Furnace grown gate oxynitride using nitric oxide (NO)

Gate oxynitride was grown in NO for the first time. This approach can provide a tight N accumulation near the Si/SiO₂ interface. Much lower thermal budget is required for an NO process than for an N₂O process to produce an oxynitride with useful properties. Submicron MOSFET's with NO oxynitride showed superior current drive characteristics and comparable hot carrier immunity to those with N₂O oxynitride     

Pulsed laser deposition of indium antimonide

Single crystalline oriented films of indium antimonide have been grown on cadmium telluride substrates by the pulsed laser deposition technique. The films were (111) oriented which is the substrate orientation. The composition of the grown films were found to deviate from that of the target owing to loss of antimony during evaporation. This deviation from stoichiometry led to film-substrate reaction, resulting in mixed interface. The antimony deficiency in the films were controlled by correcting the stoichiometry, which led to avoiding mixed interfaces. The stoichiometric films showed good surface morphology and well defined sharp interfaces. The IR transmission spectrum showed sharp band to band absorption and effective detection in the MWIR. Paper presented at the poster session of MRSI AGM VI, Kharagpur, 1995     

AK-5 tumor-induced expression of interleukin-12: role of IL-12 in NK-mediated AK-5 regression

Spontaneous regression of AK-5, a histiocytic tumor, is mediated by CD3-, CD8+ NK cells through ADCC. The onset of AK-5 regression is associated with the induction of humoral immune response and the augmentation of effector function. The mechanism of tumor cell death involves both necrosis and apoptosis. Interleukin-12, a 75-kDa heterodimeric cytokine, has multiple effects on T and NK cells. We have investigated the role of IL-12 in the NK cell-mediated AK-5 tumor regression process. Subcutaneous transplantation of AK-5 tumor induced the expression of IL-12 (p35 and p40) message by Day 6-8 in the splenocytes of syngenic rats. Similarly, analysis of serum samples from tumor-bearing animals showed the presence of circulating IL-12 around the same time. Interaction of immune cells with antibody-tagged AK-5 cells in vitro also triggered the expression of IL-12 message and protein by 3 hr. The circulating IL-12 in the sera of tumor-rejecting animals, as well as rIL-12, stimulated NK cell proliferation, expression of CD16 and CD25, and the activation of NK cells function. These observations suggest that the ability of the AK-5 tumor to induce the endogenous production of IL-12 may be responsible for keeping the NK cells constantly in an activated state, thus demonstrating an efficient mechanism for the complete regression of the tumor.     

Characterization and Catalytic Properties of Combustion Synthesized Au/CeO2 Catalyst

Ceria-supported Au catalyst has been synthesized by the solution combustion method for the first time and characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Au is dispersed as Au⁰ as well as Au³⁺ states on CeO₂ surface of 20-30 nm crystallites. On heating the as-prepared 1% Au/CeO₂ in air, the concentration of Au³⁺ ions on CeO₂ increases at the expense of Au⁰. Catalytic activities for CO and hydrocarbon oxidation and NO reduction over the as-prepared and the heat-treated 1% Au/CeO₂ have been carried out using a temperature-programmed reaction technique in a packed bed tubular reactor. The results are compared with nano-sized Au metal particles dispersed on -Al₂O₂ substrate prepared by the same method. All the reactions over heat-treated Au/CeO₂ occur at lower temperature in comparison with the as-prepared Au/CeO₂ and Au/Al₂O₂. The rate of NO + CO reaction over as-prepared and heat-treated 1% Au/CeO₂ are 28.3 and 54.0 mol g^-1 s^-1 at 250 and 300 °C respectively. Activation energy (E _a) values are 106 and 90 kJ mol^-1 for CO + O₂ reaction respectively over as-prepared and heat-treated 1% Au/CeO₂ respectively.     

