Search results for: Ting Zhu Huang

Authors: Tingke Wu, Yaping Huang

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Many cities in China have been experiencing serious urban sprawl since the 1980s, which pose great challenges to a country with scare cultivated land and huge population. Because of different social and economic context and development stage, driving forces of urban sprawl in China are quite different from developed countries. Therefore, it is of great importance to probe into urban sprawl driving mechanism in Chinese context. By a comparison study of the background and features of urban sprawl between China and developed countries, this research establishes an analytical framework for sprawl dynamic mechanism in China. By literature review and analyzing data from national statistical yearbook, it then probes into the driving mechanism and the primary cause of urban sprawl. The results suggest that population increase, economic growth, traffic and information technology development lead to rapid expansion of urban space; defects of land institution and lack of effective guidance give rise to low efficiency of urban land use. Moreover, urban sprawl is ultimately attributed to imperfections of policy and institution. On this basis, this research puts forward several sprawl control strategies in Chinese context.

Keywords: China, driving forces, driving mechanism, land institution, urban expansion, urban sprawl.

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Authors: T. H. Young, S. J. Huang, Y. S. Chiu

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This paper investigates the parametric stability of an axially moving web subjected to non-uniform in-plane edge excitations on two opposite, simply-supported edges. The web is modeled as a viscoelastic plate whose constitutive relation obeys the Kelvin-Voigt model, and the in-plane edge excitations are expressed as the sum of a static tension and a periodical perturbation. Due to the in-plane edge excitations, the moving plate may bring about parametric instability under certain situations. First, the in-plane stresses of the plate due to the non-uniform edge excitations are determined by solving the in-plane forced vibration problem. Then, the dependence on the spatial coordinates in the equation of transverse motion is eliminated by the generalized Galerkin method, which results in a set of discretized system equations in time. Finally, the method of multiple scales is utilized to solve the set of system equations analytically if the periodical perturbation of the in-plane edge excitations is much smaller as compared with the static tension of the plate, from which the stability boundaries of the moving plate are obtained. Numerical results reveal that only combination resonances of the summed-type appear under the in-plane edge excitations considered in this work.

Keywords: Axially moving viscoelastic plate, in-plane periodic excitation, non-uniformly distributed edge tension, dynamic stability.

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Authors: Yuxuan Huang, Weixin Qian, Hongfang Ma, Haitao Zhang, Weiyong Ying

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Light olefins are important building blocks for chemical industry. Direct conversion of syngas to light olefins has been investigated for decades. Meanwhile, the limit for light olefins selectivity described by Anderson-Schulz-Flory (ASF) distribution model is still a great challenge to conventional Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The emerging strategy called oxide-zeolite concept (OX-ZEO) is a promising way to get rid of this limit. ZnCrO_x was prepared by co-precipitation method and (NH₄)₂CO₃ was used as precipitant. SAPO-34 was prepared by hydrothermal synthesis, and Tetraethylammonium hydroxide (TEAOH) was used as template, while silica sol, pseudo-boehmite, and phosphoric acid were Al, Si and P source, respectively. The bifunctional catalyst was prepared by mechanical mixing of ZnCrO_x and SAPO-34. Catalytic reactions were carried out under H₂/CO=2, 380 ℃, 1 MPa and 6000 mL·g_cat^-1·h^-1 in a fixed-bed reactor with a quartz lining. Catalysts were characterized by XRD, N₂ adsorption-desorption, NH₃-TPD, H₂-TPR, and CO-TPD. The addition of Al as structure promoter enhances CO conversion and selectivity to light olefins. Zn/Cr ratio, which decides the active component content and chemisorption property of the catalyst, influences CO conversion and selectivity to light olefins at the same time. C_2-4⁼ distribution of 86% among hydrocarbons at CO conversion of 14% was reached when Zn/Cr=1.5.

Keywords: Light olefins, OX-ZEO, syngas, ZnCrOx.

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Authors: Shiuh-Jer Huang, Yu-Chi Liu, Su-Hai Hsiang

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A novel low-cost impedance control structure is proposed for monitoring the contact force between end-effector and environment without installing an expensive force/torque sensor. Theoretically, the end-effector contact force can be estimated from the superposition of each joint control torque. There have a nonlinear matrix mapping function between each joint motor control input and end-effector actuating force/torques vector. This new force control structure can be implemented based on this estimated mapping matrix. First, the robot end-effector is manipulated to specified positions, then the force controller is actuated based on the hall sensor current feedback of each joint motor. The model-free fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) strategy is employed to design the position and force controllers, respectively. All the hardware circuits and software control programs are designed on an Altera Nios II embedded development kit to constitute an embedded system structure for a retrofitted Mitsubishi 5 DOF robot. Experimental results show that PI and FSMC force control algorithms can achieve reasonable contact force monitoring objective based on this hardware control structure.

