Method and apparatus for controlling braking on a train having ECP railcars using a conventional automatic brake valve. The locomotive and railcars are connected to brake pipe and a wireline, or use RF communications. A brake handle or other brake control valve interface is operated to cause a pressure change in an equalizing reservoir. The relay valve is isolated from the pressure change and connected to a reference pressure whereby brake pipe pressure is maintained. The pressure change is sensed and a signal generated representative thereof which is used to determine the level of braking commanded on the railcars. The apparatus includes an interface unit interposed between pertinent ports connecting the automatic brake valve, equalizing reservoir and brake pipe, and an equalizing reservoir pressure sensor to provide an output signal to an ECP controller for controlling braking on the railcars.

The present invention relates generally controlling electro-pneumatic braking on railway train of railcars having electrically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brake equipment, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for controlling the braking on such ECP equipped railcars from an automatic brake control valve on a locomotive of the train, which automatic brake valve conventionally controls the train brakes pneumatically via a brake pipe interconnecting the locomotive and the railcars. An example of such an automatic brake valve is a Type 26 automatic brake valve manufactured by Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Company ("WABTEC"™), or other types of locomotive brake control valves which operate in the same general manner. Controlling the application of brakes on ECP equipped railcars using a conventional automatic brake valve provides a manner of control which is similar in appearance and operation to existing pneumatic braking equipment from the train operator's standpoint, while incorporating the advantages of ECP braking, as discussed in detail hereinafter.
The existing standard method of controlling air brakes on trains using an automatic brake valve involves pressurizing a fluid passageway, and its associated connectors and fittings, known collectively as the brake pipe, to which the locomotive and each railcar is interconnected. In particular, such automatic brake valves can operate the train brakes by the train operator initiating pressure changes in an equalizing reservoir via the automatic brake handle, or other automatic brake valve operator interface. The pressure change in the equalizing reservoir, or a similar pressurized control volume, can be mirrored in the brake pipe by a relay valve, which is typically a portion of the automatic brake valve. The pressure change in the brake pipe is then detected by brake equipment on each railcar, which is connected to the brake pipe, and used to control the level of braking on the railcar. Conventionally, each railcar has equipment for applying the brakes, including an air reservoir which is typically divided into two portions—an emergency portion and an auxiliary portion, and a pneumatic brake control valve for applying and releasing the brakes on the railcar. One such railcar brake valve is, for example, an ABDW™ valve manufactured by WABTEC™. However, it should also be understood that there are other types of railcar brake control valves besides the ABDW™ which operate in the same general manner. The such railcar brake control valves can typically have a service portion—for service level brake applications, and an emergency portion—for emergency brake applications. The auxiliary and emergency reservoirs are normally charged from the brake pipe to a predetermined pressure, which is set by the train operator, using what is commonly referred to as the "feed valve." Once the brake pipe on a train has been charged to the feed valve setting, the brake equipment of the controlling locomotive, when so equipped, will maintain the desired pressure against slight to moderate leakage.
In order to apply the brakes on the train, the operator typically uses an interface, or control portion of the automatic brake valve, which is typically the brake handle, but could be any other type of operator control portion or device, to reduce the pressure in the brake pipe by a selected amount. A low to moderate reduction of pressure in the brake pipe will cause the service portion or the railcar brake control valve to admit air from the auxiliary reservoir into the brake cylinder, in proportion to the amount of reduction in brake pipe pressure, to apply the brakes on the railcar. Subsequent reductions in brake pipe pressure will cause greater brake cylinder pressure, up to the point at which the pressure in the auxiliary reservoir is permitted to equalize with the pressure in the brake cylinder. If a greater amount of brake cylinder pressure is desired, the brake pipe pressure can be rapidly reduced to zero, which will cause the railcar brake control valve emergency portion to add the volume of the emergency reservoir to the combined auxiliary reservoir and brake cylinder pressure.
Due to the design of freight car brake equipment, as well as the properties of compressed air in the brake system, an incremental, or "graduated" release of the brakes on a freight train is not possible. The operator can release the brakes on the each railcar only by moving the handle of the automatic brake valve to the "release" position, thereby restoring the pressure in the brake pipe to the previously established feed valve setting. In response to the rise in brake pipe pressure, the brake control valves on the each railcar will vent the brake cylinder to release the pressure, and also couple the auxiliary and emergency reservoirs to the brake pipe to restore the pressure in each reservoir to the desired setpoint.
It should be understood that the movement of pressurized air within the brake pipe is typically restrained by various factors, such as bends, branch pipes, rubber hoses, couplings, and the like. Therefore, upon initiation of a brake application by the train operator, via a reduction in brake pipe pressure, a lengthy delay may occur until the brakes at the rearmost railcars of the train begin to develop significant braking effort. As a result, an unequal application of the brakes occurs through the train, due to the amount of time it takes for the pressure reduction in the brake pipe to propagate through the brake pipe from the locomotive to the rearmost railcars in the train. A consequence of non-uniform braking on the railcars from front of the train to rear is that serious tensile or compressive forces can be generated in the train, which can cause serious train handling problems.
Similarly, when releasing the brakes following an application, air must flow into the brake pipe from the front of the train, and release of the brakes on each railcar occurs, like the brake application process described above, in a sequential manner, rather than simultaneously as would be preferred. Again, serious consequences may result from the thus generated in-train forces, especially at slow speeds.
In order to eliminate several of the perceived shortcomings of the conventional pneumatically implemented train braking control system, an ECP brake system has been developed by which each railcar can develop truly simultaneous brake applications and releases through the use of a cable, commonly called a trainline, connected between the various cars of the train. Alternatively to the use of a trainline, radio communication control could be utilized between the locomotives and the railcars. The trainline can provide two functions: 1) a source of current from which the electronic equipment on each car can charge local batteries, and 2) a pathway by which electrical control signals can be communicated to cars and other locomotives so equipped.
In the ECP braking system, trains made up of cars and locomotives so equipped can operate in such a fashion that the brake pipe no longer serves as both a supply and control line, but becomes only a means by which air is supplied to the cars for charging their reservoirs and supplying brake cylinder pressure. Applications of the brakes on the cars can instead be accomplished by means of an electrical signal on the trainline, or by radio communication. Each railcar, and additional locomotives when used, in the train can receive command signals and apply or release the brakes on the car according to the level of braking communicated in the command signal.
Since all of the brakes on the train will apply in parallel, rather than serially, smoother handling of the train can be achieved with less chance of damage to the train or its cargo. A second benefit of the ECP system is that the brake cylinder pressure on the various railcars can now be released in incremental steps. This graduated release allows the train operator to gradually reduce the braking effort on the train without danger of having the train pick up excessive speed from having to fully release the brakes on all of the railcars.
Presently known ECP system are fully electronic, using components such as magnet valves and transducers to develop the required level of air pressure in the brake cylinders. The existing brake equipment in conventional locomotives, i.e., non-electronic brake control valves, operates by controlling air pressure mechanically. Therefore, for conventional brake control equipment in locomotives to be able to control the brakes on ECP equipped railcars, an additional piece of equipment, called a Head End Unit (HEU), it typically added to permit the train operator to control braking on the railcars. However, the HEU competes with space in the already crowded locomotive cab. To control ECP braking on the railcars, such HEUs typically includes a variety of push-button controls, requiring the train operator to use this additional train brake control device to operate the brakes on the railcars in ECP mode. This is also in contrast to the movement of the brake handle typically used on conventional non-electronic locomotive automatic brake control valves to which the operator is accustomed.
Accordingly it would be desirable to provide a brake control system which permits a train operator to control the brakes on the railcars in an ECP manner using the existing pneumatic locomotive brake control valve. Moreover, the brake handle commonly used with such brake valves, with which the train operator may be comfortable, can also be used to control the ECP braking on the railcars, thus integrating the operation of the ECP braking system with the conventional pneumatic locomotive brake control valve such that an additional ECP brake control device is not required.

