• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.117-129
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• 2020

Background: Radiation portal monitors (RPMs) involving plastic scintillators installed at the border inspection sites can detect illicit trafficking of radioactive sources in cargo containers within seconds. However, RPMs may generate false alarms because of the naturally occurring radioactive materials. To manage these false alarms, we previously suggested an energy-weighted algorithm that emphasizes the Compton-edge area as an outstanding peak. This study intends to evaluate the identification of radioactive sources using an improved energy-weighted algorithm. Materials and Methods: The algorithm was modified by increasing the energy weighting factor, and different peak combinations of the energy-weighted spectra were tested for source identification. A commercialized RPM system was used to measure the energy-weighted spectra. The RPM comprised two large plastic scintillators with dimensions of 174 × 29 × 7 ㎤ facing each other at a distance of 4.6 m. In addition, the in-house-fabricated signal processing boards were connected to collect the signal converted into a spectrum. Further, the spectra from eight radioactive sources, including special nuclear materials (SNMs), which were set in motion using a linear motion system (LMS) and a cargo truck, were estimated to identify the source identification rate. Results and Discussion: Each energy-weighted spectrum exhibited a specific peak location, although high statistical fluctuation errors could be observed in the spectrum with the increasing source speed. In particular, ¹³⁷Cs and ⁶⁰Co in motion were identified completely (100%) at speeds of 5 and 10 km/hr. Further, SNMs, which trigger the RPM alarm, were identified approximately 80% of the time at both the aforementioned speeds. Conclusion: Using the modified energy-weighted algorithm, several characteristics of the energy weighted spectra could be observed when the used sources were in motion and when the geometric efficiency was low. In particular, the discrimination between ⁶⁰Co and ⁴⁰K, which triggers false alarms at the primary inspection sites, can be improved using the proposed algorithm.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.687-701
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• 2014

Sea ice is generally accepted as an important factor to understand the process of earth climate changes and is the basis of earth system models for analysis and prediction of the climate changes. To continuously monitor sea ice changes at kilometer scale, it is demanded to create more accurate grid data from the current, limited sea ice data. In this paper we described a downscaling method for Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) Sea Ice Concentration (SIC) from 10 km to 1 km resolution using a weighting scheme of sea ice days ratio derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sea ice cover product that has a high correlation with the SIC. In a case study for Okhotsk Sea, the sea ice areas of both data (before and after downscaling) were identical, and the monthly means and standard deviations of SIC exhibited almost the same values. Also, Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analyses showed that three kinds of SIC data (ERA-Interim, original AMSR2, and downscaled AMSR2) had very similar principal components for spatial and temporal variations. Our method can apply to downscaling of other continuous variables in the form of ratio such as percentage and can contribute to monitoring small-scale changes of sea ice by providing finer SIC data.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.372-381
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• 2019

In this study, the National Disaster Management System (NDMS) was analyzed to evaluate the disaster impact assessment standards for steep slopes. Problems in the assessment methods and systems were discovered, which could be reasons for poor reliability. The disaster-risk evaluation index needs improvement to evaluate various types of retaining walls, such as concrete/reinforced soil walls and reinforcing stone masonry. Additionally, using the same score for overturning, bulging, and efflorescence could be reasons for poor reliability, and different weighting factors are needed. Assessment methods are needed to subdivide the social influence evaluation index while considering environmental conditions of steep slopes, such as railroads and reservoirs. For the evaluation of steep slopes, standards for start and end points of steep slopes should be created for effective management, and disaster impact assessment needs to be performed after redevelopment from an advanced index for protection and reinforcement. These problems were derived from a current evaluation system, so a disaster impact assessment is necessary to supplement the results of this study.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.68-77
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• 2024

Background: Depressive disorders can be categorized into daily depression and clinical depression. The experience of depressive disorder can increase health care utilization due to decreased treatment compliance and somatization. On the other hand, the clinical depression group may also experience social prejudice associated with the illness, which can limit their access to health care utilization. In terms of the significance of health care utilization as a factor in individual and social issues, this study aims to compare the health care utilization of the clinical depression group with that of the non-depressed group and the daily depression group. Methods: The analysis utilized the inverse probability of treatment weighting based on the generalized propensity score. Results: As a result of the analysis, clinical depression and daily depression were higher among women, low-income groups, individuals with low education levels, and so forth. The clinical depression group was also higher among individuals who were not economically active, did not have private health insurance, or had multiple chronic diseases. The number of outpatient department visits in the depression group was significantly higher than in the non-depressed group. In addition, the number of outpatient department visits for the clinical depression group was significantly higher than that for the daily depression group. Outpatient medical expenses were higher in the depression group than in the non-depressed group, and there was no significant difference between the clinical depression group and the daily depression group. Conclusion: Health care utilization was higher in the depression group than the non-depressed group, it was also higher in the clinical depression group than the daily depression group.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.40-53
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• 2008

