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In dealing with a max-value cost function over the parameter interval in optimization of dynamic systems, we propose a treatment of directly handling the original max-value cost function in order to avoid the computational burden of the transformation treatment using an artificial design variable. In this paper, it is theoretically shown that the transformation treatment results in demanding an additional equality constraint as a part of the Kuhn–Tucker necessary conditions. Also, it is demonstrated that the usability and feasibility conditions on the search direction of the transformation treatment retard the convergence rate. To investigate the numerical performances of both treatments, typical optimization algorithms in ADS are employed to solve a min–max steady-state response optimization. All the algorithms tested reveal that the suggested direct treatment is more efficient and stable than the transformation treatment. Also, better performance of the direct treatment over the transformation treatment is clearly shown by contrasting the convergence paths in the design space of the sample problem. Three min–max transient response optimization problems are also solved by using both treatments, and the comparisons of the results confirm that the performances of the direct treatment are better than those of the transformation treatment. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

New rosin-based photoactive polyamideimides (PAI-a and PAI-b) with a large second-order nonlinear optical coefficient and photoinduced birefringence were synthesized by the polycondensation of rosin-maleic anhydride adduct (RMA) with azo-dye diamines, 2-(2-{ethyl-[4-(4-nitrophenylazo)phenyl]aminoethoxy)benzene-1,4-diamine (4a) or 2-(2-[ethyl-[4-(4-methylsulfonylphenylazo)phenyl]amino}ethoxy)benzene-1,4-diamine (4b). Due to the bulky alicyclic structure of the rosin, these polymers were highly soluble in organic solvents and could easily be processed by spin-coating into thin films of high optical quality. Fabricated polymer films were very smooth, tough, adhesive to the substrate, and optically clear. Second-order nonlinear optical coefficients (d 33 ) of the corona-poled PAI-a and PAI-b films were 83 and 54 pm/V, respectively, at the fundamental wavelength of 1064 nm. Birefringences as high as 0.072 for PAI-a and 0.035 for PAI-b could be induced and erased repeatedly by the irradiation of linearly polarized and circularly polarized 532-nm light, respectively.

This letter presents a new microelectromechanical system-based tunable LC filter that utilizes a tunable capacitor and a tunable inductor in a single device. An electrically floating metal plate is located between the tunable capacitor and the tunable inductor. As the floating metal plate is thermally moved and used commonly for both the capacitor and inductor, the device provides an ultra-wide continuous frequency tuning range by a simultaneous increase or decrease of the capacitance and inductance. The fabricated tunable LC filter showed a continuous frequency tuning ratio in excess of 127% in a range of 8.8 GHz to more than 20 GHz.

A layer of a new bifunctional photoreactive side-chain copolymer (SCCP) is used for aligning liquid crystal (LC) molecules. The SCCP consists of a photo-crosslinking group as well as photo-isomerizing group. For producing uniform alignment of a nematic LC, a linearly polarized ultraviolet (LPUV) light is exposed to the SCCP film. The quality and the stability of the LC alignment upon the LPUV exposure are studied.

This study proposes a design methodology for determining configurations of subamient pressure shaped rail sliders by using a nonlinear programming technique in order to meet the desired flying characteristics over the entire recording band. The desired flying characteristics considered in this study are to minimize the variation in flying height from a target value, to keep the pitch angle within a suitable range, and to ensure that the outside rail flies lower than the inside rail even with the roll distribution due to manufacturing process. The design variables selected are recess depth, geometry of the air bearing surface, and pivot location in the transverse direction of the slider. The method of feasible directions in Automated Design Synthesis (ADS) is utilized to automatically find the optimum design variables which simultaneously meet all the desired flying characteristics. To validate the suggested design methodology, a computer program is developed and applied to a 30 percent/15 nm twin rail slider and a 30 percent/15 nm tri-rail slider. Simulation results for both sliders demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed design methodology by showing that the flying characteristics of the optimally designed sliders are enhanced in comparison with those of the initial ones.