Keywords: Robot, impedance control, fuzzy sliding mode control, contact force estimator.

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Authors: Shih-Ching Lo, Hsieh-Chu Huang

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Mostly, pedestrian-car accidents occurred at a signalized interaction is because pedestrians cannot across the intersection safely within the green light. From the viewpoint of pedestrian, there might have two reasons. The first one is pedestrians cannot speed up to across the intersection, such as the elders. The other reason is pedestrians do not sense that the signal phase is going to change and their right-of-way is going to lose. Developing signal logic to protect pedestrian, who is crossing an intersection is the first purpose of this study. Another purpose of this study is improving the reliability and reduce delay of public transportation service. Therefore, bus preemption is also considered in the designed signal logic. In this study, the traffic data of the intersection of Chong-Qing North Road and Min-Zu West Road, Taipei, Taiwan, is employed to calibrate and validate the signal logic by simulation. VISSIM 5.20, which is a microscopic traffic simulation software, is employed to simulate the signal logic. From the simulated results, the signal logic presented in this study can protect pedestrians crossing the intersection successfully. The design of bus preemption can reduce the average delay. However, the pedestrian safety and bus preemptive signal will influence the average delay of cars largely. Thus, whether applying the pedestrian safety and bus preemption signal logic to an isolated intersection or not should be evaluated carefully.

Keywords: vulnerable road user, bus preemption, signal design.

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Authors: Hui-Yu Huang, Shih-Hang Hsu

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In this paper, we propose a robust scheme to work face alignment and recognition under various influences. For face representation, illumination influence and variable expressions are the important factors, especially the accuracy of facial localization and face recognition. In order to solve those of factors, we propose a robust approach to overcome these problems. This approach consists of two phases. One phase is preprocessed for face images by means of the proposed illumination normalization method. The location of facial features can fit more efficient and fast based on the proposed image blending. On the other hand, based on template matching, we further improve the active shape models (called as IASM) to locate the face shape more precise which can gain the recognized rate in the next phase. The other phase is to process feature extraction by using principal component analysis and face recognition by using support vector machine classifiers. The results show that this proposed method can obtain good facial localization and face recognition with varied illumination and local distortion.

Keywords: Gabor filter, improved active shape model (IASM), principal component analysis (PCA), face alignment, face recognition, support vector machine (SVM)

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Authors: Fu-Hsuan Huang, Po-Jung Yuan, Kang-Ping Lin, Hen-Hong Chang, Cheng-Lun Tsai

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Photoplethysmography is a simple measurement of the variation in blood volume in tissue. It detects the pulse signal of heart beat as well as the low frequency signal of vasoconstriction and vasodilation. The transmission type measurement is limited to only a few specific positions for example the index finger that have a short path length for light. The reflectance type measurement can be conveniently applied on most parts of the body surface. This study analyzed the factors that determine the quality of reflectance photoplethysmograph signal including the emitter-detector distance, wavelength, light intensity, and optical properties of skin tissue. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) with four different visible wavelengths were used as the light emitters. A phototransistor was used as the light detector. A micro translation stage adjusts the emitter-detector distance from 2 mm to 15 mm. The reflective photoplethysmograph signals were measured on different sites. The optimal emitter-detector distance was chosen to have a large dynamic range for low frequency drifting without signal saturation and a high perfusion index. Among these four wavelengths, a yellowish green (571nm) light with a proper emitter-detection distance of 2mm is the most suitable for obtaining a steady and reliable reflectance photoplethysmograph signal

Keywords: Reflectance photoplethysmograph, Perfusion index, Signal-to-noise ratio

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Authors: Kuo-Yang Cheng, Yi-Lun Pan, Chang-Hsing Wu, His-En Yu, Hui-Shan Chen, Weicheng Huang

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The main mission of Ezilla is to provide a friendly interface to access the virtual machine and quickly deploy the high performance computing environment. Ezilla has been developed by Pervasive Computing Team at National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC). Ezilla integrates the Cloud middleware, virtualization technology, and Web-based Operating System (WebOS) to form a virtual computer in distributed computing environment. In order to upgrade the dataset and speedup, we proposed the sensor observation system to deal with a huge amount of data in the Cassandra database. The sensor observation system is based on the Ezilla to store sensor raw data into distributed database. We adopt the Ezilla Cloud service to create virtual machines and login into virtual machine to deploy the sensor observation system. Integrating the sensor observation system with Ezilla is to quickly deploy experiment environment and access a huge amount of data with distributed database that support the replication mechanism to protect the data security.

