• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.23-28
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• 2019

In recent years, medium- to large-scale transportation machinery and machine tool manufacturing process lines have shown a trend toward centralization, softening, lightening, and slimming to reduce costs and increase productivity. This has increased the demand for vertical articulated robots. When developing and introducing a heavy weight-handling robot that can be easily applied to existing production lines, it is expected to have a great effect in securing industrial competitiveness by solving industrial issues such as the decreased productivity and increased risk of accidents due to work involving heavy lifting. In this study, we design a 6-axis robot mechanism with a heavy load-handling capacity of 700kg or more for large-sized materials of various types supplied in small quantities.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.565-570
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• 2021

Agriculture in South Korea is losing productivity due to the lack of manpower as aging population increases. To overcome this, the agricultural robot market is growing rapidly, and research is being conducted on remote control and autonomous driving of agricultural robots. This work designs the appearance and structure of agricultural robots and implements the devices and control systems for driving. By utilizing and optimizing LiDAR sensors, we applied object recognition technology, which is an essential function for autonomous driving. This can reduce labor costs and improve productivity of transportation tasks that require the most labor in agriculture.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.65 no.3
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• pp.627-637
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• 2023

As the population and income levels rise, meat consumption steadily increases annually. However, the number of farms and farmers producing meat decrease during the same period, reducing meat sufficiency. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has begun to be applied to reduce labor and production costs of livestock farms and improve productivity. This technology can be used for rapid pregnancy diagnosis of sows; the location and size of the gestation sacs of sows are directly related to the productivity of the farm. In this study, a system proposes to determine the number of gestation sacs of sows from ultrasound images. The system used the YOLOv7-E6E model, changing the activation function from sigmoid-weighted linear unit (SiLU) to a multi-activation function (SiLU + Mish). Also, the upsampling method was modified from nearest to bicubic to improve performance. The model trained with the original model using the original data achieved mean average precision of 86.3%. When the proposed multi-activation function, upsampling, and AutoAugment were applied, the performance improved by 0.3%, 0.9%, and 0.9%, respectively. When all three proposed methods were simultaneously applied, a significant performance improvement of 3.5% to 89.8% was achieved.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.1794-1806
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• 2023

This study presents a method for capturing photographs of users as input and converting them into 2D character animation sprites using a generative adversarial network-based artificial intelligence network. Traditionally, 2D character animations have been created by manually creating an entire sequence of sprite images, which incurs high development costs. To address this issue, this study proposes a technique that combines motion videos and sample 2D images. In the 2D sprite generation process that uses the proposed technique, a sequence of images is extracted from real-life images captured by the user, and these are combined with character images from within the game. Our research aims to leverage cutting-edge deep learning-based image manipulation techniques, such as the GAN-based motion transfer network (impersonator) and background noise removal (U² -Net), to generate a sequence of animation sprites from a single image. The proposed technique enables the creation of diverse animations and motions just one image. By utilizing these advancements, we focus on enhancing productivity in the game and animation industry through improved efficiency and streamlined production processes. By employing state-of-the-art techniques, our research enables the generation of 2D sprite images with various motions, offering significant potential for boosting productivity and creativity in the industry.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.27-35
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• 2024

In accordance with the cloud conversion of public sector information systems and the implementation of cloud native introduction policies, review items were presented to review the cloud native of information systems for stable and efficient cloud native deployment. By presenting cloud native considerations when promoting a project, we propose a plan to flexibly respond to policy and business changes and improve development quality and productivity to operate cloud services stably. In order for information project managers to switch to a cloud-native-based information system in order to efficiently utilize the cloud as a cloud, they must decide whether to introduce cloud-native through suitability review questions and sufficiently review development and operation costs and efficiency to promote the project. As a result of conducting a focus group interview (FGI) with a council of cloud native experts, there was an opinion that information systems can be operated in a cloud-native manner even with a monolithic structure. By fully considering the circumstances of each system, development quality and productivity, we expect to be able to operate improved to provide a stable cloud service.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.182-189
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• 2008

In private and public construction works, cost estimation and site productivity management are based on designed labor quantities calculated by the Standard Quantities per Unit (SQU). The designed labor quantities are regarded as the basis for insurance costs and safety and environmental costs and also affect the progress measurement of construction works. Even though the designed labor quantities from the SQU has been considered to be different from actual labor quantities put to construction works, there is no research that empirically analyzes the statistical differences. This study analyzes actual labor quantities of form workers, steel-bar fabricators, concrete pourers in reinforced concrete works of the 43 apartment projects, and compares the actual labor quantities to labor quantities from the SQU. It goes further to scrutinize the critical reasons underlying the differences through a survey on 65 practitioners and interviews with 32 site managers and supervisors. The regression models of labor quantities of the apartment concrete work produced by the present study will contribute to reasonable construction contracts based on the past actual costs and practical site management by the actual labor quantities.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.134-145
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• 2013