We have investigated electro-optic properties of nonlinear optical polymer with self-crosslinkable groups in the side chain, which we synthesized previously. The system includes crosslinkable epoxy-functionalized copolymer with Tg around 120°C, second harmonic coefficient as high as 45.5 pm/V at 632 nm, and with good temporal stability of the poling-induced chromophore orientation obtained by self-crosslinking reactions in the polymer matrix during the poling process. Successful strategies for simultaneous poling and self-crosslinking during the poling without addition of crosslinking agents are presented. Significant improvement in the temporal stability of chromophore orientation was accomplished up to 90%.

The second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) itaconite copolymer was synthesized to study the effect of temperature and time on the electro-optic effect. The aminonitrostilbene chromophore was synthesized to be bound to itaconate polymer backbone. Particularly, two chromophoric groups were present to enhance the dipole moment in one repeating unit of polyitaconate. The resistance and electric potential between the two electrodes were characterized with temperature. The electro-optic signal and coefficient were investigated using the modified reflection technique. The time-resolved study gave much information on how the electro-optic property can be brought about. Temporal stability was also observed at various temperatures, which around and far below glass transition temperature.

We synthesized the second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) copolymers for studying the effect of temperature on the temporal stability of electro-optic effect. Heterocyclic azo chromophore was synthesized to be bound to methacrylate and naphthalate polymer backbone. Particularly, amino methylsulfonylbenzothiazole was employed to prepare the azo chromophore. Second harmonic generation can give us the relationship between the second harmonic signal and sample temperature during corona poling. The decaying behavior of second harmonic signal was traced at different temperature that is in the vicinity of the glass transition temperature.

Mesogenic and azo monomer were synthesized and copolymerized to get liquid crystalline copolymer such as polymethacrylate (CP I). Another copolymer (CP II) was prepared with methylmethacrylate using the same azo monomer used above. Trans-cis isomerization of two copolymers was observed under UV-irradiation. The stability of photoinduced birefringence in CP I was found better than that of CP II.

We simply synthesized the triethoxysilane bearing the second-order nonlinear optical(NLO) active chromophore or chalcone derivatives. In order to improve the poor temporal stability of second-order NLO effect in sol-gel matrix, we introduced the photo-crosslink between the side chain. themselves. Photo-crosslink formation was confirmed with UV-VIS absorption and infrared vibrational spectroscopy. Under a polarized light, we investigated the decaying behavior of molecular order parameter after corona poling.

A second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) chromophore (disperse red 1) was reacted with (3-isocyanatopropyl)triethoxysilane to form a functionalized silicon alkoxide precursor (SGDR1). To improve the temporal stability of the second-order NLO effect, we employed a thermal cross-link between the organic side groups themselves. (3-Glycidoxypropyl)trimethoxysilane was mixed with SGDR1 in tetrahydrofuran (SGDR1/GPTS). We compared the temporal stability of the poled samples with SGDR1 and SGDR1/GPTS. We investigated second-order NLO properties of sol−gel films by virtue of second harmonic generation (SHG) and linear electrooptic (E/O) coefficient measurements for the purpose. We achieved much improvement in the temporal stability of second-order NLO effect at high temperature with the heterogeneous films.

This paper addresses stochastic linkage modeling for mechanical error analysis of planar mechanisms. Considering the effects of joint angle variations, the effective link length model is generalized. The generalized model produces more accurate predictions of mechanical errors than the effective link length model. However, the generalization requires more complicated mechanical error analysis. This paper proposes a stochastic model to intuitively consider the effects of tolerances and clearances, based on the clearance vector concept. Stochastic models are applied to typical mechanisms and their results are compared with those of Monte Carlo simulations. The comparison shows that the proposed stochastic model is effective for mechanical error analysis. The clearance vector model yields more accurate results and is easier to use than the generalized effective link length model.

With the evolution of IT technologies, large-scale graph data have lately become a growing interest. As a result, there are a lot of research results in large-scale graph analysis on Hadoop. The graph analysis based on Hadoop provides parallel programming models with data partitioning and contains iterative phases of MapReduce jobs. Therefore, the effectiveness of data partitioning depends on how the data partitioning maintains data locality in each node of cluster. In this paper, we propose a semi-clustering scheme for large-scale graph analysis such as PageRank algorithm on Hadoop and show that the proposed scheme is effective. With experiment results, PageRank computation with the semi-clustering improves the performance.

