Contribution to The Study of Gracilaria and relative genera (Gracilariales, Rhodophyta) from Vietnam

More than 1500 specimens of Gracilaria sensu lato (Gracilaria, Gracilariopsis, and Hydropuntia) collecting by previous authors along the coast of Vietnam and our new material, which are deposited in the herbaria of the Institute of Oceanography, Nhatrang (ION), Institute of Material Science, Nhatrang Branch (IMS) and Institute of Oceanology, Hai Phong Branch (IOH), have been studied. We re-examined almost herbarium specimens of 33 Gracilaria taxa had been published by Dawson (1954); Pham Hoang Ho (1969), Nguyen Huu Dinh (1992), Nguyen Huu Dinh et al (1993) and Nguyen Van Tien (1994). Some of them were misidentified or misapplied names. In this paper, 19 Vietnamese species of Gracilaria sensu lato were discussed and critically adjusted. The structure of male and female reproductive organs, particularly the formation of spermatangia has been studied carefully. Five of the nineteen were added for the flora: Gracilaria rubra, G. cuneifolia, G. longirostric, G. yamamotoi, and Hydropuntia divergens

EmbryosFormer: Deformable Transformer and Collaborative Encoding-Decoding for Embryos Stage Development Classification

The timing of cell divisions in early embryos during the In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) process is a key predictor of embryo viability. However, observing cell divisions in Time-Lapse Monitoring (TLM) is a time-consuming process and highly depends on experts. In this paper, we propose EmbryosFormer, a computational model to automatically detect and classify cell divisions from original time-lapse images. Our proposed network is designed as an encoder-decoder deformable transformer with collaborative heads. The transformer contracting path predicts per-image labels and is optimized by a classification head. The transformer expanding path models the temporal coherency between embryo images to ensure monotonic non-decreasing constraint and is optimized by a segmentation head. Both contracting and expanding paths are synergetically learned by a collaboration head. We have benchmarked our proposed EmbryosFormer on two datasets: a public dataset with mouse embryos with 8-cell stage and an in-house dataset with human embryos with 4-cell stage. Source code: https://github.com/UARK-AICV/Embryos.Comment: Accepted at WACV 202

Early detection of slight bruises in apples by cost-efficient near-infrared imaging

Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been widely reported for its useful applications in assessing internal fruit qualities. Motivated by apple consumption in the global market, this study aims to evaluate the possibility of applying NIR imaging to detect slight bruises in apple fruits. A simple optical setup was designed, and low-cost system components were used to promote the future development of practical and cost-efficient devices. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, slight bruises were created by a mild impact with a comparably low impact energy of only 0.081 Joules. Experimental results showed that 100% of bruises in Jazz and Gala apples were accurately detected immediately after bruising and within 3 hours of storage. Thus, it is promising to develop customer devices to detect slight bruises for not only apple fruits but also other fruits with soft and thin skin at their early damage stages

IMPLEMENT POLICIES ON TRAINING AND FOSTERING CADRES AND CIVIL SERVANTS OF KHMER IN THE MEKONG DELTA, VIETNAM

Cadres and civil servants who are ethnic Khmer people in the Mekong Delta have an essential position and role in implementing the Party's guidelines and guidelines, policies, and laws of the State to present with the people and directly manage society to achieve order, stability, and development. Cadres and civil servants who are ethnic Khmer people are the bridge between the Party, State, and the people, reflecting the people's legitimate thoughts and aspirations for the Party and State. Based on the method of document research, and secondary data, the paper outlines the characteristics of the Khmer people in the Mekong Delta; viewpoints and lines of the Party, policies, and laws of the State on training and retraining policies for cadres and civil servants who are ethnic Khmer people; On the basis of the actual situation of the policy, the thesis has proposed a number of solutions to improve the effectiveness of the policy on training and fostering cadres and civil servants who are ethnic Khmer people in the Mekong Delta.  Article visualizations

Sintering behavior and physical properties of Bi0.5(Na1–xKx)0.5SnO3 lead-free ceramics

In this study, Bi0.5(Na1–xKx)0.5SnO3 (BNKS) ceramics (x = 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4) were fabricated via ultrasound wave before milling. The time of ball milling decreased from 20 to 1 h. The X-ray diffraction patterns show that the BNKS has a single-phase structure. When the potassium content increases, the phase structure of the ceramics changes from rhombohedral to tetragonal. When sintered at 1100 °C and x = 0.2, the ceramics’ physical properties are the best with the mass density of 5.59 g/cm3, the electromechanical coupling constants kp of 0,31 and kt of 0.27, the remanent polarization of      11.9 µC/cm; the dielectric constant εr of 1131, and the highest dielectric constant emax of 4800

