Community service: it always means more when it comes from the heart

Community service itself is a voluntary activity. It is up to students to choose and it should not be an obligation or an assignment. Students need to have an opinion on what they want to do as service so that they will enjoy the experience and thus be able to learn from it

Existence and multiplicity of solutions to equations of N−N-Laplacian type with critical exponential growth in RN\mathbb{R}^{N}

In this paper, we deal with the existence and multiplicity of solutions to the nonuniformly elliptic equation of the N-Lapalcian type with a potential and a nonlinear term of critical exponential growth and satisfying the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition. In spite of a possible failure of the Palais-Smale compactness condition, in this article we apply minimax method to obtain the weak solution to such an equation. In particular, in the case of $N-$Laplacian, using the minimization and the Ekeland variational principle, we obtain multiplicity of weak solutions. Finally, we will prove the above results when our nonlinearity doesn't satisfy the well-known Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition and thus derive the existence and multiplicity of solutions for a much wider class of nonlinear terms $f$.Comment: 30 pages. First draft in November, 201

Deep Network for Simultaneous Decomposition and Classification in UWB-SAR Imagery

Classifying buried and obscured targets of interest from other natural and manmade clutter objects in the scene is an important problem for the U.S. Army. Targets of interest are often represented by signals captured using low-frequency (UHF to L-band) ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology. This technology has been used in various applications, including ground penetration and sensing-through-the-wall. However, the technology still faces a significant issues regarding low-resolution SAR imagery in this particular frequency band, low radar cross sections (RCS), small objects compared to radar signal wavelengths, and heavy interference. The classification problem has been firstly, and partially, addressed by sparse representation-based classification (SRC) method which can extract noise from signals and exploit the cross-channel information. Despite providing potential results, SRC-related methods have drawbacks in representing nonlinear relations and dealing with larger training sets. In this paper, we propose a Simultaneous Decomposition and Classification Network (SDCN) to alleviate noise inferences and enhance classification accuracy. The network contains two jointly trained sub-networks: the decomposition sub-network handles denoising, while the classification sub-network discriminates targets from confusers. Experimental results show significant improvements over a network without decomposition and SRC-related methods

Standardization versus Localization with Impacts of Cultural Patterns on Consumption in International Marketing

For a company to go global, a primary question to be answered is what should be a suitable approach in international marketing strategy, whether they standardize or localize their marketing strategy to adapt to the out-of-country markets that they want to penetrate in. It also is the challenge for global corporations to decide what marketing strategy to adopt (Kotler, 2009). Nevertheless, the issue is not whether to go global but how to tailor the global marketing concept to fit each business and how to make it work (Quelch & Hoff, 1986).  In the international marketing, a number of elements including macro and micro economic environment, legal issues, culture and infrastructure should be thoroughly considered. Among these elements, the culture plays a vital role in developing the international marketing strategy for a firm.This paper is to discuss about the standardization and localization in the international marketing strategy with advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. The further discussion of impacts of cultural patterns on consumption is addressed in both standardization and localization marketing strategy. Keywords: International Marketing Strategy, Standardization, Localization, Adaptation, Customization, Culture, Acculturation, Cultural Patterns

Telomeric DNA Damage and Repair Machineries in HIV Infection

In this thesis, we investigated T cell homeostasis and DNA damage repair machineries in HIV infection. We found that the frequencies of CD4T cells were low, which is associated with cell apoptosis in HIV patients compared to healthy subjects. Importantly, these events were closely correlated to the increase in T cell exhaustion, senescence, DNA damage, and telomere attrition. Mechanistically, while the DNA damage sensors Mer11, Rad50, and NBS1 (MRN) complexes remained intact, the ataxia-telangiectasia mutated (ATM) kinase and its downstream checkpoint kinase 2 (CHK2) were significantly inhibited during HIV infection. Additionally, telomeric repeat-binding factor 2 (TRF2) that functions to protect telomeres from unwanted DNA damage was also suppressed by HIV infection. These findings revealed an important mechanism by which telomeres undergo DNA damage that remained unrepaired due to ATM deficiency and TRF2 deprotection - a process that could promote T cell apoptosis, senescence, and cellular dysfunction in HIV infection