Recently, research on big data has been actively made because big data are generated in various scientific applications, such as biology and astronomy. Therefore, distributed data processing techniques have been studied to manage the big data in large number servers. Meanwhile, some scientific applications like genome data analysis require loop control in analyzing big data using a MapReduce framework. In this paper, we first describe the existing MapReduce-based distributed systems which support iterative data processing. In addition, we do the performance analysis of the existing distributed systems in terms of execution time for various scientific applications which require iterative data processing. Finally, based on the performance analysis, we discuss some requirements for a new MapReduce-based distributed system which supports iterative data processing efficiently.

Aho-Corasick (AC) algorithm is a commonly used string matching algorithm. It performs multiple patterns matching for computer and network security, bioinformatics, among many other applications. These applications impose high computational requirements, thus efficient parallelization of the AC algorithm is crucial. In this paper, we present a multi-stream based parallelization approach for the string matching using the AC algorithm on the latest Nvidia Kepler architecture. Our approach efficiently utilizes the HyperQ feature of the Kepler GPU so that multiple streams generated from a number of OpenMP threads running on the host multicore processor can be efficiently executed on a large number of fine-grain processing cores. Experimental results show that our approach delivers up to 420Gbps throughput performance on Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU.

As global Internet business has been evolving, large-scale graphs are becoming popular. PageRank computation on the large-scale graphs using Hadoop with default data partitioning method suffers from poor performance because Hadoop scatters even a set of directly connected vertices to arbitrary multiple nodes. In this paper we propose a semi-clustering scheme to address this problem and improve the performance of PageRank on Hadoop. Our scheme divides a graph into a set of semi-clusters, each of which consists of connected vertices, and assigns a semi-cluster to a single data partition in order to reduce the cost of data exchange between nodes during the computation of PageRank. The semi-clusters are merged and split before the PageRank computation, in order to evenly distribute a large-scale graph into a number of data partitions. Our semi-clustering scheme drastically improves the performance: total elapsed time including the cost of the semi-clustering computation reduced by up to 36%. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our scheme increases as the size of the graph increases.

Second-order nonlinear optical properties of the polymers of N -phenylmaleimides coupled with nonlinear optical (NLO) chromophores through urethane linkages were investigated. N -[4-(Azidocarbonyl)phenyl]-maleimide, the precursor of the isocyanato N -phenylmaleimide, was prepared and reacted with NLO chromophores, N -(4-nitrophenyl)- l -prolinol (NPP) or 4′-[(2-hydroxyethyl)methylamino]-4-nitrostilbene (ANS) to give monomer 5 or monomer 6 . The monomers were polymerized and copolymerized with methyl methacrylate (MMA) and styrene (ST). The nonresonant linear electro-optic (EO) coefficients, r 33 values of the copolymers of 5 with MMA or ST corona-poled under 0.6 MV cm −1 were found to be about 10–15 pm V −1 when measured at 632.8 nm, and those measured at 830 nm were lower by 15–20%. The r 33 values of the copolymers of 6 with MMA measured at 632.8 nm and 830 nm were 25–35 pm V −1 and 8–10 pm V −1 , respectively. The homopolymer of 5 showed the excellent thermal stability of the EO coefficient, which retained 85% of its original value when aged at 80°C for 48 h. The EO coefficients of the copolymers were 45–70% of their original values after 48 h at 80°C. At room temperature, no decay of r 33 values of all polymers was observed over a period of 1 month. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.

This paper proposes a design method for determining the configuration of a TPC slider by using an optimization technique in order to meet the desired flying characteristics over the entire recording band. The desired flying characteristics considered in this study are to minimize the variation in flying height from a target value, to maintain the pitch angle as large as possible, to keep the roll angle as small as possible, and to keep the outside rail to fly lower than the inside rail. The design variables selected are left-side step width, pad width, right-side step width, side step depth, front taper height, and pivot offset in the transverse direction of the slider. The sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method in Automated Design Synthesis (ADS) is used to efficiently find the optimum design variables which simultaneously meet all the desired flying characteristics. To validate the suggested design method, a computer program is developed and applied to the configuration design of two TPC slider models positioned by a rotary actuator. The optimum configurations of each slider model are automatically obtained for three different target flying heights with the same predefined skew angle range without any difficulty. This shows the effectiveness of the proposed design method in comparison with the conventional one based on the parametric study.

