• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.530-539
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• 2019

Brain aging is an inevitable process characterized by structural and functional changes and is a major risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases. Most brain aging studies are focused on neurons and less on astrocytes which are the most abundant cells in the brain known to be in charge of various functions including the maintenance of brain physical formation, ion homeostasis, and secretion of various extracellular matrix proteins. Altered mitochondrial dynamics, defective mitophagy or mitochondrial damages are causative factors of mitochondrial dysfunction, which is linked to age-related disorders. Etoposide is an anti-cancer reagent which can induce DNA stress and cellular senescence of cancer cell lines. In this study, we investigated whether etoposide induces senescence and functional alterations in cultured rat astrocytes. Senescence-associated ${\beta}$-galactosidase (SA-${\beta}$-gal) activity was used as a cellular senescence marker. The results indicated that etoposide-treated astrocytes showed cellular senescence phenotypes including increased SA-${\beta}$-gal-positive cells number, increased nuclear size and increased senescence-associated secretory phenotypes (SASP) such as IL-6. We also observed a decreased expression of cell cycle markers, including PhosphoHistone H3/Histone H3 and CDK2, and dysregulation of cellular functions based on wound-healing, neuronal protection, and phagocytosis assays. Finally, mitochondrial dysfunction was noted through the determination of mitochondrial membrane potential using tetramethylrhodamine methyl ester (TMRM) and the measurement of mitochondrial oxygen consumption rate (OCR). These data suggest that etoposide can induce cellular senescence and mitochondrial dysfunction in astrocytes which may have implications in brain aging and neurodegenerative conditions.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.17-26
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• 2019

We aimed to build a patient-based allergy prevention system using the smartphone and focused on the region of interest (ROI) extraction method for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the general environment. However, the current ROI extraction method has shown good performance in the experimental environment, but the performance in the real environment was not good due to the noisy background. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the compared methods of reducing noisy background to solve the ROI extraction problem. There five methods used as a SMF, DIN, Denoising Autoencoder(DAE), DAE with Convolution Neural Network(DAECNN) and median filter(MF) with DAECNN (MF+DAECNN). We have shown that our proposed DAECNN and MF+DAECNN methods are 69%, respectively, which is relatively higher than the conventional DAE method 55%. The verification of performance improvement uses MSE, PSNR and SSIM. The system has implemented OpenCV, C++ and Python, including its performance, is tested on real images.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.19-26
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• 2022

This paper presents a pre-processing method to facilitate the container's BIC-code recognition. We propose a network that can find ROI(Region Of Interests) containing a BIC-code region and estimate a homography matrix for warping. Taking the structure of STN(Spatial Transformer Networks), the proposed network consists of next 3 steps, ROI detection, homography matrix estimation, and warping using the homography estimated in the previous step. It contributes to improving the accuracy of BIC-code recognition by estimating ROI and matrix using the proposed network and correcting perspective distortion of ROI using the estimated matrix. For performance evaluation, five evaluators evaluated the output image as a perfect score of 5 and received an average of 4.25 points, and when visually checked, 224 out of 312 photos are accurately and perfectly corrected, containing ROI.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.1111-1120
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• 2022

Image Capturing is a matter of viewing images and describing images in language. The problem is an important problem that can be solved by keeping, understanding, and bringing together two areas of image processing and natural language processing. In addition, by automatically recognizing and describing images in text, images can be converted into text and then into speech for visually impaired people to help them understand their surroundings, and important issues such as image search, art therapy, sports commentary, and real-time traffic information commentary. So far, the image captioning research approach focuses solely on recognizing and texturing images. However, various environments in reality must be considered for practical use, as well as being able to provide image descriptions for the intended purpose. In this work, we limit the universally available Korean and English image captioning models and text generation techniques for the purpose of image captioning.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2022.10a
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• pp.225-228
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• 2022

The method of calculating the architectural design cost of the Korean Society of Architecture Policy considers the time spent during the design period. Therefore, faster design times can reduce design costs. As a result of a survey of students majoring in architecture, they felt tiredness from repeated floor plan drawings and difficulties in that there were many things to consider when floor plan drawing. In this paper, we implement a program that can automatically convert sketches into standardized floor plans during the architectural design process and a web app for user convenience. In the proposed method, when a user registers a sketch image through a web app, the program separates the space in the drawing through geometric shapes detection. Based on the dimensions and spatial information shown in the sketch, the outer and inner walls are displayed and the appropriate furniture is placed in the space. Through the proposed method, the design cost can be expected to be reduced by reducing the time of the drawing process in the architectural design stage, and 95.2% of architectural students expressed their intention to use the program.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.86 no.5
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• pp.673-686
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• 2023

Determining the properties of pile from cone penetration test (CPT) is costly, and need several in-situ tests. At the present study, two novel hybrid learning models, namely PSO-RF and HHO-RF, which are an amalgamation of random forest (RF) with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Harris hawks optimization (HHO) were developed and applied to predict the pile set-up parameter "A" from CPT for the design aim of the projects. To forecast the "A," CPT data along were collected from different sites in Louisiana, where the selected variables as input were plasticity index (PI), undrained shear strength (S_u), and over consolidation ratio (OCR). Results show that both PSO-RF and HHO-RF models have acceptable performance in predicting the set-up parameter "A," with R² larger than 0.9094, representing the admissible correlation between observed and predicted values. HHO-RF has better proficiency than the PSO-RF model, with R² and RMSE equal to 0.9328 and 0.0292 for the training phase and 0.9729 and 0.024 for testing data, respectively. Moreover, PI and OBJ indices are considered, in which the HHO-RF model has lower results which leads to outperforming this hybrid algorithm with respect to PSO-RF for predicting the pile set-up parameter "A," consequently being specified as the proposed model. Therefore, the results demonstrate the ability of the HHO algorithm in determining the optimal value of RF hyperparameters than PSO.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.1807-1822
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• 2023

