A DRAINAGE SYSTEM FOR MITIGATING MOISTURE DAMAGE TO BRIDGE DECK PAVEMENTS

This study presents the development of a new drainage system that can quickly drain water that has penetrated into bridge deck pavements. The new drainage system is expected to significantly reduce potholes that typically lead to premature failure of pavements. This system can be established by applying a thin drainage layer between the waterproofing layer and top wearing course. The most important factors for this system are to meet satisfactory performance of the waterproofing layer and to develop appropriate construction technique for the thin drainage layer. The drainage layer was formulated with porous asphalt mixtures designed for the max aggregate size of 10 mm, and was validated through various physical and mechanical laboratory tests to confirm its performance characteristics. For the waterproofing layer, methyl methacrylate (MMA) – type material was introduced, and a series of mechanical tests were performed to estimate the applicability of the MMA material for waterproofing. It was observed from the tests that the MMA material satisfied all specification requirements. In addition, to evaluate the field performance of the new drainage system, a field study was conducted on a real bridge. Field performance observations on both the waterproofing and pavement materials indicated that the new drainage system performs much better than traditional methods in draining water that has penetrated into pavement layers

Prompt Tuning of Deep Neural Networks for Speaker-adaptive Visual Speech Recognition

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) aims to infer speech into text depending on lip movements alone. As it focuses on visual information to model the speech, its performance is inherently sensitive to personal lip appearances and movements, and this makes the VSR models show degraded performance when they are applied to unseen speakers. In this paper, to remedy the performance degradation of the VSR model on unseen speakers, we propose prompt tuning methods of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for speaker-adaptive VSR. Specifically, motivated by recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we finetune prompts on adaptation data of target speakers instead of modifying the pre-trained model parameters. Different from the previous prompt tuning methods mainly limited to Transformer variant architecture, we explore different types of prompts, the addition, the padding, and the concatenation form prompts that can be applied to the VSR model which is composed of CNN and Transformer in general. With the proposed prompt tuning, we show that the performance of the pre-trained VSR model on unseen speakers can be largely improved by using a small amount of adaptation data (e.g., less than 5 minutes), even if the pre-trained model is already developed with large speaker variations. Moreover, by analyzing the performance and parameters of different types of prompts, we investigate when the prompt tuning is preferred over the finetuning methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on both word- and sentence-level VSR databases, LRW-ID and GRID

Efficient and effective human action recognition in video through motion boundary description with a compact set of trajectories

Human action recognition (HAR) is at the core of human-computer interaction and video scene understanding. However, achieving effective HAR in an unconstrained environment is still a challenging task. To that end, trajectory-based video representations are currently widely used. Despite the promising levels of effectiveness achieved by these approaches, problems regarding computational complexity and the presence of redundant trajectories still need to be addressed in a satisfactory way. In this paper, we propose a method for trajectory rejection, reducing the number of redundant trajectories without degrading the effectiveness of HAR. Furthermore, to realize efficient optical flow estimation prior to trajectory extraction, we integrate a method for dynamic frame skipping. Experiments with four publicly available human action datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art HAR approaches in terms of effectiveness, while simultaneously mitigating the computational complexity

Electronic Commerce Strategy for Small and Medium Enterprises: Case Studies of Korean Firms

Business firms are increasingly taking part in online business activities through internet as the size of the e-commerce market is rapidly growing in the recent years. Electronic commerce (EC) activities now become an essential part of the business strategy for survival as well as growth for both large enterprises and small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Previous studies on e-commerce mostly focused on the adoption of EC by business firms, and also have been carried out with the data from big enterprises. More often than not, the results obtained from the large business firms are used to provide the guidelines for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are, however, different from large business firms in many aspects, and need to be studied on their own. This paper extends the previous research on EC in two aspects. Firstly, we study the e-commerce issues in the area of implementation in relation to the business firm\u27s performance, beyond the adoption and diffusion of IT technology which has been the research issues in many previous research. Secondly, we focus on small and medium enterprises which comprise a large portion of national economy with significant influenc

A Case of Birt-Hogg-Dubé Syndrome

Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome (BHDS) is an autosomal dominant genodermatosis characterized by cutaneous hair follicle tumors (fibrofolliculoma or trichodiscoma), pulmonary cysts, and increased risk of renal neoplasia. The genetic alteration for BHDS has been mapped to chromosome 17p12q11, and the gene in this region has been cloned and believed to be responsible for the BHDS. Mutations in the BHD gene (also known as FLCN) have been described in the patients with BHDS. We present a case of a 30-yr-old Korean woman with multiple mildly pruritic papules on her face and neck area. The patient had several firm, flesh-colored, dome-shaped, papular lesions measuring between 2 to 5 mm. Except for a history of pneumothorax her medical records were not remarkable. Mutation analysis of the BHD gene was performed, and a novel deletion mutation (p.F519LfsX17 [c.1557delT]) causing truncation of the gene product, folliculin, was found in the exon 14. The actual incidence of BHDS is unknown, but it is most likely underdiagnosed. So it is imperative that doctors recognize the skin lesions of BHDS and institute proper screening to detect other manifestations of the disease. Here, we report a case of BHDS with a novel mutation, which is the first report in Korea