117 research outputs found
How to innovate and make successful business
Mr Yim is an architect-turned-furniture designer and a successful industrialist. He has successfully built POSH from a small local business to an international band. POSH has obtained the “Outstanding Enterprise in Office Furniture Industry” from Hong Kong Business in 2006 and the “Hong Kong Top Brand Award” from Hong Kong Brand Development Council in 2010. Mr. Yim will talk about his tips of innovating new products and leading a company to success
Effects of YouTube Video as Pre-Lecture Preparation
Classroom lectures convey course concepts more effectively when students have prepared in advance. Traditionally, students prepare for lectures by reading the course textbook. Textbooks are the default study material for most educational courses; however, some technical subjects are better conveyed in video format. Therefore, in this study, we encouraged students to supplement their learning resources with web-based video tutorials that provide detailed demonstrations with the respect to technical network configuration and management. YouTube is a video sharing website that can provide free educational tutorials and instructions on technical subject matter, where students can observe practical human-machine interaction to prepare for lectures and increase overall course performance on exams, assignments, and laboratory projects. Our goal was to compare the overall performance as well as the level of active class participation between two groups of the same computer networking course. We found that the group that used YouTube videos for pre-lecture preparation scored approximately 3% higher on exams but 5% lower on homework assignments than the control group (textbook only). There was no statistical significance between the two groups with respect to overall course grades. Study habits and degree of class participation of each student correlated more strongly with overall course performance than whether the student viewed the videos
Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot Systems
The field of modular self-reconfigurable robotic systems addresses the design, fabrication, motion planning, and control of autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology. Modular self-reconfigurable systems have the promise of making significant technological advances to the field of robotics in general. Their promise of high versatility, high value, and high robustness may lead to a radical change in automation. Currently, a number of researchers have been addressing many of the challenges. While some progress has been made, it is clear that many challenges still exist. By illustrating several of the outstanding issues as grand challenges that have been collaboratively written by a large number of researchers in this field, this article has shown several of the key directions for the future of this growing fiel
The Interstellar Medium and Star Formation in Edge-On Galaxies. II. NGC 4157, 4565, and 5907
We present a study of the vertical structure of the gaseous and stellar disks
in a sample of edge-on galaxies (NGC 4157, 4565, and 5907) using BIMA/CARMA
12CO (J = 1 --> 0), VLA H I, and Spitzer 3.6 micron data. In order to take into
account projection effects when we measure the disk thickness as a function of
radius, we first obtain the inclination by modeling the radio data. Using the
measurement of the disk thicknesses and the derived radial profiles of gas and
stars, we estimate the corresponding volume densities and vertical velocity
dispersions. Both stellar and gas disks have smoothly varying scale heights and
velocity dispersions, contrary to assumptions of previous studies. Using the
velocity dispersions, we find that the gravitational instability parameter Q
follows a fairly uniform profile with radius and is greater than or equal to 1
across the star forming disk. The star formation law has a slope that is
significantly different from those found in more face-on galaxy studies, both
in deprojected and pixel-by-pixel plots. Midplane gas pressure based on the
varying scale heights and velocity dispersions appears to roughly hold a
power-law correlation with the midplane volume density ratio.Comment: 26 pages, 26 figures, Accepted for publication in A
Explicit and Implicit Semantic Ranking Framework
The core challenge in numerous real-world applications is to match an inquiry
to the best document from a mutable and finite set of candidates. Existing
industry solutions, especially latency-constrained services, often rely on
similarity algorithms that sacrifice quality for speed. In this paper we
introduce a generic semantic learning-to-rank framework, Self-training Semantic
Cross-attention Ranking (sRank). This transformer-based framework uses linear
pairwise loss with mutable training batch sizes and achieves quality gains and
high efficiency, and has been applied effectively to show gains on two industry
tasks at Microsoft over real-world large-scale data sets: Smart Reply (SR) and
Ambient Clinical Intelligence (ACI). In Smart Reply, assists live
customers with technical support by selecting the best reply from predefined
solutions based on consumer and support agent messages. It achieves 11.7% gain
in offline top-one accuracy on the SR task over the previous system, and has
enabled 38.7% time reduction in composing messages in telemetry recorded since
its general release in January 2021. In the ACI task, sRank selects relevant
historical physician templates that serve as guidance for a text summarization
model to generate higher quality medical notes. It achieves 35.5% top-one
accuracy gain, along with 46% relative ROUGE-L gain in generated medical notes
Fluorescent image-guided surgery in breast cancer by intravenous application of a quenched fluorescence activity-based probe for cysteine cathepsins in a syngeneic mouse model
