• Wind and Structures
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.343-356
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• 2005

Overhead sign support structures number in the tens of thousands throughout the trunk-line roadways in the United States. A recent two-phase study sponsored by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program resulted in the most significant changes to the AASHTO design specifications for sign support structures to date. The driving factor for these substantial changes was fatigue related cracks and some recent failures. This paper presents the method and results of a subsequent study sponsored by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) to develop a relative performance-based procedure to rank overhead sign support structures around the United States based on a linear combination of their expected fatigue life and an approximate measure of cost. This was accomplished by coupling a random vibrations approach with six degree-of-freedom linear dynamic models for fatigue life estimation. Approximate cost was modeled as the product of the steel weight and a constructability factor. An objective function was developed and used to rank selected steel sign support structures from around the country with the goal of maximizing the objective function. Although a purely relative approach, the ranking procedure was found to be efficient and provided the decision support necessary to MDOT.

• STI Policy Review
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.105-145
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• 2015

Science, technology and innovation (STI) is crucially important to eradicating poverty, and making advances in various areas such as agriculture, health, environment, transport, industry, and telecommunications. Therefore, it is vital to the overall socioeconomic development of nations. The indispensable role of STI in the competitive globalized economy led to several attempts to measure national STI capacities. The present study outlines STI capacity around three sets of capabilities: technological capabilities, social capabilities, and common capabilities. The Global Science, Technology and Innovation Capacity (GSTIC) index was developed to provide current evidence on the national STI capacities of the countries, and to improve the composite indicators used for such purposes. The GSTIC ranks a large number of countries (167) on the basis of their STI capacities and categories them into four groups: i.e. leaders, dynamic adopters, slow adopters, and laggards. For more meaningful assessment of the STI capacities of nations, it captures the achievement gaps of individual countries with the highest achiever. The study also provides ranking and achievement gaps of nations in the nine GSTIC pillars: technology creation, R&D capacity, R&D performance, technology absorption, diffusion of old technologies, diffusion of recent innovations, exposure to foreign technology, human capital, and enabling factors. A more detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses in different pillars of STI capacity of ten selected countries is also provided. The results show that there are significant disparities among nations in STI capacity and its various aspects, and developing countries have much to catch-up with the developed nations. However, different countries may adopt different strategies according to their strengths and weaknesses. Useful insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the national STI capacities of different countries are provided in the study.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.48-54
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• 2008

MMORPGs may involve a great number of concurrent players, and those servers usually have to manage hundred, or even thousands of avatars co-existing in the same virtual world. So if failing to send a command or an event message, or sending it too late may cause damages to the avatar evolution(death, injury, loss of resources), and may result in unjustified penalties for the player. Many policies could be defined to realize a ranking evaluation of available servers. Unfortunately, due to the highly dynamic characteristics of server loads and network performances, any optimal allocation would soon become sub-optimal. In order to solve those problems we propose the "time-interval based fairness partitioning method"(TIP). TIP will distribute the avatar to the game server equally with time-interval in order to avoid the problems form the unfairness of game servers load.

• Journal of Integrative Natural Science
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.81-95
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• 2023

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide, ranking third after lung and breast cancer in terms of global prevalence. With an expected 1.93 million new cases and 935,000 deaths in 2020, it is more prevalent in males than in women. Evidence has shown that during the later stages of colon cancer, STAT1 promotes tumor progression by promoting cell survival and resistance to chemotherapy. Recent studies have shown that inhibiting STAT1 pathway leads to a reduction in tumor cell proliferation and growth, and can also promote apoptosis in colon cancer cells. One of the recent approaches in the field of drug discovery is drug repurposing. In drug repurposing approach we have virtually screened FDA database against STAT1 protein and their interactions have been studied through Molecular docking. Cross docking was performed with the top 10 compounds to be more specific with STAT1 comparing the affinity with STAT2, STAT3, STAT4, STAT5a, STAT5b and STAT6. The drugs that showed higher affinity were subjected to Conceptual - Density functional theory. Besides, the Molecular dynamic simulation was also carried out for the selected leads. We also validated in-vitro against colon cancer cell lines. The results showed mainly Acetyldigitoxin has shown better binding to the target. From this study, we can predict that the drug Acetyldigitoxin has shown noticeable inhibitory efficiency against STAT1, which in turn can also lead to the reduction of tumor cell growth in colon cancer.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.238-252
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• 2009