Groundwater pollution prediction methods have been developed to plan the sustainable groundwater usage and protection from potential pollution in many countries. DRASTIC established by US EPA is the most widely used groundwater vulnerability mapping method. However, the DRASTIC showed limitation in predicting the groundwater contamination because the DRASTIC method is designed to embrace only hydrogeologic factors. Therefore, in this study, three different methods were applied to improve a groundwater pollution prediction method: US EPA DRASTIC, Modified-DRASTIC suggested by Panagopoulos et al. (2006), and LSDG (Land use, Soil drainage, Depth to water, Geology) proposed by Rupert (1999). The Modified-DRASTIC is the modified version of the DRASTIC in terms of the rating scales and the weighting coefficients. The rating scales of each factor were calculated by the statistical comparison of nitrate concentrations in each class using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test; while the weighting coefficients were modified by the statistical correlation of each parameter to nitrate concentrations using the Spearman's rho test. The LSDG is a simple rating method using four factors such as Land use, Soil drainage, Depth to water, and Geology. Classes in each factor are compared by the Wilcoxon rank-sum test which gives a different rating to each class if the nitrate concentration in the class is significantly different. A database of nitrate concentrations in groundwaters from 149 wells was built in Keumsan area. Application of three different methods for assessing the groundwater pollution potential resulted that the prediction which was represented by a correlation (r) between each index and nitrate was improved from the EPA DRASTIC (r = 0.058) to the modified rating (r = 0.245), to the modified rating and weights (r = 0.400), and to the LSDG (r = 0.415), respectively. The LSDG seemed appropriate to predict the groundwater pollution in that it contained land use as a factor of the groundwater pollution sources and the rating of each class was defined by a real pollution nitrate concentration.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.592-600
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• 2014

This paper proposes an enhanced adaptive genetic algorithm(EAGA) dedicated to pattern synthesis of array antenna which conforms to a curved surface of rotation with quadratic function. EAGA combines adaptive genetic algorithm(AGA) with invasive weed optimization(IWO) for the faster convergence and the lower cost value of the cost function. The amplitude and phase of each excited weighting factor are optimized to meet the required goals using EAGA. The EAGA results indicate that the proposed algorithm is superior to AGA when applied to the problem of conformal array antenna pattern synthesis.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.475-481
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• 2014

Recently, it is used to apply various improved methods to determine the cause of traffic accidents. However, most of vehicle black box usually start to store the video information by an event trigger in case that the impact value at that time exceeds the threshold impact value as compared the threshold impact value saved in advance with the current impact value. there are problems with above method that a lot video information should be saved in the memory card of the vehicle black box, and the user should delete the unwanted video information every time because of unclassified video store. In this paper, we propose the ontology-based context aware algorithm that the vehicle black box recognize the situation, and then remove the video data with a low weighting factor by itself for efficient memory management.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.330-336
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• 2012

We surveyed and evaluated quantities and distribution characteristics of debris on the sea floor around active fishing grounds around the islands in the southwest coast of Korea in 2007 where the average depth is below 40m. Proper recovery gears mainly to haul the derelict fishing gears are selected considering the sea bed types of the areas. The collected debris amounts were used to estimate the total amount of the surveyed area. The number of hauls per trial times the amount of the debris was extended to whole sampling area and the weighting factor from the opinion was applied to reach the total amount of marine debris on the floor. The amount of the deposited marine debris around Wangdeung-do area is estimated as about 686 $kg/km^2$, and the cost of the collection and treatment for the deposited marine debris is estimated about 3.9 billion KRW after consideration of the proper size of the working ships, labor, transport and treatment cost.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.47-58
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• 1997

The conversion coefficients of effective dose per unit air kerma and equivalent dose per unit fluence were calculated by MCNP4A code for antero-posterior(AP) and postero- anterior(PA) incidence of broad, unidirectional beams of photons into anthropomorphic MIRD phantom. Calculations have been performed for 20 monoenergetic photons of energy ranging from 0.03 to 10 MeV. The conversion coefficients showed a good agreement with the corresponding values given in the draft publication of joint task group of ICRP and ICRU within 10%. The deviations may arise from the differences of geometry in the MIRD phantom and the ADAM/EVE phantoms, and the differences in the codes and cross-section data used. Inclusion of a specific oesophagus model results in effective dose slightly different(5% at most) from the effective doses obtained by adopting the equivalent doses for the thymus or pancreas. Deletion of the ULI from the remainder organ appeared not to be significant for the cases of photon dosimetry covered in this study.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.344-365
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• 2009

The performance of a tracking system is greatly increased if multiple types of sensors are combined to achieve the objective of the tracking instead of relying on single type of sensor. To conduct the multi-modal tracking, we have previously developed a multi-modal sensor-based tracking model where acoustic sensors mainly track the objects and visual sensors compensate the tracking errors [1]. In this paper, we find a network synchronization problem appearing in the developed tracking system. The problem is caused by the different location and traffic characteristics of multi-modal sensors and non-synchronized arrival of the captured sensor data at a processing server. To effectively deliver the sensor data, we propose a time-based packet aggregation algorithm where the acoustic sensor data are aggregated based on the sampling time and sent to the server. The delivered acoustic sensor data is then compensated by visual images to correct the tracking errors and such a compensation process improves the tracking accuracy in ideal case. However, in real situations, the tracking improvement from visual compensation can be severely degraded due to the aforementioned network synchronization problem, the impact of which is analyzed by simulations in this paper. To resolve the network synchronization problem, we differentiate the service level of sensor traffic based on Weight Round Robin (WRR) scheduling at the routers. The weighting factor allocated to each queue is calculated by a proposed Delay-based Weight Allocation (DWA) algorithm. From the simulations, we show the traffic differentiation model can mitigate the non-synchronization of sensor data. Finally, we analyze expected traffic behaviors of the tracking system in terms of acoustic sampling interval and visual image size.