PURPOSE: The reoperation rate for breast-conserving surgery is as high as 15-30% due to residual tumor in the surgical cavity after surgery. In vivo tumor-targeted optical molecular imaging may serve as a red-flag technique to improve intraoperative surgical margin assessment and to reduce reoperation rates. Cysteine cathepsins are overexpressed in most solid tumor types, including breast cancer. We developed a cathepsin-targeted, quenched fluorescent activity-based probe, VGT-309, and evaluated whether it could be used for tumor detection and image-guided surgery in syngeneic tumor-bearing mice. METHODS: Binding specificity of the developed probe was evaluated in vitro. Next, fluorescent imaging in BALB/c mice bearing a murine breast tumor was performed at different time points after VGT-309 administration. Biodistribution of VGT-309 after 24 h in tumor-bearing mice was compared to control mice. Image-guided surgery was performed at multiple time points tumors with different clinical fluorescent camera systems and followed by ex vivo analysis. RESULTS: The probe was specifically activated by cathepsins X, B/L, and S. Fluorescent imaging revealed an increased tumor-to-background contrast over time up to 15.1 24 h post probe injection. In addition, VGT-309 delineated tumor tissue during image-guided surgery with different optical fluorescent imaging camera systems. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that optical fluorescent molecular imaging using the cathepsin-targeted probe, VGT-309, may improve intraoperative tumor detection, which could translate to more complete tumor resection when coupled with commercially available surgical tools and techniques
Green Propellant Infusion Mission Program Development and Technology Maturation
The NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate's (STMD) Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) Technology Demonstration Mission (TDM) is comprised of a cross-cutting team of domestic spacecraft propulsion and storable green propellant technology experts. This TDM is led by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. (BATC), who will use their BCP- 100 spacecraft to carry a propulsion system payload consisting of one 22 N thruster for primary divert (DeltaV) maneuvers and four 1 N thrusters for attitude control, in a flight demonstration of the AF-M315E technology. The GPIM project has technology infusion team members from all three major market sectors: Industry, NASA, and the Department of Defense (DoD). The GPIM project team includes BATC, includes Aerojet Rocketdyne (AR), Air Force Research Laboratory, Aerospace Systems Directorate, Edwards AFB (AFRL), NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC), NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). STMD programmatic and technology oversight is provided by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. The GPIM project shall fly an operational AF-M315E green propulsion subsystem on a Ball-built BCP-100 spacecraft
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Improving Student Success: Researching How Students Use Electronic Library Resources
This presentation presents a research study conducted at UNT. The UNT Libraries partnered with the Department of Anthropology at UNT to conduct ethnographic research of how UNT students use the electronic library services
The state of the Martian climate
60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes
Are C-Reactive Protein Associated Genetic Variants Associated with Serum Levels and Retinal Markers of Microvascular Pathology in Asian Populations from Singapore?
Introduction:C-reactive protein (CRP) levels are associated with cardiovascular disease and systemic inflammation. We assessed whether CRP-associated loci were associated with serum CRP and retinal markers of microvascular disease, in Asian populations.Methods:Genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) for serum CRP was performed in East-Asian Chinese (N = 2,434) and Malays (N = 2,542) and South-Asian Indians (N = 2,538) from Singapore. Leveraging on GWAS data, we assessed, in silico, association levels among the Singaporean datasets for 22 recently identified CRP-associated loci. At loci where directional inconsistencies were observed, quantification of inter-ethnic linkage disequilibrium (LD) difference was determined. Next, we assessed association for a variant at CRP and retinal vessel traits [central retinal artery equivalent (CRAE) and central retinal vein equivalent (CRVE)] in a total of 24,132 subjects of East-Asian, South-Asian and European ancestry.Results:Serum CRP was associated with SNPs in/near APOE, CRP, HNF1A and LEPR (p-values ≤4.7×10-8) after meta-analysis of Singaporean populations. Using a candidate-SNP approach, we further replicated SNPs at 4 additional loci that had been recently identified to be associated with serum CRP (IL6R, GCKR, IL6 and IL1F10) (p-values ≤0.009), in the Singaporean datasets. SNPs from these 8 loci explained 4.05% of variance in serum CRP. Two SNPs (rs2847281 and rs6901250) were detected to be significant (p-value ≤0.036) but with opposite effect directions in the Singaporean populations as compared to original European studies. At these loci we did not detect significant inter-population LD differences. We further did not observe a significant association between CRP variant and CRVE or CRAE levels after meta-analysis of all Singaporean and European datasets (p-value >0.058).Conclusions:Common variants associated with serum CRP, first detected in primarily European studies, are also associated with CRP levels in East-Asian and South-Asian populations. We did not find a causal link between CRP and retinal measures of microvascular disease
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