Innovation and rapid increased functionality in user friendly smartphones has encouraged shutterbugs to have picturesque image macros while in work environment or during travel. Formal signboards are placed with marketing objectives and are enriched with text for attracting people. Extracting and recognition of the text from natural images is an emerging research issue and needs consideration. When compared to conventional optical character recognition (OCR), the complex background, implicit noise, lighting, and orientation of these scenic text photos make this problem more difficult. Arabic language text scene extraction and recognition adds a number of complications and difficulties. The method described in this paper uses a two-phase methodology to extract Arabic text and word boundaries awareness from scenic images with varying text orientations. The first stage uses a convolution autoencoder, and the second uses Arabic Character Segmentation (ACS), which is followed by traditional two-layer neural networks for recognition. This study presents the way that how can an Arabic training and synthetic dataset be created for exemplify the superimposed text in different scene images. For this purpose a dataset of size 10K of cropped images has been created in the detection phase wherein Arabic text was found and 127k Arabic character dataset for the recognition phase. The phase-1 labels were generated from an Arabic corpus of quotes and sentences, which consists of 15kquotes and sentences. This study ensures that Arabic Word Awareness Region Detection (AWARD) approach with high flexibility in identifying complex Arabic text scene images, such as texts that are arbitrarily oriented, curved, or deformed, is used to detect these texts. Our research after experimentations shows that the system has a 91.8% word segmentation accuracy and a 94.2% character recognition accuracy. We believe in the future that the researchers will excel in the field of image processing while treating text images to improve or reduce noise by processing scene images in any language by enhancing the functionality of VGG-16 based model using Neural Networks.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.13-22
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• 2024

Currently, with the proliferation of digital devices, the significance of handwritten texts in daily lives is gradually diminishing. As the use of keyboards and touch screens increase, a decline in Korean handwriting quality is being observed across a broad spectrum of Korean documents, from young students to adults. However, Korean handwriting still remains necessary for many documentations, as it retains individual unique features while ensuring readability. To this end, this paper aims to implement an application designed to improve and correct the quality of handwritten Korean script The implemented application utilizes the CRAFT (Character-Region Awareness For Text Detection) model for handwriting area detection and employs the VGG-Feature-Extraction as a deep learning model for learning features of the handwritten script. Simultaneously, the application presents the user's handwritten Korean script's reliability on a syllable-by-syllable basis as a recognition rate and also suggests the most similar fonts among candidate fonts. Furthermore, through various experiments, it can be confirmed that the proposed application provides an excellent recognition rate comparable to conventional commercial character recognition OCR systems.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.259-276
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• 2024

The undrained shear strength is widely acknowledged as a fundamental mechanical property of soil and is considered a critical engineering parameter. In recent years, researchers have employed various methodologies to evaluate the shear strength of soil under undrained conditions. These methods encompass both numerical analyses and empirical techniques, such as the cone penetration test (CPT), to gain insights into the properties and behavior of soil. However, several of these methods rely on correlation assumptions, which can lead to inconsistent accuracy and precision. The study involved the development of innovative methods using extreme gradient boosting (XGB) to predict the pile set-up component "A" based on two distinct data sets. The first data set includes average modified cone point bearing capacity (q_t), average wall friction (f_s), and effective vertical stress (σ_vo), while the second data set comprises plasticity index (PI), soil undrained shear cohesion (S_u), and the over consolidation ratio (OCR). These data sets were utilized to develop XGBoost-based methods for predicting the pile set-up component "A". To optimize the internal hyperparameters of the XGBoost model, four optimization algorithms were employed: Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Social Spider Optimization (SSO), Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA), and Sine Cosine Optimization Algorithm (SCOA). The results from the first data set indicate that the XGBoost model optimized using the Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (XGB - AOA) achieved the highest accuracy, with R2 values of 0.9962 for the training part and 0.9807 for the testing part. The performance of the developed models was further evaluated using the RMSE, MAE, and VAF indices. The results revealed that the XGBoost model optimized using XGBoost - AOA outperformed other models in terms of accuracy, with RMSE, MAE, and VAF values of 0.0078, 0.0015, and 99.6189 for the training part and 0.0141, 0.0112, and 98.0394 for the testing part, respectively. These findings suggest that XGBoost - AOA is the most accurate model for predicting the pile set-up component.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.31-56
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• 2023

As the COVID-19 pandemic is prolonged, non-contact work has increased, as well as the demand for automation of simple and repetitive questions and tasks with success of using them. Therefore, companies are attempting to expand the area of automated business and apply various technologies such as AI to complex and various business processes of E2E to provide automation of all business. However, the extension to Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is still in its beginning stage so that it is difficult to find practical use cases and related solutions. In this aspect, it is safe to say that there is insufficient evidence for companies which have various and complex enterprise processes to make a decision about the adoption. In this study, to solve this problem, a Hyper Automation Platform (HAP) that consists of RPA, Chatbot, and AI technology was proposed. Moreover, an implementation method that can bring intelligent process automation using HAP, and practical use-cases were provided so that it makes it possible to review the implementation of the HAP objectively and comprehensively. This study is meaningful and valuable to check the feasibility of the Hyper Automation concept and to actively utilize HAP.