EXPLORING THE STRUCTURE AND PROPERTIES OF NANOMATERIALS USING ADVANCED ELECTRON MICROSCOPY TECHNIQUES

Nowadays people are relying on all kinds of electronic devices in their daily life. All these devices are getting smaller and lighter with longer battery life due to the improvement of nanotechnology and materials sciences. Electron microscopy (EM) plays a vital role in the evolution of materials characterization which shapes the technology in today’s life. In electron microscopy, electron beam is used as the illumination source instead of visible light used in traditional optical microscopy, the wavelength of an electron is about 105 times shorter than visible light. By taking this advantage, the resolving power and magnification are greatly improved which gives us the ability to understand the morphology and the structure of smaller materials. Besides high resolution and high magnifications, the electron-matter interactions in electron microscopy are also very interesting and provide useful information. Typically, there are three types of post electron-matter interaction electrons, and they are: secondary electrons, backscattered electrons and transmitted electrons. Different signals are carried out with these electron-matter interactions, the most common techniques including electron dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) and selected area electron diffraction (SAED). In this dissertation, I will discuss how electron microscopy techniques approach complicated nanostructures, such as MnSb2Se4 nanorods to reveal the composition, structure, surfactant controlled size, and relative magnetic properties. Other important features such as mapping localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) using EELS and newly developed liquid cell scanning mode transmission electron microscopy (STEM) in situ observation are also presented

Low-complexity face-assisted video coding

[[abstract]]This paper presents a novel face-assisted video coding scheme to enhance the visual quality of the face regions in video telephony applications. A skin-color based face detection and tracking scheme is proposed to locate the face regions in real-time. After classifying the macroblocks into the face and non-face regions, we present a dynamic distortion weighting adjustment (DDWA) scheme to drop the static non-face macroblocks, and the saved bits are used to compensate the face region by adjusting the distortion weighting of the face macroblocks. The quality of face regions will thus be enhanced. Moreover, the computation originally required for the skipped macroblocks can also be saved. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the PSNR and the subjective quality of face regions, while the degradation introduced on the non-face areas is relatively insensitive to human perception. The proposed algorithm is fully compatible with the H.263 standard, and the low complexity feature makes it well suited to implement for real-time applications[[fileno]]2030144030041[[department]]電機工程學

Contract manager anywhere and internet-enabled database application

This thesis describes the design and implementation of an Internet-enabled database application which uses ASP (Active Server Pages) and other related knowledge such as ADO (ActiveX Data Object), ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and OLE-DB (Object Linking and Embed-DataBase). Because it is an Internet-enabled application, the subject of Security was also studied by implementing ASP technology. The database was created using Microsoft Access 97 and the web interface was built using HTML, VBScript and JavaScript. This system will be fully functioning at the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) site and will enable remote access to allow users to monitor hundreds of contracts. Features include advanced scheduling, warning and accounting capability. The Internet-enabled feature allows nationwide users, including FLDOE project managers, FLDOE technical advisors and independent contractors, to follow the status of contracts, contractors, and payments very closely

Automated Audio Generation for Testing Voice Interface Devices

Testing of voice interface devices across multiple languages and locales is difficult due to factors such as the lack of availability of native speakers, inconsistency of human speech samples across languages, difficulty in scaling the number of human-provided query samples, etc. This disclosure describes the use of automated translation and text-to-speech generation technologies to obtain machine-generated audio in various languages. A set of query strings is translated into multiple languages and a text-to-speech synthesizer generates a consistent set of audio samples. The generated audio samples can be used to test voice interface devices

Realtime object extraction and tracking with an active camera using image mosaics

[[abstract]]Moving object extraction plays a key role in applications such as object-based videoconference, surveillance, and so on. The dimculties of moving object segmentation lie in the fact that physical objects are normally not homogeneous with to low-level features and it's usually tough to segment them accnrately and efficiently. Object segmentation based on prestored background information has proved to be effective and efficient in several applications such as videophone, video conferencing, and surveillance, etc. The previous works, however, were mainly concentrated on object segmentation with a static camera and in a stationary background. In this paper, we propose a robust and fast segmentation algorithm and a reliable tracking strategy without knowing the shape of the object in advance. The proposed system can real-time extract the foreground from the background and track the moving object with an active (pan-tilt) camera such that the moving object always stays around the center of images.[[fileno]]2030144030033[[department]]電機工程學

Effectiveness Comparison of Solution Approaches for Solving the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem

The most popular solution approaches for solving the economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP) include the common cycle (CC) approach, the extended basic period (EBP) approach and the time-varying lot sizing (TVLS) approach where both the CC and EBP approaches are the basic period-based approaches. Some studies claimed that the TVLS approach is able to obtain better solutions than the basic period-based approaches though without the support of extensive numerical experiments. Therefore, we are motivated to compare the performance of the CC, EBP and the TVLS approaches in this study. Interestingly, our random experiments show no one serves as a dominant solution approach among the three approaches, but the settings of setup cost and setup time could affect their performance significantly. Our results may be valuable for the decision makers before they choose a solution approach for solving the ELSP

Safety and Efficacy of Tien-Hsien Liquid Practical in Patients with Refractory Metastatic Breast Cancer: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Parallel-Group, Phase IIa Trial

To evaluate the safety and efficacy of Tien-Hsien Liquid Practical (THL-P), a Chinese herbal mixture, in patients with refractory metastatic breast cancer, we performed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, phase IIa pilot trial. Patients were randomly assigned to either receive THL-P or matching placebo and followed up every 4 weeks for 24 weeks. The primary endpoint was changes in the global health status/quality of life (GHS/QOL) scale. The secondary endpoints were changes in functional and symptom scales, immunomodulating effects, and adverse events. Sixty-three patients were enrolled between June 2009 and June 2011. The intent-to-treat population included 28 patients in the THL-P group and 11 patients in the placebo group. Compared to the placebo group, the THL-P group had significant improvement from baseline to last visit in GHS/QOL (41.7 versus −33.3; P < 0.05), CD3, CD4/CD8, CD19, CD16+56 positive cells (P < 0.05), and higher levels of physical, role, emotional, and cognitive functioning, as well as decreased fatigue and systemic side effects. Treatment-related adverse events were mild constipation and localized itching, and no serious adverse events were reported. THL-P appears to be a safe alternative adjuvant treatment for patients with refractory metastatic breast cancer, as it effectively improves QOL and palliates cancer-related symptoms