Method and apparatus for controlling electro-pneumatic braking on a train

Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation


A centrifugal separator and pitot pump has a rotor driven in rotation within a casing with fluid to be cleansed of solid material entering a separation chamber of the rotor. Under a rotor imposed, centrifugal force field, solids in the fluid separate from the fluid and exit in a liquid carrier through a pitot tap close to the outer radial rotor wall. Radially interiorly of this tap, a pitot pickup intercepts cleansed production fluid and exits that fluid from the rotor. A head of a scoop of the pitot tap has an inlet in a blunt leading face and a top at the maximum radial limit of the scoop that is relieved from the leading face of the scoop to a trailing end. An inlet passage from the inlet generally parallels the line of the relief. In profile, the leading face of a scoop neck below the head curves in relief from the inlet face to a scoop base and has a relatively large radius of curvature. The leading face of the neck and base in planes normal to a radius from the axis of the rotor presents a blunt surface with curved transition corners between the middle of the face and the sides of the neck and base.

The present invention relates to centrifugal pumps of the pitot type and, more in particular, to an improved pitot pickup for such pumps that is particularly resistant to particle erosion.
Centrifugal pumps of the pitot type are well known. In general, these pumps include a drive that drives a rotor in rotation within a casing. A pitot pickup in a chamber of the rotor is stationary relative to the rotor and intercepts fluid within the chamber and draws that fluid from the chamber. The exiting fluid has a head larger than its inlet fluid head because of energy imparted to it by the rotor. Typically, fluid enters the rotor chamber through an annulus surrounding a pitot tube mounting tube and through a plurality of radial passages in a rotor chamber cover to exit near the outer radial limit of the chamber. The pitot inlet in the chamber may be comparatively close to the outer radial limits of the chamber, or comparatively close to the axis of rotation of the rotor, or both, depending on the application.
Centrifugal pumps of the pitot type find an application in petroleum recovery. Petroleum wells quite often employ downhole machinery to pump fluid produced by the well and fluid introduced into the well from the surface. These two fluids as pumped collectively are known as a power production fluid. The introduced fluid may be used to power downhole machinery. Typically, the downhole machinery is either a centrifugal or reciprocal engine. Power fluid for a downhole engine should be comparatively free of abrasives so that the engine is not damaged. For example, solid abrasives can erode journals and journal bearings of centrifugal machinery, in time erode blades of centrifugal machinery, and destroy seals in both types of machinery. Clearly, it is undesirable to subject downhole machinery to such a ruinous environment. Accordingly, attempts have been made to remove abrasives from the power fluid.
The problem of abrasive removal from power fluid is a continuous one. The power fluid is typically oil recovered from the well and may be in an open system where power fluid is continuously generated from well fluid. Solid contaminants abound in well fluid. Even in closed systems where power fluid circulates in a closed loop, makeup fluid for the circuit brings into it abrasive solids, and inevitable contamination with abrasive solids occurs from other sources, such as contaminated lines and leakage.
The well fluid may be multiple phase, having gas, oil and water content. Power fluid is usually single phase, either oil or water.
Centrifugal pitot pumps, usually in conjunction with other separating equipment, have been used to remove solids from power fluid streams and to separate well fluid into its phases. One technique for solid removal uses the fact that the solids are denser than fluid and employs radial exit ports in the rotor through which the solid contaminants exit the rotor chamber. Agitation vanes may be used to prevent buildup and blockage of these radial ports. When used to separate production fluid into its phases, pickups at different radii for each phase draw such phases from the rotor. These pickups may be pitot tubes.
The separation of solids from a production fluid stream through nozzles in the rotor of a pitot separator has disadvantages. When the casing outside the rotor is at atmospheric pressure, the fluid and solids entering the casing lose all their dynamic and pressure head. The fluid and solids in the typical case cannot be discharged into a collection vessel at the well. This discharge must, instead, be pumped away to some central collection area. The pump must typically raise the head of the solid and liquid discharge to several hundred pounds per square inch, say, 300 or 400 p.s.i. Sometimes it is inconvenient to provide a pump for the discharge at the well. The head lost through the nozzles could have been used to introduce the solid and liquid discharge into a flow line.
One system for separation of solids from production fluid employs a settling tank and a pitot separator. The settling tank effects phase separation by time and gravity. The pitot separator takes power fluid, say oil, from the separator and removes more solids from the stream. The pitot separator discharges separated solids and this fluid carrier back into the separator. The separator operates at flow line pressure so the discharge from the pitot separator does not suffer the large head loss that the alternative method entailed. However, the casing pressure of the pitot separator was necessarily high, and mechanical seal problems resulted.
The pitot in the path of the rotating fluid within the chamber is subjected to the erosive effect of solids carried by the fluid. The erosive effect is directly proportional to the cube of the relative velocity between the fluid and the pitot. Particularly at comparatively large radii of the chamber, the erosive effect of the solids can be startling.
Known pitot pumps includes those described in the following U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,384,024; 3,776,658; 3,795,459; 3,817,659; 3,838,939; 3,926,534; 3,960,319; 3,977,810; and 3,994,618. The pitot pickups of these patents are generally characterized by a head that extends forward toward oncoming fluid from a body. The entrance to the pitot pickup is in the head, and the material of the head surrounding the entrance may be sharp. The body below the head typically has a sharp leading edge. The surface of the head behind the entrance where cut by radial planes from the axis of the rotor is streamlined.