Road construction projects are parcelled into sub-sections which are then tendered to individual contractors for construction. The type of work and equipments used are similar for each sub-section. However, such equipment are not shared on a regular basis among the contractors and only partially performed in an informal and ad hoc manner. Consequently, road construction equipment suffer from low utilization and increased leasing costs. Lean construction and Program Management approaches stress the importance of collaboration among individual participants in a way that increases the collective cost savings of the entire project. This research attempts to apply such theories with the notion that under utilization of expensive equipment can be improved by formalizing a way to enable the sharing of equipment in large, public sponsored, multi-sectioned road construction projects. A system was developed consisting of a set of criteria and processes that enables automatic allocation of equipment to multiple sites on daily basis, in a way that minimizes equipment costs and improves their individual utility. The system was then applied in allocating three different types of equipment to an actual road construction project with four sub-sections for three months. A new metric, nDPR showed that utilization improved for all equipment and also equipment related costs were decreased by 4.45%. Results also showed that increased shared opportunities of equipment correspond to an increase in utilization and cost savings.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.111 no.4
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• pp.583-593
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• 2022

The harvesting system in South Korea faces the problems of aging workers and high wages, so it is necessary to improve the operation system and train workers to use high-performance forestry machines. This study compared the effectiveness and costs of yarding and processing operations between a multi-operation system using a tower yarder (HAM300) and a processor (KESLA 20SH) with those of a single-system using a forestry combi-machine. A whole-tree (cable) yarding operation was conducted in the clear-cutting area located at Compartment 15, Gwangneung Experimental Forest, National Institute of Forest Science, and the productivity and cost of multi- and single-system were analyzed. The productivity of the single-system was 1.5 m³/PMH and 1.6 m³/PMH higher than that of the multi- system because the single-system produced 1 log/cycle more than the multi-system in the yarding operation. The cost was approximately 12.1% lower for the single-system (￦36,113/m³) than for the multi-system (￦41,065/m³). The costs of the single-system and multi-system were decreased by maximums of 22.6% and 15.9%, respectively, by decreasing the idle time.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.291-300
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• 2012

Objectives: We aimed to estimate the annual socioeconomic burden of coronary heart disease (CHD) in Korea in 2005, using the National Health Insurance (NHI) claims data. Methods: A prevalence-based, top-down, cost-of-treatment method was used to assess the direct and indirect costs of CHD (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision codes of I20-I25), angina pectoris (I20), and myocardial infarction (MI, I21-I23) from a societal perspective. Results: Estimated national spending on CHD in 2005 was $2.52 billion. The majority of the spending was attributable to medical costs (53.3%), followed by productivity loss due to morbidity and premature death (33.6%), transportation (8.1%), and informal caregiver costs (4.9%). While medical cost was the predominant cost attribute in treating angina (74.3% of the total cost), premature death was the largest cost attribute for patients with MI (66.9%). Annual per-capita cost of treating MI, excluding premature death cost, was $3183, which is about 2 times higher than the cost for angina ($1556). Conclusions: The total insurance-covered medical cost ($1.13 billion) of CHD accounted for approximately 6.02% of the total annual NHI expenditure. These findings suggest that the current burden of CHD on society is tremendous and that more effective prevention strategies are required in Korea.

• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.362-373
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• 2010

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the costs and benefits of individual home visiting health care using secondary data and literature review. Methods: The total number of subjects was 1,008,837. A specific program was classified into disease management, care of infant, child and women, or elderly care. The costs and effects of a program were identified from a societal perspective, and the effects were converted into monetary terms or benefits. The total cost was calculated in the way that medical expenses, travel costs and productivity losses were offset by the decrease in benefits and thus only the program budget was included in the total cost. Results: The total program cost was 47.6 billion won per year and the total annual benefit was estimated at 435.6 billion won. The benefits of arthritis management were the biggest among disease management programs. The net benefit was 388.0 billion won per year and the benefit/cost ratio was 9.16. Conclusion: Home visiting health care was validated to be economically effective. It made a positive contribution to improving the health status of vulnerable populations and reducing medical expenses. These results suggest that home visiting care should be extended more broadly to vulnerable populations.