Keywords: Cloud, Virtualization, Cassandra, WebOS

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Authors: Wen-Yuh Jywe, Bor-Jeng Lin, Jing-Chung Shen, Jeng-Dao Lee, Hsueh-Liang Huang, Tung-Hsien Hsieh

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In this study, a simple 2-D measurement system based on optical design was developed to measure the motion errors of the linear guideway. Compared with the transitional methods about the linear guideway for measuring the motion errors, our proposed 2-D optical measurement system can simultaneously measure horizontal and vertical running straightness errors for the linear guideway.

The performance of the 2-D optical measurement system is verified by experimental results. The standard deviation of the 2-D optical measurement system is about 0.4μm in the measurement range of 100 mm. The maximum measuring speed of the proposed automatic measurement instrument is 1 m/sec.

Keywords: 2-D measurement, linear guideway, motion errors, running straightness.

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Authors: Jian Shi, Baoguo Yu, Haonan Jia, Meng Liu, Ping Huang

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Adapting to the flexibility of war, a large number of guided weapons launch from aircraft. Therefore, the inertial navigation system loaded in the weapon needs to undergo an alignment process in the air. This article proposes the following methods to the problem of inaccurate modeling of the system under large misalignment angles, the accuracy reduction of filtering caused by outliers, and the noise changes in GPS signals: first, considering the large misalignment errors of Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS)/GPS, a more accurate model is made rather than to make a small-angle approximation, and the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) algorithms are used to estimate the state; then, taking into account the impact of GPS noise changes on the fine alignment algorithm, the innovation adaptive filtering algorithm is introduced to estimate the GPS’s noise in real-time; at the same time, in order to improve the anti-interference ability of the air fine alignment algorithm, a robust filtering algorithm based on outlier detection is combined with the air fine alignment algorithm to improve the robustness of the algorithm. The algorithm can improve the alignment accuracy and robustness under interference conditions, which is verified by simulation.

Keywords: Air alignment, fine alignment, inertial navigation system, integrated navigation system, UKF.

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Authors: Chun-Chi Li, Da-Wei Huang, Yin-Chia Su, Liang-Chih Tasi

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In hypersonic environments, the aerothermal effect makes it difficult for the optical side windows of optical guided missiles to withstand high heat. This produces cracking or breaking, resulting in an inability to function. This study used computational fluid mechanics to investigate the external cooling jet conditions of optical side windows. The turbulent models k-ε and k-ω were simulated. To be in better accord with actual aerothermal environments, a thermal radiation model was added to examine suitable amounts of external coolants and the optical window problems of aero-thermodynamics. The simulation results indicate that when there are no external cooling jets, because airflow on the optical window and the tail groove produce vortices, the temperatures in these two locations reach a peak of approximately 1600 K. When the external cooling jets worked at 0.15 kg/s, the surface temperature of the optical windows dropped to approximately 280 K. When adding thermal radiation conditions, because heat flux dissipation was faster, the surface temperature of the optical windows fell from 280 K to approximately 260 K. The difference in influence of the different turbulence models k-ε and k-ω on optical window surface temperature was not significant.

Keywords: aero-optical side window, aerothermal effect, cooling, hypersonic flow

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Authors: Weiwen Li, Hao Huang, Chengmao You, Jianji Liao, Lei Wang, Lina An

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Zooplankton are a central issue in the ecology which makes a great contribution to maintaining the balance of an ecosystem. It is critical in promoting the material cycle and energy flow within the ecosystems. A generalized additive model (GAM) was applied to analyze the relationships between the density (individuals per m³) of zooplankton and other variables in West Daya Bay. All data used in this analysis (the survey month, survey station (longitude and latitude), the depth of the water column, the superficial concentration of chlorophyll a, the benthonic concentration of chlorophyll a, the number of zooplankton species and the number of zooplankton species) were collected through monthly scientific surveys during January to December 2016. GLM model (generalized linear model) was used to choose the significant variables’ impact on the density of zooplankton, and the GAM was employed to analyze the relationship between the density of zooplankton and the significant variables. The results showed that the density of zooplankton increased with an increase of the benthonic concentration of chlorophyll a, but decreased with a decrease in the depth of the water column. Both high numbers of zooplankton species and the overall total number of zooplankton individuals led to a higher density of zooplankton.

Keywords: Density, generalized linear model, generalized additive model, the West Daya Bay, zooplankton.