Dynamic ACK skipping in TCP with Network Coding for Power Line Communication Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) still plays an essential role in various user applications for end-to-end reliable data transmission. However, TCP cannot get a high goodput performance in the lossy networks because it considers any packet loss to be a congestion signal and decreases the congestion window mistakenly. Therefore, TCP with Network Coding (termed TCP/NC) was proposed to recover the packet loss at the sink without retransmission if the number of coded packets is enough. However, the ACK packet needs to be sent for any arriving coded packet as a feedback of the end-to-end channel condition, resulting in a lower transmission performance in half- duplex networks, e.g., Power Line Communication. Therefore, we propose the ACK-Skipping scheme for TCP/NC to limit the number of ACK packets but still retain the necessary information, e.g., for channel estimation. The simulation result on ns-3 (Network Simulation 3) shows that the proposal achieves a higher goodput on PLC environment compared to TCP with Selective Acknowledgment and TCP Westwood+ as well as the recent variant of TCP/NC.The 22nd International Conference on Advanced Communications Technology, ICACT2020, 16-19 February 2020, Phoenix Park, PyeongChang, Kore

Internal market orientation, frontliners' organizational commitment and customer-oriented behavior: A study of airport service in Vietnam

This research examines the three-component structure of the concept internal market orientation (IMO) and investigates its impact on frontliners’ organizational commitment (OC) and customer-oriented behavior (COB) in the context of airport service in Vietnam. Based on a sample of 294 frontliners working in various airports, SEM analysis reveals that IMO has a strong impact on OC. It also has direct and indirect impacts on COB. Moreover, the empirical result supports the component structure of IMO. It is, therefore, suggested that IMO is powerful to enhance both internal employee management and external marketing performance in the research context

XGV-BERT: Leveraging Contextualized Language Model and Graph Neural Network for Efficient Software Vulnerability Detection

With the advancement of deep learning (DL) in various fields, there are many attempts to reveal software vulnerabilities by data-driven approach. Nonetheless, such existing works lack the effective representation that can retain the non-sequential semantic characteristics and contextual relationship of source code attributes. Hence, in this work, we propose XGV-BERT, a framework that combines the pre-trained CodeBERT model and Graph Neural Network (GCN) to detect software vulnerabilities. By jointly training the CodeBERT and GCN modules within XGV-BERT, the proposed model leverages the advantages of large-scale pre-training, harnessing vast raw data, and transfer learning by learning representations for training data through graph convolution. The research results demonstrate that the XGV-BERT method significantly improves vulnerability detection accuracy compared to two existing methods such as VulDeePecker and SySeVR. For the VulDeePecker dataset, XGV-BERT achieves an impressive F1-score of 97.5%, significantly outperforming VulDeePecker, which achieved an F1-score of 78.3%. Again, with the SySeVR dataset, XGV-BERT achieves an F1-score of 95.5%, surpassing the results of SySeVR with an F1-score of 83.5%

20-Hydroxyecdysone from Dacrycarpus imbricatus bark inhibits the proliferation of acute myeloid leukemia cells

Abstract Objective To investigate the anti-proliferative effects of 20-hydroxyecdysone isolated from the bark of Dacrycarpus imbricatus (Blume) de Laub. Methods Column chromatography was used for isolation of compounds from plant material. The structure of the isolated compound was identified by mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, including HSQC, HMBC, NOE-difference experiments. The isolated compound was tested for its anti-proliferative activity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and OCI-AML cells. Results Compound 1 was isolated from the ethyl acetate fraction of Dacrycarpus imbricatus barks by column chromatography. Its chemical structure was identified as 20-hydroxyecdysone (20HE), a cholestane-type ecdysteroid, by a combination of mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometric analyses. Our goal was to test the anti-proliferative activity of 20HE using the OCI-AML cell line. 20HE significantly decreased OCI cell number at a concentration of 1 mg/mL, whereas lower concentrations were ineffective. Moreover, this decrease was due to partial blockage of the G 1 /S phase of the cell cycle, with a reduction of cells in the G 2 M phase, not due to increased apoptosis. Conclusions This indicates that 20HE significantly decreases the number of cells in the G 1 /S phase of the cell cycle in human AML cells. This is the first time that the anti-proliferative activity of 20HE against a human tumor cell line has been reported