FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF MOVIE CHARACTERS: THE CASE OF THE TAG-ALONG

The types of Taiwanese films are becoming more and more abundant, especially those with “thriller” or “horror” elements. In addition to the increase in these types of film production, there are more brilliant box office performances. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to conduct a more in-depth analysis of this type of films. Analyzing the role design and plot direction in the films, so that there is a narrative structure can be referenced in this type of works. This study adopted text analysis, and coupled with the character functions theory proposed by scholar Propp. This study analyzed the functionalities of the main characters in the famous domestic movie “The Tag-Along”. The research results show that there are 6 types of functional characters in “The Tag-Along”: the villain, the helper, the donor, the dispatcher, the hero and the princess. In the 31 character functions listed by Propp, the film contains 18 of them, and these 18 functions are used to describe the story. The film of thriller and horror types are still developing in Taiwan, and the researchers expect to use this research result to find the narrative structure of this type of films. Filmmakers will have a basic structure for reference when creating such movies, and at the same time it extends the other possibilities of this type of films in the development of characters and plots

Retraction and Generalized Extension of Computing with Words

Fuzzy automata, whose input alphabet is a set of numbers or symbols, are a formal model of computing with values. Motivated by Zadeh's paradigm of computing with words rather than numbers, Ying proposed a kind of fuzzy automata, whose input alphabet consists of all fuzzy subsets of a set of symbols, as a formal model of computing with all words. In this paper, we introduce a somewhat general formal model of computing with (some special) words. The new features of the model are that the input alphabet only comprises some (not necessarily all) fuzzy subsets of a set of symbols and the fuzzy transition function can be specified arbitrarily. By employing the methodology of fuzzy control, we establish a retraction principle from computing with words to computing with values for handling crisp inputs and a generalized extension principle from computing with words to computing with all words for handling fuzzy inputs. These principles show that computing with values and computing with all words can be respectively implemented by computing with words. Some algebraic properties of retractions and generalized extensions are addressed as well.Comment: 13 double column pages; 3 figures; to be published in the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System

Floating Point Arithmetic Protocols for Constructing Secure Data Analysis Application

AbstractA large variety of data mining and machine learning techniques are applied to a wide range of applications today. There- fore, there is a real need to develop technologies that allows data analysis while preserving the confidentiality of the data. Secure multi-party computation (SMC) protocols allows participants to cooperate on various computations while retaining the privacy of their own input data, which is an ideal solution to this issue. Although there is a number of frameworks developed in SMC to meet this challenge, but they are either tailored to perform only on specific tasks or provide very limited precision. In this paper, we have developed protocols for floating point arithmetic based on secure scalar product protocols, which is re- quired in many real world applications. Our protocols follow most of the IEEE-754 standard, supporting the four fundamental arithmetic operations, namely addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We will demonstrate the practicality of these protocols through performing various statistical calculations that is widely used in most data analysis tasks. Our experiments show the performance of our framework is both practical and promising

Estimation of Agricultural Groundwater Usage by Well Pumping Efficiency and Electric Consumption

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive

Land Subsidence Caused by Groundwater Exploitation in Yunlin, Taiwan

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive

A Deep Learning Approach to Radar-based QPE

In this study, we propose a volume-to-point framework for quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) based on the Quantitative Precipitation Estimation and Segregation Using Multiple Sensor (QPESUMS) Mosaic Radar data set. With a data volume consisting of the time series of gridded radar reflectivities over the Taiwan area, we used machine learning algorithms to establish a statistical model for QPE in weather stations. The model extracts spatial and temporal features from the input data volume and then associates these features with the location-specific precipitations. In contrast to QPE methods based on the Z-R relation, we leverage the machine learning algorithms to automatically detect the evolution and movement of weather systems and associate these patterns to a location with specific topographic attributes. Specifically, we evaluated this framework with the hourly precipitation data of 45 weather stations in Taipei during 2013-2016. In comparison to the operational QPE scheme used by the Central Weather Bureau, the volume-to-point framework performed comparably well in general cases and excelled in detecting heavy-rainfall events. By using the current results as the reference benchmark, the proposed method can integrate the heterogeneous data sources and potentially improve the forecast in extreme precipitation scenarios.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures. Published in Earth and Space Scienc

Immunotherapy: rAAV2 expressing interleukin-15 inhibits HeLa cell tumor growth in mice

Human interleukin-15 (hIL15) has anti-tumor activities, but it is not convenient for tumor treatment because of its short half-life. A gene therapy for mouse lung cancer using an adenovirus vector expressing IL15 has been reported. However, adenovirus vector-mediated gene therapy can provoke cellular toxicity and inflammatory reactions. The recombinant adenovirus-associated vector 2 (rAAV2) is safer due to minimal cellular toxicity and immune response. In order to demonstrate that gene therapy can be used safely and successfully for human cancer treatment, the rAAV2 expressing hIL15 gene (rAAV2-hIL15) is applied for human cervical cancer, HeLa cell, in this study. This study successfully demonstrates that rAAV2-hIL15 can express IL15 with bioactivities in vitro and in vivo. In conclusion, our studies show that human cervical cancers are inhibited on animal model with rAAV2-hIL15 treatment and provide a safer and important reference for human cancer gene therapy

Do female directors will have impact on corporate performance?

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of female directors on the corporate performance of Chinese banks and Taiwanese financial holding companies. The sample consists of 14 Chinese banks and 15 Taiwanese financial holding companies in 2010–2014. The empirical results show that the proportion of non-executive female directors and independent female directors have significant positive influence on corporate performance. The result shows that the higher the proportion of female directors is, the better off the corporate performance would be. There is robust evidence in the data to conclude that female directors in specific posts can influence a firm’s corporate performance