National Cheng Kung University

About: National Cheng Kung University is a education organization based out in Tainan City, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Thin film. The organization has 49723 authors who have published 69799 publications receiving 1437420 citations. The organization is also known as: NCKU.

RNA Viruses: ROS-Mediated Cell Death

Abstract: Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are well known for being both beneficial and deleterious. The main thrust of this review is to investigate the role of ROS in ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus pathogenesis. Much evidences has accumulated over the past decade, suggesting that patients infected with RNA viruses are under chronic oxidative stress. Changes to the body's antioxidant defense system, in relation to SOD, ascorbic acid, selenium, carotenoids, and glutathione, have been reported in various tissues of RNA-virus infected patients. This review focuses on RNA viruses and retroviruses, giving particular attention to the human influenza virus, Hepatitis c virus (HCV), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and the aquatic Betanodavirus. Oxidative stress via RNA virus infections can contribute to several aspects of viral disease pathogenesis including apoptosis, loss of immune function, viral replication, inflammatory response, and loss of body weight. We focus on how ROS production is correlated with host cell death. Moreover, ROS may play an important role as a signal molecule in the regulation of viral replication and organelle function, potentially providing new insights in the prevention and treatment of RNA viruses and retrovirus infections.

Enhancing wireless information and power transfer by exploiting multi-antenna techniques

Abstract: This article reviews an emerging wireless information and power transfer (WIPT) technique with an emphasis on its performance enhancement employing multi-antenna techniques. Compared to traditional wireless information transmission, WIPT faces numerous challenges. First, it is more susceptible to channel fading and path loss, resulting in a much shorter power transfer distance. Second, it gives rise to the issue of how to balance spectral efficiency for information transmission and energy efficiency for power transfer in order to obtain an optimal tradeoff. Third, there exists a security issue for information transmission in order to improve power transfer efficiency. In this context, multi-antenna techniques, e.g. energy beamforming, are introduced to solve these problems by exploiting spatial degree of freedom. This article provides a tutorial on various aspects of multi-antenna based WIPT techniques, with a focus on tackling the challenges by parameter optimization and protocol design. In particular, we investigate the WIPT tradeoffs based on two typical multi-antenna techniques: the limited feedback multi-antenna technique for short-distance transfer; and the large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (LS-MIMO, also known as massive MIMO) technique for long-distance transfer. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.

Models for Effective Deployment and Redistribution of Bicycles Within Public Bicycle-Sharing Systems

Abstract: We develop practical operations research models to support decision making in the design and management of public bicycle-sharing systems. We develop a network flow model with proportionality constraints to estimate the flow of bicycles within the network and the number of trips supported, given an initial allocation of bicycles at each station. We also examine the effectiveness of periodic redistribution of bicycles in the network to support greater flow, and the impact on the number of docks needed. We conduct our numerical analysis using transit data from train operators in Singapore. Given that a substantial proportion of passengers in the train system commute a short distance—more than 16% of passengers alight within two stops from the origin—this forms a latent segment of demand for a bicycle-sharing program. We argue that for a bicycle-sharing system to be most effective for this customer segment, the system must deploy the right number of bicycles at the right places, because this affects the util...

An effective tree structure for mining high utility itemsets

Abstract: Research highlights? In this paper, the high utility pattern tree (HUP tree) is designed. ? The HUP-growth mining algorithm is proposed to derive high utility patterns effectively and efficiently. ? The proposed approach integrates the previous two-phase procedure for utility mining and the FP-tree concept to utilize the downward-closure property and generate a compressed tree structure. In the past, many algorithms were proposed to mine association rules, most of which were based on item frequency values. Considering a customer may buy many copies of an item and each item may have different profits, mining frequent patterns from a traditional database is not suitable for some real-world applications. Utility mining was thus proposed to consider costs, profits and other measures according to user preference. In this paper, the high utility pattern tree (HUP tree) is designed and the HUP-growth mining algorithm is proposed to derive high utility patterns effectively and efficiently. The proposed approach integrates the previous two-phase procedure for utility mining and the FP-tree concept to utilize the downward-closure property and generate a compressed tree structure. Experimental results also show that the proposed approach has a better performance than Liu et al.'s two-phase algorithm in execution time. At last, the numbers of tree nodes generated from three different item ordering methods are also compared, with results showing that the frequency ordering produces less tree nodes than the other two.