New Releases by Hoang Nguyen

Super-Resolution imaging refers to modern techniques of achieving resolution below conventional limits. This book gives a comprehensive overview of mathematical and computational techniques used to achieve this, providing a solid foundation on which to develop the knowledge and skills needed for practical application of techniques. Split into five parts, the first looks at the mathematical and probabilistic tools needed, before moving on to description of different types of imaging; single-wave, anomaly, multi-wave and spectroscopic and nanoparticle.As an important contribution to the understanding of super-resolution techniques in biomedical imaging, this book is a useful resource for scientists and engineers in the fields of biomedical imaging and super-resolution, and is self-contained reference for any newcomers to these fields.

Acetaldehyde impacts the sensory properties of wine, not only by conferring aroma but also by reacting with other wine constituents and consequently altering color and mouthfeel. Recent studies have suggested that acetaldehyde, while normally thought of as a product of chemical oxidation, may be produced by the post-fermentation metabolism of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in oxidative conditions. To test this hypothesis, red wine with a population of yeast remaining from alcoholic fermentation was either sterile-filtered or left unfiltered, and either saturated with oxygen or left unoxygenated. Although oxygen was rapidly consumed by residual yeast, whose populations were maintained with the provision of oxygen, acetaldehyde decreased rather than accumulating as was observed in previous studies. However, other volatile aroma compounds associated with yeast metabolism were higher in the unfiltered wine than in the filtered suggesting yeast can continue to influence wine flavor after the completion of fermentation. To investigate the possibilities that acetaldehyde accumulation is strain-dependent and/or that chemical consumption by wine constituents may outpace acetaldehyde formation, unfiltered synthetic wine made with different strains of S. cerevisiae was oxygenated and acetaldehyde was monitored. While concentrations were higher in the synthetic wine compared to in real wine and acetaldehyde dynamics were found to be strain-dependent, no accumulation occurred, with levels instead unchanging or declining for all strains tested. In contrast to the previous studies, the net consumption of acetaldehyde observed in these experiments suggests that more than just yeast and oxygen are required for acetaldehyde production.

Cyber Physical System (CPS) is an integration of an embedded system with network coupled tightly with physical processes and is considered as the next generation of embedded systems. As a CPS needs to respond simultaneously to the changes in the environment that it is monitoring, the computational cost and real-time constraints are the main challenges and important factors when designing an effective CPS. To overcome these challenges, Chip Multi-Processors (CMP) have been used to enhance the overall system performance by exploring the computational parallelism. Nevertheless, the performance of the whole system is still constrained by the overhead of data transfers between sensors/actuators and processors. While CMP just needs about a few microseconds to execute the control algorithm to make a decision, it may need tens of microseconds to copy the dataset among sensors/actuators, external memory, and internal memory of CMP [22]. In this thesis, in order to accelerate the access time between sensors/actuators and processors, we introduce an I/O processing scheme combined with a DMA data prefetching optimization technique. Typically, the I/O data is first placed into main memory which takes many clock cycles to access from processors. In this method, the I/O data is placed directly into SPM which reduces the access time between processor and I/O data. To do this, this approach uses DMA to transfer data between I/O port and on-chip memory. In addition, in this approach, we propose a DMA operation optimization technique to reduce the latency by placing DMA operation initialization on processors'' idle time frames. The experimental results collected by using benchmark programs and graphs generated by TGFF tool clearly show that the proposed approach improves performance of the system significantly. Based on the normalized performance gains using three to five-core CPSs in our experiment results, our approach brings up to 25% improvement on the average in execution time compared to the traditional I/O data transfer scheme without using DMA optimization technique.

Honeycomb reactor is often used in pollution abatement applications. A typical commercial honeycomb reactor is made of a ceramic material, which is deposited with the high surface area washcoat carrier such as Al2O3. The polluted gases enter the reactor channels and diffuse through this porous structure to the catalytic sites where they are converted to less harmful gases. Stringent environmental regulations have driven the markets toward increasing engine efficiencies and better after-treatment strategies. Achieving high hydrocarbon conversion requires comprehensive information about the thermal and concentration fields inside the monolith reactor. The concentration fields can be studied by a Spatially Resolved Capillary Inlet Mass Spectrometer technique (Spaci-MS). On the other hand, the temperature field is often measured by positioning thermocouples at various locations inside the monolith channel, which can be intrusive to the reactor and not suitable for fast transient processes. To overcome this limitation, I use a new optoelectronic technique called coherent optical frequency domain reflectometry (c-OFDR). This technique enables instant temperature measurement along a fiber with high spatial and temporal resolutions. The objectives of my works are: i) illustrate the capability of the c-OFDR method to measure transient temperature inside the monolith channel, ii) employed c-OFDR method to analyze the veracity of the concentration measurement by the Spaci-MS probe, iii) develop the experimental setup combining the c-OFDR and Spaci-MS techniques to study the dynamic behaviors of the Pt/CeO2/Al2O3 catalyst system under periodic lean-rich operation.