Centrifugal pitot pump with improved pitot


Some embodiments provide a method of managing cloud resources on several of nodes of a hosting system. The method receives a cloud resource configuration. The method identifies a particular node from the several nodes to host the cloud resource configuration. The method sets an administrative state of the hosting system to reflect the hosting of the cloud resource configuration on the particular node. The administrative state includes information for each node in the hosting system. Each node includes a performer operating on the node that manages an operational state of the node based on the administrative state of the node.

Hosting services provide a means whereby multiple users can implement custom cloud resource configurations (e.g., cloud servers, cloud storage shares, load balancers, etc.) without the overhead costs associated with purchasing, upgrading, and maintaining the equipment needed to implement the configuration. In some cases, a hosting service provider maintains and provisions a grid of hardware nodes that are shared amongst the multiple users. More specifically, resources of a single node can be partitioned and each of these partitions can be allocated to host a cloud resource configuration of a different user.
Virtualization provides the means for partitioning the hardware resources amongst the multiple cloud resource configurations. Virtualization creates the façade that each cloud resource configuration is individually hosted on dedicated equipment with a particular set of resources. Two or more cloud resource configurations are provided non-conflicting sets of resources of the same hardware node such that a guaranteed amount of processing resources is available to each such configuration. In other words, a single physical resource is partitioned to operate as multiple logical resources.
The hosting service must continuously manage each node in the grid of hardware nodes (and specialized virtual machines for certain types of cloud resources) to verify that the hardware node has been configured according to the user's intended cloud resource configurations. Each time a user modifies or updates a cloud resource configuration, the hosting service needs to implement the same modifications or updates on the particular hardware node that is hosting the cloud resource configuration. Certain hosting services implement a centralized management paradigm for managing the grid of hardware nodes. That is, the hosting service includes a single centralized module that is responsible for managing the entire grid of hardware nodes. Using a centralized management paradigm to manage all of the cloud resources presents various problems. The centralized management paradigm is unable to operate during various common system failures (e.g., network failures, hardware node failures, etc.). For example, when deploying a cloud resource on a particular node, a network failure may cause the centralized module to deploy several instantiations of the same cloud resources on the node. Furthermore, there may be various artifacts of partially configured cloud resources left on the node due to these failures which interfere with the complete deployment of the cloud resource on the node. Thus, there is a need in the art for a method of managing a grid of hardware nodes of a hosting system to consistently reflect the user's intended cloud resource configurations and to operate successfully even during a system failure situation. These failure scenarios can result in a mismatch of the user's intended configuration or "administrative state" (i.e., what the world should be) and the target resource's actual configuration or "operational state" (i.e., what the world is).

System and method for distributed management of cloud resources in a hosting environment