Due to the rapid increase of available contents via the convergence of broadcasting and internet, the efficient access to personally preferred contents has become an important issue. In this paper, for recommendation scheme for TV programs using a collaborative filtering technique is studied. For recommendation of user preferred TV programs, our proposed recommendation scheme consists of offline and online computation. About offline computation, we propose reasoning implicitly each user's preference in TV programs in terms of program contents, genres and channels, and propose clustering users based on each user's preferences in terms of genres and channels by dynamic fuzzy clustering method. After an active user logs in, to recommend TV programs to the user with high accuracy, the online computation includes pulling similar users to an active user by similarity measure based on the standard preference list of active user and filtering-out of the watched TV programs of the similar users, which do not exist in EPG and ranking of the remaining TV programs by proposed rank model. Especially, in this paper, the BM (Best Match) algorithm is extended to make the recommended TV programs be ranked by taking into account user's preferences. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme with the extended BM model yields 62.1% of prediction accuracy in top five recommendations for the TV watching history of 2,441 people.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.17A no.5
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• pp.229-236
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• 2010

With an increasing number of documents in the Internet or enterprises, it becomes crucial to efficiently support users' queries on those documents. In that situation, the full-text search technique is accepted in general, because it can answer uncontrolled ad-hoc queries by automatically indexing all the keywords found in the documents. The size of index files made for full-text searches grows with the increasing number of indexed documents, and thus the disk cost may be too large to process multi-keyword queries against those enlarged index files. To solve the problem, we propose both of the index file structure and its management scheme suitable to the processing of multi-keyword queries against a large volume of index files. For this, we adopt the structure of inverted-files, which are widely used in the multi-keyword searches, as a basic index structure and modify it to a hierarchical structure for join operations and ranking operations performed during the query processing. In order to save disk costs based on that index structure, we dynamically store in the main memory the results of join operations between two keywords, if they are highly expected to be entered in users' queries. We also do performance comparisons using a cost model of the disk to show the performance advantage of the proposed scheme.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.79-96
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• 2008

One of the roles of the Semantic Web services is to execute dynamic intra-organizational services including the integration and interoperation of business processes. Since different organizations design their processes differently, the retrieval of similar semantic business processes is necessary in order to support inter-organizational collaborations. Most approaches for finding services that have certain features and support certain business processes have relied on some type of logical reasoning and exact matching. This paper presents our approach of using imprecise matching for expanding results from an exact matching engine to query the OWL(Web Ontology Language) MIT Process Handbook. MIT Process Handbook is an electronic repository of best-practice business processes. The Handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesigning organizational processes, (2) inventing new processes, and (3) sharing ideas about organizational practices. In order to use the MIT Process Handbook for process retrieval experiments, we had to export it into an OWL-based format. We model the Process Handbook meta-model in OWL and export the processes in the Handbook as instances of the meta-model. Next, we need to find a sizable number of queries and their corresponding correct answers in the Process Handbook. Many previous studies devised artificial dataset composed of randomly generated numbers without real meaning and used subjective ratings for correct answers and similarity values between processes. To generate a semantic-preserving test data set, we create 20 variants for each target process that are syntactically different but semantically equivalent using mutation operators. These variants represent the correct answers of the target process. We devise diverse similarity algorithms based on values of process attributes and structures of business processes. We use simple similarity algorithms for text retrieval such as TF-IDF and Levenshtein edit distance to devise our approaches, and utilize tree edit distance measure because semantic processes are appeared to have a graph structure. Also, we design similarity algorithms considering similarity of process structure such as part process, goal, and exception. Since we can identify relationships between semantic process and its subcomponents, this information can be utilized for calculating similarities between processes. Dice's coefficient and Jaccard similarity measures are utilized to calculate portion of overlaps between processes in diverse ways. We perform retrieval experiments to compare the performance of the devised similarity algorithms. We measure the retrieval performance in terms of precision, recall and F measure? the harmonic mean of precision and recall. The tree edit distance shows the poorest performance in terms of all measures. TF-IDF and the method incorporating TF-IDF measure and Levenshtein edit distance show better performances than other devised methods. These two measures are focused on similarity between name and descriptions of process. In addition, we calculate rank correlation coefficient, Kendall's tau b, between the number of process mutations and ranking of similarity values among the mutation sets. In this experiment, similarity measures based on process structure, such as Dice's, Jaccard, and derivatives of these measures, show greater coefficient than measures based on values of process attributes. However, the Lev-TFIDF-JaccardAll measure considering process structure and attributes' values together shows reasonably better performances in these two experiments. For retrieving semantic process, we can think that it's better to consider diverse aspects of process similarity such as process structure and values of process attributes. We generate semantic process data and its dataset for retrieval experiment from MIT Process Handbook repository. We suggest imprecise query algorithms that expand retrieval results from exact matching engine such as SPARQL, and compare the retrieval performances of the similarity algorithms. For the limitations and future work, we need to perform experiments with other dataset from other domain. And, since there are many similarity values from diverse measures, we may find better ways to identify relevant processes by applying these values simultaneously.