A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood—as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form—has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.

This paper analyses the international linkages of the Korean economy using the GVAR model developed by Greenwood-Nimmo, Nguyen and Shin (2012a, J. Appl. Econometrics). By employing a combination of generalized impulse response analysis and forecast error variance decompositions, we uncover a number of interesting phenomena. Among our most important results are the findings that the real economy and the financial markets are highly sensitive to the oil price even though it has little effect on inflation and that the interest rate is set largely without recourse to overseas conditions except to the extent that they are captured by the exchange rate. We find that the dominant sources of overseas influence on the Korean economy are the US, the Eurozone, Japan and China. Korea''s complex and open linkages with these countries will inevitably pose challenges for domestic economic management and stabilization policy faced by the Korean monetary and fiscal authorities.

Planarians, free-living flatworms, are able to regenerate complete individuals from miniscule fragments. However, little is known about the effects of regeneration on aging, or senescence, in planarians. Using an asexual strain of the planarian, Schmidtea mediterranea, we studied long-term differences in aging between the two fragments of fission, the anterior (head) and posterior (tail), by tracking fecundity and viability. Fecundity was quantified by measuring patterns in the time interval between fissions. Viability was tracked as survival rates over time. We created separate lines of successive heads and successive tails for observation. We present the first demonstration that the head and tail products of fission are not identical with respect to aging. Lines of successive heads showed aging through reduced fecundity over time; and all lines ultimately died out. Conversely, lines of successive tails showed no aging based on uniform fecundity and no recorded deaths. Furthermore, we found that all tails were equally rejuvenated regardless of the age of the original planarian at the time of fission. Thus, asexual fission can act as a mechanism for rejuvenation in tails at the cost of aging in heads.

In contrast to a current propellant-based rocket, the concept in this thesis uses the rotational mass to create an imbalanced centrifugal force in a non-circular enclosure, which results in a propulsion force being generated. The approach to analyze and validate this imbalance centrifugal force using the simple harmonic motion method through the use of Mathematica software to solve and plot out the cam profile curve, the velocity, the acceleration, the centrifugal force, and the linear momentum. This thesis would be an ideal solution to space propulsion. Furthermore, this concept is lightweight, especially compared to expellants, because the necessary thrust is self-contained, repeated, and reused.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop an algorithm to compute all the characteristic numbers of genus one curves in projective spaces of arbitrary dimension. The characteristic numbers of genus zero curves, genus zero curves with an ordinary node, genus zero curves with an ordinary cusp are also computed en route.

"We generalize the portfolio shifts model advanced by Evans and Lyons (2002a; b), and develop the dynamic asymmetric portfolio shifts (DAPS) model by explicitly allowing for possible market under- and overreactions and for asymmetric pricing impacts of order flows. Using the Reuters D2000-1 daily trading data for eight currency markets over a four-month period from 1 May to 31 August 1996, we find strong evidence of a nonlinear cointegrating relationship between exchange rates and (cumulative) order flows: The price impact of negative order flows (selling pressure) is overwhelmingly stronger than that of the positive ones (buying pressure). Through the dynamic multiplier analysis, we find two typical patterns of the price discovery process. The markets following overreactions tend to display a delayed overshooting and a volatile but faster adjustment towards equilibrium whereas the market following underreactions are generally characterized by a gradual but persistent adjustment. In our model, these heterogeneous adjustment patterns reflect different liquidity provisions associated with different market conditions following under- and overreactions. In addition, the larger is the mispricing, the faster is the overall adjustment speed, a finding consistent with Abreu and Brunnermeier (2002) and Cai et al. (2011). We also find that underreactions are followed mostly by positive feedback trading while overreactions are characterized by delayed overshooting in the short run but corrected by negative feedback trading at longer horizons, the finding is consistent with Barberis et al. (1998) who show that positive short-run autocorrelations (momentum) signal underreaction while negative long-run autocorrelations (reversal) signal overreaction."--Abstract.

Nguyen examines mortgage fraud as an inherent part of the subprime mortgage crisis. He traces the exponential growth of mortgage fraud to the loose underwriting standards, alternative loan products, and inadequate regulation and regulatory oversight of the subprime mortgage industry. He describes the various financial crimes constituting mortgage origination fraud, a form of fraud involving fraud for profit, fraud for property, and predatory lending. The accounts of mortgage frauds by industry insiders presented in this book provide a chilling view of the criminal implications of an unregulated financial industry. Nguyen proposes several broad recommendations highlighting the need to recognize the potential for insider fraud, enhance government regulation and oversight, tighten loan qualification requirements, and increase standards of underwriting.

