Autonomous Ground Vehicle

WildCat is an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). AGVs were first developed for military purposes: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Manufacturing, Search and Rescue operations, Mining, etc. WildCat will be entered in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle competition (IGVC) held in June 2016 at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Teams from major universities not only in the U.S., but also India, France, the UK, China, and around the world will be competing. The IGVC offers a design experience that is at the very cutting edge of engineering education. It is multidisciplinary, theory-based, hands-on, team implemented, and outcome assessed competition. It encompasses the very latest technologies impacting industrial development and taps subjects of high interest to students. The objective of the competition is to challenge students to think creatively as a team about the evolving technologies of vehicle electronic controls, sensors, computer science, robotics, and system integration throughout the design, fabrication, and field testing of autonomous intelligent mobile robots. The vehicle will compete to: 1) autonomously navigate an outdoor obstacle course as quickly as possible, keeping within the speed limit and reaching all GPS waypoints, 2) complete a course with remote (user) control, and 3) have ingenuity and uniqueness in design

Medical College Students’ Use of Metacognitive Strategies in English Online Reading

Combined with the ubiquitousness of internet, technological gadgets and digital tools, mobile assisted language learning is undergoing rapid development and online reading has become an integrated part of college English education, especially in medical colleges, which requires students to get corresponding reading skills and strategies in their daily study. Metacognitive strategies, as one of language learning strategies, has been a heated topic in students’ English reading, but the awareness and use of them in online English reading haven’t been emphasized. Since metacognitive strategies are of great help to effective online reading and autonomous learning, it is essential to know whether they have been used or to what extent they have been employed and then to explore some suggestions for college English teaching and learning. Based on 296 questionnaires and six students’ think-aloud sessions, this study focused on the use of metacognitive online reading strategies by medical college students, aiming to explore the frequency of metacognitive online reading strategies employed by college students and to know the differences in the use of metacognitive online reading strategies of college students with different English proficiency, then to search for effective ways to help students become autonomous language learners

Electron transfer theory revisit: Quantum solvation effect

The effect of solvation on the electron transfer (ET) rate processes is investigated on the basis of the exact theory constructed in J. Phys. Chem. B Vol. 110, (2006); quant-ph/0604071. The nature of solvation is studied in a close relation with the mechanism of ET processes. The resulting Kramers' turnover and Marcus' inversion characteristics are analyzed accordingly. The classical picture of solvation is found to be invalid when the solvent longitudinal relaxation time is short compared with the inverse temperature.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. J. Theo. & Comput. Chem., accepte

Kinetics and thermodynamics of electron transfer in Debye solvents: An analytical and nonperturbative reduced density matrix theory

A nonperturbative electron transfer rate theory is developed based on the reduced density matrix dynamics, which can be evaluated readily for the Debye solvent model without further approximation. Not only does it recover for reaction rates the celebrated Marcus' inversion and Kramers' turnover behaviors, the present theory also predicts for reaction thermodynamics, such as equilibrium Gibbs free-energy and entropy, some interesting solvent-dependent features that are calling for experimental verification. Moreover, a continued fraction Green's function formalism is also constructed, which can be used together with Dyson equation technique, for efficient evaluation of nonperturbative reduced density matrix dynamics.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. J. Phys. Chem. B, accepte

A Contact Energy Function Considering Residue Hydrophobic Environment and Its Application in Protein Fold Recognition

The three-dimensional (3D) structure prediction of proteins is an important task in bioinformatics. Finding energy functions that can better represent residue-residue and residue-solvent interactions is a crucial way to improve the prediction accuracy. The widely used contact energy functions mostly only consider the contact frequency between different types of residues; however, we find that the contact frequency also relates to the residue hydrophobic environment. Accordingly, we present an improved contact energy function to integrate the two factors, which can reflect the influence of hydrophobic interaction on the stabilization of protein 3D structure more effectively. Furthermore, a fold recognition (threading) approach based on this energy function is developed. The testing results obtained with 20 randomly selected proteins demonstrate that, compared with common contact energy functions, the proposed energy function can improve the accuracy of the fold template prediction from 20% to 50%, and can also improve the accuracy of the sequence-template alignment from 35% to 65%