Tonometric Vascular Function Assessment

Non

Host Residents’ Perceptions and Attitudes toward an Event

This study investigates the structural relationship among perceived impacts, benefit perceptions, and supports for the event. Local residents in the Black Hills area in South Dakota, where the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is held, were invited to participate in the study. A total of 190 responses were collected using convenience sampling and structural equation modeling was performed to identify the relationship. The findings indicate that the perceived positive impact significantly affects both benefit perceptions and supports while perceived negative impact is not a significant predictor of residents’ benefit perception. In order to maximize community supports, it is recommended that event organizers emphasize on positive economic impacts

Real-time delay-multiply-and-sum beamforming with coherence factor for in vivo clinical photoacoustic imaging of humans

In the clinical photoacoustic (PA) imaging, ultrasound (US) array transducers are typically used to provide B-mode images in real-time. To form a B-mode image, delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming algorithm is the most commonly used algorithm because of its ease of implementation. However, this algorithm suffers from low image resolution and low contrast drawbacks. To address this issue, delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS) beamforming algorithm has been developed to provide enhanced image quality with higher contrast, and narrower main lobe compared but has limitations on the imaging speed for clinical applications. In this paper, we present an enhanced real-time DMAS algorithm with modified coherence factor (CF) for clinical PA imaging of humans in vivo. Our algorithm improves the lateral resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of original DMAS beam-former by suppressing the background noise and side lobes using the coherence of received signals. We optimized the computations of the proposed DMAS with CF (DMAS-CF) to achieve real-time frame rate imaging on a graphics processing unit (GPU). To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we implemented DAS and DMAS with/without CF on a clinical US/PA imaging system and quantitatively assessed their processing speed and image quality. The processing time to reconstruct one B-mode image using DAS, DAS with CF (DAS-CF), DMAS, and DMAS-CF algorithms was 7.5, 7.6, 11.1, and 11.3 ms, respectively, all achieving the real-time imaging frame rate. In terms of the image quality, the proposed DMAS-CF algorithm improved the lateral resolution and SNR by 55.4% and 93.6 dB, respectively, compared to the DAS algorithm in the phantom imaging experiments. We believe the proposed DMAS-CF algorithm and its real-time implementation contributes significantly to the improvement of imaging quality of clinical US/PA imaging system.11Ysciescopu

Chemically etched ultrahigh-Q wedge-resonator on a silicon chip

Ultrahigh-Q optical resonators are being studied across a wide range of fields, including quantum information, nonlinear optics, cavity optomechanics and telecommunications. Here, we demonstrate a new resonator with a record Q-factor of 875 million for on-chip devices. The fabrication of our device avoids the requirement for a specialized processing step, which in microtoroid resonators8 has made it difficult to control their size and achieve millimetre- and centimetre-scale diameters. Attaining these sizes is important in applications such as microcombs and potentially also in rotation sensing. As an application of size control, stimulated Brillouin lasers incorporating our device are demonstrated. The resonators not only set a new benchmark for the Q-factor on a chip, but also provide, for the first time, full compatibility of this important device class with conventional semiconductor processing. This feature will greatly expand the range of possible ‘system on a chip’ functions enabled by ultrahigh-Q devices

A Feasible Configuration of AFDX Networks for Real-Time Flows in Avionics Systems

REACTION 2013. 2nd International Workshop on Real-time and distributed computing in emerging applications. December 3rd, 2013, Vancouver, Canada.AFDX (Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet) Networks have been proposed to meet unique ADN (Aircraft Data Networks) characteristics and then standardized as a Part 7 in ARNIC 664. As for this new communication technology, some research works have been conducted to address design issues such as optimizing virtual links as well as analytic modeling including response time. Despite of their research efforts, configuration problem for both MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) and BAG (Bandwidth Allocation Gap) over virtual links in AFDX networks remains unsolved yet. In this paper, we propose how to set MTU and BAG value on each virtual link according to both application requirements and AFDX switch constraints. We define a new problem of feasible configurations of virtual links in an AFDX switch and propose an algorithm to derive feasible BAG and MTU pairs based on the branch-and-bound technique. Throughout simulations, we evaluate the proposed algorithm and analyze the effect of parameters in AFDX networks.This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (No. NRF- 2012R1A1A1015096) and BK21+ Program

Leveraging Speaker Embeddings with Adversarial Multi-task Learning for Age Group Classification

Recently, researchers have utilized neural network-based speaker embedding techniques in speaker-recognition tasks to identify speakers accurately. However, speaker-discriminative embeddings do not always represent speech features such as age group well. In an embedding model that has been highly trained to capture speaker traits, the task of age group classification is closer to speech information leakage. Hence, to improve age group classification performance, we consider the use of speaker-discriminative embeddings derived from adversarial multi-task learning to align features and reduce the domain discrepancy in age subgroups. In addition, we investigated different types of speaker embeddings to learn and generalize the domain-invariant representations for age groups. Experimental results on the VoxCeleb Enrichment dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed adaptive adversarial network in multi-objective scenarios and leveraging speaker embeddings for the domain adaptation task

Highly p-doped graphene obtained by fluorine intercalation

We present a method for decoupling epitaxial graphene grown on SiC(0001) by intercalation of a layer of fluorine at the interface. The fluorine atoms do not enter into a covalent bond with graphene, but rather saturate the substrate Si bonds. This configuration of the fluorine atoms induces a remarkably large hole density of p \approx 4.5 \times 1013 cm-2, equivalent to the location of the Fermi level at 0.79 eV above the Dirac point ED .Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, in print AP