The thesis evaluates the benefit of allowing for long memory volatility dynamics in forecasts of the variance-covariance matrix for asset allocation. First, I compare the forecast performance of multivariate long memory conditional volatility models (the long memory EWMA, long memory EWMA-DCC, FIGARCH-DCC and Component GARCH-DCC models) with that of short memory conditional volatility models (the short memory EWMA and GARCH-DCC models), using the asset allocation framework of Engle and Colacito (2006). The research reports two main findings. First, for longer horizon forecasts, long memory volatility models generally produce forecasts of the covariance matrix that are statistically more accurate and informative, and economically more useful than those produced by short memory volatility models. Second, the two parsimonious long memory EWMA models outperform the other models - both short memory and long memory - in a majority of cases across all forecast horizons. These results apply to both low and high dimensional covariance matrices with both low and high correlation assets, and are robust to the choice of estimation window. The research then evaluates the application of multivariate long memory conditional volatility models in dynamic asset allocation, applying the volatility timing procedure of Fleming et al. (2001). The research consistently identifies the economic gains from incorporating long memory volatility dynamics in investment decisions. Investors are willing to pay to switch from the static to the dynamic strategies, and especially from the short memory volatility timing to the long memory volatility timing strategies across both short and long investment horizons. Among the long memory conditional volatility models, the two parsimonious long memory EWMA models, again, generally produce the most superior portfolios. When transaction costs are taken into account, the gains from the daily rebalanced dynamic portfolios deteriorate; however, it is still worth implementing the dynamic strategies at lower rebalancing frequencies. The results are robust to estimation error in expected returns, the choice of risk aversion coefficients and the use of a long-only constraint. To control for estimation error in forecasts of the long memory high dimensional covariance matrix, the research develops a dynamic long memory factor (the Orthogonal Factor Long Memory, or OFLM) model by embedding the univariate long memory EWMA model of Zumbach (2006) into an orthogonal factor structure. The factor-structured OFLM model is evaluated against the six above multivariate conditional volatility models in terms of forecast performance and economic benefits. The results suggest that the OFLM model generally produces impressive forecasts over both short and long forecast horizons. In the volatility timing framework, portfolios constructed with the OFLM model consistently dominate the static and other dynamic volatility timing portfolios in all rebalancing frequencies. Particularly, the outperformance of the factor-structured OFLM model to the fully estimated LM-EWMA model confirms the advantage of the factor structure in reducing estimation error. The factor structure also significantly reduces transaction costs, making the dynamic strategies more feasible in practice. The dynamic factor long memory volatility model also consistently produces more superior portfolios than those produced by the traditional unconditional factor and the dynamic factor short memory volatility models.

A concise introduction to the core concepts in digital communication, providing clarity and depth through examples, problems and MATLAB exercises.

Hair occlusion often causes automated melanoma diagnostic systems to fail. We present a new method to segment hair in dermoscopic images. First, all possible dark and light hairs are amplified without prejudice with a universal matched filtering kernel. We then process the filter response with a novel tracing algorithm to get a raw hair mask. This raw mask is skeletonized to contain only the centerlines of all the possible hairs. Then the centerlines are verified by applying a model checker on the response and the original images. If a centerline indeed corresponds to a hair, the hair is reconstructed; otherwise it is rejected. The result is a clean hair mask which can be used to disocclude hair. Application on real dermoscopic images yields good results for thick hair of varying colours. The algorithm also performs well on skin images with a mixture of both dark and light hair.

Economists, industry practitioners, and government officials have failed to observe the significance of mortgage fraud as an inherent problem related to the subprime mortgage crisis. Relying on intensive interviews with 23 subjects, previously and currently employed in the subprime lending industry, government reports, media accounts, and a variety of secondary sources, this study traces the exponential growth of mortgage fraud to loose underwriting standards, alternative loan products, and inadequate regulation and regulatory oversight of the subprime mortgage industry. The research findings detail and describe various types of financial crimes that constitute a modern form of mortgage fraud; unlike their traditional counterpart, contemporary mortgage fraud contain elements of both fraud for profit and fraud for property. Various types and patterns of mortgage fraud - "data manipulation," "data fabrication," and "concerted ignorance"--Completely altered the function of the subprime industry. Toward this end, the industry operated not only to provide bad loans to bad credit borrowers but also to provide bad loans to bad credit borrowers who fully lacked the ability to repay the loans. The social and economic implications of fraud are also explored in light of the findings. From a policy perspective, future fraud prevention and intervention strategies should incorporate a multi-faceted approach that includes strict underwriting standards, regulatory oversight, accountability, and mandatory continuous education for loan practitioners.

Purpose: To evaluate the changes in retention of pink Locator attachments after exposure to various denture cleansers...