Review Paper: A critical review of the present and future prospects for electronic paper

Abstract— The commercial success of monochrome electronic paper (e‐Paper) is now propelling the development of next‐generation flexible, video, and color e‐Paper products. Unlike the early battles in the 1980s and 1990s between transmissive and emissive display technologies, there is a extraordinary diversity of technologies vying to become the next generation of e‐Paper. A critical review of all major e‐Paper technologies, including a technical breakdown of the performance limitations based on device physics and commentary on possible future breakthroughs, is presented. In addition, the visual requirements for color e‐Paper are provided and compared to standards used in conventional print. It is concluded that researchers have much work remaining in order to bridge the significant gap between reflective electronic displays and print‐on‐paper.     

Memory effects of all‐solution‐processed oxide thin‐film transistors using ZnO nanoparticles

Abstract— Non‐volatile memory effects of an all‐solution‐processed oxide thin‐film transistor (TFT) with ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) as the charge‐trapping layer are reported. The device was fabricated by using a soluble MgInZnO active channel on a ZrHfO^x gate dielectric. ZnO NPs were used as the charge‐trapping site at the gate‐insulator—channel interface, and Al was used for source and drain electrodes. Transfer characteristics of the device showed a large clockwise hysteresis, which can be used to demonstrate its memory function due to electron trapping in the ZnO NP charge‐trapping layer. This memory effect has the potential to be utilized as a memory application on displays and disposable electronics.     

A new vertical‐alignment LC mode with high‐transmittance and fast‐response‐time features

Abstract— A novel pixel design for vertical‐alignment LCDs with superior transmittance has been developed. The new liquid‐crystal mode, refered to as the hole‐induced vertical‐alignment mode (Hi‐VA), uses a via hole of an organic layer on a TFT substrate to achieve multi‐domain alignment. Compared to the conventional design, the Hi‐VA mode has a transmittance of up to 135% with a contrast ratio of 2000:1. Moreover, the new structure is free from ITO patterning or protrusion on the color‐filter side, which makes the fabrication process simple and low cost.     

Modeling,simulation, and practice of floor control for synchronous and ubiquitous collaboration

Floor control refers to the need for coordinating activities occurred in synchronously cooperating applications shared among collaborators. We address this for ubiquitous collaboration—the capability of multiple users to link together with disparate access device anytime and anywhere. Floor control has been studied for years but most researchers focus on relaxed coordination mechanisms with stationary devices that allow updates by any user on any object and resolve the uncoordinated updates. In this paper we present a floor control mechanism, called XGSP-Floor, which implements a coordination mechanism at application level for enabling users to consistently share the same resource in real time (synchronous collaboration) in ubiquitous collaboration environment. The implementation platform on cell phone devices may not be new. But we believe the implementation and experiment for XGSP-Floor on cell phone devices is a new challenge in ubiquitous collaboration environment even though the coordination mechanism can intuitively impose a tremendous overhead in worst case. We also describe the results of the modeling of XGSP-Floor and formal verification to prove the correctness of the modeling using Colored Petri Nets. We describe lessons learned and discuss future work.     

Binding conformation prediction between human acetylcholinesterase and cytochrome c using molecular modeling methods

The acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is important to terminate acetylcholine-mediated neurotransmission at cholinergic synapses. The pivotal role of AChE in apoptosome formation through the interactions with cytochrome c (Cyt c) was demonstrated in recent study. In order to investigate the proper binding conformation between the human AChE (hAChE) and human Cyt c (hCyt c), macro-molecular docking simulation was performed using DOT 2.0 program. The hCyt c was bound to peripheral anionic site (PAS) on hAChE and binding mode of the docked conformation was very similar to the reported crystal structure of the AChE and fasciculin-II (Fas-II) complex. Two 10ns molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were carried out to refine the binding mode of docked structure and to observe the differences of the binding conformations between the absent (Apo) and presence (Holo) of heme group. The key hydrogen bonding residues between hAChE and hCyt c proteins were found in Apo and Holo systems, as well as each Tyr341 and Trp286 residue of hAChE was participated in cation-pi (π) interactions with Lys79 of hCyt c in Apo and Holo systems, respectively. From the present study, although the final structures of the Apo and Holo systems have similar binding pattern, several differences were investigated in flexibilities, interface interactions, and interface accessible surface areas. Based on these results, we were able to predict the reasonable binding conformation which is indispensable for apoptosome formation.     