Extracting lexical and phrasal paraphrases: a review of the literature

Recent advances in natural language processing have increased the popularity of paraphrase extraction. Most of the attention, however, has been focused on the extraction methods only without taking the resource factor into the consideration. Unknowingly, there is a strong relationship between them and the resource factor also plays an equally important role in paraphrase extraction. In addition, almost all of the previous studies have been focused on corpus-based methods that extract paraphrases from corpora based solely on syntactic similarity. Despite the popularity of corpus-based methods, a considerable amount of research has consistently shown that these methods are vulnerable to several types of erroneous paraphrases. For these reasons, it is necessary to evaluate whether the trend is moving in a positive direction. This paper reviews the major research on paraphrase extraction methods in detail. It begins by exploring the definition of paraphrase from different perspectives to provide a better understanding of the concept of paraphrase extraction. It then studies the characteristics and potential uses of different types of paraphrase resources. After that, it divides paraphrase extraction methods into four main categories: heuristic-based, knowledge-based, corpus-based and hybrid-based and summarizes their strengths and weaknesses. This paper concludes with some potential open research issues for future directions.     

Oil thermal annealed nano‐structured indium tin oxide thin films for display applications

Indium tin oxide‐coated thin films (200 nm) are deposited on glass substrates by using R.f. sputtering technique. Here, we investigate the influence of new technique of treatment, which is called as “oil thermal annealing” on the nano‐structured indium tin oxide thin films at fixed temperature (150 °C) which improves adhesion strength, electrical conductivity and optical properties (transmittance) of the films. Oil thermal annealing is used to reduce inherent defects that may be introduced during the prepared thin film and cooling processes. Proposed technique is highly suitable for liquid crystal displays, solar cells and organic light emitting diodes, and many other display‐related applications.     

High-throughput drilling of titanium alloys

Experiments of high-throughput drilling of Ti–6Al–4V at 183 m/min cutting speed and 156 mm³/s material removal rate (MRR) using a 4 mm diameter WC–Co spiral point drill were conducted. The tool material and geometry and drilling process parameters, including cutting speed, feed, and fluid supply, were studied to evaluate the effect on drill life, thrust force, torque, energy, and burr formation. The tool wear mechanism, hole surface roughness, and chip light emission and morphology for high-throughput drilling were investigated. Supplying the cutting fluid via through-the-drill holes has proven to be a critical factor for drill life, which can be increased by 10 times compared to that of dry drilling at 183 m/min cutting speed and 0.051 mm/rev feed. Under the same MRR of 156 mm³/s with a doubled feed of 0.102 mm/rev (91 m/min cutting speed), over 200 holes can be drilled. The balance of cutting speed and feed is essential to achieve long drill life and good hole surface roughness. This study demonstrates that, using proper drilling process parameters, spiral point drill geometry, and fine-grained WC–Co tool material, the high-throughput drilling of Ti alloy is technically feasible.     

An integrated semantic-based approach in concept based video retrieval

Multimedia content has been growing quickly and video retrieval is regarded as one of the most famous issues in multimedia research. In order to retrieve a desirable video, users express their needs in terms of queries. Queries can be on object, motion, texture, color, audio, etc. Low-level representations of video are different from the higher level concepts which a user associates with video. Therefore, query based on semantics is more realistic and tangible for end user. Comprehending the semantics of query has opened a new insight in video retrieval and bridging the semantic gap. However, the problem is that the video needs to be manually annotated in order to support queries expressed in terms of semantic concepts. Annotating semantic concepts which appear in video shots is a challenging and time-consuming task. Moreover, it is not possible to provide annotation for every concept in the real world. In this study, an integrated semantic-based approach for similarity computation is proposed with respect to enhance the retrieval effectiveness in concept-based video retrieval. The proposed method is based on the integration of knowledge-based and corpus-based semantic word similarity measures in order to retrieve video shots for concepts whose annotations are not available for the system. The TRECVID 2005 dataset is used for evaluation purpose, and the results of applying proposed method are then compared against the individual knowledge-based and corpus-based semantic word similarity measures which were utilized in previous studies in the same domain. The superiority of integrated similarity method is shown and evaluated in terms of Mean Average Precision (MAP).     

Multistable electro‐optical modes in ferroelectric liquid crystals

Abstract— Multistable electro‐optical modes exist under certain conditions in ferroelectric liquid‐crystal (FLC) cells, which means that any light‐transmission level can be memorized after the driving voltage is switched off. The multistability is responsible for three new electro‐optical modes with different shapes of the gray‐scale curve that can be either S‐shaped (double or single dependent upon the applied‐voltage pulse sequence and boundary conditions) or V‐shaped dependent upon boundary conditions and FLC cell parameters. The origin of these modes will be described.