• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.245-250
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• 2011

Parallel imaging technique can provide several advantages for a multitude of MRI applications. Especially, in SENSE technique, sensitivity maps were always required in order to determine the reconstruction matrix, therefore, a number of difference approaches using sensitivity information from coils have been demonstrated to improve of image quality. Moreover, many filtering methods were proposed such as adaptive matched filter and nonlinear diffusion technique to optimize the suppression of background noise and to improve of image quality. In this study, we performed SENSE reconstruction using computer simulations to confirm the most suitable method for the feasibility of filtering effect and according to changing order of polynomial fit that were applied on variation of spatial resolution of sensitivity map. The image was obtained at 0.32T(Magfinder II, Genpia, Korea) MRI system using spin-echo pulse sequence(TR/TE = 500/20 ms, FOV = 300 mm, matrix = $128{\times}128$, thickness = 8 mm). For the simulation, obtained image was multiplied with four linear-array coil sensitivities which were formed of 2D-gaussian distribution and the image was complex white gaussian noise was added. Image processing was separated to apply two methods which were polynomial fitting and filtering according to spatial resolution of sensitivity map and each coil image was subsampled corresponding to reduction factor(r-factor) of 2 and 4. The results were compared to mean value of geomety factor(g-factor) and artifact power(AP) according to r-factor 2 and 4. Our results were represented while changing of spatial resolution of sensitivity map and r-factor, polynomial fit methods were represented the better results compared with general filtering methods. Although our result had limitation of computer simulation study instead of applying to experiment and coil geometric array such as linear, our method may be useful for determination of optimal sensitivity map in a linear coil array.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.8-13
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• 2013

Persons with sensorineural hearing impairment have troubles in hearing at noisy environments because of their deteriorated hearing levels and low-spectral resolution of the auditory system and therefore, they use hearing aids to compensate weakened hearing abilities. Various algorithms for hearing loss compensation and environmental noise reduction have been implemented in the hearing aid; however, the performance of these algorithms vary in accordance with external sound situations and therefore, it is important to tune the operation of the hearing aid appropriately in accordance with a wide variety of sound situations. In this study, a sound classification algorithm that can be applied to the hearing aid was suggested. The proposed algorithm can classify the different types of speech situations into four categories: 1) speech-only, 2) noise-only, 3) speech-in-noise, and 4) music-only. The proposed classification algorithm consists of two sub-parts: a feature extractor and a speech situation classifier. The former extracts seven characteristic features - short time energy and zero crossing rate in the time domain; spectral centroid, spectral flux and spectral roll-off in the frequency domain; mel frequency cepstral coefficients and power values of mel bands - from the recent input signals of two microphones, and the latter classifies the current speech situation. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm could classify the kinds of speech situations with an accuracy of over 94.4%. Based on these results, we believe that the proposed algorithm can be applied to the hearing aid to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.12
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• pp.2857-2863
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• 2014

IR-UWB has been developed as a standard of indoor ranging technology, because it has robust and good transmission characteristics in indoor environments and it can be operated with low power. In this paper, a IR-UWB packet analyzer is designed and implemented based on IEEE 802.15.4a, which is useful in developing IR-UWB real time location system with resolution of a few ten centimeters. A sniffer device of the packet analyzer monitors IR-UWB wireless networks, captures MAC packet frames, and transmits packet frames to the packet analyzing computer. The packet analyzing program in a computer analyzes received MAC packet frames and displays parsed packet information for developing engineers. Developed packet analyzer is used to analyze IEEE 802.15.4a MAC protocol, and also it can be used in other IEEE 802 series MAC protocol by modifying some functions.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.506-512
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• 2013

Biomass and low-grade coals are known to be better potential sources of energy compared to crude oil and natural gas since these materials are readily available and found to have large reserves, respectively. Gasification of these carbonaceous materials produced syngas for chemical synthesis and power generation. Woodchip, sawdust and lignite were gasified with steam in a thermobalance reactor under atmospheric pressure in order to evaluate their kinetic rate information. The effects of gasification temperature ($600{\sim}900^{\circ}C$) and partial pressure of steam (20~90 kPa) on the gasification rate were investigated. The three different types of gas-solid reaction models were applied to the experimental data to predict the behavior of the gasification reactions. The modified volumetric model predicted the conversion data well, thus the model was used to evaluate kinetic parameters in this study. The observed activation energy of biomass, sawdust and lignite gasification reactions were found to be in reasonable range and their rank was found to be sawdust > woodchip > lignite. The expression of apparent reaction rates for steam gasification of the three solids was proposed to provide basic information on the design of coal gasification processes.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.328-334
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• 2007

Chemical heat pump system of 2-propanol/acetone/hydrogen is most suitable to the recovery of waste heat of power plant. various types of 5 wt% Pt-alumina catalysts were prepared for 2-propanol dehydrogenation using sol-gel method. The characteristics and the dehydrogenation reaction rate of each catalyst were investigated. Pt-alumina xerogel catalyst has excellent reaction rate and good durability in comparison with the existing alumina supported Pt catalysts. Pt-alumina aerogel catalyst had the highest reaction rate in all prepared catalysts, but sufficient aging time was necessary to maintain its reaction rate. A potential advantage of the aerogel catalyst is the fact that the high temperature heat treatment is not required. Without heat treatment or with low temperature heat treatment, the Pt-alumina aerogel catalyst has excellent reaction rate as well as durability and this gives us the economic advantage. Alumina xerogel supported Pt catalyst prepared by incipient wetness method showed good reaction rate, and had good mechanical strength. Blank alumina xerogel prepared by sol-gel method can be used for the support of metal catalysts.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.43 no.7 s.349
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• pp.60-71
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• 2006

