• Biomedical Science Letters
• /
• v.28 no.4
• /
• pp.211-222
• /
• 2022

After more than two years of efforts to end the corona pandemic, a gradual recovery is starting in countries with high vaccination rates. Easing public health policies for a full-fledged post-corona era, such as lifting the mandatory use of outdoor mask and quarantine measures in entry have been considered in Korea. However, the continuous emergence of new variants of SARS-CoV-2 and limitations in vaccine efficacy still remain challenging. Fortunately, T cells and memory T cells, which are key components of adaptive immunity appear to contribute substantially in COVID-19 control. SARS-CoV-2 specific CD4⁺/CD8⁺ T cells are induced by natural infection or vaccination, and rapid induction and activation of T cells is mainly associated with viral clearance and attenuated clinical severity. In addition, T cell responses induced by recognition of a wide range of epitopes were minimally affected and conserved against the highly infectious subsets of omicron variants. Polyfunctional SARS-CoV-2 specific T cell memory including stem cell-like memory T cells were also developed in COVID-19 convalescent patients, suggesting long lasting protective T cell immunity. Thus, a robust T-cell immune response appears to serve as a reliable and long-term component of host protection in the context of reduced efficacy of humoral immunity and persistent mutations and/or immune escape.

• Journal of IKEEE
• /
• v.27 no.4
• /
• pp.439-449
• /
• 2023

In an era marked by the increasing use of drones and the growing demand for indoor surveillance, the development of a robust application for detecting and tracking both drones and humans within indoor spaces becomes imperative. This study presents an innovative application that uses FMCW radar to detect human and drone motions from the cloud point. At the outset, the DBSCAN (Density-based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) algorithm is utilized to categorize cloud points into distinct groups, each representing the objects present in the tracking area. Notably, this algorithm demonstrates remarkable efficiency, particularly in clustering drone point clouds, achieving an impressive accuracy of up to 92.8%. Subsequently, the clusters are discerned and classified into either humans or drones by employing a deep learning model. A trio of models, including Deep Neural Network (DNN), Residual Network (ResNet), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), are applied, and the outcomes reveal that the ResNet model achieves the highest accuracy. It attains an impressive 98.62% accuracy for identifying drone clusters and a noteworthy 96.75% accuracy for human clusters.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.31 no.3
• /
• pp.93-104
• /
• 2024

This study conducts an in-depth analysis of user reviews from three leading metaverse platforms - Minecraft, Roblox, and Zepeto - using advanced topic modeling techniques to uncover key factors for business success. By examining a substantial dataset of user feedback, we identified and categorized the main themes and concerns expressed by users. Our analysis revealed that common issues across all platforms include technical functionality problems, user engagement and interest, payment concerns, and connection difficulties. Specifically, Minecraft users highlighted the importance of adventure and creativity, Roblox users expressed significant concerns about security and fraud, and Zepeto users focused heavily on the fairness of the in-game economy. The findings suggest that for metaverse platforms to achieve sustained success, they must prioritize the resolution of technical issues, enhance features that foster user engagement, ensure reliable connectivity, and address platform-specific concerns such as security for Roblox and payment fairness for Zepeto. These insights provide valuable guidance for developers and business strategists, emphasizing the need for robust technical infrastructure, engaging and diverse content, seamless user access, and transparent and fair economic systems. By addressing these key areas, metaverse platforms can improve user satisfaction, build a loyal user base, and secure long-term success in an increasingly competitive market.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.1301-1316
• /
• 2024

In modern warfare, missiles play a pivotal role but typically spend the majority of their lifecycle in long-term storage or standby mode, making it difficult to detect failures. Preemptive detection of missiles that will fail is crucial to preventing severe consequences, including safety hazards and mission failures. This study proposes a contamination-based stacking ensemble model, employing the local outlier factor (LOF), to detect such missiles. The proposed model creates multiple base LOF models with different contamination values and combines their anomaly scores to achieve a robust anomaly detection. A comparative performance analysis was conducted between the proposed model and the traditional single LOF model, using production-related inspection data from missiles deployed in the military. The experimental results showed that, with the contamination parameter set to 0.1, the proposed model exhibited an increase of approximately 22 percentage points in accuracy and 71 percentage points in F1-score compared to the single LOF model. This approach enables the preemptive identification of potential failures, undetectable through traditional statistical quality control methods. Consequently, it contributes to lower missile failure rates in real battlefield scenarios, leading to significant time and cost savings in the military industry.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
• /
• v.67 no.4
• /
• pp.279-299
• /
• 2015