We simply synthesized the triethoxysilane bearing the second-order nonlinear optical(NLO) active chromophore in the side chain. In order to improve the poor temporal stability of second-order NLO effect, we introduced the thermal crosslink between the side chain themselves. We prepared two different silane solutions; one is composed of triethoxysilane with NLO chromophore (SGDR1) only. The other consists of SGDR1 and 3-glycidoxypropyl trimethoxysilane. Thermal crosslink formation was traced with in-situ infrared spectroscopy. We achieved much improvement of the temporal stability of second-order NLO effect utilizing this crosslinked composite system.

This paper presents an efficient approach for dynamic responseoptimization based on the ALM method. In this approach, an approximateaugmented Lagrangian is employed for line searches while an exactaugmented Lagrangian is used for finding search directions. An importantfeature of this study is that the approximate augmented Lagrangian forline search is composed of the linearized cost and constraint functionsprojected on the search direction. The quality of this approximationshould be good since an approximate penalty term is found to have almostsecond-order accuracy near the optimum. Quasi-Newton and conjugategradient algorithms are used to find exact search directions and a goldensection method followed by a cubic polynomial approximation is employedfor line search. The numerical performance of the proposed approach isinvestigated by solving eight typical dynamic response optimizationproblems and comparing the results with those in the literature. Thiscomparison shows that the suggested approach is robust and efficient.

This paper presents an effective analysis approach for a flexible rotor in ball bearings with nonlinear stiffness characteristics to obtain realistic dynamic behavior results. The ball bearing is modeled in five degrees of freedom and the nonlinear stiffness characteristics of the bearing are completely described as functions of combined loads and spin speed. For dynamic behavior analysis of the nonlinear rotor-bearing system, a transfer-matrix method is iteratively used until the bearing displacements and the shaft displacements at every bearing location converge to the same values. The results show that the nonlinear stiffness characteristics of ball bearings significantly influence system dynamic behaviors and the proposed analysis approach for the nonlinear rotor-bearing system is effective.

Since the optical flying head (OFH) for magnetooptical recording systems requires stricter static and dynamic characteristics of slider air bearings within an optical tilt tolerance over the entire recording band than conventional magnetic head sliders in hard disk drives, a new design to keep the focusing and tracking ability stable is essential. This paper proposes a design methodology to automatically determine the optimum configurations of the OFH satisfying the desired design requirements by using the proposed design framework. The desired flying characteristics considered in this paper are to minimize the variation in flying height between the solid immersion lens (SIL) and the disk from a target value, satisfying the restriction of the minimum flying height to keep the pitch and roll angles within an optical tilt tolerance and to ensure a higher air-bearing stiffness. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methodology by showing that the static and dynamic flying characteristics of the optimally designed OFH are enhanced in comparison with those of the original. The gap between the SIL and the MO disk can be kept at less than 100 nm, even if the optical tilt tolerance of the SIL is considered.

Many practical design problems are multidisciplinary and typically involve the transfer of complex information between analysis modules. In solving such problems, the method for performing multidisciplinary analyses greatly affects the speed of the total design time. Thus, it is very important to group and order a multidisciplinary analysis (MDA) process so as to minimize the total computational time and cost by decomposing a large multidisciplinary problem into several subsystems and then processing them in parallel. This study proposes a decomposition method that exploits parallel computing, including the determination of an optimal number of subsystems by using a multi-objective optimization formulation and a messy genetic algorithm (GA) modified to handle discrete design variables. In the suggested method, an MDA process is decomposed and sequenced for simultaneously minimizing the feedback couplings within each subsystem, the total couplings between subsystems, the variation of computation times among subsystems, and the computation time of each subsystem. The proposed method is applied to the decomposition of an artificial complex system example and a multidisciplinary design problem of a rotorcraft with 17 analysis modules; promising results are presented using this proposed method.

Second-order nonlinear optical sol-gel materials containing a nonlinear optically active chromophore in the side chain were synthesized. The chromophore was covalently bonded to the silicon oxide network. Second-order nonlinear optical properties of the sol-gel films were investigated in terms of the second harmonic generation (SHG) and linear electro-optic (EO) coefficient measurement. The SHG coefficient, d 33 was found to be 20–44 pm/V at the fundamental wavelength of 1064 nm and the EO coefficient, r 33 was found to be 67–113 pm/V at 633 nm.

