Enhanced Emission Using Thin Li-Halide Cathodic Interlayers for Improved Injection into Poly(p-phenylene vinylene) Derivative PLEDs

In this study, the effects of thin Li-halide cathodic interlayers on electron injection were examined for electroluminescent layers of polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs). An order of magnitude increase in current density is observed as Li-halide salts are varied down the group VII column of the periodic table. When considering luminance, devices with a LiCl interlayer were 2.3× greater than those with LiF, whereas devices with LiBr were 2.8× greater, while concurrently lowering the turn-on voltage. This resulting enhanced current density and subsequent luminance could be due to a lowered work-function difference at the cathode created by either the Li-halides dissociation-induced doping of the polymer surface or an interfacial dipole of ionic Li-halide compound, leading to band bending

Experimental Investigation for Tensile Performance of GFRP-Steel Hybridized Rebar

Tensile performance of the recently developed “FRP Hybrid Bar” at Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) is experimentally evaluated by the authors. FRP Hybrid Bar is introduced to overcome the low elastic modulus of the existing GFRP bars to be used as a structural member in reinforced concrete structures. The concept of material hybridization is applied to increase elastic modulus of GFRP bars by using steel. This hybridized GFRP bar can be used in concrete structures as a flexural reinforcement with a sufficient level of elastic modulus. In order to verify the effect of material hybridization on tensile properties, tensile tests are conducted. The test results for both FRP Hybrid Bar and the existing GFRP bars are compared. The results indicate that the elastic modulus of FRP Hybrid Bar can be enhanced by up to approximately 250 percent by the material hybridization with a sufficient tensile strength. To ensure the long-term durability of FRP Hybrid Bar to corrosion resistance, the individual and combined effects of environmental conditions on FRP Hybrid Bar itself as well as on the interface between rebar and concrete are currently under investigation

Inter-KD: Intermediate Knowledge Distillation for CTC-Based Automatic Speech Recognition

Recently, the advance in deep learning has brought a considerable improvement in the end-to-end speech recognition field, simplifying the traditional pipeline while producing promising results. Among the end-to-end models, the connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based model has attracted research interest due to its non-autoregressive nature. However, such CTC models require a heavy computational cost to achieve outstanding performance. To mitigate the computational burden, we propose a simple yet effective knowledge distillation (KD) for the CTC framework, namely Inter-KD, that additionally transfers the teacher's knowledge to the intermediate CTC layers of the student network. From the experimental results on the LibriSpeech, we verify that the Inter-KD shows better achievements compared to the conventional KD methods. Without using any language model (LM) and data augmentation, Inter-KD improves the word error rate (WER) performance from 8.85 % to 6.30 % on the test-clean.Comment: Accepted by 2022 SLT Worksho

Endoscopic Thyroidectomy via an Axillo-Breast Approach without Gas Insufflation for Benign Thyroid Nodules and Micropapillary Carcinomas: Preliminary Results

PURPOSE: To examine the feasibility of endoscopic thyroidectomy (ET) via an axillo- breast approach without gas insufflation for large thyroid tumors and micropapillary carcinomas. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The patients in the benign group were separated into groups 1 (n=95, <4 cm in tumor diameter) and 2 (n=37, ≥4 cm in tumor diameter). Also, 57 patients in the micropapillary carcinoma group underwent an endoscopic hemithyroidectomy (HT) (group 3) and were compared with 60 patients who received conventional open HT (group 4). Postoperative functional outcome, local complications, surgical outcomes, and pathological outcomes were compared between the groups. RESULTS: In the benign group, there was no significant difference in mean operating time, hospital stay, or overall perioperative complications between the two groups. In the micropapillary carcinoma group, mean operating time and hospital stay in group 3 were significantly longer than in group 4 (p=0.015 and p≤0.001). The overall perioperative complications did not differ significantly between the groups. The postoperative cosmetic result was better in groups 1-3 (endo group) than in group 4 (open group). CONCLUSION: ET via a gasless axillo-breast approach seems to be a safe procedure even for benign thyroid lesions ≥4 cm and micropapillary carcinomas. Although it has the advantage of better cosmetic results over open thyroidectomy, there is room for improvement in terms of lessening its invasiveness and shortening the operative time.ope