• Atmosphere
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.1-21
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• 2024

Private companies are increasingly required to take more substantial actions on climate change. This study introduces the principle and cases of climate (physical) risk estimation for 11 private companies in Korea. Climate risk is defined as the product of three major determinants: hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Hazard is the intensity or frequency of weather phenomena that can cause disasters. Vulnerability can be reflected in the function that explains the relationship between past weather records and loss records. The final climate risk is calculated by multiplying the function by the exposure, which is defined as the area or value of the target area exposed to the climate. Future climate risk is estimated by applying future exposure to estimated future hazard using climate model scenarios or statistical trends based on weather data. The estimated climate risks are developed into three types according to the demand of private companies: i) climate risk for financial portfolio management, ii) climate risk for port logistics management, iii) climate risk for supply chain management. We hope that this study will contribute to the establishment of the climate risk management system in the Korean industrial sector as a whole.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.101-105
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• 2024

4H-SiC power metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) have been developed to achieve lower specific-on-resistance (R_on,sp), and the gate oxides have been thermally grown. The poor channel mobility resulting from the high interface trap density (D_it) at the SiO₂/4H-SiC interface significantly affects the higher switching loss of the power device. Therefore, the development of novel fabrication processes to enhance the quality of the SiO₂/4H-SiC interface is required. In this paper, NO post-oxidation annealing (POA) by using the conditions of N₂ diluted NO at a high temperature (1,300℃) is proposed to reduce the high interface trap density resulting from thermal oxidation. The NO POA is carried out in various NO ambient (0, 10, 50, and 100% NO mixed with 100, 90, 50, and 0% of high purity N₂ gas to achieve the optimized condition while maintaining a high temperature (1,300℃). To confirm the optimized condition of the NO POA, measuring capacitance-voltage (C-V) and current-voltage (I-V), and time-of-flight secondary-ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) are employed. It is confirmed that the POA condition of 50% NO at 1,300℃ facilitates the equilibrium state of both the oxidation and nitridation at the SiO₂/4H-SiC interface, thereby reducing the D_it.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.2643-2657
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• 2023

Scene graphs are structured representations that can clearly convey objects and the relationships between them, but are often heavily biased due to the highly skewed, long-tailed relational labeling in the dataset. Indeed, the visual world itself and its descriptions are biased. Therefore, Unbiased Scene Graph Generation (USGG) prefers to train models to eliminate long-tail effects as much as possible, rather than altering the dataset directly. To this end, we propose Geometric and Semantic Improvement (GSI) for USGG to mitigate this issue. First, to fully exploit the feature information in the images, geometric dimension and semantic dimension enhancement modules are designed. The geometric module is designed from the perspective that the position information between neighboring object pairs will affect each other, which can improve the recall rate of the overall relationship in the dataset. The semantic module further processes the embedded word vector, which can enhance the acquisition of semantic information. Then, to improve the recall rate of the tail data, the Class Balanced Seesaw Loss (CBSLoss) is designed for the tail data. The recall rate of the prediction is improved by penalizing the body or tail relations that are judged incorrectly in the dataset. The experimental findings demonstrate that the GSI method performs better than mainstream models in terms of the mean Recall@K (mR@K) metric in three tasks. The long-tailed imbalance in the Visual Genome 150 (VG150) dataset is addressed better using the GSI method than by most of the existing methods.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.69-78
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• 2023

With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, the demand for semiconductors is enormously increasing everywhere. To ensure the manufacturing quality and quantity simultaneously, the importance of automatic defect detection during the packaging process has been re-visited by adapting various deep learning-based methodologies into automatic packaging defect inspection. Deep learning (DL) models require a large amount of data for training, but due to the nature of the semiconductor industry where security is important, sharing and labeling of relevant data is challenging, making it difficult for model training. In this study, we propose a new framework for securing sufficient data for DL models with fewer computing resources through a divide-and-conquer approach. The proposed method divides high-resolution images into pre-defined sub-regions and assigns conditional labels to each region, then trains individual sub-regions and boundaries with boundary loss inducing the globally coherent and seamless images. Afterwards, full-size image is reconstructed by combining divided sub-regions. The experimental results show that the images obtained through this research have high efficiency, consistency, quality, and generality.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.41.1-41.16
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• 2022

The human antimicrobial peptide LL-37 has chemotactic and modulatory activities in various immune cells, including dendritic cells. Because of its characteristics, LL-37 can be considered an adjuvant for vaccine development. In this study, we confirmed the possible adjuvant activity of LL-37 in mucosal vaccine development against Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV) by means of intranasal immunization in C57BL/6 and human dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (hDPP4)-transgenic (hDPP4-Tg) mice. Intranasal immunization using the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of MERS-CoV spike protein (S-RBD) recombined with LL-37 (S-RBD-LL-37) induced an efficient mucosal IgA and systemic IgG response with virus-neutralizing activity, compared with S-RBD. Ag-specific CTL stimulation was also efficiently induced in the lungs of mice that had been intranasally immunized with S-RBD-LL-37, compared with S-RBD. Importantly, intranasal immunization of hDPP4-Tg mice with S-RBD-LL-37 led to reduced immune cell infiltration into the lungs after infection with MERS-CoV. Finally, intranasal immunization of hDPP4-Tg mice with S-RBD-LL-37 led to enhanced protective efficacy, with increased survival and reduced body weight loss after challenge infection with MERS-CoV. Collectively, these results suggest that S-RBD-LL-37 is an effective intranasal vaccine candidate molecule against MERS-CoV infection.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.39-45
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• 2024