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Authors: Chih-Ling Huang, Wen-Yi Lin, Kuo-Mo Hsiao

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A method based on the power series solution is proposed to solve the natural frequency of flapping vibration for the rotating inclined Euler beam with constant angular velocity. The vibration of the rotating beam is measured from the position of the corresponding steady state axial deformation. In this paper the governing equations for linear vibration of a rotating Euler beam are derived by the d'Alembert principle, the virtual work principle and the consistent linearization of the fully geometrically nonlinear beam theory in a rotating coordinate system. The governing equation for flapping vibration of the rotating inclined Euler beam is linear ordinary differential equation with variable coefficients and is solved by a power series with four independent coefficients. Substituting the power series solution into the corresponding boundary conditions at two end nodes of the rotating beam, a set of homogeneous equations can be obtained. The natural frequencies may be determined by solving the homogeneous equations using the bisection method. Numerical examples are studied to investigate the effect of inclination angle on the natural frequency of flapping vibration for rotating inclined Euler beams with different angular velocity and slenderness ratio.

Keywords: Flapping vibration, Inclination angle, Natural frequency, Rotating beam.

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Authors: Chang-Bin Huang, Fu-Kuang Ko

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Taiwan was the first country in Asia to announce “Nuclear-Free Homeland" in 2002. In 2008, the new government released the Sustainable Energy Policy Guidelines to lower the nationwide CO2 emissions some time between 2016 and 2020 back to the level of year 2008, further abatement of CO2 emissions is planed in year 2025 when CO2 emissions will decrease to the level of year 2000. Besides, under consideration of the issues of energy, environment and economics (3E), the new government declared that the nuclear power is a carbon-less energy option. This study analyses the effects of nuclear power generation for CO2 abatement scenarios in Taiwan. The MARKAL-MACRO energy model was adopted to evaluate economic impacts and energy deployment due to life extension of existing nuclear power plants and build new nuclear power units in CO2 abatement scenarios. The results show that CO2 abatement effort is expensive. On the other hand, nuclear power is a cost-effective choice. The GDP loss rate in the case of building new nuclear power plants is around two thirds of the Nuclear-Free Homeland case. Nuclear power generation has the capacity to provide large-scale CO2 free electricity. Therefore, the results show that nuclear power is not only an option for Taiwan, but also a requisite for Taiwan-s CO2 reduction strategy.

Keywords: Energy model, CO2 abatement, nuclear power, economic impacts.

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Authors: Zhi Zhang, Tao Tang, Guangda Lu, Cheng Qin, Huogen Huang, Shaotao Zheng

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High purity hydrogen and the valuable by-product of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can be produced by the methane catalytic decomposition. The methane conversion and the performance of CNTs were determined by the choices of catalysts and the condition of decomposition reaction. In this paper, Ni/MgO and Ni/O-D (oxidized diamond) catalysts were prepared by wetness impregnation method. The effects of reaction temperature and space velocity of methane on the methane conversion were investigated in a fixed-bed. The surface area, structure and micrography were characterized with BET, XPS, SEM, EDS technology. The results showed that the conversion of methane was above 8% within 150 min (T=500) for 33Ni/O-D catalyst and higher than 25% within 120 min (T=650) for 41Ni/MgO catalyst. The initial conversion increased with the increasing temperature of the decomposition reaction, but their catalytic activities decreased rapidly while at too higher temperature. To decrease the space velocity of methane was propitious to promote the methane conversion, but not favor of the hydrogen yields. The appearance of carbon resulted from the methane decomposition lied on the support type and the condition of catalytic reaction. It presented as fiber shape on the surface of Ni/O-D at the relatively lower temperature such as 500 and 550, but as grain shape stacked on and overlayed on the surface of the metal nickel while at 650. The carbon fiber can form on the Ni/MgO surface at 650 and the diameter of the carbon fiber increased with the decreasing space velocity.

Keywords: methane, catalytic decomposition, hydrogen, carbon nanofiber

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Authors: N. S. Yen, T. H. Yang, W. H. Huang, Y. F. Fang, H. W. Cho

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Ultimatum game is an experimental paradigm to study human decision making. There are two players, a proposer and a responder, to split a fixed amount of money. According to the traditional economic theory on ultimatum game, proposer should propose the selfish offers to responder as much as possible to maximize proposer’s own outcomes. However, most evidences had showed that people chose more fair offers, hence two hypotheses – fairness favoring and strategic concern were proposed. In current study, we induced the motivation in participants to be either selfish or altruistic, and manipulated the task variables, the stake sizes (NT$100, 1000, 10000) and the share sizes (the 40%, 30%, 20%, 10% of the sum as selfish offers, and the 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% of the sum as altruistic offers), to examine the two hypotheses. The results showed that most proposers chose more fair offers with longer reaction times (RTs) no matter in choosing between the fair and selfish offers, or between the fair and altruistic offers. However, the proposers received explicit self-interest instruction chose more selfish offers accompanied with longer RTs in choosing between the fair and selfish offers. Therefore, the results supported the strategic concern hypothesis that previous proposers choosing the fair offers might be resulted from the fear of rejection by responders. Proposers would become more self-interest if the fear of being rejected is eliminated.

