• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Applied Pharmacology
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.79-92
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• 2007

Oxidative stress have known to be a risk factor for the degenerative processes and closely related to a lot of diseases. It is well established that antioxidants are good in protection and therapeutic means against oxidative damage. There is increasing interest in natural antioxidants and many natural antioxidants have been found and utilized as the possible protection for various diseases and skin aging. We have screened natural antioxidant agents for cosmeceuticals, nutraceuticals, and drugs as therapeutic and preventive means against oxidative stress, and have developed a number of novel antioxidants from various natural sources. A novel melanin synthesis inhibitor, Melanocin A, isolated from the metabolite of a fungal strain Eupenicillium shearii F80695 inhibited mushroom tyrosinase and melanin biosynthesis of B16 melanoma cells with $IC_{50}$ value of 9.0 nM and MIC value of $0.9\;{\mu}M$, respectively. Melanocin A also exhibited potent antioxidant activity by scavenging of DPPH and superoxide anion radicals. UV was found to increase the level of hydrogen peroxides and other reactive oxygen species (ROS) in skin tissues. This increase in ROS may not only alter the structure and function of many genes and proteins directly but may also modulate their expressions through signal transduction pathways and, ultimately, lead to skin damage. We investigated the effect of Melanocin A on UV-induced premature skin aging. Firstly, the effect of Melanocin A on UV-induced matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-9 expression in an immortalized human keratinocyte cell line, HaCaT in vitro was investigated. Acute UV irradiation induced MMP-9 expression at both the mRNA and protein levels and Melanocin A suppressed this expression in a dose-dependent manner. We then investigated UV-induced skin changes in hairless mice in vivo by Melanocin A. Chronic exposure of hairless mouse dorsal skin to UV increased skin thickness and induced wrinkle formation and the gelatinase activities of MMP-2 and MMP-9. Moreover, Melanocin A significantly suppressed UV-induced morphologic skin changes and MMP-2 and MMP-9 expression. These results show that Melanocin A can prevent the harmful effects of UV that lead to skin aging. Therefore, we suggest that Melanocin A should be viewed as a potential therapeutic agent for preventing and/or treating premature skin aging. Terrein is a bioactive fungal metabolite isolated from Penicillium species. Terrein has a relatively simple structure and can be easily synthesized. However, the biologic effects of terrein are comparatively unknown. We found for the first time that terrein potently inhibit melanin production in melanocytes and has a strong hypopigmentary effect in a spontaneously immortalized mouse melanocyte cell line, Mel-Ab. Treatment of Mel-Ab cells with terrein (10-100 mM) for 4 days significantly reduced melanin levels in a dose-dependent manner. In addition, terrein at the same concentration also reduced tyrosinase activity. We then investigated whether terrein influences the extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (ERK) pathway and the expression of microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF), which is required for tyrosinase expression. Terrein was found to induce sustained ERK activation and MITF down-regulation, and luciferase assays showed that terrein inhibits MITF promoter activity in a dose-dependent manner. To elucidate the correlation between ERK pathway activation and a decreased MITF transcriptional level, PD98059, a specific inhibitor of the ERK pathway, was applied before terrain treatment and found to abrogate the terrein-induced MITF attenuation. Terrein also reduced the tyrosinase protein level for at least 72 h. These results suggest that terrain reduces melanin synthesis by reducing tyrosinase production via ERK activation, and that this is followed by MITF down-regulation.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.251-263
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• 2013

To explore the device to allow the marriage immigrants' family to take jobs in our country, the social and economic environments that they face are investigated and analyzed through literature survey and field inquiry. The principal motive of the marriage to Korean is economic problem. But their actual economic conditions are inferior, and other legal problems, such as getting jobs and remitting money to their home country, drive them to unstable status. The present hiring policy is applied only to foreign workers with no domestic relations(E-9), hence the marriage immigrants are excluded from the domestic employment. To make institutional devices for giving them the employment opportunity, the modification of the existing laws are proposed. For examples, the 'Act on employment of foreign workers' can be revised to permit immigrant's relatives to get jobs, and 'Immigration control law' can be amended to guarantee legal qualification for taking jobs. It is desirable that the overall control be made by the Prime Minister's Office, and operation as well as surveillance be performed by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MGEF) and the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MEL).