This study examines the impact of Long-Term Care Insurance(LTCI) on family caregivers(especially focused on female household members) labor supply in South Korea. When public care and informal care are substitutes, LTCI will change allocation of time of family caregivers to spend more time to paid work. The impact of LTCI on labor supply depends on each country's institutional level of public care services. If public care can not substitute for informal care, labor supply of family caregivers will not rise significantly. The conclusions of vigorous empirical study from western countries' are incompatible and problem of endogeneity in terms of methodology has been raised consistently. The dataset of this study are used the third and ninth waves of Korea Welfare Panel. As a result, the introduction of LTCI had no effect on labor supply of household members. Robust findings suggest the positive effects of caregiving on labor market outcomes in simple comparison t-test, but not in fixed-effect regression. Compared with western countries, South Korea's public care services can be interpreted as a supplement to only part that remained at the level does not substitute informal care. These findings may suggest that if LTCI become much more prevalent in the future, senior citizens and family members will be able to choose the LTCI arrangement that best suits their needs.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.45 no.5
• /
• pp.1-8
• /
• 2008

The belief propagation method that has been studied recently yields good performance in disparity extraction. The method in which a target function is modeled as an energy function based on Markov random field(MRF), solves the stereo matching problem by finding the disparity to minimize the energy function. MRF models provide robust and unified framework for vision problem such as stereo and image restoration. the belief propagation method produces quite correct results, but it has difficulty in real time implementation because of higher computational complexity than other stereo methods. To relieve this problem, in this paper, we propose a fast algorithm of the belief propagation method. Energy function consists of a data term and a smoothness tern. The data term usually corresponds to the difference in brightness between correspondences, and smoothness term indicates the continuity of adjacent pixels. Smoothness information is created from messages, which are assigned using four different message arrays for the pixel positions adjacent in four directions. The processing time for four message arrays dominates 80 percent of the whole program execution time. In the proposed method, we propose an algorithm that dramatically reduces the processing time require in message calculation, since the message.; are not produced in four arrays but in a single array. Tn the last step of disparity extraction process, the messages are called in the single integrated array and this algorithm requires 1/4 computational complexity of the conventional method. Our method is evaluated by comparing the disparity error rates of our method and the conventional method. Experimental results show that the proposed method remarkably reduces the execution time while it rarely increases disparity error.

• Review of Culture and Economy
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.59-88
• /
• 2018

This study examines demand of the Korean TV VOD using monthly aggregate data and time series analysis models. In particular, the impact of box office attendance, number of IPTV subscribers, income and price of substitutes on TV VOD market is analyzed. Data on TV VOD download during the period 2013 January to 2018 June are used for the empirical analysis. TV VOD demand shows lower level of seasonality than box office attendance and the share of monthly top1 movie in TV VOD platform is also lower than that of box office attendance. The relationship between a movie's holdback and box office performance does not seem consistent. The empirical result of ARDL model reveals that in the short-run box office attendance, number of IPTV subscribers and price of substitutes have significant impact on TV VOD demand. The result on the long-term relation shows that income is the only determinant of TV VOD demand. The impact of box office attendance on TV VOD is not shown to be robust both for the short-term and long-term.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
• /
• v.42 no.6
• /
• pp.450-464
• /
• 2016