Second-order nonlinear optical copolymer containing p-hydroxyphenyl maleimide as a comonomer was newly synthesized. Second-order nonlinear optical properties of the poled films were investigated in terms of the second harmonic generation (SHG) and linear electrooptic (EO) coefficient measurement. SHG coefficient, d33 was found to be 14 pm/V at the fundamental wavelength of 1064 nm and EO coefficient, r33 was found to be 25-30 pm/V at 633 nm wavelength. To prevent the orientational relaxation of poled polymer, the thermal crosslink reaction was induced using diisocyanate as a crosslinker between the side chains themselves. Temporal stabilities of second-order NLO coefficients of crosslinked polymer systems were proved much better than that of guest-host system or other side chain polymers. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Developing a novel vaccine that can be applied against multiple strains of influenza virus is of utmost importance to human health. Previously, we demonstrated that the intranasal introduction of Fc-fused IL-7 (IL-7-mFc), a long-acting cytokine fusion protein, confers long-lasting prophylaxis against multiple strains of influenza A virus (IAV) by inducing the development of lung-resident memory-like T cells, called TRM-like cells. Here, we further investigated the mechanisms of IL-7-mFc-mediated protective immunity to IAVs. First, we found that IL-7-mFc treatment augments the accumulation of pulmonary T cells in 2 ways: recruiting blood circulating T cells into the lung and expanding T cells at the lung parenchyma. Second, the blockade of T cell migration from the lymph nodes (LNs) with FTY720 treatment was not required for mounting the protective immunity to IAV with IL-7-mFc, suggesting a more important role of IL-7 in T cells in the lungs. Third, IL-7-mFc treatment also recruited various innate immune cells into the lungs. Among these cells, plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) play an important role in IL-7-mFc-mediated protective immunity through reducing the immunopathology and increasing IAV-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses. In summary, our results show that intranasal treatment with IL-7-mFc modulates pulmonary immune responses to IAV, affecting both innate and adaptive immune cells.

Correction for ‘Thermally activated delayed fluorescence blue dopants and hosts: from the design strategy to organic light-emitting diode applications’ by Mallesham Godumala et al., J. Mater. Chem. C, 2016, DOI: 10.1039/c6tc04377a.

Recently, biological applications start to be reimplemented into the applications which exploit many cores of GPUs for better computation performance. Therefore, by providing virtualized GPUs to VMs in cloud computing environment, many biological applications will willingly move into cloud environment to enhance their computation performance and utilize infinite cloud computing resource while reducing expenses for computations. In this paper, we propose a BioCloud system architecture that enables VMs to use GPUs in cloud environment. Because much of the previous research has focused on the sharing mechanism of GPUs among VMs, they cannot achieve enough performance for biological applications of which computation throughput is more crucial rather than sharing. The proposed system exploits the pass-through mode of PCI express (PCI-E) channel. By making each VM be able to access underlying GPUs directly, applications can show almost the same performance as when those are in native environment. In addition, our scheme multiplexes GPUs by using hot plug-in/out device features of PCI-E channel. By adding or removing GPUs in each VM in on-demand manner, VMs in the same physical host can time-share their GPUs. We implemented the proposed system using the Xen VMM and NVIDIA GPUs and showed that our prototype is highly effective for biological GPU applications in cloud environment.

We synthesized novel side chain copolymers containing the stilbazolium tetraphenylborate for the linear electro-optic coefficient measurement. These polymers are very soluble in common organic solvents such as acetone, cyclohexanone, dimethylformamide etc. The second-order nonlinear optical properties of poly [1-[(N- ethylenepiperazyl)-stilbazolium tetraphenylborate]-N-[(1, l-dimethyl-m-isopropenyl)benzyl]carbamate-co-methylmethacrylate](POLYMER Ia & Ib), poly [l-[(N-ethylenepiperazyl)-stilbazolium tetraphenyl borate]-N-[(1,1-dimethyl-m-isopropenyl)benzyl]carbamate-co-N-vinylcarbazole](POLYMER II), and poly [1-[(N- ethylenepiperazyl)-stilbazolium tetraphenyl borate]-N-[(1, 1-dimethyl-m-Isopropenyl)benzyl]carbamate-co-4-hydroxyphenyl maleimide] (POLYMER III) were improved due to the change of the nonlinear optical chromophore in the side chain.