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.679-686
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• 2020

In this thesis, an enhanced method for the feature extraction of vocal source signals and score combination using an MCE-Based weight estimation of the score of multiple feature vectors are proposed for the performance improvement of speaker recognition systems. The proposed feature vector is composed of perceptual linear predictive cepstral coefficients, skewness, and kurtosis extracted with lowpass filtered glottal flow signals to eliminate the flat spectrum region, which is a meaningless information section. The proposed feature was used to improve the conventional speaker recognition system utilizing the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the perceptual linear predictive cepstral coefficients extracted with the speech signals and Gaussian mixture models. In addition, to increase the reliability of the estimated scores, instead of estimating the weight using the probability distribution of the convectional score, the scores evaluated by the conventional vocal tract, and the proposed feature are fused by the MCE-Based score combination method to find the optimal speaker. The experimental results showed that the proposed feature vectors contained valid information to recognize the speaker. In addition, when speaker recognition is performed by combining the MCE-based multiple feature parameter scores, the recognition system outperformed the conventional one, particularly in low Gaussian mixture cases.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
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• v.42 no.11
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• pp.1744-1752
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• 2013

We investigated the protective effect of UVB inducing photodamage from mulberry extract (ME) and Lithospermum erythrorhizon extract (LE). The contents of total anthocyanin and shikonin as a color compound of ME and LE were 4.92 mg/g and 9.58 mg/g, respectively. The electron donating ability and superoxide radical scavenging activity of ME were 84.32% and 76.34%, respectively. The oxygen radical absorbance capacity of the ME ($545.37{\mu}moles$ TE/g) was higher than LE ($427.18{\mu}moles$ TE/g). MMP-1 production in the HS68 cells were exposed to UVB suppressed by treatment with $200{\mu}g/mL$ of ME (68.6%) and LE (32.7%). ME and LE were applied to a skin aging mouse model, which was induced by the irradiation of UVB to the backs of hairless mice. The value of skin erythema index, wrinkle depth and thickness, epidermis thickness, and collagenous fiber damage in the experiment groups (MEL: ME 3%, MEM: ME 5%, MEH: ME 7%, LEL: LE 3%, LEM: LE 5%, LEH: LE 7%) were remarkably reduced than in the control group (only UVB exposure group), while water capacity increased. The level of total wrinkles depth in the skin was decreased to be 30% of the control group by MEH and LEM. These results suggest that ME and LE are useful cosmetic materials for skin protection against UVB-inducing.

• Textile Coloration and Finishing
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.70-79
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• 2015

To establish the optimal conditions for the manufacture of high absortive cellulose film(CF) originated from Styela clava tunic(SCT), the physicochemical properties included absorption was measured in CFs prepared under the various conditions. The highest absorption was observed for SCT-CF20 prepared from the cellulose solution dissolved at $80^{\circ}C$ for 20min, although the filtration treatment did not induce any significance alteration. Also, the absorption was higher in SCT-CF20-F prepared by the freeze drying than SCT-CF20-N(ambient air drying) and SCT-CF20-H(heat drying). The addition of porogen($NaHCO_3$) induced an increase of absorption in SCT-CF20-PF relative to SCT-CF20-F, while the number of interconnected porous structures was enhanced in SCT-CF20-PF. Furthermore, a high level of SK-MEL-2 cells viability was observed in SCT-CF20-PN and SCT-CF20-PF cultured group. These results show that SCT-CF may have high absorption and biocompatibility when prepared from SCT cellulose solution dissolved at $80^{\circ}C$ for 20min after addition of porogen and then subjected to freeze drying.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.180-186
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• 2004

The presence of noise in speech signals degrades the performance of recognition systems in which there are mismatches between the training and test environments. To make a speech recognizer robust, it is necessary to compensate these mismatches. In this paper, we studied about an improvement of stochastic feature extraction based on band-SNR for robust speech recognition. At first, we proposed a modified version of the multi-band spectral subtraction (MSS) method which adjusts the subtraction level of noise spectrum according to band-SNR. In the proposed method referred as M-MSS, a noise normalization factor was newly introduced to finely control the over-estimation factor depending on the band-SNR. Also, we modified the architecture of the stochastic feature extraction (SFE) method. We could get a better performance when the spectral subtraction was applied in the power spectrum domain than in the mel-scale domain. This method is denoted as M-SFE. Last, we applied the M-MSS method to the modified stochastic feature extraction structure, which is denoted as the MMSS-MSFE method. The proposed methods were evaluated on isolated word recognition under various noise environments. The average error rates of the M-MSS, M-SFE, and MMSS-MSFE methods over the ordinary spectral subtraction (SS) method were reduced by 18.6%, 15.1%, and 33.9%, respectively. From these results, we can conclude that the proposed methods provide good candidates for robust feature extraction in the noisy speech recognition.