The purpose of security control in the public sector is to secure the safety of administrative services for the public by preventing resource loss or information infringement in information systems and information and communication networks. The security control system is a process that performs real-time detection, analysis, response, and reporting through system vulnerability analysis and security system detection pattern optimization. This study aims to objectively identify the current situation of the mismatch between the supply and demand of cyber security control centers currently in operation and specialized security control companies that can be entrusted to operate them, and to derive and propose practical and institutional improvement measures. Considering that the operation of security control centers in the public sector is expected to increase in the future, research on the practical supplementation required for the operation process of security control centers and the improvement of the designation system of security control specialized organizations has fundamental and timely significance, and it is an area that requires continuous research in terms of strategic industrialization.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.82 no.3
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• pp.527-540
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• 2021

Peripheral arterial occlusive disease (PAOD) of the femoropopliteal artery is commonly caused by atherosclerosis. It can present with varying clinical symptoms depending on the degree of disease, ranging from intermittent claudication to critical limb ischemia and tissue loss. Therefore, appropriate and timely treatment is required to improve symptoms and salvage the affected limbs. Interventional approaches for femoropopliteal arterial disease commonly include percutaneous transluminal angioplasty, atherectomy, and stent placement. Over the years, endovascular recanalization has been widely performed for treating PAOD due to continuous developments in its techniques and availability of dedicated devices with the inherent advantage of being minimal invasive. In this review, we introduce various types of endovascular treatment methods, discuss the results of clinical research from existing literature, and illustrate the treatment procedures using representative images.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.8.1-8.17
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• 2021

The global crisis caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to the most significant economic loss and human deaths after World War II. The pathogen causing this disease is a novel virus called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2). As of December 2020, there have been 80.2 million confirmed patients, and the mortality rate is known as 2.16% globally. A strategy to protect a host from SARS-CoV-2 is by suppressing intracellular viral replication or preventing viral entry. We focused on the spike glycoprotein that is responsible for the entry of SARS-CoV-2 into the host cell. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration/EU Medicines Agency authorized a vaccine and antibody to treat COVID-19 patients by emergency use approval in the absence of long-term clinical trials. Both commercial and academic efforts to develop preventive and therapeutic agents continue all over the world. In this review, we present a perspective on current reports about the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 as a therapeutic target.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.25.1-25.13
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• 2020

Acinetobacter baumannii is known for its multidrug antibiotic resistance. New approaches to treating drug-resistant bacterial infections are urgently required. Cathelicidin-related antimicrobial peptide (CRAMP) is a murine antimicrobial peptide that exerts diverse immune functions, including both direct bacterial cell killing and immunomodulatory effects. In this study, we sought to identify the role of CRAMP in the host immune response to multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. Wild-type (WT) and CRAMP knockout mice were infected intranasally with the bacteria. CRAMP^-/- mice exhibited increased bacterial colony-forming units (CFUs) in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid after A. baumannii infection compared to WT mice. The loss of CRAMP expression resulted in a significant decrease in the recruitment of immune cells, primarily neutrophils. The levels of IL-6 and CXCL1 were lower, whereas the levels of IL-10 were significantly higher in the BAL fluid of CRAMP^-/- mice compared to WT mice 1 day after infection. In an in vitro assay using thioglycollate-induced peritoneal neutrophils, the ability of bacterial phagocytosis and killing was impaired in CRAMP^-/- neutrophils compared to the WT cells. CRAMP was also essential for the production of cytokines and chemokines in response to A. baumannii in neutrophils. In addition, the A. baumannii-induced inhibitor of κB-α degradation and phosphorylation of p38 MAPK were impaired in CRAMP^-/- neutrophils, whereas ERK and JNK phosphorylation was upregulated. Our results indicate that CRAMP plays an important role in the host defense against pulmonary infection with A. baumannii by promoting the antibacterial activity of neutrophils and regulating the innate immune responses.

• Annals of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.437-442
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• 2023

Emergency pancreaticoduodenectomy (EPD) is a rarely performed operation. It is important to know the indications and outcomes of EPD to have a better understanding of its application in clinical practice. A review of eight consecutive cases of EPD was done. Between January 2003 and December 2021, 8 out of 370 patients (2.2%) in a single center received pancreaticoduodenectomy as emergency. There were six males and two females with a median age of 45.5 years. The indications were trauma in three patients, bleeding tumors in two patients, and one patient each in obstructing duodenal tumor, postoperative complication and post-endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) complication. The median operative time and blood loss were 427.5 minutes and 1,825 mL, respectively. There was no operative mortality. Seven patients (87.5%) had postoperative complications. Three patients (37.5%) developed postoperative grade B pancreatic fistula. The median postoperative hospital stay was 23.5 days. Five patients were still alive while three patients survived for 13, 31, and 42 months after the operation. The causes of death were recurrent tumors in two patients, and sepsis in one patient. According to this case series, EPD is associated with increased morbidity and pancreatic fistula, but is still deserved in life-threatening situations and long-term survival is possible after EPD.