• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.53-60
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• 2012

On the grounds of Diane Vaughan's pioneering study into the Challenger Disaster, STS(Science and Technology Studies) scholars have recently argued that most engineers seldom face an ethical situation, in which the boundary between the ethical and the unethical is absolutely clear, and for which a serious moral decision such as "whistle blowing" is urgently needed. They have instead suggested that engineering ethics needs to address engineers' everyday routine practices, which, if accumulated, may have some impact upon the overall performance of the technological system. However, such studies have not completely resolved the tension between STS that emphasizes contextual elements in which the everyday practice of engineers are done, on the one hand, and engineering ethics that stresses individual engineer's moral decision of an existential kind, on the other. By discussing various works on the Challenger Disaster and related issues over technological risks, this paper attempts to establish an interface between STS and engineering ethics, and proposes some practical implications for the effective education of engineering ethics to engineering students.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.223-229
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• 2014

In an attempt to retrieve useful information for an efficient decision in the large knowledge system, it is generally necessary and important for a refined feature selection. Rough set has difficulty in generating optimal reducts and classifying boundary objects. In this paper, we propose quick reduction algorithm generating optimal features by rough entropy analysis for condition and decision attributes to improve these restrictions. We define a new conditional information entropy for efficient feature extraction and describe procedure of feature selection to classify the significance of features. Through the simulation of 5 datasets from UCI storage, we compare our feature selection approach based on rough set theory with the other selection theories. As the result, our modeling method is more efficient than the previous theories in classification accuracy for feature selection.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.7C
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• pp.635-643
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• 2007

In this paper, a decision-directed expectation maximization (DEM) algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of channel estimation in OFDM-based cellular systems. The DEM algorithm enables a mobile station (MS) with multiple antennas, located at the cell boundary, to increase the performance of channel estimation using transmit data, without decreasing spectral efficiency. Also, DEM algorithm can apply fast fading without loss of channel estimation performance because that includes channel variation factor in a group. It is verified by computer simulation that the DEM algorithm can reduce computational complexity significantly while improving the performance of channel estimation in fast fading channels, compared with the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm.

• The Journal of the Korean dental association
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.326-332
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• 2019

Extraction treatment has been used for a long time to treat crowding or lip protrusion patients and still extraction decision is the most difficult and important decision during diagnosis and treatment planning. If the amount of crowidng is severe, premolar extraction is often considered. Because of their location, premolar extractions would seem to allow for the most straightforward relief of crowding and the improvement of soft tissue profile. But patients and their parents often prefer nonextraction approach if possible and such a preference gives us serious question about the boundary of nonextraction treatment. Because Orthodontic Mini-Implant (OMI) become popular these days, distalization of posterior teeth can be obtained easily without patient's compliance. For this reason, many orthodontists are trying to treat crowding patient with nonextraction than before. But sometime, unexpected side effects are observed including unesthetic profile, impaction of second molar and long treatment time. All the tools for space gaining - extraction, arch expansion, molar distalization and interproximal enamel reduction - have their limitations and indications. Possible side effects and limitations should be carefully considered during the treatment planning. Although Korean patients usually require extraction more often than US or European patients, more knowledge about the tools for space gaining would help us to decrease the rate of extraction and the problems during treatment of crowding patients.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.75-84
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• 2012

HMM-based Text-to-Speech systems generally utilize context dependent tri-phone units from a large corpus speech DB to enhance the synthetic speech. To downsize a large corpus speech DB, acoustically similar tri-phone units are clustered based on the decision tree using context dependent information. Context dependent information includes phoneme sequence as well as prosodic information because the naturalness of synthetic speech highly depends on the prosody such as pause, intonation pattern, and segmental duration. However, if the prosodic information was complicated, many context dependent phonemes would have no examples in the training data, and clustering would provide a smoothed feature which will generate unnatural synthetic speech. In this paper, instead of complicate prosodic information we propose a simple three prosodic boundary types and decision tree questions that use rising tone, falling tone, and monotonic tone to improve naturalness. Experimental results show that our proposed method can improve naturalness of a HMM-based Korean TTS and get high MOS in the perception test.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.115-124
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• 2010