A pixel electrode for driving liquid crystal is formed on a planarization insulator film covering a thin film transistor, and a vertical alignment film without rubbing treatment is formed on the pixel electrode. An alignment control window that has electrode-free portion is formed in a common electrode, and a vertical alignment film is formed on the common electrode without rubbing treatment. The liquid crystal having negative dielectric constant anisotropy is controlled in an initial direction of the substantially normal direction without pretilt. Upon applying a voltage, the tilt of the alignment is controlled in the direction of a slanting electric field at the edge of the pixel electrode and the edge of the alignment control window, so that pixel division is performed. Since rubbing treatment is not performed, electrostatic breakdown of the thin film transistor is prevented and, because a black matrix is eliminated, aperture ratio is improved.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vertically alignment liquid crystal display (LCD).
2. Description of the Related Art
Flat panel displays such as LCD, organic electroluminescence (EL), or plasma displays have been enthusiastically developed and commercialized in recent years. Particularly, LCDs has become a main display for office automation (OA) devices and audio visual (AV) devices because LCDs have attractive features such as thin and low power consumption. Especially, active matrix LCDs having thin film transistors (TFTS) as switching elements for controlling a timing to rewrite pixel data into each pixel enable a wide screen and animation display with a high resolution, and have become widely used in various television sets, personal computers, mobile computers, and monitors for digital still and video cameras.
A TFT is a kind of field effect transistor (FET) made of metal and semiconductor layers formed in a predetermined pattern on an insulated substrate. In an active matrix LCD, each TFT is connected to a corresponding capacitor for driving the liquid crystal disposed between a pair of substrates; the capacitor is constructed between the substrates.
FIG. 1 is an enlarged plan view of a display pixel portion of an LCD, and FIG. 2 is a cross section of the LCD along B--B line shown in FIG. 1. On the substrate 50 a gate electrode 51 is formed that is made of Cr, Ti, Ta, or another suitable metal, over which a gate insulating film 52 is formed. On the gate insulating film 52 an amorphous silicon, i.e., a-Si film 53 is formed in an island shape so as to cross over the gate electrode 51. On the a-Si film 53 an N.sup.+ a-Si film 53N is formed, each end of which is doped with impurities so as to make an ohmic layer. Above the channel region of the a-Si film 53, an etch stopper 54 is remained. On the N.sup.+ a-Si film 53N a drain electrode 56 and a source electrode 57 are formed, over which an interlayer insulating film 58 is formed. On the interlayer insulating film 58 a pixel electrode 59 that is made of indium tin oxide (ITO) or Al is formed, which is connected to the source electrode 57 via a contact hole formed in the interlayer insulating film 58. On the pixel electrode 59 an alignment film 71 made of polyimide or the like is formed, and is processed by rubbing treatment as shown in FIG. 3. In this way, the TFT substrate is manufactured.
On another substrate 60 facing the TFT substrate 50, red (R), green (G), and blue (B) color filters 61 are formed, each of which is made of a film resist and is disposed at a position corresponding to each pixel electrode 59. In addition, a black matrix 61BM which is made of a light shielding film resist is formed at a position corresponding to a gap between the pixel electrodes 59 and at a position corresponding to the TFT. On the layers of these color filters 61 and the black matrix, a common electrode 62 made of ITO is formed. On the common electrode 62 an alignment film 72 is formed and is processed by rubbing treatment in the same way as on the substrate 50. In this way, the opposing substrate is manufactured.
Between the TFT substrate 50 and the opposing substrate 60, a liquid crystal layer 80 is disposed. The orientation, i.e., the alignment of the liquid crystal molecules 81 is controlled in accordance with an intensity of an electric field formed by a voltage applied between the pixel electrodes 59 and the common electrode 62. Outsides of the substrates 50 and 60 polarizing films (not shown) with perpendicular polarizing axes are provided. Linear polarized light passing through these polarizing films is modulated when passing through the liquid crystal layer 80 that is controlled in different alignments per each display pixel, and is thereby controlled in a desired transmittance.
In the above-mentioned example, the liquid crystal has a negative dielectric constant anisotropy. The alignment films 71 and 72 are vertical alignment films that control the initial direction of the liquid crystal in the direction perpendicular to the substrate. In this case, when a voltage is not applied, the linear polarized light that passed through one of the polarizing films is blocked by the other polarizing films after passing through the liquid crystal layer 80 so that the display is recognized as black. When the voltage is applied, the linear polarized light that passed through one of the polarizing films is double refracted by the liquid crystal layer 80 to become an elliptically polarized light, which passes the other polarizing films so that the display is recognized as nearly white. This type is called a normally black (NB) mode. Particularly, the vertical alignment films 71 and 72 are processed by the rubbing treatment, so that the initial orientations of the liquid crystal molecules 81 are aligned in the direction with a slight pretilt from the normal direction. This pretilt angle .theta. is normally set to more than one degree, but equal to or less than five degrees. The liquid crystal molecule 81 is electrically uniaxial. The angle between the axial direction and the direction of the electric field is determined by the electric field strength, while the azimuth with respect to the direction of the electric field is not controlled. The liquid crystal molecule 81 having the negative dielectric constant anisotropy tilts in a direction different from the electric field direction. However, by providing pretilt, an applied voltage can make the liquid crystal molecule 81 tilt toward the pretilt direction. Therefore, the tilt directions are aligned so that a variation of alignments of the liquid crystal in a plane can be suppressed and deterioration of the display quality can be prevented.
The black matrix 61BM is provided for preventing a drop of the contrast ratio due to undesired light that is emitted from the display by the birefringence of the liquid crystal with the pretilt and passes through the liquid crystal layer 80 in a region in which the voltage is not applied between the display pixels.
FIGS. 4A-4E show a method for manufacturing the opposing substrate. First, in the step shown in FIG. 4A, the R, G and B color filters 61R, 61G and 61B are formed on the substrate 60. In order to form the R color filter 61R, an R film resist is affixed, which is then exposed and developed in the shape corresponding to the R display pixels. The G color filter 61G and the B color filter 61B are formed in a similar manner. These color filters 61R, 61G, and 61B are formed in dimensions slightly smaller than those of the corresponding display pixels 59 shown in FIG. 2.
In the next step shown in FIG. 4B, a light shielding film resist 61BM' is affixed, and is followed by the step shown in FIG. 4C, in which the film resist is exposed and developed in the shape corresponding to the gap between the pixels so that the black matrix 61BM is formed among the color filters 61R, 61G and 61B. This black matrix 61BM is formed in a dimension larger than the gap between the pixel electrodes 59 shown in FIG. 2.
In the next step shown in FIG. 4D, the ITO film is formed so as to produce the common electrode 62. In addition, in the step shown in FIG. 4E, a polyimide film is formed by a printing method. Then, the polyimide film is dried by baking, and processed by rubbing treatment. The film is rubbed in the arrow direction with a cloth so as to make the alignment film 72 for giving the pretilt to the liquid crystal.
The liquid crystal having a negative dielectric constant anisotropy changes the alignment of its molecules upon the electric field in such a way that the alignment becomes perpendicular to the direction of the electric field. On this occasion, the liquid crystal generates an action opposing the generated electric field. Generally, however, such a change of the orientation from the vertical alignment of the liquid crystal is not stable compared with a liquid crystal having a positive dielectric constant anisotropy such as a twist nematic (TN) liquid crystal changes from the horizontal alignment. Especially, unevenness of the alignment film 71 and 72 at the interface with the liquid crystal layer 80 due to a step of the TFT or the color filter influences the alignment change of the liquid crystal molecules 81, resulting in a deteriorated display quality.
Furthermore, as shown in FIGS. 3 and 4E, the related art uses a rubbing treatment for the vertical alignment film 71 and 72 in order to give the pretilt .theta. to the initial orientation of the liquid crystal as shown in FIG. 2. Therefore, when the voltage is applied, all the liquid crystal molecules 81 tilt in the direction of the pretilt (rightward in FIG. 2). Accordingly, the tilt angle of the liquid crystal molecule 81 with respect to the optical path when viewing the LCD from upper right in FIG. 2 is different from that when viewing the LCD from upper left, resulting different transmittances. Thus, there is a problem that a brightness or a contrast ratio changes in accordance with a viewing direction. This is called viewing angle dependence.
Furthermore, since the black matrix 61BM formed on the opposing substrate 60 side should cover the gap region between the pixel electrodes completely, it is formed larger in consideration of position shift when the black matrix 61BM is affixed to the TFT substrate 50 side. For this reason, effective display area decreases and aperture ratio decreases.
In addition, rubbing treatment for making the vertical alignment film 71 of the TFT substrate side may cause an electrostatic breakdown of the TFT, which results in defective display or decline of yield in production of LCDs.

Vertical alignment liquid crystal display device having planarized substrate surface


A computer-implemented method for creating an ordered set of boundary data by transforming data from remotely sensed imagery of shorelines is provided. A feature data set and an edge data set are transformed into a set of 3-point boundary segments having a specific head and tail point and the segments are ordered from tail to head in a clockwise or counterclockwise manner relative to the water. Once the 3-point segments are created they are easily linked together into larger segments. These large multi-point segments in turn are linked together to create a closed loop in a predetermined direction, for example, but not limited to, the shorelines for rivers or coastal areas.

