• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.464-480
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• 2022

With the steady development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), online stores are adopting chatbot services as virtual shopping assistants. This study proposes the concept of para-social presence to explore the undiscovered role of fashion chatbots' emotional and relational characteristics on service acceptance. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study investigates the effect of a chatbot's para-social presence on service acceptance intention through consumers' beliefs. The web-based experiment was conducted on adult consumers who experienced chatbot services in an online shopping situation. A total of 247 responses were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and multi-group SEM by AMOS 21.0 and SPSS 23.0. The findings illustrate that the chatbot's intimacy positively influenced consumers' perceived enjoyment, while the chatbot's understanding had a significant effect on perceived usefulness and ease of use. The chatbot's involvement had a positive effect on all consumer beliefs. Moreover, perceived ease of use had a positive influence on usefulness. A greater level of perceived usefulness and enjoyment positively heightened consumers' service acceptance intention. This study also verifies the moderating role of a need for human interaction. Consumers with a high need for human interaction have a relatively low tendency to perceive chatbot services as useful.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.60 no.1
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• pp.51-56
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• 2022

Global efforts to identify groups at high risk for schistosomiasis have mainly concentrated on identifying their geographical distribution. Investigations on the socioeconomic characteristics of high-risk groups are relatively scarce. This study aimed to explore the associations between schistosomiasis among students and their parents' occupations. A nationwide cross-sectional survey was conducted targeting 105,167 students in 1,772 primary schools across Sudan in 2017. From these students, 100,726 urine and 96,634 stool samples were collected to test for Schistosoma haematobium and S. mansoni infection. A multi-level mixed effect analysis was used with age and sex as fixed factors, and school as a random factor. The odd ratios (ORs) of practicing open defecation among farmers' children were almost 5 times higher than their counterparts whose parents were government officials (OR=4.97, 95% confidence intervals (CIs): 4.57-5.42, P<0.001). The ORs of contacting water bodies for watering livestock among farmers' children were more than 4 times higher than those of children whose parents were government officials (OR=4.59, 95% CIs: 4.02-5.24, P<0.001). This study shows that schistosomiasis represents a disease of poverty and that farmers' children constituted a high-risk group.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.439-452
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• 2022

A forecast of slope behavior during catastrophic events, such as earthquakes is crucial to recognize the risk of slope failure. This paper endeavors to eliminate the significant supposition of predefined slip surfaces in the slope stability analysis, which questions the relevance of simple conventional methods under seismic conditions. To overcome such limitations, a methodology dependent on the slip line hypothesis, which permits an automatic generation of slip surfaces, is embraced to trace the extreme slope face under static and seismic conditions. The effect of earthquakes is considered using the pseudo-static approach. The current outcomes developed from a parametric study endorse a non-linear slope surface as the extreme profile, which is in accordance with the geomorphological aspect of slopes. The proposed methodology is compared with the finite element limit analysis to ensure credibility. Through the design charts obtained from the current investigation, the stability of slopes can be assessed under seismic conditions. It can be observed that the extreme slope profile demands a flat configuration to endure the condition of the limiting equilibrium at a higher level of seismicity. However, a concurrent enhancement in the shear strength of the slope medium suppresses this tendency by offering greater resistance to the seismic inertial forces induced in the medium. Unlike the traditional linear slopes, the extreme slope profiles mostly exhibit a steeper layout over a significant part of the slope height, thus ensuring a more optimized solution to the slope stability problem. Further, the susceptibility of the Longnan slope failure in the Huining-Wudu seismic belt is predicted using the current plasticity approach, which is found to be in close agreement with a case study reported in the literature. Finally, the concept of equivalent single or multi-tiered planar slopes is explored through an example problem, which exhibits the appropriateness of the proposed non-linear slope geometry under actual field conditions.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Rural Architecture
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2023

This is a case study of private sector's development of long-term unexecuted urban parks in Pohang through a special act, which provides a guideline of 30% of land for non-park while 70% of land for park. The strategy has a lot of validity in many respects along with the urban planning sunset system, but even with the special act it would not easy to be implemented in Pohang, where the guideline has been modified to 20% for non-park, mostly multi-family housing projects while 80% for park. Thus, participation of private companies would be discouraged due to low commercial validity. Also, there would exist various risks because the project would be completed through a long-term decision-making and execution process. Thus, this study argues that it would be better for Pohang to follow the original guideline of the government for better implementation of the projects, along with preparation of a law with which the government be able to recoup excess profits when too much profits would be given to private developers. For the project implemented smoothly, it is also important to understand local housing market and fluctuating economic conditions, and to prepare various incentives for private companies. In addition, to secure publicity, guidelines on the level of publicity of the project should be prepared through negotiation by parties to prevent the project being discouraged too much.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.325-334
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• 2023

Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.271-280
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• 2010

While the future warfare is expected to be appeared as network-centric, effect-based, and coordinated cooperative, most current M&S systems reflect only the unit behaviors and interactions of each weapon system. There are limitations to analyze the behaviors of managing weapons cooperatively and sharing the situational awareness over the networks of distributed sensors, C2, and shooters using them. Therefore, we introduce the new design of the networkcentric warfare modeling system using the agent-based modeling and simulation approach. We have developed a system for engagement-level warfare models and tested with multi-platform battleship warfare. In this paper, we propose the method to design battle agents, environments, and networks for network centric warfare modeling.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.699-707
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• 2023

DevSecOps is a concept that adds security procedures to the operational procedures of DevOps to respond to the short development and operation cycle. Multi-step vulnerability scanning process should be considered to provide reliable security while supporting rapid development and deployment cycle in DevSecOps. Many open-source vulnerability scanning tools available can be used for each stage of scanning, but there are difficulties in evaluating the security level and identifying the importance of information in integrated operation due to the various functions supported by the tools and different security results. This paper proposes an integrated security metric design plan for scurity results and the combination of open-source scanning tools that can be used in security stage when building the open-source based DevSecOps system.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.66 no.1
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• pp.33-43
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• 2023

Objective : To compare the outcomes of anterior lumbar interbody fusion (ALIF), oblique lumbar interbody fusion (OLIF), and transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF) in terms of global sagittal alignment. Methods : From January 2007 to December 2019, 141 adult patients who underwent multilevel interbody fusion for lumbar degenerative disorders were enrolled. Regarding the approach, patients were divided into the ALIF (n=23), OLIF (n=60), and TLIF (n=58) groups. Outcomes, including local radiographic parameters and global sagittal alignment, were then compared between the treatment groups. Results : Regarding local radiographic parameters, ALIF and OLIF were superior to TLIF in terms of the change in the anterior disc height (7.6±4.5 mm vs. 6.9±3.2 mm vs. 4.7±2.9 mm, p<0.001), disc angle (-10.0°±6.3° vs. -9.2°±5.2° vs. -5.1°±5.1°, p<0.001), and fused segment lordosis (-14.5°±11.3° vs. -13.8°±7.5° vs. -7.4°±9.1°, p<0.001). However, regarding global sagittal alignment, postoperative lumbar lordosis (-42.5°±9.6° vs. -44.4°±11.6° vs. -40.6°±12.3°, p=0.210), pelvic incidence-lumbar lordosis mismatch (7.9°±11.3° vs. 6.7°±11.6° vs. 11.5°±13.0°, p=0.089), and the sagittal vertical axis (24.3±28.5 mm vs. 24.5±34.0 mm vs. 25.2±36.6 mm, p=0.990) did not differ between the groups. Conclusion : Although the anterior approaches were superior in terms of local radiographic parameters, TLIF achieved adequate global sagittal alignment, comparable to the anterior approaches.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.139-145
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• 2023

The ROK Army is promoting cutting-edge, future-oriented military development such as a mobile, intelligent, and hyper-connected Army TIGER system. The future infantry brigade plans to increase mobility with squad-level tactical vehicles to enable combat in multi-domain operations and to deploy various weapon systems such as surveillance and reconnaissance drones. In addition, it will be developed into an intelligent unit that transmits and receives data collected through the weapon system through a hyper-connected network. Accordingly, the future infantry brigade will transmit and receive more data. However, the Army's tactical information communication system has limitations in operating as a tactical communication system for future units, such as low transmission speed and bandwidth and restrictions on communication support. Therefore, in this paper, the information distribution capability of the future infantry brigade is presented through the offensive operation scenario and M&S.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.595-602
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• 2023

The EAST ICRF system operating space has been extended in power and phase control with a low-level RF system for the new double-strap antenna. Then the multi-step power and periodic phase scanning experiment were conducted in L-mode plasma, respectively. In the power scanning experiment, the stored energy, radiation power, plasma impedance and the antenna's temperature all have positive responses during the short ramp-ups of P_L;ICRF. The core ion temperature increased from 1 keV to 1.5 keV and the core heating area expanded from |Z| ≤ 5 cm to |Z| ≤ 10 cm during the injection of ICRF waves. In the phasing scanning experiment, in addition to the same conclusions as the previous relatively phasing scanning experiment, the superposition effect of the fluctuation of stored energy, radiation power and neutron yield caused by phasing change with dual antenna, resulting in the amplitude and phase shift, was also observed. The active control of RF output facilitates the precise control of plasma profiles and greatly benefits future experimental exploration.