Integrated Use of a Continuous Simulation Model and Multi-Attribute Decision-Making for Ranking Urban Watershed Management Alternatives

The objective of this paper is to introduce a continuous simulation-based screening procedure for ranking urban watershed management alternatives using multi-attribute decision making (MADM). The procedure integrates continuous urban runoff simulation results from the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) with the use of an alternative evaluation index (AEI) and MADM techniques, following the driver-pressure-state-impact-response (DPSIR) approach. The analytic hierarchy process estimates the weights of the criteria, and SWMM results are used to quantify the effects of the management alternatives on water quantity and quality metrics. In addition, the tendency of AEI to reflect resident preferences toward management objectives is incorporated to include stakeholder participation in the decision-making process. This systematic decision support process is demonstrated for a Korean urban watershed. According to the AEI, seven alternatives were divided into three groups: poor (0∼0.3), acceptable (0.3∼0.6), and good (0.6∼1). The use of multiple MADM techniques provided a consistency check. The demonstration illustrates the ability of the continuous simulation-based MADM approach to provide decision makers with a ranking of suitable urban watershed management alternatives which incorporate stakeholder feedback.     

Feature‐Based Relation Classification Using Quantified Relatedness Information

Feature selection is very important for feature‐based relation classification tasks. While most of the existing works on feature selection rely on linguistic information acquired using parsers, this letter proposes new features, including probabilistic and semantic relatedness features, to manifest the relatedness between patterns and certain relation types in an explicit way. The impact of each feature set is evaluated using both a chisquare estimator and a performance evaluation. The experiments show that the impact of relatedness features is superior to existing well‐known linguistic features, and the contribution of relatedness features cannot be substituted using other normally used linguistic feature sets.     

Promising zeolite-type hydrocarbon trap catalyst by a knowledge-based combinatorial approach

Libraries consisting of more than 100 zeolite samples were prepared and examined for developing a promising HC trap catalyst. Parallel adsorptions of toluene onto the catalyst samples were conducted over a 10 × 10 array reactor under dry and wet conditions with or without a heating process three knowledge-based conditions for developing an automotive catalyst during the cold-start period. FAU and BEA type zeolites revealed a high performance of toluene adsorption under the dry condition. However, FAU type zeolite significantly decreased the amount of toluene adsorbed in the presence of water in the feed gas stream, mainly due to the hydrophobicity of the catalyst surface. Over Beta type zeolites, the toluene adsorbed was found to be considerably preserved, even after forced desorption temperature-ramping to the warm-up condition of an automotive engine. Li, K, or Ag ion-exchanged Beta zeolites seem to be particularly promising as an HC trap catalyst.     

Noun Sense Identification of Korean Nominal Compounds Based on Sentential Form Recovery

In a machine translation system, word sense disambiguation has an essential role in the proper translation of words when the target word can be translated differently depending on the context. Previous research on sense identification has mostly focused on adjacent words as context information. Therefore, in the case of nominal compounds, sense tagging of unit nouns mainly depended on other nouns surrounding the target word. In this paper, we present a practical method for the sense tagging of Korean unit nouns in a nominal compound. To overcome the weakness of traditional methods regarding the data sparseness problem, the proposed method adopts complement‐predicate relation knowledge that was constructed for machine translation systems. Our method is based on a sentential form recovery technique, which recognizes grammatical relationships between unit nouns. This technique makes use of the characteristics of Korean predicative nouns. To show that our method is effective on text in general domains, the experiments were performed on a test set randomly extracted from article titles in various newspaper sections.     

Synchrotron X-ray reflectivity study of high dielectric constant alumina thin films prepared by atomic layer deposition

High dielectric constant (high-k) gate dielectric alumina films were prepared with nanoscale thicknesses on p-type silicon substrates by atomic layer deposition (ALD) with alternating pulses of trimethyl aluminum, nitrogen, ozone and nitrogen, and some of them were further thermally annealed. These high-k gate dielectric films were characterized by synchrotron X-ray reflectivity (XR), and the XR data were quantitatively analyzed, providing the following structural parameters of each gate dielectric film: the surface roughness and interfacial roughness, the electron density profile, the number of layers, and the thickness of individual layers. These structural characteristics were then analyzed in detail by considering the ALD processing conditions and post-thermal annealing history.     

