• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.657-661
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• 2011

The chlorinated dioxins and furans have attracted considerable scientific and public concern because of their environmental persistence and super-toxicity through the foodchain. Recent dioxin scandals in several military bases have also contributed to a higher awareness on the side of food consumers as well as foodwaste combustion. However, there is continuing uncertainty over the relative importance of different sources of dioxins and furans to the soil environment. In difference to those awareness there is a main influence of potential soil contamination on the dioxin contents in groundwater. It is, therefore, important to provide a sound scientific framework and basis by which to evaluate the significance of the presence of dioxin in soils. Consequently, we have to identify the characteristics and nature of dioxin released into the soil environment, especially in agricultural aspect.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.319-323
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• 2015

The performance of diagnostic test accuracy is usually summarized by a variety of statistics such as sensitivity, specificity, predictive value, likelihood ratio, and kappa. These indices are most commonly presented when evaluations of competing diagnostic tests are reported, and it is of utmost importance to compare the accuracies of diagnostic tests to decide on the best available test for certain medical disorder. However, it is important to emphasize that specific point values of these indices are merely estimates. If parameter estimates are reported without a measure of uncertainty (precision), knowledgeable readers cannot know the range within which the true values of the indices are likely to lie. Therefore, when evaluations of diagnostic accuracy are reported the precision of estimates should be stated in parallel. To reflect the precision of any estimate of a diagnostic performance characteristic or of the difference between performance characteristics, the computation of confidential interval (CI), an indicator of precision, is widely used in medical literatures in that CIs are more informative to interpret test results than the simple point estimates. The majority of peer-reviewed journals usually require CIs to be specified for descriptive estimates, whereas domestic veterinary journals seem less vigilant on this issues. This paper describes how to calculate the indices and associated CIs using practical examples when assessing diagnostic test performance.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 2006.03a
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• pp.276-283
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• 2006

Korea is considered to be immune from the earthquake hazard because it is located far away from the active fault. However, recent earthquake caused a loss of lives and economical loss worldwide. Hence there has been raised an importance of the earthquake resistant design for various infrastructures. In this research, the seismic design and evaluation criterion for RC bridge pier were proposed from the experimental results of 82 circular RC bridge piers tested in domestic and aboard. New seismic criterion was introduced the limited ductile design provision suitable to Korean peninsula, which would be classified as a low or moderate seismic region. In addition, further important topic for the seismic safety of RC bridge piers in Korea is the seismic performance enhancement of RC bridge piers, which were designed and constructed before the 1992 seismic design provision. Therefore, the proposed seismic performance evaluation criterion could be very useful to judge seismic retrofit need or not according to the residual seismic performance of the RC bridge piers. Also, it could reduce an uncertainty for the safety of the infrastructure under earthquakes.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.293-309
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• 2018

The prediction of multimode flutter relies, to a larger extent than bimodal flutter, on accurate modeling of the self-excited forces since it is challenging to perform experimental validation by using aeroelastic tests for a multimode case. This paper sheds some light on the accuracy of predicted self-excited forces by comparing numerical predictions of self-excited forces with measured forces from wind tunnel tests considering the flutter vibration mode. The critical velocity and the corresponding flutter vibration mode of the Hardanger Bridge are first determined using the classical multimode approach. Then, a section model of the bridge is forced to undergo a motion corresponding to the flutter vibration mode at selected points along the bridge, during which the forces that act upon it are measured. The measured self-excited forces are compared with numerical predictions to assess the uncertainty involved in the modeling. The self-excited lift and pitching moment are captured in an excellent manner by the aerodynamic derivatives. The self-excited drag force is, on the other hand, not well represented since second-order effects dominate. However, the self-excited drag force is very small for the cross-section considered, making its influence on the critical velocity marginal. The self-excited drag force can, however, be of higher importance for other cross-sections.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.329-339
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• 2019

The strategy for the management of earthquakes is shifting from post recovery to prevention; therefore, seismic performance management requires quantitative predictions of damage and the establishment of strategies for initial responses to earthquakes. Currently, seismic performance evaluation for seismic management in Korea consists of two stages: preliminary evaluation and detailed evaluation. Also, the priority of seismic performance management is determined in accordance with the preliminary evaluation. As a deterministic method, preliminary evaluation quantifies the physical condition and socio-economic importance of a facility by various predetermined indices, and the priority is decided by the relative value of the indices; however, with the deterministic method it is difficult to consider any uncertainty related to the return-year, epicenter, and propagation of seismic energy. Also this method cannot support tasks such as quantitative socio-economic damage and the provision of data for initial responses to earthquakes. Moreover, indirect damage is often greater than direct damage; therefore, a method to quantify damage is needed to enhance accuracy. In this paper, a Seismic Risk Assessment is used to quantify the cost of damage of road facilities in Pohang city and to support decision making.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.115-132
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• 2015