In this paper, an optimization technique is utilized to find an optimum configuration of the taper-flat slider positioned by a rotary actuator for enhanced static air-bearing characteristics. The aim of optimization consists in simultaneously minimizing the variation in flying height from a target value, maximizing the smallest pitch angle, and minimizing the largest roll angle, over the entire magnetic recording band. As the design variables, the leading edge taper angle and rail width of a taper-flat slider, and the skew angle at the inside track are chosen since they seem to be the most influential parameters on air-bearing characteristics. The optimum design variables are automatically obtained by using the augmented Lagrange multiplier method, and the static characteristics of the optimally designed sliders are found to be superior to those of the taper-flat sliders of typical configuration over the entire recording band. Results obtained for three taper-flat slider models are reported, showing the effectiveness of the proposed design scheme.

A self-crosslinkable second-order nonlinear optical copolymer with thermal stability at 100°C was prepared by the copolymerization of methacrylic nonlinear optical monomer with glycidyl methacrylate. The nonlinear optical property of this copolymer was compared with that of well-known side-chain polymer P2ANS. Electro-optic coefficient and second harmonic generation measurements showed a r33 value of 57 pm/V at 632.8 nm and a d33 value of 45.5 pm/V at 1064 nm. Moreover, self-crosslinking during poling was observed between the epoxy groups in the copolymer without adding any crosslinking agent and thus the copolymer showed an excellent thermal stability of aligned chromophores at 100°C. It is thought that the crosslinking was performed between the epoxy groups due to the catalytic basicity of tertiary amine groups in the NLO monomer.

Second-harmonic generation (SHG) has been studied for understanding the enhancement mechanism for the second-order optical nonlinearity by the nematic (or axial) ordering in a liquid crystal doped with one-dimensional nonlinear optical (NLO) organic molecules. An extended version of the Maier-Saupe mean-field theory for nematic liquid crystals was developed to obtain analytical expressions for the second-order NLO coefficients in terms of the axial order, the polar order and the effective nematic potential. From the SHG data in a guest-host system composed ofN,N'-dimethylaminonitrostilbene molecules (0.5% by weight) and a liquid crystal, the enhancement of the second-order NLO coefficient,d33, by nematic ordering becomes almost 3, which agrees well with our theoretical predictions.

SummaryAn algorithm for the motion planning of the multifingered hand is proposed to generate finite displacements and changes in orientation of objects by considering sliding contacts as well as rolling contacts between the fingertip and the object at the contact point. Specifically, a nonlinear optimization problem is firstly formulated and solved to find the minimum joint velocity and the minimum contact force to impart a desired motion to the object at each time step. Then, the relative velocity at the contact point is found by calculating the velocity of the fingertip and the object at the contact point. Finally, time derivatives of the surface variables and the contact angle of the fingertip and the object at the current time step is computed using the Montana's contact equation to find the contact parameters of the fingertip and the object at the next time step. To show the validity of the proposed algorithm, a numerical example is illustrated by employing the robotic hand manipulating a sphere with three fingers each of which has four joints

To understand the chiroptical responses of polyfluorenephenylene (PFP) films, circular dichroism (CD), surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), attenuated total reflection (ATR), and spectroscopic ellipsometry studies were performed. The pristine PFP films exhibited significant CD at room temperature, and the chirality increased by thermal annealing at 120 degrees C (above the glass transition temperature). SERS and ATR spectra indicated that the chirality enhancement was due to the rearrangement of the polymer backbones on the glass substrate by thermal annealing and/or self-organization. In addition, comparison of PFP and polyfluorene polymers indicated that molecular structure of polymer backbone plays an important role in the chiroptical responses of the chiral polymers. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America

The purpose of this study is to automatically design the air-bearing surface shape to meet all desired flying performances using global approximation concepts. The reduced basis concept is used to reduce the number of design variables. The progressive quadratic response surface modeling is used to handle the nonsmooth and discontinuous cost and constraint functions. A multicriteria optimization problem is formulated to enhance the flying performance over the entire recording band during the steady-state and track-seek operations as well as the fast takeoff performance. Optimum solutions for the three target flying heights with four basis models are successfully obtained.