Optical properties of Si0.8Ge0.2/Si multiple quantum wells

The optical property was studied on the Si_0.8Ge_0.2/Si strained multiple quantum well (MQW) structure grown using ultra-high vacuum chemical vapor deposition (UHV-CVD). Three peaks are observed in Raman spectrum, which are located at about 510, 410, and 300 cm⁻¹, corresponding to the vibration of Si–Si, Si–Ge, and Ge–Ge phonons, respectively. The photoluminescence (PL) spectrum originates from the radiative recombinations both from the Si substrate and the Si_0.8Ge_0.2/Si MQW. For Si_0.8Ge_0.2/Si strained MQW, the transition peaks related to the MQW region observed in the photocurrent (PC) spectrum were preliminarily assigned to electron–heavy hole (e–hh) and electron–light hole (e–lh) fundamental excitonic transitions.     

Identification of Spatial Ranking of Hydrological Vulnerability Using Multi-Criteria Decision Making Techniques: Case Study of Korea

Potential flood damage (PFD), potential streamflow depletion (PSD), potential water quality deterioration (PWQD), and watershed evaluation index (WEI) have been developed to spatially quantify the hydrological vulnerability using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. All criteria are selected on the basis of a sustainability evaluation concept (pressure-state-response model), and their weights are estimated by an Analytic Hierarchy Process, which is also a type of MCDM technique. The MCDM techniques used for the evaluation are composite programming, compromise programming, ELECTRE II, Regime method, and Evamix method; these techniques can be classified according to data availability and objectives (prefeasibility and feasibility). Furthermore, the WEI is improved to reflect the preferences of the residents with regard to management objectives through weights (of PFD, PSD, and PWQD) obtained from questionaires of residents. Finally, this study derives a procedure to identify the spatial investment prioritization using four indices.     

Modeling of surface modification of sewing thread

Second-order regression polynomial mathematical models describing the characteristics of modification of sewing thread by application of coatings were constructed. The adequacy of the regression equations makes the proposed method a good tool for analysis of multifactor mechanisms with a large set of experimental data. __________ Translated from Khimicheskie Volokna, No. 6, pp. 24–28, November–December, 2005.     

Thermal and mechanical behavior of copper molds during thin-slab casting (I): Plant trial and mathematical modeling

Three-dimensional (3-D) finite-element thermal-stress models have been developed to predict temperature, distortion, and residual stress in the mold of continuous casters of thin steel slabs, comparing both funnel-shaped and parallel molds. The mold shape and high casting speed leads to higher mold temperatures and shorter mold life than in conventional slab casters. This study investigates heat flux and the effects of mold shape on distortion and cracking of the thin-slab mold. In Part I of this two-part article, mold wall temperatures measured in the plant were analyzed to determine the corresponding heat-flux profiles in thin-slab molds. This data was then used in an elastic-visco-plastic analysis to investigate the deformation of the molds in service for the two different mold shapes. The model predictions of temperature and distortion during operation match plant observations. During operation, the hot-face temperature reaches 580 °C and heat flux varies from 7 to 4.5 MW/m² when casting at 3.6 m/min. The copper plates bend toward the steel, with a maximum outward distortion of about 0.3 mm. This occurs just above the center of the wide faces and is smaller than the distortion of a conventional slab mold.     

Architectural enhancements for network congestion control applications

Complex network protocols and various network services require significant processing capability for modern network applications. One of the important features in modern networks is differentiated service. Along with differentiated service, rapidly changing network environments result in congestion problems. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of representative congestion control applications-scheduling and queue management algorithms, and we propose application-specific acceleration techniques that use instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and packet-level parallelism (PLP) in these applications. From the PLP perspective, we propose a hardware acceleration model based on detailed analysis of congestion control applications. In order to get large throughputs, a large number of processing elements (PEs) and a parallel comparator are designed. Such hardware accelerators provide large parallelism proportional to the number of processing elements added. A 32-PE enhancement yields 24/spl times/ speedup for weighted fair queueing (WFQ) and 27/spl times/ speedup for random early detection (RED). For ILP, new instruction set extensions for fast conditional operations are applied for congestion control applications. Based on our experiments, proposed architectural extensions show 10%-12% improvement in performance for instruction set enhancements. As the performance of general-purpose processors rapidly increases, defining architectural extensions (e.g., multi-media extensions (MMX) as in multimedia applications) for general-purpose processors could be an alternative solution for a wide range of network applications.