Keywords: Ultimatum game, self-interest, altruistic, fear of rejection.

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Authors: Chia-Ta Tsai, Wen-Lin Huang, Shinn-Jang Ho, Li-Sun Shu, Shinn-Ying Ho

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Prediction of bacterial virulent protein sequences can give assistance to identification and characterization of novel virulence-associated factors and discover drug/vaccine targets against proteins indispensable to pathogenicity. Gene Ontology (GO) annotation which describes functions of genes and gene products as a controlled vocabulary of terms has been shown effectively for a variety of tasks such as gene expression study, GO annotation prediction, protein subcellular localization, etc. In this study, we propose a sequence-based method Virulent-GO by mining informative GO terms as features for predicting bacterial virulent proteins. Each protein in the datasets used by the existing method VirulentPred is annotated by using BLAST to obtain its homologies with known accession numbers for retrieving GO terms. After investigating various popular classifiers using the same five-fold cross-validation scheme, Virulent-GO using the single kind of GO term features with an accuracy of 82.5% is slightly better than VirulentPred with 81.8% using five kinds of sequence-based features. For the evaluation of independent test, Virulent-GO also yields better results (82.0%) than VirulentPred (80.7%). When evaluating single kind of feature with SVM, the GO term feature performs much well, compared with each of the five kinds of features.

Keywords: Bacterial virulence factors, GO terms, prediction, protein sequence.

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Authors: Chung-Yao Yang, Lin-Ya Huang, Tang-Long Shen, J. Andrew Yeh

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The importance for manipulating an incorporated scaffold and directing cell behaviors is well appreciated for tissue engineering. Here, we developed newly nano-topographic oxidized silicon nanosponges capable of being various chemical modifications to provide much insight into the fundamental biology of how cells interact with their surrounding environment in vitro. A wet etching technique is exerted to allow us fabricated the silicon nanosponges in a high-throughput manner. Furthermore, various organo-silane chemicals enabled self-assembled on the surfaces by vapor deposition. We have found that Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells displayed certain distinguishable morphogenesis, adherent responses, and biochemical properties while cultured on these chemical modified nano-topographic structures in compared with the planar oxidized silicon counterparts, indicating that cell behaviors can be influenced by certain physical characteristic derived from nano-topography in addition to the hydrophobicity of contact surfaces crucial for cell adhesion and spreading. Of particular, there were predominant nano-actin punches and slender protrusions formed while cells were cultured on the nano-topographic structures. This study shed potential applications of these nano-topographic biomaterials for controlling cell development in tissue engineering or basic cell biology research.

Keywords: Nanosponge, Cell adhesion, Cell morphology

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Authors: Yuan-Hong Ho, Chiung-Ju Huang

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Previous studies on political budget cycles (PBCs) implicitly assume the executive has full discretion power over fiscal policy, neglecting the role of checks and balances of the legislature. This paper goes beyond traditional PBCs models and sheds light on the case study of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan over the 1988-2007 periods. Based on the results, we find no evidence of electoral impacts on the public expenditures in South Korean and Taiwan's congressional elections. We also noted that PBCs are found on Taiwan-s government expenditures during our sample periods. Furthermore, the results also show that Japan-s legislature has a significant checks and balances on government-s expenditures. However, empirical results show that the legislature veto player in Taiwan neither has effect on the reduction of public expenditures, nor has the moderating effect over Taiwan-s political budget cycles, albeit that they are statistically insignificant.We suggest that the existence of PBCs in Taiwan is due to a weaker systemof checks and balances. Our conjecture is that Taiwan either has no legislative veto player or has observed low compliance to the law during the time period examined in our study.

Keywords: Checks and balances, compliance to the law, political budget cycles, veto player.