• The Korea Journal of Herbology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.151-158
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• 2006

Objectives : The purpose of the present study is to observe the neuroprotective effect of the $NeuBo153^{\circledR}$ on transient focal cerebral ischemia in rats. Methods : $NeuBo153^{\circledR}$ was made by mixing the herbs, mainly the root of Panax ginseng, the root of Rehmannia glutinosa and Poria cocos, the stem bark of Acanthopanax senticosus, the root of Scutellaria baicalensis and Mel, and heating for 96 hours. Transient Focal cerebral ischemia (2 h of ischemia, 22 h of reperfusion) was induced by intraluminal suture method with SD rats. Sensory motor function was tested by rotarod test, prehensile traction test, beam balance test and foot fault test at 24 h after ischemia. The brain slices were stained by 2% 2, 3, 5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride and the infarct volume was measured by graphic analyzer at 24 h after ischemia. Results : $NeuBo153^{\circledR}$ treated group did not show significant differences compared with vehicle treated group in body temperature. Oral administration of $NeuBo153^{\circledR}$ reduced brain infarct volume by 29.7% compared with vehicle treated group. $NeuBo153^{\circledR}$ also showed protective effects on sensory motor functional deficits. Conclusion : $NeuBo153^{\circledR}$ treatment reduced brain damage and improved functional deficits induced by MCAo. It showed neuroprotective effects even when treatment was relayed 2 h after injury. Further research is required to evaluating long term functional recovery am accurate therapeutic range and mechanisms.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.23-35
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• 2013

This paper proposes an effective technique that is used to automatically extract feature vectors from vibration signals for fault classification systems. Conventional mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are sensitive to noise of vibration signals, degrading classification accuracy. To solve this problem, this paper proposes spectral envelope cepstral coefficients (SECC) analysis, where a 4-step filter bank based on spectral envelopes of vibration signals is used: (1) a linear predictive coding (LPC) algorithm is used to specify spectral envelopes of all faulty vibration signals, (2) all envelopes are averaged to get general spectral shape, (3) a gradient descent method is used to find extremes of the average envelope and its frequencies, (4) a non-overlapped filter is used to have centers calculated from distances between valley frequencies of the envelope. This 4-step filter bank is then used in cepstral coefficients computation to extract feature vectors. Finally, a multi-layer support vector machine (MLSVM) with various sigma values uses these special parameters to identify faulty types of induction motors. Experimental results indicate that the proposed extraction method outperforms other feature extraction algorithms, yielding more than about 99.65% of classification accuracy.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1440-1447
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• 2019

Currently, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in children is reported to be higher and shows various types of disorders. In particular, they are having difficulty in communication due to communication impairment in the area of social communication and need to be improved through training. Thus, this study proposes a method of acquiring voice information through a microphone mounted on a robot designed through preliminary research and using this information to make intelligent motions. An ANN(Artificial Neural Network) was used to classify the speech data into robot motions, and we tried to improve the accuracy by combining the Recurrent Neural Network based on Convolutional Neural Network. The preprocessing of input speech data was analyzed using MFCC(Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient), and the motion of the robot was estimated using various data normalization and neural network optimization techniques. In addition, the designed ANN showed a high accuracy by conducting an experiment comparing the accuracy with the existing architecture and the method of human intervention. In order to design robot motions with higher accuracy in the future and to apply them in the treatment and education environment of children with autism.

• Particle and aerosol research
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.17-28
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• 2012

Air pollution levels of gases and aerosol particles inside the Jeongneung and Hongjimun tunnels of the Naebu express way in Seoul were investigated through on-road measurement using a mobile emission laboratory (MEL) on February 8, 2011. The concentrations of $NO_x$, $CO_2$, number concentration of particles ranging 21-560 nm, and surface area of particles deposited on a human lung almost linearly increased with increasing distance from the tunnel entrance, and decreased rapidly before the tunnel exit. This trend was observed regardless of tunnel length and driving directions, which thought to be caused by semi-transverse ventilation facilities of the tunnels. The concentration increments per 1-m distance for $NO_x$, $CO_2$, deposited particle surface area, and number of particles ranging 21-560 nm were 0.61~0.80 ppb, 0.16~0.21 ppm, $0.20{\sim}0.29{\mu}m^2/cm^3$, and 117~192 particles/$cm^3$, respectively. Average pollution levels inside the two tunnels for $CO_2$, deposited particle surface area, and number of particles >5.6 nm ranged 681~748 ppm, $246{\sim}381{\mu}m^2/cm^3$, and $2.4{\sim}6.7{\times}10^5$ particles/$cm^3$, respectively. In case of $NO_x$, the maximum concentration exceeded 1 ppm. These pollution levels inside the tunnels are much higher than those at urban background sites. This result can be utilized as basic data to evaluate the effectiveness of present ventilation system for reducing the pollution level caused by vehicles inside the tunnels.