Shoreline position is essential information for autonomous vehicle navigation, river management such as monitoring channel flow changes, pollution tracking, and characterization of riverine currents and erosion processes. Waterway surveys taken solely from the land can be prohibitive due to challenging terrain or outright inaccessibility of a region. Often such surveys desire such high levels of spatial resolution that they become economically infeasible. Modern advances in the availability, quality, resolution, and processing methodologies for high resolution imagery render it an attractive, alternative source for shoreline information. While edges in imagery data are easily detected by the human eye, significant efforts in recent times have been devoted to the automated extraction of these edges, though each of these approaches has drawbacks and shortfalls.
The problem of extracting accurate shoreline information from remotely sensed images such as imagery from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) or digital imagery obtained from satellites or aircraft is an on-going concern facing the remote sensing and geographical modeling communities. This is a very important problem since knowledge of a shoreline position over large areas is essential for autonomous ship navigation, coastal management, and coastal modeling of currents and erosion. In addition, it is often difficult to survey a region solely from the land since terrain and/or accessibility can often prohibit data collection in some coastal areas, necessitating the use of remote sensing methods. However, manually determining shorelines from aerial photographs is a time-consuming process that is prone to errors due to the inherent subjectivity of an individual cartographer. Thus, automated software-based methods are currently a topic of significant interest.
The standard approaches for solving the shoreline extraction problem have involved first locating the land-water boundary through edge detection and then delineating the location of the boundary through line segment tracing. The practical use of edge data, for numerical modeling or geographical information systems (GIS) purposes, requires the edge coordinates be ordered in either a clockwise or counterclockwise manner and be self-consistent.
There are a number of well-known algorithms for edge detection and boundary tracing. For example, to determine the "edge" region between land and water, the variation (or gradient) in pixel intensity is typically used. However, because pixilated images have a discrete resolution and the contrast between the land and the water can be poor, sophisticated methods have been developed for isolating the edge pixels. See J. S. Lee, et al., "Coastline detection and tracing in SAR images." IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 28(4), 662-668 (1990); and Y. Yu, "Automated delineation of coastline from polarimetric SAR imagery," International Journal of Remote Sensing, 25 (17), 3423-3438 (2004). This becomes a particularly difficult process in either extremely shallow water with sandy bottoms or when there are shadows on the water caused by vegetation around the water edge. In these cases small differences between radiance values of the land and water can exist at many wavelengths commonly used in edge discrimination.
The boundary tracing procedure is also quite complex and requires a number of steps to determine the line segments that accurately represent the shoreline. Because the boundary tracing process can lead to disconnected line segments if the boundary is not well defined due to poor edge resolution, a number of methods for connecting boundary segments have been developed as well. See G. Gorman, et al., "Shoreline approximation for unstructured mesh generation," Computers and Geosciences, 33, 666-667 (2007); and I. Kolingerova, et al., "Reconstructing boundaries within a given set of points, using Delaunay triangulation," Computers and Geosciences, 32, 1310-1319 (2006).
In addition, small regions of isolated "land" or "water" points can also be eliminated from the shoreline boundary based on some reasonable criteria to distinguish significant land or water masses from noise in the images. An essential part of tracing the boundary involves determining how to connect neighboring edge pixels to each other in such a manner that a smooth boundary is produced. The most widely used method to accomplish this involves an eight point "stencil" centered at each edge pixel. The eight nearest neighbors of a pixel box (four face sharing boxes and four corner touching boxes along the diagonals of the central pixel box) are searched in order to determine the nearest neighboring "edge" pixel that minimizes the angular change from the existing boundary line segment. Using this approach an initial list of line segment vectors can be created. After this initial step, the boundary can be further refined by joining larger multi-vector segments.
A drawback of this approach is that it must be assumed that the coastline does not change rapidly in the tracing direction (i.e. the minimum angle constraint) and a searching procedure must be implemented to determine the nearest pixel (of the eight neighbors) that satisfies the minimum angle criteria. Also, this approach does not enforce any particular tracing direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise) around the land-water boundary. As a result, there is an additional post-processing step required to create a vectorized shoreline data set, which requires additional time and processing resources.
Other approaches for extracting shorelines can involve more complex transformations of the remotely sensed imagery (i.e. Watershed transform, Hough transform, active contouring or "snakes", classification schemes). See D. C. Mason, et al., "Accurate and efficient determination of the shoreline in ERS-1 SAR images," IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 34(5), 1243-1253 (1996). The primary drawback of these methods is that they involve a number of mathematical procedures that all have various caveats with regard to how they may be applied. In addition, although these approaches are mathematically rigorous they may not be robust in their applicability to all intended problems and thus may require additional refinements and checking procedures to ensure the quality of the extracted shoreline.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.

The United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of the Navy


A monolithic protection component is formed in a P-type low-doped semiconductor substrate. The protection diode comprises, in an upper surface of the substrate, a first and a second N-type well with a mean doping level; at the surface of the first well, a first highly doped P region; at the surface of the second well, a second very highly doped N region; a third very highly doped N region laterally contacting the first well; a fourth highly-doped P region beneath a portion of the lower surface of the third region; a first metallization contacting the surface of the first and second regions which constitute the first diode terminal; and a second metallization coupled to a P-type area extending up to the fourth region and second well, which forms the second terminal of the diode. The protection component provides a unidirectional protection diode. Two of the protection components may be combined in a single structure to provide a bidirectional protection diode.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to protection diodes and more particularly to low voltage protection diodes.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A unidirectional protection diode Z1 (FIG. 1A) is a component allowing current to flow in a forward direction (from terminal B to terminal A) and blocking current in the reverse direction (from terminal A to terminal B) as long as the voltage does not exceed a predetermined threshold. A bidirectional diode Z2 (FIG. 2A) is a component allowing current to flow from terminal C to terminal D or from terminal D to terminal C only when the voltage between these terminals exceeds a predetermined threshold.
Such diodes are disposed in parallel on circuits to be protected and are operative only when exceptional voltage surges occur. Therefore, during a normal state of the power supply or under normal operating conditions of the circuit, the diodes must not impair the circuit operation. However, it is known that a low voltage protection diode has a relatively high capacitance between its terminals. Indeed, the capacitance across a diode increases in proportion to the surface area of the useful junction of this diode and exponentially with the doping level of the least doped layer at the junction. In practice, in the case of a protection diode, if it is desired to obtain a relatively low breakdown voltage, ranging approximately from 5 to 10 volts, the doping level of the least doped layer must be high (approximately 1 to 5.times.10.sup.18 atoms/cm.sup.3) and, therefore, the diode capacitance is unavoidably high. For example, a low voltage protection diode having a breakdown voltage of approximately 5 volts has a capacitance of approximately 5000 pF/mm.sup.2. To meet its protection function requirements, the surface area of this type of component is seldom lower than 0.5 mm.sup.2 ; this leads to a 2500 pF capacitance. This relatively high value is liable to impair the operation of the circuit to be protected.
To solve this problem, it has been proposed in the prior art to combine the protection diodes with simple conventional rectifying diodes in various circuit configurations. All these various configurations have exhibited drawbacks and have not enabled hitherto realization of monolithic protection components.