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Authors: Shuenn-Yih Chang, Chiu-Li Huang

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It has been shown that a load discontinuity at the end of an impulse will result in an extra impulse and hence an extra amplitude distortion if a step-by-step integration method is employed to yield the shock response. In order to overcome this difficulty, three remedies are proposed to reduce the extra amplitude distortion. The first remedy is to solve the momentum equation of motion instead of the force equation of motion in the step-by-step solution of the shock response, where an external momentum is used in the solution of the momentum equation of motion. Since the external momentum is a resultant of the time integration of external force, the problem of load discontinuity will automatically disappear. The second remedy is to perform a single small time step immediately upon termination of the applied impulse while the other time steps can still be conducted by using the time step determined from general considerations. This is because that the extra impulse caused by a load discontinuity at the end of an impulse is almost linearly proportional to the step size. Finally, the third remedy is to use the average value of the two different values at the integration point of the load discontinuity to replace the use of one of them for loading input. The basic motivation of this remedy originates from the concept of no loading input error associated with the integration point of load discontinuity. The feasibility of the three remedies are analytically explained and numerically illustrated.

Keywords: Dynamic analysis, load discontinuity, shock response, step-by-step integration

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Authors: Nhat Linh Ho, Thanh-Phong Dao, Shyh-Chour Huang, Hieu Giang Le

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This paper presents a design and optimization for a compliant gripper. The gripper is constructed based on the concept of compliant mechanism with flexure hinge. A passive force regulation mechanism is presented to control the grasping force a micro-sized object instead of using a sensor force. The force regulation mechanism is designed using the planar springs. The gripper is expected to obtain a large range of displacement to handle various sized objects. First of all, the statics and dynamics of the gripper are investigated by using the finite element analysis in ANSYS software. And then, the design parameters of the gripper are optimized via Taguchi method. An orthogonal array L₉ is used to establish an experimental matrix. Subsequently, the signal to noise ratio is analyzed to find the optimal solution. Finally, the response surface methodology is employed to model the relationship between the design parameters and the output displacement of the gripper. The design of experiment method is then used to analyze the sensitivity so as to determine the effect of each parameter on the displacement. The results showed that the compliant gripper can move with a large displacement of 213.51 mm and the force regulation mechanism is expected to be used for high precision positioning systems.

Keywords: Flexure hinge, compliant mechanism, compliant gripper, force regulation mechanism, Taguchi method, response surface methodology, design of experiment.

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Authors: Hui Fang Huang Su, Jia Borror

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This study compared two different interventions for math instruction among preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The first intervention, a combination of discrete trial teaching and Strategies for Teaching Based on Autism Research (STAR), was the regular math curriculum utilized at the preschool. The second activity-based, naturalistic intervention was Project Mind, also known as Math is Not Difficult. The curricular interventions were randomly assigned to four preschool classrooms with ASD students and implemented over three months for Project MIND. Measurements gained during the same three months for the STAR intervention were used. A quasi-experimental, pre-test/post-test design was selected to compare which intervention was the most effective in increasing mathematical knowledge and skills among preschoolers with ASD. Standardized pre and post-test instruments included the Bracken Basic Concept Scale-3 Receptive, the Applied Problems and Calculation subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Achievement, and the TEMA 3: Test of Early Mathematics Ability – Third Edition. The STAR assessment is typically administered to all preschoolers at the study site three times per year, and those results were used in this study. We anticipated that the implementation of these two approaches would lead to improvement in the mathematical knowledge and skills of children with ASD. Still, it is essential to see whether a behavioral or naturalistic teaching approach leads to more significant results.

Keywords: Autism, mathematics, preschool, special education.

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Authors: Andrii Shalaginov, Katrin Franke, Xiongwei Huang

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One of the leading problems in Cyber Security today is the emergence of targeted attacks conducted by adversaries with access to sophisticated tools. These attacks usually steal senior level employee system privileges, in order to gain unauthorized access to confidential knowledge and valuable intellectual property. Malware used for initial compromise of the systems are sophisticated and may target zero-day vulnerabilities. In this work we utilize common behaviour of malware called ”beacon”, which implies that infected hosts communicate to Command and Control servers at regular intervals that have relatively small time variations. By analysing such beacon activity through passive network monitoring, it is possible to detect potential malware infections. So, we focus on time gaps as indicators of possible C2 activity in targeted enterprise networks. We represent DNS log files as a graph, whose vertices are destination domains and edges are timestamps. Then by using four periodicity detection algorithms for each pair of internal-external communications, we check timestamp sequences to identify the beacon activities. Finally, based on the graph structure, we infer the existence of other infected hosts and malicious domains enrolled in the attack activities.

Keywords: Malware detection, network security, targeted attack.