Improvement to the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines was evaluated in a Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection mouse model examining the combined effects of nonlytic Fc-fused IL-7 DNA (IL-7-nFc) and Flt3-ligand fused Mtb32 (F-Mtb32) DNA. Mice were treated with conventional chemotherapy for 6 weeks from 4 weeks after aerosol infection of MTB. Following the start of chemotherapy, DNA immunizations were administered five times with 2-week intervals. Coadministration of IL-7-nFc and F-Mtb32 DNA given during chemotherapy synergistically enhanced the magnitude of Mtb32-specific T cell responses and sustained for one-year after the last immunization assessed by IFN-γ ELISPOT assay. After dexamethasone treatment, a significantly reduced MTB reactivation was observed in mice received both IL-7-nFc and F-Mtb32 DNA, compared with F-MTb32 DNA alone or with control mice. In addition, mice treated with IL-7-nFc and F-Mtb32 DNA together showed improved lung pathology and reduced pulmonary inflammation values relative to F-Mtb32 DNA or saline injected mice. Intracellular cytokine staining revealed that the protection levels induced by combination therapy with IL-7-nFc and F-Mtb32 DNA was associated with enhanced Mtb32-specific IFN-γ secreting CD4(+) T cell responses and CD8(+) T cell responses stimulated with CTL epitope peptide in the lungs and spleens. These data suggest that IL-7-nFc as a novel TB adjuvant may facilitate therapeutic TB DNA vaccine to the clinics through significant enhancement of codelivered DNA vaccine-induced T cell immunity.

In this study, we propose a new filtered diagonal quadratic approximate (FDQA) algorithm adopting the concept of a nonlinear acceptance filter for enhancing convergence property of convex and separable approximations based on dual subproblems. The proposed nonlinear acceptance filter tests whether the current optimum point is acceptable or not. If the current optimum point is rejected by the filter, the inner iteration is conducted until an acceptable optimum point is found. We also propose several values to obtain a more conservative approximation in the inner iteration stage. To investigate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm, two benchmark numerical examples and a structural topology optimization problem are solved. From the numerical tests, the proposed FDQA algorithm is found to be robust by improving convergence ability without worsening efficiency. In case of the topology optimization problem of minimizing compliance subject to a volume constraint with penalization parameter of three, the proposed algorithm is found to well converge in a efficient manner while the other three competing algorithms do not converge in a maximum number of iterations specified.

The regioregular hexyl-substituted poly(3,4-ethylenedioxy-2-thiophenylthiophene) (PEDOTt), structurally alternating copolymer of EDOT and thiophene, was synthesized via the Grignard Metathesis (GRIM) using catalytic amounts of Ni(dppp)Cl2. The products were characterized by 1H NMR spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy and XRD. The alkyl-substituted conjugated polymer showed an enhancement of solubility in common organic solvents. Based on XRD data, the regioregular hexyl-substituted poly(3,4-ethylenedioxy-2-thiophenylthiophene) (PEDOTt) shows better crystallinity than the regiorandom hexyl-substituted PEDOTt owing to self-ordering. In addition, regioregular hexyl-PEDOTt has a conductivity of 0.788 S/cm by iodine doping.

Valve gate locations and open timing for injection molding of an automotive instrument panel is to be determined to minimize the cavity pressure. To achieve design automation for obtaining the solution of this design problem, we first integrated MAPS-3D, a commercial injection molding analysis tool, to PIAnO, a commercial process integration and design optimization (PIDO) tool, using the file parsing technique. Then, we automated an iterative analysis and design procedure using a batch run capability provided by PIAnO. To obtain the optimal design solution, we employed a metamodel-based design optimization method combining an experimental design, a metamodel and an optimization algorithm available in PIAnO. Using the proposed design automation approach, the cavity pressure was found to decrease by 34.2 % compared to the initial one, which clearly shows the validity of the proposed approach.