Low voltage monolithic protection diode with a low capacitance


Remote computing resource service providers allow customers to reduce overhead by using computing resources shared with other customers. Customers communicate with the computing resources over a network, such as the Internet, these networks enable the use of remote computing resources but do experience errors. To ensure access to resources by the customer, a network troubleshooting service allows the customer to determine connectivity between computing resources and provides operations to the customer that when performed establish connectivity between computing resources. Furthermore, monitoring of connectivity once a connection is established ensures that the resources maintain connectivity.

The use of remote computing services, such as remote program execution and remote data storage, has greatly increased in recent years. Customers may reduce expenses and overhead by purchasing these services from a computing resource service provider. Customers of the computing resource service provider can communicate with computing systems, services and virtual machine instances which are widely distributed over many geographically dispersed networks. Customers, for instance, may communicate with computers of other customers to access and/or provide data while using services of a computing resource service provider. In many instances, customers configure and operate remote networks using hardware managed by computing resource service providers, thereby reducing infrastructure costs and achieving other advantages. Networks often span multiple geographic boundaries connecting with other networks and connection errors may occur at various points a long a communication path. With such configurations of networks and computing resources, ensuring connectivity between resources can be challenging, especially as the size and complexity of such networks grow.

Troubleshooting network paths in a distributed computing environment


A thermoelectric conversion element includes a film composed of a conductive oxide, a first electrode disposed on one end of the film composed of the conductive oxide, and a second electrode disposed on another end of the film composed of the conductive oxide, wherein the conductive oxide has a tetragonal crystal structure expressed by ABO3-x, where 0.1<x<1, wherein the conductive oxide has a band structure in which a Fermi level intersects seven bands between a Γ point and an R point, and wherein the first electrode and the second electrode are disposed on the film composed of the conductive oxide so that electrical charge moves in a direction of a smallest vector among three primitive translation vectors of the crystal structure.

Recently, attention has been focused on use of SrTiO3 as a material for thermoelectric conversion elements because SrTiO3 has a high power factor and causes a low environmental load (for example, see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 5-218511, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2012-186230, and J. D. Baniecki et al., Journal of Applied Physics 113, 013701, 2013).
However, it has been difficult to realize a sufficient thermoelectric performance even using a thermoelectric conversion element including SrTiO3.
Accordingly it is desired a thermoelectric conversion element that allows a higher thermoelectric performance to be achieved, a method for producing such a thermoelectric conversion element, and the like.

Method for producing thermoelectric conversion element


Embodiments, systems, and techniques for vehicle operation assistance are provided herein. Vehicle operation assistance may be provided by monitoring characteristics of an occupant of a vehicle and determining an emergency status for the occupant based on characteristics of the occupant, transmitting a request for help based on the emergency status indicating the occupant of the vehicle is experiencing an emergency, receiving a “follow me” request from a potential leader vehicle, enabling follower mode such that vehicle is a follower vehicle and the potential leader vehicle is a leader vehicle, establishing a connection with the leader vehicle and receiving navigation instructions from the leader vehicle based on the vehicle being in follower mode, generating driving action commands based on navigation instructions, and executing respective driving action commands in an autonomous fashion based on the vehicle being in follower mode.

Drivers, passengers, or other occupants of a vehicle or automobile may experience emergencies, such as a medical emergency or suffer from effects of a medical condition while driving or operating a vehicle. Such medical conditions may prevent the driver of the vehicle from operating the vehicle effectively, performing a driving task or driving operation, or reacting in time to a road hazard. As a result, the driver may pose a risk to him or herself and/or cause an inconvenience or create a dangerous scenario for surrounding traffic or other bystanders, such as pedestrians.


This invention discloses a handwriting information processing system, comprising handwriting information input means and handwriting information recognition means, said handwriting information input means and said handwriting information recognition means co-operate for accepting and recognizing a user""s handwriting input, said handwriting information processing system is characterized by further comprising a character segmentation user interface for accepting the definitions of text/picture areas, handwriting lines and character boundaries from a user.

The present invention relates to handwriting information processing system, and more particularly to handwriting information processing system with a user interface for character segmentation.
With the quick development of computer technologies, there appear many information processing devices for accepting users"" handwriting input, such as personal digital assistants PDA or hand portable computers HPC. Users can input handwritten data and symbols into computers by means of pen-like devices. Correspondingly, there appear many handwritten characters recognition devices, which can recognize a user""s handwriting input.
The IBM""s ThinkScribe is a device integrating a handwriting digitizer with a traditional paper-based recording system. This device records a user""s handwriting input in strokes and associated timing and can reproduce the user""s handwriting input according to the original timing information. When users write Chinese characters on ThinkScribe, they usually write characters continuously with little or without any space in-between characters. And sometimes, users even overlap strokes of adjacent characters or connect the last stroke of the preceding character with the first stroke of the latter character. This makes the character segmentation a problem before recognition.
At present, there are no effective character segmentation methods, particularly for handwritten Chinese characters. The handwritten character recognition technologies can only recognize an individual Chinese character or handwritten Chinese character strings with big spaces. The difficulties of automatically segmenting handwritten Chinese character strings lie in:
1) Many Chinese characters have separable components lined up from left to right. When writing quickly in a horizontal line from left to right, the distance between such components may be similar to that between two characters. In addition to this spatial confusion, the left and right parts of those characters are often themselves single characters, or may resemble some characters. Similar statements can be made for Chinese characters written in a vertical line, since many Chinese characters have separable components stacked up from top to down.
2) For adjacent characters, when writing cursively, the end stroke of the first character and the beginning stroke of the second character may not be clearly separated with each other.
In addition, the text areas may overlap the picture areas and the handwriting lines may be not always very straight. In such a case, the automatic techniques for detecting the text areas, finding out the handwriting lines, and segmenting the individual characters in a string for recognition are not always reliable and accurate. A manual procedure is needed for such work.
Therefore, the present invention provides a handwriting information processing system, which comprises a user interface for accepting the definition of text/picture areas, handwriting lines and character boundaries from a user.
With the interface, a user can define the text/picture areas. The automatic line detecting mechanism can find out the handwriting lines by use of the information. A user can also correct errors in the automatic layout analysis with the information.
In addition, the user interface for character segmentation according to the present. invention provides an effective and natural definition handwriting line mode. By use of the information, the automatic character segmentation mechanism can find out the character boundaries and can correct errors in the automatic recognition process with the information.
The user interface for character segmentation according to the present invention provides a method for effectively defining character boundaries. By use of the information, the automatic recognition mechanism can recognize continuously written characters, and can also correct errors in automatic recognition with the information.