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Authors: Zehai Yu, Hui Zhu, Linglong Lin, Huawei Liang, Biao Yu, Weixin Huang

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With the development of intelligent vehicle systems, a high-precision road map is increasingly needed in many aspects. The automatic lane lines extraction and modeling are the most essential steps for the generation of a precise lane-level road map. In this paper, an automatic lane-level road map generation system is proposed. To extract the road markings on the ground, the multi-region Otsu thresholding method is applied, which calculates the intensity value of laser data that maximizes the variance between background and road markings. The extracted road marking points are then projected to the raster image and clustered using a two-stage clustering algorithm. Lane lines are subsequently recognized from these clusters by the shape features of their minimum bounding rectangle. To ensure the storage efficiency of the map, the lane lines are approximated to cubic polynomial curves using a Bayesian estimation approach. The proposed lane-level road map generation system has been tested on urban and expressway conditions in Hefei, China. The experimental results on the datasets show that our method can achieve excellent extraction and clustering effect, and the fitted lines can reach a high position accuracy with an error of less than 10 cm.

Keywords: Curve fitting, lane-level road map, line recognition, multi-thresholding, two-stage clustering.

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Authors: Hassan M. Abo Salem, Xiaolin Huang

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Background: The effectiveness of mirror therapy (MT) has been investigated in acute hemiplegia. The present study examines whether MT, given during chronic stroke, was more effective in promoting motor recovery of the lower extremity and walking speed than standard rehabilitation alone. Methods: The study enrolled 30 patients with chronic stroke. Fifteen patients each were assigned to the treatment group and the control group. All patients received a conventional rehabilitation program for a 4-week period. In addition to this rehabilitation program, patients in the treatment group received mirror therapy for 4 weeks, 5 days a week. Main measures: Passive ankle joint dorsiflexion range of motion, gait speed, Brunnstrom stages of motor recovery, plantar flexor muscle tone by Modified Ashworth Scale. Results: No significant difference was found in the outcome measures among groups before treatment. When compared with standard rehabilitation, mirror therapy improved Ankle ROM, Brunnstrom stages and waking speed (p < 0.05). However, there were no significant differences between two groups on MAS (P > 0.05).Conclusion: Mirror therapy combined with a conventional stroke rehabilitation program enhances lowerextremity motor recovery and walking speed in chronic stroke patients.

Keywords: Mirror therapy, stroke, MAS, walking speed.

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Authors: Wen-Shyong Tzou, Chih-Ching Huang, Chin-Hwa Hu, Ying-Tsang Lo, Tun-Wen Pai, Chia-Yin Chiang, Chung-Hao Li, Hong-Jyuan Jian

Abstract:

Plasmin plays an important role in the human circulatory system owing to its catalytic ability of fibrinolysis. The immediate injection of plasmin in patients of strokes has intrigued many scientists to design vectors that can transport plasmin to the desired location in human body. Here we predict the structure of human plasmin and investigate the interaction of plasmin with the gold-nanoparticle. Because the crystal structure of plasminogen has been solved, we deleted N-terminal domain (Pan-apple domain) of plasminogen and generate a mimic of the active form of this enzyme (plasmin). We conducted a simulated annealing process on plasmin and discovered a very large conformation occurs. Kringle domains 1, 4 and 5 had been observed to leave its original location relative to the main body of the enzyme and the original doughnut shape of this enzyme has been transformed to a V-shaped by opening its two arms. This observation of conformational change is consistent with the experimental results of neutron scattering and centrifugation. We subsequently docked the plasmin on the simulated gold surface to predict their interaction. The V-shaped plasmin could utilize its Kringle domain and catalytic domain to contact the gold surface. Our findings not only reveal the flexibility of plasmin structure but also provide a guide for the design of a plasmin-gold nanoparticle.

Keywords: Docking, gold nanoparticle, molecular simulation, plasmin.

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Authors: Xunan Huang, Caicai Zhang

Abstract:

This paper investigated the code-mixing features in Mandarin-English bilingual children in Singapore. First, it examined whether the code-mixing rate was different in Mandarin Chinese and English contexts. Second, it explored the syntactic categories of code-mixing in Singapore bilingual children. Moreover, this study investigated whether morphological information was preserved when inserting syntactic components into the matrix language. Data are derived from the Singapore Bilingual Corpus, in which the recordings and transcriptions of sixty English-Mandarin 5-to-6-year-old children were preserved for analysis. Results indicated that the rate of code-mixing was asymmetrical in the two language contexts, with the rate being significantly higher in the Mandarin context than that in the English context. The asymmetry is related to language dominance in that children are more likely to code-mix when using their nondominant language. Concerning the syntactic categories of code-mixing words in the Singaporean bilingual children, we found that noun-mixing, verb-mixing, and adjective-mixing are the three most frequently used categories in code-mixing in the Mandarin context. This pattern mirrors the syntactic categories of code-mixing in the Cantonese context in Cantonese-English bilingual children, and the general trend observed in lexical borrowing. Third, our results also indicated that English vocabularies that carry morphological information are embedded in bare forms in the Mandarin context. These findings shed light upon how bilingual children take advantage of the two languages in mixed utterances in a bilingual environment.