Latest High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms are built with heterogeneous chips such as multicore microprocessors and multicore GPUs (Graphic Processing units), thus they are commonly called as Heterogeneous High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. Parallelizing applications on such platforms is mostly dominated by SIMD style of parallelism mainly to exploit GPUs' excellent floatingpoint performance. However, it is a restricted parallel model because the multiple CPU cores are not participating in the parallel execution, thus the full performance potential of heterogeneous architectures is not exploited. In this paper, we propose a generalized parallelization methodology to efficiently map applications onto the heterogeneous architectures and to exploit their full performance potential. For the methodology, we develop strategies to map parallel tasks onto different components of the heterogeneous architectures. A general parallel execution model beyond SIMD is adopted in the task mapping.

Organic semiconducting thin film of 10−6 S/cm conductivity was prepared by the plasma polymerization of pyrrole followed by the thermal treatment in nitrogen. Obtained film (TPP-Py) was uniform, pin-hole free, and optically clear. We investigated the electrical and photoelectrical properties of the semiconductor devices consisting of the TPP-Py sandwiched between the two planar electrodes, such as the Au, Al, ITO, and n-Si. It was found that the TPP-Py formed ohmic contact with either Au or ITO electrode and showed a weak photoconducting behavior. On the other hand, the Schottky contact and heterojunction of TPP-Py with Al and n-Si respectively showed the rectification and photovoltaic properties. The performances of these cells were characterized in detail through the measurement of dark- and photoconductivity, and also of the capacitance-voltage (CV) characteristics.

Employing the conventional second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) chromophore such as nitrostilbene derivative, we synthesized a polymer composed of poly α-methylstyrene structure. New α-methylstyrene polymer containing piperazyl nitrostilbene in the side chain was designed and synthesized in an attempt to enhance both the electro-optic coefficient, r33 and its temporal stability. The polymer showed the high glass transition temperature (Tg) implying better temporal stability of the secondorder NLO property. This polymer film was corona-poled under 3.5–5 kV at the temperature which was either close to the Tg or higher than that. The electro-optic coefficient of this polymer was measured to be 23–28pm/V at 632.8 nm of He-Ne laser.

This paper suggests a method to predict the static solution for gas-lubricated slider bearings in a hard disk drive (HDD) by using an optimization technique. The modified Reynolds equation for the hydrodynamic lubrication theory under the slip condition is used to describe the compressible fluid flow within the gas bearing, and a factored implicit finite difference (FIFD) scheme is applied for pressure calculations. An optimization technique is employed to find the solution at which the forces and moments acting on the gas bearing are in a state of equilibrium. The proposed method is more general and robust than the conventional update schemes since it exploits the automatic update capability of the optimization technique instead of using an empirical approach, and may be more efficient than the transient FIFD approach since it directly searches for static solutions instead of tracking the time-dependent equations asymptotically to steady state. Results obtained for several typical head slider models are reported, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We report the diffraction behavior of the photorefractive (PR) molecular materials that contain the phenothiazine derivatives. Diphenylhydrazine and malononitrile were reacted with N-alkyl substituted phenothiazinyl aldehyde to provide charge transporting and nonlinear optical (NLO) molecules, respectively. In the molecular materials prepared with phenothiazine derivatives, we observed very unusual complementary gratings formed by the space charge fields of two types of photocarriers, which can be explained based on a bipolar two-trap PR model. Adding the specific molecules to the host PR materials increased the trapped hole density during grating formation and erasing processes.

We present the design sensitivity analysis for two pico sliders. The discrete form of the generalized lubrication equation based on a control volume formulation is used as the equations of equilibrium to analyze air-lubricated slider bearings. The residual function for the force equilibrium of the slider is employed as a constraint function. The design variables are the slider thickness parameters at all grid cells, determining the topological geometry of air-bearing surfaces. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach while the amount of calculation is reduced by 97% in comparison with the conventional finite difference approximation.

This paper presents an approach to achieve an optimal air bearing surface (ABS) design by using the reduced-basis concept that can effectively reduce the number of design variables. A multicriteria optimization problem is formulated to meet both the desired flying characteristics over the entire recording band and the fast takeoff performance at the landing zone. The optimal solutions of the sliders, whose target flying heights are 12 and 9 nm, are obtained. Due to its efficiency, our proposed method achieves the optimum solution with less than one-tenth of the effort for the conventional optimization method.