protect
pedestrians who are mostly vulnerable on the road. In this
work, we seek to enable a V2P service that can identify which
pedestrians may be nearby a dangerous driving event and then
notify them of warning messages. To enable this V2P service,
there are two major challenges. First, a low-latency V2P message
transport is required for this infrastructure-based service.
Second, the pedestrian’s smartphone requires an energy-efficient
outdoor positioning method instead of power-hungry GPS due
to its limited battery life. We thus propose a novel solution,
V2PSense, which trades off positioning precision for energy
savings while achieving low-latency message transport with LTE
high-priority bearers. It does a coarse-grained positioning by
leveraging intermittent GPS information and mobile sensing data,
which includes step count from the pedometer and cellular signal
strength changes. Though the V2PSense’s positioning is not as
precise as the GPS, it can still ensure that all the pedestrians
nearby dangerous spots can be notified. Our results show that
it can achieve the average precision ratio 92.6% for estimating
where the pedestrian is while saving 20.8% energy, compared
with the GPS always-on case.This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Tech-nology, Taiwan, under grant numbers 106-2622-8-009-017 and 106-2218-E-009-018, and by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586
Establishing engineering S-curves to evaluate supervision engineer allocations for highway construction projects
An engineering consultant firm needs to allocate engineers to supervise a highway construction project in each month during the construction phase. Properly assigning the supervision engineers under a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract has been a key factor affecting the profitability of the firm and the quality assurance of the project. Assigning too many engineers will be a waste, while allocating too few engineers may harm the supervision quality. This work proposes a two-stage model to develop engineering S-curves (called ES-curves) for planning and controlling the engineering superÂvision schedule. In the planning stage, a predictive ES-curve model is established based on historical ES-curves. In the controlling stage, an ES-curve is built according to the relationships between the engineering progress and construction progress. A cluster analysis and regression analysis are applied to the model development. A case study demonstrates that the produced ES-curves can help management in planning and evaluating when to increase or decrease the number of supervision engineers assigned to a project
A simple marking system for accurate intraoperative monitoring and adjustment of cyclotorsion strabismus surgery
Ocular cyclotorsion is treatable only with surgery. The surgical procedure must be tailored individually to the specific etiologies causing the horizontal and vertical strabismus and its torsional components. An adjustable surgical approach is often used for postoperative or intraoperative adjustments. However, the methods currently used have some limitations. In this study, we propose a simple intraoperative marking system for all cyclotorsion correction surgery. The proposed marking system used three sets of surface markers: external horizontal markings, ocular horizontal markings, and surgical torsion markings, drawn in sequence. We retrospectively analyzed the surgical results using this novel marking system in this single-center, single-surgeon study. Fifteen patients with cyclotorsion who underwent treatment using the proposed marking system as an intraoperative aid between August 2019 and August 2021 were included. The medical charts were thoroughly reviewed, and the pre-and postoperative subjective and objective cyclotorsion were analyzed. Among the study subjects (10 males, 5 females; age range: 6–89 years), 13 had excyclotorsion and 2 incyclotorsion. Preoperative mean net subjective cyclotorsion measured by the double Maddox rod (DMR) test was 6.0° (standard deviation: 10.8°) and mean net disc-to-fovea angle (DFA) was 20.23° (13.21°). The postoperative net DMR and DFA were 0.2° (2.1°) and 14.09° (5.97°), respectively. The mean absolute net DMR and DFA being treated were 9.8° (4.8°) and 9.76° (4.61°). Overall, the proposed intraoperative marking system is a simple and quantitative method to assess, monitor, and adjust the torsional aspect for all strabismus surgeries
Change in insulin resistance according to virological response during antiviral treatment for hepatitis C virus infection
SummaryBackgroundHepatitis C virus (HCV) infection can lead to increased insulin resistance, but the dynamics of insulin resistance in HCV-infected patients receiving pegylated interferon plus ribavirin remain elusive.MethodsThis prospective study enrolled HCV-infected patients who received pegylated interferon plus ribavirin. Patients were classified according to the attainment of sustained virological response (SVR). Insulin resistance was measured using homeostatic model assessment-insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). The change in HOMA-IR at baseline, the end of treatment, and 24 weeks after the end of treatment was compared in patients who achieved SVR and those who did not.ResultsA total of 65 patients participated in this study, of which 46 (71%) achieved SVR. Overall, The HOMA-IR changed significantly during antiviral therapy, with the median values [interquartile range (IQR)] of 3.7 (1.6–10.0) prior to the treatment, 1.5 (0.8–2.9) at the end, and 1.6 (0.9–3.1) at 24 weeks after completion of therapy. However, only patients who achieved SVR had significant off-therapy reduction of HOMA-IR, with median values of 1.3 (IQR, 0.7–2.6) at 24 weeks off therapy and 3.6 (IQR, 1.5–9.9) at baseline (p < 0.0001). In those without SVR, the HOMA-IR measured 24 weeks after treatment completion (median, 2.2; IQR, 1.9–4.7) did not differ from baseline values (median, 3.9; IQR, 2.2–10.0; p = 0.5).ConclusionDual therapy with pegylated interferon plus ribavirin ameliorated IR in HCV-infected patients, but the off-therapy improvement of IR was limited to those who attained SVR
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