Handwriting information processing system with character segmentation user interface

International Business Machines Corporation


Technology for determining the order of the search results to maximize a financial goal is described. In an example embodiment, a method, implemented using the one or more computing devices, such as client and/or server devices, may receive a product search request from a user device associated with a user and retrieve a set of products from a product database based on the product search request. Based on a purchase probability and one or more of a margin and a price for that product, the method determines an expected financial gain for each of the products of the set and sorts the set of products into an ordered set of products having an order based on the expected financial gain associated with each of the products. The method may then provide the ordered set of products for display to the user on the user device.

The present specification generally relates to the field of optimizing the order of search results to maximize a financial gain.
The use of the internet to promote and sell products has proliferated in recent years to the point where it has become a significant portion of retail sales. While retailers commonly allow customers to sort products based on prices and other characteristics, the order of the products is generally sorted by popularity, price, location, match to customer, etc. Sorting products in this way fails to optimize the sale opportunity to that customer because the customer is generally presented with products in an order that does not bear the potential of generating an optimal financial outcome for the merchant.

Ordering search results to maximize financial gain


A garment for a hospital patient is disclosed. The garment has a front piece with a first side, a first shoulder, a second side and a second shoulder, and a back piece with a first edge and a second edge. The first edge of the back piece is sewn to the front piece at a first side and a first shoulder thereof. A plurality of fastening means in pairs is provided at a second side and a second shoulder, and the second edge. Two sleeves are respectively formed at the first and second shoulders. The sleeve at the first shoulder is sewn with the first edge of the second piece. The sleeve at the second side is sewn only with the front piece. An extending part is formed on the front piece and extends backwards from the second shoulder.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a garment, and more particularly to a garment designed for patients in a hospital, etc.
2. Description of Related Art
In hospital, patients must wear a garment specially designed for them. The conventional patient's garment has a front placket formed on a front part thereof. A plurality of buttons is formed at a first side of the front placket and a plurality of button holes corresponding to the buttons is defined at a second side of the front placket. The garment is put on from the patient's back and then fastened at the patient's front. Thus, the patient must get up from a bed in order to put on or take off the garment, and it may be difficult and even painful for some patients, especially those with back injuries. Furthermore, when a doctor wants to take a patient's temperature by inserting a thermometer in an armpit, some of the buttons must be unfastened which is inconvenient.
Another conventional patient's garment is designed to allow physical examination of the patient. The garment has a back placket formed at a back part thereof and cords respectively provided at two sides of the back placket. The garment is first put on from the front of the patient's body and then fastened at the patient's back by tying the cords. However, the patient's back is not completely covered by the garment whereby discomfort as well as embarrassment may be experienced. Moreover, it is also inconvenient for the hospital staff that the cords must be untied when the patient's temperature has to be taken.
Therefore, it is an objective of the invention to provide a convenient garment for hospital patients to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.


The present invention relates to an autonomous vehicle and an autonomous vehicle system having the same. The autonomous vehicle according to the present invention comprises: a plurality of cameras; a radar; a communication unit; a display; an audio output unit; and a processor which, in an autonomous driving mode, controls the autonomous vehicle so as to select any one of a plurality of routes toward a destination and perform autonomous driving along the selected route, to receive advertisement information from the outside when driving along the selected route, and to output the received advertisement information through at least one of a display or an audio output unit, the received advertisement information being variable for each of the plurality of routes. Due to this feature, it is possible to provide different advertisements for each route to the destination during autonomous driving.

A vehicle is an apparatus that allows a user who rides therein to drive the vehicle in a desired direction. A representative example of the vehicle may be an automobile.
Meanwhile, for convenience of the user who uses the vehicle, the vehicle is provided with, for example, various sensors and electronic devices. In particular, for example, various devices for user driving convenience are being developed. An image captured by a rear camera is provided upon reversing or parking a vehicle.

Autonomous vehicle and autonomous vehicle system having same


Disclosed is a learning assessment method and device using a virtual tutor. The device comprises at least one action acquisition module, a virtual tutor synthesis module, and a learning assessment module. The method captures and analyzes a first and a second action-feature for a first and a second targets respectively, and constructs an intrinsic model of the second target based on a reference data of the second target. A virtual tutor is synthesized by applying the first action-feature to the intrinsic model such that the virtual tutor exhibits the intrinsic characteristics of the second target but performs a synthesized action-feature similar to the first action-feature. The method then assesses the difference between the synthesized action-feature and the second action-feature.