The current study investigated the role of acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening in lexical segmentation of a non-native language. In a series of cross-modal identity-priming experiments, native Korean listeners heard English auditory stimuli and made lexical decision to visual targets (i.e., written words). The auditory stimuli contained critical two word sequences which created temporal lexical ambiguity (e.g., 'mill#company', with the competitor 'milk'). There was either an IP boundary or a word boundary between the two words in the critical sequences. The initial CV of the second word (e.g., [$k_{\Lambda}$] in 'company') was spliced from another token of the sequence in IP- or Wd-initial positions. The prime words were postboundary words (e.g., company) in Experiment 1, and preboundary words (e.g., mill) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, Korean listeners showed priming effects only in IP contexts, indicating that they can make use of IP boundary cues of English in lexical segmentation of English. The acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening were also exploited by Korean listeners, but significant effects were found only for the segmentation of postboundary words. The results therefore indicate that L2 listeners can make use of prosodically driven phonetic detail in lexical segmentation of L2, as long as the direction of those cues are similar in their L1 and L2. The exact use of the cues by Korean listeners was, however, different from that found with native English listeners in Cho, McQueen, and Cox (2007). The differential use of the prosodically driven phonetic cues by the native and non-native listeners are thus discussed.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.10
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• pp.3965-3982
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• 2015

Event detection is one of the key issues in many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. The uncertainties that are derived from the instability of sensor node, measurement noise and incomplete sampling would influence the performance of event detection to a large degree. Many of the present researches described the sensor readings with crisp values, which cannot adequately handle the uncertainties inhered in the imprecise sensor readings. In this paper, a fault-tolerant event detection algorithm is proposed based on Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory (also called evidence theory). Instead of crisp values, all possible states of the event are represented by the Basic Probability Assignment (BPA) functions, with which the output of each sensor node are characterized as weighted evidences. The combination rule was subsequently applied on each sensor node to fuse the evidences gathered from the neighboring nodes to make the final decision on whether the event occurs. Simulation results show that even 20% nodes are faulty, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm is around 80% for event region detection. Moreover, 97% of the error readings have been corrected, and an improved detection capability at the boundary of the event region is gained by 75%. The proposed algorithm can enhance the detection accuracy of the event region even in high error-rate environment, which reflects good reliability and robustness. The proposed algorithm is also applicable to boundary detection as it performs well at the boundary of the event.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.1
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• pp.123-132
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• 1999

In this paper, a quadratic sigmoid neural equalizer(QSNE) is proposed to improve the performance of conventional neural equalizer in terms of bit error probability by using a quadratic sigmoid function as the activation function of neural networks. Conventional neural equalizers which have been used to compensate for nonlinear distortions adopt the sigmoid function. In the case of sigmoid neural equalizer, each neuron has one linear decision boundary. So many neurons are required when the neural equalizer has to separate complicated structure. But in case of the proposed QSNF and quadratic sigmoid neural decision feedback equalizer(QSNDFE), each neuron separates decision region with two parallel lines. Therefore, QSNE and QSNDFE have better performance and simpler structure than the conventional neural equalizers in terms of bit error probability. When the proposed QSNDFE is applied to communication systems and digital magnetic recording systems, it is an improvement of approximately 1.5dB~8.3dB in signal to moise ratio(SNR) over the conventional decision feedback equalizer(DEF) and neural decision feedback equalizer(NDFE). As intersymbol interference(ISI) and nonlinear distortions become severer, QSNDFE shows astounding SNR shows astounding SNR performance gain over the conventional equalizers in the same bit error probability.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.4E
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• pp.128-131
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• 2005

A new algorithm for speech signal segmentation is proposed. This algorithm is based on finding successive similar frames belonging to a segment and represents it by an average spectrum. The speech signal is a slowly time varying signal in the sense that, when examined over a sufficiently short period of time (between 10 and 100 ms), its characteristics are fairly stationary. Generally this approach is based on finding these fairly stationary periods. Advantages of the. algorithm are accurate border decision of segments and simple computation. The automatic segmentations using frame averaging show as much as $82.20\%$ coincided with manually verified segmentation of CMU ARCTIC corpus within time range 16 ms. More than $90\%$ segment boundaries are coincided within a range of 32 ms. Also it can be combined with many types of automatic segmentations (HMM based, acoustic cues or feature based etc.).

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.53-66
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• 1998

This study presents the Family FIRO model for stepfamily development. The Family FIRO model conceptualizes interactional patterns in stepfamily for dealing with developmental tasks and suggests a method for organizing assessment and for prioritizing treatment strategies. Boundary ambiguity role confusion intergenerational coalition and loyalty conflict lack of relationship commitment and resource management issues of stepfamily constitute the inclusion interaction dimension in The Family FIRO model. While power role negotiation conflict decision making and discipline issues represent the control interaction dimension lack of emotional exchange and open self-disclosure issues are intimacy interaction dimension in the stepfamily. The family FIRO model suggests that stepfamily should attend to the developmental tasks related to inclusion before placing a major emphasis on control issues which in turn should come before emphasis on stepfamily intimacy.