Multi-sector multi-range control for self-organizing wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-sector multi-range (MSMR) control algorithm for supporting self-organizing wireless networks. The algorithm enables us to reduce the unnecessary coverage with fine-tuned range control and also to increase the network-wide capacity with enhanced spatial reusability. The proposed algorithm discovers neighboring nodes within the maximum transmission range at every node, divides its transmission area into multiple non-overlapping angular sectors of a given degree, chooses the home sector for each neighboring node according to its relative position, and constructs a spanning subgraph per sector by determining appropriate transmission range to maintain connectivity. Since the range control influences on network connectivity directly, we prove in the first place that the proposed algorithm preserves both network-wide and local connectivity as far as both connectivity exist in the network that uses the maximum transmission range. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we implemented it in the ns-2 simulator, and performed an extensive set of simulation study in comparison with other transmission range control schemes. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme is superior to other schemes with respect to the network-wide throughput and its normalized value per energy in various simulation configurations. In specific, the algorithm achieves minimally one order and maximally two orders of magnitude improvement in those performance evaluations. The improvement becomes more salient as the number of nodes increases and is immune to traffic type, network size, node distribution, or node density.     

Sequence classification via large margin hidden Markov models

We address the sequence classification problem using a probabilistic model based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). In contrast to commonly-used likelihood-based learning methods such as the joint/conditional maximum likelihood estimator, we introduce a discriminative learning algorithm that focuses on class margin maximization. Our approach has two main advantages: (i) As an extension of support vector machines (SVMs) to sequential, non-Euclidean data, the approach inherits benefits of margin-based classifiers, such as the provable generalization error bounds. (ii) Unlike many algorithms based on non-parametric estimation of similarity measures that enforce weak constraints on the data domain, our approach utilizes the HMM’s latent Markov structure to regularize the model in the high-dimensional sequence space. We demonstrate significant improvements in classification performance of the proposed method in an extensive set of evaluations on time-series sequence data that frequently appear in data mining and computer vision domains.     

Higher-order schemes for the Laplace transformation method for parabolic problems

In this paper we solve linear parabolic problems using the three stage noble algorithms. First, the time discretization is approximated using the Laplace transformation method, which is both parallel in time (and can be in space, too) and extremely high order convergent. Second, higher-order compact schemes of order four and six are used for the the spatial discretization. Finally, the discretized linear algebraic systems are solved using multigrid to show the actual convergence rate for numerical examples, which are compared to other numerical solution methods.     

An Experimental Economics Investigation of Shipper-carrier Interactions in the Choice of Mode and Shipment Size in Freight Transport

The paper discusses the theoretical and empirical evidence on the subject and concludes that freight mode choice can be best understood as the outcome of interactions between shippers and carriers, and that mode choice depends to a large extent on the shipment size that results from shipper-carrier interactions. These conclusions are supported by economic experiments designed to test the hypothesis of cooperative behavior. This was accomplished by conducting two sets of experiments (ones with the shipper playing the lead role in selecting the shipment size; and others in which the shipment size decision was left to the carriers), and by comparing their results to the ones obtained numerically under the assumption of perfect cooperation. The comparison of results indicated that the experiments converged to the perfect cooperation case. This is in line with the conclusion from game theory that indicates that under typical market conditions the shipper and carrier would cooperate. These results also imply that it really does not matter who “makes” the decision about the shipment size and mode to be used at a given time period, as over time the shipper—that is the customer—ends up selecting the bids more consistent with its own interest. In other words, these results do not support the assumption that freight mode choice is solely made by the carriers.     

Performance assessment in an interactive call center workforce simulation

In this paper, a new performance assessment methodology for human-in-the-loop call center systems at the level of customer-agent interactions (CAI) is proposed. We develop a team-in-the-loop simulation test bed, to analyze CAI-level performance of a service system using a temporal performance measure with time windows. The proposed framework should allow researchers to collect and analyze individual as well as team performance at a finer granularity than current call center efforts which focus on queue-centered analysis. The software framework is object-oriented and has been designed to be configurable. A sample simulation study in different scenarios is illustrated to provide the usages and advantages of the proposed method with index of Interactive Service Performance.