Group key agreement protocols are designed to allow a group of parties communicating over a public network to securely and efficiently establish a common secret key, Over the years, a number of solutions to the group key agreement protocol have been proposed with varying degrees of complexity, and the research relating to group key agreement to securely communicate among a group of members in integrated wired and wireless networks has been recently proceeded. Both features of wired computing machines with the high-performance and those of wireless devices with the low-power are considered to design a group key agreement protocol suited for integrated wired and wireless networks. Especially, it is important to reduce computational costs of mobile devices which have the limited system resources. In this paper, we present an efficient group key agreement scheme which minimizes the computational costs of mobile devices and is well suited for this network environment and prove its security.

• Korean Journal of Occupational Health Nursing
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.122-131
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• 2015

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate what factors are affecting job-seeking stress in nursing students. Methods: Subjects were 463 students from two 3-year and two 4-year colleges of nursing in K-Province in Korea. Data was collected from self-administered questionnaires. t-test, ANOVA, Pearson's and Spearman's correlation coefficients, and hierarchical multiple regression with dummy variables were used for statistical analysis of data. Results: Job-seeking stress was significantly different by school system (t=2.76, p=.006), family economic status (F=3.40, p=.005), characteristics (t=1.99, p=.047), academic achievement (F=6.54, p=.002), current weight control status (t=2.23, p=.026), times of cosmetic surgery (r=.11, p=.022), self-esteem (r=-.47, p<.001) and appearance stress (r=.40, p<.001). However, after controlling for general characteristics, self-esteem, and perceived appearance stress, job-seeking stress was significantly different by grade (1st vs 3rd, ${\beta}=0.163$, p<.001), academic achievement (low vs. high, ${\beta}=-0.121$, p=.0321), self-esteem (${\beta}=-0.224$, p<.001), and appearance stress (${\beta}=0.099$, p<.001). The explanation power of self-esteem on job-seeking stress was greater compared with that of appearance stress. Conclusion: Results of this study suggest that it is necessary for nursing students to develop intervention program aimed at reducing job-seeking stress, and it would be effective to focus on improving self-esteem for them.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.272-278
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• 2015

This paper analyzed interference impact between wireless headset and Wireless Fidelity which get a high possibility of simultaneously operating in the Industry Science Medical(ISM) bands. Analysis methods of Minimum Coupling Loss(MCL) and Monte Carlo(MC) were applied by using the characters and parameters referenced to Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers(IEEE) 802.11b. The protection distance between interferer (WiFi transmitter) and victim (Wireless headset receiver) was calculated through the MCL. The protection distance was obtained for the case of single interferer, and the maximum allowable number of multiple interferers was computed according to the cell radius of a victim system to meet 5 % below of interference probability by using a statistical analysis based on the MC method. The analysis results are expected to be used as a guideline to coexist the wireless headset and low power devices in the ISM band.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.19-27
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• 2015

Due to the advantages of fast read/write operation and low power consumption, SSD(Solid State Drive) is now widely adopted as storage device of smart phone, laptop computer, server, etc. However, the shortcomings of SSD such as limited number of write operations and asymmetric read/write operation lead to the problem of shortened life span of SSD. Therefore, the block replacement policy of SSD used as cache for HDD is very important. The existing solutions for improving the lifespan of SSD including the LARC scheme typically employ the LRU algorithm to manage the SSD blocks, which may increase the miss rate in SSD due to the replacement of frequently used block instead of rarely used block. In this paper we propose a novel block replacement scheme which considers the block reuse interval to effectively handle various data read/write patterns. The proposed scheme replaces the block in SSD based on the recency decided by reuse interval and age along with hit ratio. Computer simulation using workload trace files reveals that the proposed scheme consistently improves the performance and lifespan of SSD by increasing the hit ratio and decreasing the number of write operations compared to the existing schemes including LARC.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2010

Recently heterogeneous storage system such as hybrid hard disk drive (H-HDD) combining flash memory and magnetic disk is launched, according as the read performance of NAND flash memory is enhanced as similar to that of hard disk drive (HDD) and the power consumption of NAND flash memory is reduced less than that of HDD. However, the read and write operations of NAND flash memory are slower than those of rotational disk. Besides, serious overheads are incurred on CPU and main memory in the case that intensive write requests to flash memory are repeatedly occurred. In this paper, we propose the Least Frequently Used-Hot scheme that replaces the data blocks whose reference frequency of read operation is low and update frequency of write operation is high, and the data flushing scheme that rearranges the data blocks into the multi-zone of the rotation disk. Experimental results show that the execution time of the proposed method is 38% faster than those of conventional LRU and LFU block replacement schemes in I/O performance aspect and the proposed method increases the life span of Non-Volatile Cache 40% higher than those of conventional LRU, LFU, FIFO block replacement schemes.