Organic semiconductors are of interest for (opto)electronic applications due to their low cost, solution processability, and tunable properties. Natural product-derived organic pigments have attracted attention due to their extraordinary environmental stability and unexpectedly good optoelectronic performance, in spite of only partially conjugated molecular structures. Fungi-derived pigments are a naturally sourced,...
Chloride-induced corrosion is one of the primary causes of the degradation of reinforced steel in concrete structures. Currently, the rapid chloride permeability test (RCPT) is the most specified method to determine the concrete’s resistivity to chloride ingress, thus a determining factor in assessing the durability of concrete. While it is...
It is desirable for complex engineered systems to perform missions efficiently and economically, even when these missions' complex, variable, long-term operational profiles make it likely for hazards to arise. It is thus important to design these systems to be resilient so that they will actively prevent and recover from hazards...
Continuous Improvement (CI) of academic computing programs is a main requirement of accreditation. Academic computing programs must have a well-documented CI plan in order to be granted accreditation. Based on the existing literature, we developed a comprehensive CI (or 360-CI) model consisting of 8 components: course, curriculum, administration, faculty, research,...
Managers of forest and plantation ecosystems are encountering growing problems involving plant pathogens and the expanding geographic ranges of these pathogens. Historically unexposed stands are exceptionally vulnerable when a non-native pathogen is introduced because these pathogens can cause devastating disease in a host population that lacks co-evolved resistance mechanisms. One...
Ovarian cancer, “the silent killer,” is one of the deadliest gynecological diseases due to delayed diagnosis, leading to a heavily disseminated and aggressive metastatic cancer. Therapeutic options are limited at stages III-IV of ovarian cancer, in which debulking surgery and cytotoxic chemotherapy remain the mainstays of
intervention. However, these therapeutic...
In Dual-ion Batteries, anions as charge carriers might be a potential technique of energy storage. While fluoride anion has been selected as a promising charge carrier for energy storage due to its high charge/mass ratio and small ionic radius, carbonate anion has never been reported as a charge carrier for...
Biological di-nitrogen (N₂) fixation is a key process in open-ocean ecosystems, where the new nitrogen (N) provided by marine diazotrophs can support a large fraction of primary productivity and carbon (C) drawdown. Recent laboratory studies have shown that elevated pCO₂ enhances the rate of N₂ fixation by select laboratory isolates...
This paper addresses the high model complexity and overconfident frame labeling of state-of-the-art (SOTA) action segmenters. Their complexity is typically justified by the need to sequentially refine action segmentation through multiple stages of a deep architecture. However, this multistage refinement does not take into account uncertainty of frame labeling predicted...
Heatmap regression has became one of the mainstream approaches to localize facial landmarks. As Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are becoming popular in solving computer vision tasks, extensive research has been done on these architectures. However, the loss function for heatmap regression is rarely studied. In...