This paper presents a new method for seismic vulnerability assessment of buildings with reference to their operational limit state. The importance of this kind of evaluation arises from the civil protection necessity that some buildings, considered strategic for seismic emergency management, should retain their functionality also after a destructive earthquake. The method is based on the identification of experimental modal parameters from ambient vibrations measurements. The knowledge of the experimental modes allows to perform a linear spectral analysis computing the maximum structural drifts of the building caused by an assigned earthquake. Operational condition is then evaluated by comparing the maximum building drifts with the reference value assigned by the Italian Technical Code for the operational limit state. The uncertainty about the actual building seismic frequencies, typically significantly lower than the ambient ones, is explicitly taken into account through a probabilistic approach that allows to define for the building the Operational Index together with the Operational Probability Curve. The method is validated with experimental seismic data from a permanently monitored public building: by comparing the probabilistic prediction and the building experimental drifts, resulting from three weak earthquakes, the reliability of the method is confirmed. Finally an application of the method to a strategic building in Italy is presented: all the procedure, from ambient vibrations measurement, to seismic input definition, up to the computation of the Operational Probability Curve is illustrated.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.99-115
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• 2014

Uncertainties in design variables and design equations have a significant impact on the safety of geotechnical structures like retaining walls and slopes. This paper presents a possible framework for obtaining the partial safety factors based on reliability approach for different random variables affecting the stability of a reinforced concrete cantilever retaining wall and a slope under static loading conditions. Reliability analysis is carried out by Mean First Order Second Moment Method, Point Estimate Method, Monte Carlo Simulation and Response Surface Methodology. A target reliability index ${\beta}$ = 3 is set and partial safety factors for each random variable are calculated based on different coefficient of variations of the random variables. The study shows that although deterministic analysis reveals a safety factor greater than 1.5 which is considered to be safe in conventional approach, reliability analysis indicates quite high failure probability due to variation of soil properties. The results also reveal that a higher factor of safety is required for internal friction angle ${\varphi}$, while almost negligible values of safety factors are required for soil unit weight ${\gamma}$ in case of cantilever retaining wall and soil unit weight ${\gamma}$ and cohesion c in case of slope. Importance of partial safety factors is shown by analyzing two simple geotechnical structures. However, it can be applied for any complex system to achieve economization.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.159-166
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• 2019

The collection and manipulation of Internet of Things (IoT) data is increasing at a fast pace and its importance is recognized in every sector of our society. For efficient utilization of IoT data, the vast and varied IoT data needs to be reliable and meaningful. In this paper, we propose an IoT framework to realize this need. The IoT framework is based on a four layer IoT architecture onto which context aware computing technology is applied. If the collected IoT data is unreliable it cannot be used for its intended purpose and the whole service using the data must be abandoned. In this paper, we include techniques to remove uncertainty in the early stage of IoT data capture and collection resulting in reliable data. Since the data coming out of the various IoT devices have different formats, it is important to convert them into a standard format before further processing, We propose the RDF format to be the standard format for all IoT data. In addition, it is not feasible to process all captured Iot data from the sensor devices. In order to decide which data to process and understand, we propose to use contexts and reasoning based on these contexts. For reasoning, we propose to use standard AI and statistical techniques. We also propose an experiment environment that can be used to develop an IoT application to realize the IoT framework.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.2299-2318
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• 2019

Location-aware networks are of great importance for both civil lives and military applications. Methods based on line-of-sight (LOS) measurements suffer sever performance loss in harsh environments such as indoor scenarios, where sensors can receive both LOS and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) measurements. In this paper, we propose a data association (DA) process based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, which enables us to exploit multipath components (MPCs). By setting the mapping relationship between the measurements and scatters as a latent variable, coefficients of the Gaussian mixture model are estimated. Moreover, considering the misalignment of sensor position, we propose a space-alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE)-based algorithms to jointly update the target localization and sensor position information. A two dimensional (2-D) circularly symmetric Gaussian distribution is employed to approximate the probability density function of the sensor's position uncertainty via the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), which enables us to calculate the expectation step with low computational complexity. Moreover, a distributed implementation is derived based on the average consensus method to improve the scalability of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed centralized and distributed algorithms can perform close to the Monte Carlo-based method with much lower communication overhead and computational complexity.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.227-242
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• 2019

Seismic isolation systems employ structural control that protect both buildings and vibration-sensitive contents from destructive effects of earthquakes. Structural control is divided into three main groups: passive, active, and semi-active. Among them, semi-active isolation systems, which can reduce floor displacements and accelerations concurrently, has gained importance in recent years since they don't require large power or pose stability problems like active ones. However, their seismic performance may vary depending on the variations that may be observed in the mechanical properties of semi-active devices and/or seismic isolators. Uncertainties relating to isolators can arise from variations in geometry, boundary conditions, material behavior, or temperature, or aging whereas those relating to semi-active control devices can be due to thermal changes, inefficiencies in calibrations, manufacturing errors, etc. For a more realistic evaluation of the seismic behavior of semi-active isolated buildings, such uncertainties must be taken into account. Here, the probabilistic behavior of semi-active isolated buildings under historical pulse-like near-fault earthquakes is evaluated in terms of their performance in preserving structural integrity and protecting vibration-sensitive contents considering aforementioned uncertainties via Monte-Carlo simulations of 3-story and 9-story semi-active isolated benchmark buildings. The results are presented in the form of fragility curves and probability of failure profiles.