Objectives: This study developed and validated reference materials (RMs) to analyze metal compounds in blood. Methods: We referred to KoNEHS (Korea National Environmental Health Survey) to estimate concentrations of blood metals (cadmium, Cd; lead, Pb; mercury, Hg) and applied analytical methods (inductively coupled plasma - mass spectroscopy, ICP-MS, for Cd and Pb; graphite furnace - atomic absorption spectrometry, GF-AAS, for Cd and Pb; and direct mercury analyzer, DMA, for Hg). Homogeneity and stability tests were carried out. In addition, certified values and uncertainties of RMs were calculated through internal and external experiments. All RMs were developed and assessed in various forms according to element, analytical method, and two types of concentration levels high concentration for occupational exposure and low concentration for environmental exposure. Results: All samples showed acceptable homogeneity, except for low concentration of Cd in the GF-AAS method. Short- and long-term stabilities were satisfied by ANOVA testing. In the inter-laboratory comparison, robust medians were lower than the certified values of all RMs (robust median/reference value; $1.301/1.327{\mu}g/L$ for Cd, ICP-MS, low concentration; $3.152/3.388{\mu}g/L$ for Cd, ICP-MS, high concentration; $1.219/1.301{\mu}g/L$ for Cd, GF-AAS, low concentration; $3.074/3.321{\mu}g/L$ for Cd, GF-AAS, high concentration; $14.473/14.516{\mu}g/L$ for Pb, ICP-MS, low concentration; $50.069/50.114{\mu}g/L$ for Pb, ICP-MS, high concentration; $12.881/14.147{\mu}g/L$ for Pb, GF-AAS, low concentration; $47.015/47.591{\mu}g/L$ for Pb, GF-AAS, high concentration; $4.059/4.218{\mu}g/L$ for Hg, DMA, low concentration; $11.474/11.181{\mu}g/L$ for Hg, DMA, high concentration). Conclusion: This study demonstrates procedures for developing and validating RMs for biomonitoring in the field of the environmental health.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
• /
• v.8 no.6
• /
• pp.339-344
• /
• 2004

Recent data have shown the importance of oxidative stresses in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease, crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. $H_2O_2$, reactive oxygen species (ROS) donor, has been reported to act as a signaling molecule involved in a variety of cellular functions such as apo/ptosis and proliferation. In the present study, we investigated viability of cultured ileal smooth muscle cells (ISMC) after stimulation with $H_2O_2$. Trypan blue method revealed that the cell viability of ISMC treated with 1 mM $H_2O_2$ was not different from that of controls at up to 2 h time point, while treatment of ISMC with 1 mM $H_2O_2$ for 48 h finally induced significant decrease in the cell viability. Therefore, we evaluated whether $H_2O_2$ was capable of ERKs activation in ISMC for the short-term exposure and examined whether tyrosine kinase was involved in the process of ERK activation by $H_2O_2$ in ISMC. We also investigated the effects of $H_2O_2$ on activation of SAPK/JNK and p38 MAP kinase in ISMC. Thus, ISMC were cultured and exposed to $H_2O_2$, and western blot analysis was performed with phosphospecific MAP kinase antibodies. Robust activation of ERK occurred within 30 min of 1 mM $H_2O_2$ treatment. $H_2O_2-induced$ ERK activation was attenuated by a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, genistein, indicating that tyrosine kinase was probably involved in the ERK activation by $H_2O_2$. $H_2O_2$ was a moderate activator of SAPK/JNK, while p38 MAP kinase was not activated by $H_2O_2$. We suggest that ERK activation induced by short-term $H_2O_2$ treatment plays a critical role in cellular protection in the early stage of response to oxidative stress. The present study suggests the necessity of identification of MAPK signaling pathways affected by ROS, since it could ultimately elucidate cellular consequences involved in initiation and perpetuation of intestinal tissue damage in the diseases such as crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, resulted from excessive ROS.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.45 no.12
• /
• pp.65-72
• /
• 2008

This paper proposes a new dual-loop digital PLL(DPLL) using seamless frequency tracking methods. The dual-loop construction, which is composed of the coarse and fine loop for fast locking time and a switching noise suppression, is used successive approximation register technique and TDC. The proposed DPLL in order to compensate the quality of jitter which follows long-term of input frequency is newly added cord conversion frequency tracking method. Also, this DPLL has VCO circuitry consisting of digitally controlled V-I converter and current-control oscillator (CCO) for robust jitter characteristics and wide lock range. The chip is fabricated with Dongbu HiTek $0.18-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. Its operation range has the wide operation range of 0.4-2GHz and the area of $0.18mm^2$. It shows the peak-to-peak period jitter of 2 psec under no power noise and the power dissipation of 18mW at 2GHz through HSPICE simulation.