Keywords: Code-mixing, Mandarin Chinese, English, bilingual children.

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Authors: Sheng Teng Huang, Shigeru Yoshida

Abstract:

Strategic alliances generally mean the cooperation or collaboration between firms which pursue for a synergy that each member hopes the benefits from the alliances would be much more than those from individual efforts. Past researches provide us sufficient theories and considerations for alliance forming in liner shipping market. This research reviews important academic journals for the past decade regarding to the most important reasons to form the alliances. We would explain the motive of alliances and details of shipping cooperation in literature review. The paper also empirically investigates the key service quality requirements improved through alliances by using quality function deployment (QFD). Moreover, the research investigates famous shipping reports, shipping consultant websites and most recent shipping publications to find out the executive-s viewpoint of several leading carriers among top 20 to assess current shipping strategic alliance on Asia/Europe route. These comments provide meaningful managerial reasons to consider alliance formations and search if there is any gap between the theories and industrial practice. Analysis of the empirical investigation and top management-s perspective on current market situation will contribute us some meaningful managerial suggestions to evaluate these theories applied to current strategic alliances.

Keywords: Liner shipping, Strategic alliances, quality function deployment, service quality.

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Authors: Bingchun Liu, Pei-Chann Chang, Natasha Huang, Dun Li

Abstract:

Machine Learning and Data Mining are the two important tools for extracting useful information and knowledge from large datasets. In machine learning, classification is a wildly used technique to predict qualitative variables and is generally preferred over regression from an operational point of view. Due to the enormous increase in air pollution in various countries especially China, Air Quality Classification has become one of the most important topics in air quality research and modelling. This study aims at introducing a hybrid classification model based on information theory and Support Vector Machine (SVM) using the air quality data of four cities in China namely Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin from Jan 1, 2014 to April 30, 2016. China's Ministry of Environmental Protection has classified the daily air quality into 6 levels namely Serious Pollution, Severe Pollution, Moderate Pollution, Light Pollution, Good and Excellent based on their respective Air Quality Index (AQI) values. Using the information theory, information gain (IG) is calculated and feature selection is done for both categorical features and continuous numeric features. Then SVM Machine Learning algorithm is implemented on the selected features with cross-validation. The final evaluation reveals that the IG and SVM hybrid model performs better than SVM (alone), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) models in terms of accuracy as well as complexity.

Keywords: Machine learning, air quality classification, air quality index, information gain, support vector machine, cross-validation.

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Authors: Yung-Tan Lee, Ren-Yi Huang, Jyh-Yi Shih, Meng-Lung Lin, Yen-Tsui Hu, Hsiao-Ling Yu, Chih-Cheng Chen

Abstract:

We measured the major and trace element contents and Rb-Sr isotopic compositions of 12 tektites from the Maoming area, Guandong province (south China). All the samples studied are splash-form tektites which show pitted or grooved surfaces with schlieren structures on some surfaces. The trace element ratios Ba/Rb (avg. 4.33), Th/Sm (avg. 2.31), Sm/Sc (avg. 0.44), Th/Sc (avg. 1.01) , La/Sc (avg. 2.86), Th/U (avg. 7.47), Zr/Hf (avg. 46.01) and the rare earth elements (REE) contents of tektites of this study are similar to the average upper continental crust. From the chemical composition, it is suggested that tektites in this study are derived from similar parental terrestrial sedimentary deposit which may be related to post-Archean upper crustal rocks. The tektites from the Maoming area have high positive εSr(0) values-ranging from 176.9~190.5 which indicate that the parental material for these tektites have similar Sr isotopic compositions to old terrestrial sedimentary rocks and they were not dominantly derived from recent young sediments (such as soil or loess). The Sr isotopic data obtained by the present study support the conclusion proposed by Blum et al. (1992)[1] that the depositional age of sedimentary target materials is close to 170Ma (Jurassic). Mixing calculations based on the model proposed by Ho and Chen (1996)[2] for various amounts and combinations of target rocks indicate that the best fit for tektites from the Maoming area is a mixture of 40% shale, 30% greywacke, 30% quartzite.

Keywords: Geochemistry, Guandong province, South China, Tektites

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