Synthesis and characterization of monodisperse uniformly shaped respirable aerosols

The top‐down, micromolding technique, referred to as Particle Replication in Nonwetting Templates (PRINT^®), affords a new opportunity for the generation of inhalation therapeutics. Powders were fabricated with predetermined particle size and shape; when dispersed with a collision jet nebulizer, these particles resulted in monodisperse aerosols with geometric standard deviations well below 1.2. Dynamic shape factors for this novel set of uniformly shaped particles were determined by correcting the drag of nonspherical particles in the ultra‐Stokesian flow conditions of the aerodynamic particle sizer (APS). This convenient approach for shape factor determination agreed well with current literature approaches and allowed for the correction of APS results for particles with known volumes. Determined shape factor values of PRINT geometries were used to estimate the theoretical median aerodynamic diameters of individual aerosols, which were then compared to actual inhalation powders. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 59: 3184–3194, 2013     

Development of Undergraduate Students’ Professional Skills

The development of engineering students’ professional skills has gained considerable national attention from Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, the National Academy of Engineering, ASCE, and other constituents. There is little debate that these professional skills are necessary. Engineering programs have tried many approaches to develop these skills in the undergraduate programs. Colorado State University (CSU) has developed a new approach modeled on the type of professional development that occurs in the professional environment. This new Professional Learning Institute (PLI) provides students with a broad array of workshops, presentations, and experiential opportunities addressing the areas of cross cultural communication and teamwork, innovation, leadership, ethics, and public service. This program introduces students to the concept of professional development through required extracurricular activities, includes minimum requirements along with requirements to earn certificates in specialty areas for motivated students. The majority of offerings in the PLI are presented by leaders from the engineering profession who have teamed with CSU to provide high quality programs for our students.     

A novel sequence representation for unsupervised analysis of human activities

Formalizing computational models for everyday human activities remains an open challenge. Many previous approaches towards this end assume prior knowledge about the structure of activities, using which explicitly defined models are learned in a completely supervised manner. For a majority of everyday environments however, the structure of the in situ activities is generally not known a priori. In this paper we investigate knowledge representations and manipulation techniques that facilitate learning of human activities in a minimally supervised manner. The key contribution of this work is the idea that global structural information of human activities can be encoded using a subset of their local event subsequences, and that this encoding is sufficient for activity-class discovery and classification.In particular, we investigate modeling activity sequences in terms of their constituent subsequences that we call event n-grams. Exploiting this representation, we propose a computational framework to automatically discover the various activity-classes taking place in an environment. We model these activity-classes as maximally similar activity-cliques in a completely connected graph of activities, and describe how to discover them efficiently. Moreover, we propose methods for finding characterizations of these discovered classes from a holistic as well as a by-parts perspective. Using such characterizations, we present a method to classify a new activity to one of the discovered activity-classes, and to automatically detect whether it is anomalous with respect to the general characteristics of its membership class. Our results show the efficacy of our approach in a variety of everyday environments.     

A simple background elimination method for Raman spectra

In this paper, we consider a new background elimination method for Raman spectra. The proposed method is based on peak detection, smoothing, and interpolation. Since the background is usually slowly varying with respect to wavelength, we could estimate the background by eliminating significant peaks. For this purpose, we seek the peaks by inspecting the smoothed derivative of a given spectrum. After clipping out the corresponding peak regions, we estimate the background by applying a modified linear interpolation. Then the background is eliminated from the measured Raman spectrum by simple subtraction. The experimental results showed that the proposed method gave satisfactory results for real Raman spectra as well as synthetic data. As the proposed method requires no prior knowledge of spectrum, we expect that the method could be applied to other spectral data as well.     

Evaluation of antimicrobial effects of lauric arginate on reduction of Salmonella spp. in ground chicken

The efficacy of lauric arginate (LAE) on Salmonella survivability in ground chicken containing 9.8% fat was determined under refrigerated storage. The effect of LAE treatments on total aerobes, pH and objective colour were also assessed in ground chicken. LAE was highly effective against Salmonella in 0.1% peptone with no detectable survivors following treatment with 200 ppm and 400 ppm of LAE. No difference existed (P > 0.05) in the growth of Salmonella and total aerobes after treatment with 200 and 400 ppm of LAE in ground chicken inoculated with a four strain mixture of Salmonella. At these concentrations, LAE did not exhibit any treatment effect on the pH and colour of ground chicken (P > 0.05). In conclusion, although LAE possesses strong inhibitory (P < 0.05) effect against Salmonella in suspension in 0.1% peptone water, no inhibitory (P > 0.05) effect on growth of Salmonella was observed in ground chicken at the currently approved levels of 200 ppm of LAE.     

Situvis: A sensor data analysis and abstraction tool for pervasive computing systems

Pervasive systems are large-scale systems consisting of many sensors capturing numerous types of information. As this data is highly voluminous and dimensional, data analysis tasks can be extremely cumbersome and time-consuming. Enabling computers to recognise real-world situations is an even more difficult problem, involving not only data analysis, but also consistency checking. Here we present Situvis, an interactive visualisation tool for representing sensor data and creating higher-level abstractions from the data. This paper builds on previous work, Clear et al. (2009) [8] through evolved tool functionality and an evaluation of Situvis. A user-trial consisting of 10 participants shows that Situvis can be used to complete the key tasks in the development process of situation specifications in over 50% less time than an improvised alternative toolset.     

BGA评估中使用的分析方法

球珊阵列（BGAs）在印刷电路板（PCB）组件上已经相当常见，进而带来了新的故障模式，要求新的分析工具或方法，以便正确评估这些元件。传统式SMT元件，如SOICs或OFPs，允许以可视方式检测焊点，查找异常情况；而BGAs则做不到这一点，因为大多数焊点隐藏在元件下面，人眼是看不到的。本文讨论了STI实验室遇到的部分故障模式，以及进行调查使用的工具和方法。