Service Life of Illinois Highway Noise Barriers Projected from Current Condition Survey

In a recently completed research project for the Illinois Department of Transportation, the potential service life of each noise barrier material or product currently in use by the Department was evaluated based on the current condition of the barriers in service. The assessment was made by field observation of a majority of the noise barriers in Illinois, and by surveying highway maintenance personnel regarding their observations and experiences with noise barriers in their jurisdictions. The accurate estimation of service life is a necessary component of life-cycle cost analysis of noise barriers, an additional outcome of the research.     

Stacked convolutional auto-encoder representations with spatial attention for efficient diabetic retinopathy diagnosis

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Recently, the attention mechanism has been effectively implemented in convolutional neural networks to boost performance of several computer vision tasks....     

Prelayout estimation of individual wire lengths

We present a novel technique for estimating individual wire lengths in a given standard-cell-based design during the technology mapping phase of logic synthesis. The proposed method is based on creating a black box model of the place and route tool as a function of a number of parameters, which are all available before layout. The place and route tool is characterized, only once, by applying it to a set of typical designs in a certain technology. We also propose a net bounding box estimation technique based on the layout style and net neighborhood analysis. We show that there is inherent variability in wire lengths obtained using commercially available place and route tools-wire length estimation error cannot be any smaller than a lower limit due to this variability. The proposed model works well within these variability limitations     

Carbon nanotubes as photoacoustic molecular imaging agents in living mice

Photoacoustic imaging of living subjects offers higher spatial resolution and allows deeper tissues to be imaged compared with most optical imaging techniques. As many diseases do not exhibit a natural photoacoustic contrast, especially in their early stages, it is necessary to administer a photoacoustic contrast agent. A number of contrast agents for photoacoustic imaging have been suggested previously, but most were not shown to target a diseased site in living subjects. Here we show that single-walled carbon nanotubes conjugated with cyclic Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) peptides can be used as a contrast agent for photoacoustic imaging of tumours. Intravenous administration of these targeted nanotubes to mice bearing tumours showed eight times greater photoacoustic signal in the tumour than mice injected with non-targeted nanotubes. These results were verified ex vivo using Raman microscopy. Photoacoustic imaging of targeted single-walled carbon nanotubes may contribute to non-invasive cancer imaging and monitoring of nanotherapeutics in living subjects.     

On the Constraint Factor and Tabor Coefficient Pertinent to Spherical Indentation

Measuring the uniaxial stress–strain response from indentation testing has been of great interest to the materials community ever since the seminal work on spherical indentation by David Tabor. In this regard, spherical indentation is the primary choice due to the ability to access a wide range of strains in a single test. While indentation testing is fairly simple to perform, the conversion factors required to calculate the uniaxial flow stress from hardness, which is commonly referred to as constraint factor and uniaxial strain from indentation contact radius and ball radius, which is called the Tabor coefficient, are not necessarily constant and most of the prior work involves assumptions about one of these conversion factors to calculate the other. In this work, we present a finite element analysis-based approach to independently determine the constraint factor and Tabor coefficient in the fully plastic indentation regime which is a pre-requisite for this analysis. The criteria to determine whether fully plastic indentation regime is satisfied has also been presented. The proposed approach has been validated by comparing the uniaxial stress–strain response from spherical indentation tests on OFHC copper and the data obtained by conventional uniaxial testing. Excellent agreement has been found between the two approaches which can be readily applied for measuring the uniaxial stress–strain response of coatings which is otherwise difficult to determine.