SeeNSearch: A context directed search facilitator for home entertainment devices

The Internet has become an extremely popular source of entertainment and information. But, despite its growing popularity, most websites today are accessed by keyword search via web browsers, making it difficult for home consumers to locate Internet content of interest on their TVs or other devices that lack keyboards. In this paper, we present assistive technologies, enabling users to easily locate Internet content related to the TV program they are watching. Access is enabled via an intuitive user interface on the TV screen or by using a secondary personal device, and thus avoiding disrupting the viewing experience of the other TV users.     

Accelerated Sulfur Evolution Reactions by TiS2/TiO2@MXene Host for High-Volumetric-Energy-Density Lithium–Sulfur Batteries (Adv. Funct. Mater. 35/2023)

The poor cycling stability and low volumetric energy density of lithium–sulfur batteries compared with lithium-ion batteries are hindering their practical applications. Here, it is demonstrated that a dense sulfur electrode containing heavy TiS₂/TiO₂@MXene heterostructures can tackle these issues. It is observed that the TiO₂ part functionally anchors the lithium polysulfides through the strong chemical affinity, and the TiS₂ part serves as an efficient electrocatalyst to enhance the kinetics of sulfur evolution reactions. Benefitting from these synergistic effects, the TiS₂/TiO₂@MXene heterostructures effectively suppress the shuttle effects, leading to superior cyclability of the sulfur cathode with a low capacity decay of 0.038% per cycle for 500 cycles at a current rate of 1 C. More encouragingly, a highly dense S/TiS₂/TiO₂@MXene cathode exhibits a high volumetric energy density of 2476 Wh L⁻¹ (based on the volume of the composite) at a high sulfur mass loading of 7.5 mg cm⁻² and lean electrolyte of 5 µL mg⁻¹. The electrochemical performance is comparable to or even superior to the lithium-ion and lithium–sulfur batteries reported in the literature. This study provides an effective strategy to design stable and high-volumetric-energy-density lithium–sulfur batteries for practical energy storage applications.     

Bone conduction reception: head sensitivity mapping

This study sought to identify skull locations that are highly sensitive to bone conduction (BC) auditory signal reception and could be used in the design of military radio communication headsets. In Experiment 1, pure tone signals were transmitted via BC to 11 skull locations of 14 volunteers seated in a quiet environment. In Experiment 2, the same signals were transmitted via BC to nine skull locations of 12 volunteers seated in an environment with 60 decibels of white background noise. Hearing threshold levels for each signal per location were measured. In the quiet condition, the condyle had the lowest mean threshold for all signals followed by the jaw angle, mastoid and vertex. In the white noise condition, the condyle also had the lowest mean threshold followed by the mastoid, vertex and temple. Overall results of both experiments were very similar and implicated the condyle as the most effective location.     

Correction to: Evaluation of a machine learning classifier for metamodels

Software and Systems Modeling -     

Atmospheric corrosion of carbon steel under field exposure in the southern part of Vietnam

The corrosion behavior of carbon steel with and without shelter at four test sites (four cities) in the south of Vietnam was investigated in terms of the environmental factors such as average relative humidity, rainfall, sulphur dioxide and chloride depositions, and various exposure periods. The mass losses of the specimens with shelter at four test sites were related to SO₂ concentration at each site. Without shelter, the mass loss at HoChiMinh was lower than that with shelter, whereas those of the other sites were higher without shelter than with shelter. Although the corrosion behavior at HoChiMinh was difficult to explain based on the environmental factors, it was estimated from a protective corrosion products caused by a synergistic effect among SO₂ concentration, rain and sunlight.     

The effect of dislocation loops on the light emission of silicon LEDs

Remarkably strong infrared light emission was recently observed from silicon p/sup +/-n diodes. In several publications a causal relation is proposed between the larger-than-expected light intensity and the existence of lattice damage around the junction. In this letter, we present direct experimental evidence that lattice damage is in fact detrimental to the efficiency of light emission of silicon LEDs. The experiments call for a revision of the explanation for strong light emission in this type of devices.     

An Upward Max-Min Fairness Multipath Flow Control

Many rate allocation algorithms for multipath flows which satisfy max-min fairness are centralized and not scalable. Upward max-min fairness is a well-known relaxation of max-min fairness and can be achieved by an algorithm extended from water-filling algorithm. In this paper, we propose a price-based multipath congestion control protocol whose equilibrium point satisfies upward max-min fairness. Our protocol is derived from a network utility maximization model for multipath flows.

     

Comparison of sublethal injury induced in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium by heat and by different nonthermal treatments

We have studied sublethal injury in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium caused by mild heat and by different emerging nonthermal food preservation treatments, i.e., high-pressure homogenization, high hydrostatic pressure, pulsed white light, and pulsed electric field. Sublethal injury was determined by plating on different selective media, i.e., tryptic soy agar (TSA) plus 3% NaCl, TSA adjusted to pH 5.5, and violet red bile glucose agar. For each inactivation technique, at least five treatments using different doses were applied in order to cover an inactivation range of 0 to 5 log units. For all of the treatments performed with a technique, the logarithm of the viability reductions measured on each of the selective plating media was plotted against the logarithm of the viability reduction on TSA as a nonselective medium, and these points were fined by a straight line. Sublethal injury between different techniques was then compared by the slope and the y intercept of these regression lines. The highest levels of sublethal injury were observed for the heat and high hydrostatic pressure treatments. Sublethal injury after those treatments was observed on all selective plating media. For the heat treatment, but not for the high-pressure treatment, sublethal injury occurred at low doses, which were not yet lethal. The other nonthermal techniques resulted in sublethal injury on only some of the selective plating media, and the levels of injury were much lower. The different manifestations of sublethal injury were attributed to different inactivation mechanisms by each of the techniques, and a mechanistic model is proposed to explain these differences.     

Design space exploration of SW beamformer on GPU

Ultrasound imaging has become one of the most widely used modalities in medical diagnosis today. However, real‐time ultrasound imaging requires large amount of data transfer and massive computation and therefore mainly relies on a complex dedicated hardware system. A recent trend of a graphics processing unit (GPU) based software‐based approach offers the advantages of flexibility and quick implementation. The GPUs have been reported as excellent accelerators across a wide range of applications. For best exploiting outstanding computational power and high memory bandwidth of a GPU, the paper explores the design space of implementing an ultrasound beamformer on a GPU platform. The design spaces are expanded by applying different optimization strategies to the beamformer on a GPU platform, and we also discuss the performance evaluation results on the various GPUs whose architectural characteristics are different to each others. The performance analysis shows that by optimizing CUDA code, our real‐time‐GPU‐based beamformer can be successfully implemented with 181 frames per second (fps) and speedup of 230.6X compared with the single‐threaded implementation on a high‐performance CPU platform. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.