As the computer hardware and software technologies progress rapidly, the accumulated knowledge of human race is also stored digitally in a rapid manner, which is usually expressed as multimedia, such as text, audio, image, video, and so on. The development of wired and wireless network further eliminates the restriction of time and geographical location on the learning and knowledge delivery. The era of digital learning appears to have arrived. However, to promote the digital learning, it is important to facilitate the learning through natural interaction in addition to improve the technologies for knowledge categorization, lookup and reference mechanism. This is especially true for behavior learning.
According to the social learning theory of Professor Bandura of Stanford University, the individual learning process starts with the observation of a target model, memorization and storage for later mimicking. In other words, the learners learn the behavior through watching how the target model behaves. However, as it is difficult for the learners to distinguish the subtle differences between the observed behavior and the mimicking behavior, the learning effectiveness is usually poor if the observed model is not present to interact with the learners to give advice and assistance. Therefore, the present invention uses the action analysis and synthesis technologies to develop a virtual tutor mechanism to assist the learners in self-learning process.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,807,535 disclosed an intelligent tutoring system 100, including a domain module 110 and a tutor module 120, constructed on a platform 130 with processor and memory, as shown in FIG. 1. The tutor module uses fuzzy logic to dynamically select appropriate knowledge from domain module 110 to teach the learner in accordance with the learner's level of understanding. The main feature of the patent is on the selection of the appropriate knowledge.
US. Publication No. 2005/0,255,434, Interactive Virtual Characters for Training including Medical Diagnosis Training, disclosed an interactive training system 200, as shown in FIG. 2. The system analyzes the user's behavior to find the user's intention, and then uses a computer-synthesized virtual character to respond accordingly. The system is applied in the medical training. The synthesized patient 210 and the tutor 220 can interact with the medical trainee 240 on the screen 230.
US. Publication No. 2006/0,045,312 disclosed an image comparison device for providing real-time feedback to the user. In the training stage, a sequence of behavior of the user 310 is recorded. In the test stage, another sequence of behavior of the user is recorded again. Through the comparison of the recorded image sequences, the device can find the discrepancy between the user's behavior in the training and the test stages.
Image-based videorealistic speech animation has drawn wide attention due to its supreme visual realism. This technique is originated from the video rewrite technique of C. Bregler. Triphone, a concatenation of three phonemes, is taken as the basic unit to collect the facial image during the target's speech. During the speech sequence synthesis, the image segments of the same triphone utterance are directly taken from the video corpus for concatenation.
AT&T also develops a similar technique using Viterbi dynamic programming algorithm to allow more flexibility in the length of the concatenating sequences for visual speech synthesis. These two approaches directly reuse the images in the pre-recorded video corpus without using any generative models for speech animation synthesis, resulted in two following problems. Firstly, the effectiveness of both approaches depends on the matched images found in the pre-recorded video corpus. Therefore, large amount of video corpus is required to ensure for the availability of any triphone-based phonetic combination in the novel sentence to be synthesized. Secondly, it is not possible to transfer the speaker to another person without recollection of a large video corpus. This poses large cost for the video recording and processing time, and the economical burden for the data space used.
Tony Ezzat et al. of MIT proposed a trainable videorealistic speech animation using the machine learning mechanism to construct the image-based videorealistic speech animation. Although this technique also requires collecting the facial video corpus of the specific person for training, only a small amount of learned model is kept for visual speech synthesis of novel sentences once the training is complete. The following describes the two core techniques, namely multidimensional morphable model (MMM) and trajectory analysis and synthesis.
MMM was proposed by M. Jones and T. Poggio of MIT in 1998, where the visual information of an image is represented by shape and texture components. The image analysis and recognition are done based on the composite coefficients of these two components. In the trainable videorealistic speech animation, however, MMM is used to parameterize the image for image synthesis application. Firstly, a set of prototype images is automatically selected from the video corpus by k-means algorithm. Then, each prototype is decomposed into a motion component represented by optical flow and a texture component. Each synthesized image can then be modeled as a linear combination of the motion and texture components of the selected prototype images.
More formally, when given a set of M prototype images {IPi}i=1M and the prototype flow {CPi}i=1M, each novel synthesized image can be modeled as:
                                          C            syn                    =                                    ∑                              i                =                1                            M                                                                  α                i                                                          C                                  P                  i                                                                    ,                            (        1        )                                                      I            syn                    =                                                    ∑                                  i                  =                  1                                M                                                                            β                  i                                                                  I                                      P                    i                                    warped                                                      =                                          ∑                                  i                  =                  1                                M                                                                            β                  i                                                                                W                    F                                                                          (                                                                  I                                                  P                          i                                                                    ,                                                                        W                          F                                                                                (                                                                                C                                syn                                                            -                                                              C                                                                  P                                  i                                                                                ,                                                          C                                                              P                                i                                                                                )                                                                                )                                                                                ,                            (        2        )            where Csyn and Isyn are the motion and texture components of the novel image respectively, WF(p,q) is the forward-warp operation that warps vectors p according to flow vector q. Conversely, given a set of MMM parameter {αi,βi}i=1M, a new mouth image can be synthesized by warping and blending the prototype images.
The goal of trajectory analysis and synthesis is to learn a phoneme model and use it to synthesize novel speech trajectories in the MMM parameter space. The characteristics of the MMM parameters for each phoneme are examined from corresponding image frames according to the audio alignment result. For simplicity, the MMM parameters for each phoneme are modeled as a multidimensional Gaussian distribution with mean vector μp and diagonal covariance matrix Σp. A trajectory of a novel speech sequence is derived by minimizing the following objective function:Es=(y−μ)TDTΣ−1D(y−μ)+λyTWkTWky,  (3)where the synthesized MMM parameter y is obtained by minimizing the distance to the cascaded target mean vector μ (weighted by the duration-weighting matrix D, and the inverse of the covariance matrix Σ), while also retaining the smoothness concatenation controlled by the k-th order difference matrix Wk.
However, the synthesized MMM parameters tend to be under-articulated when the mean and the covariance for each phoneme are directly calculated from the pooled MMM parameters for each phoneme. To resolve the problem, gradient descent learning is employed to refine the phoneme by iteratively minimizing the difference between the synthesized MMM trajectories y and the real MMM trajectories z. The error between the real and synthesized trajectories is defined by:Ea=(z−y)T(z−y)  (4)and the phoneme model is refined by:
                                                        μ              p              new                        =                                          μ                p                old                            -                              η                                                                      ∂                                          E                      a                                                                            ∂                                          μ                      p                                                                                ;                                    ∑              p              new                                                  =                                                ∑                  p                  old                                                                                -                    η                                                                                ∂                                              E                        a                                                                                ∂                                              ∑                        p                                                                                ,                            (        5        )            where η is a small learning rate parameter.
In summary, the trainable videorealistic speech animation requires two sets of parameters: a set of M prototype images and prototype flows to represent the texture and flow of the subject's mouth, and a set of phoneme models to model each phoneme in the MMM space using a Gaussian distribution for trajectory analysis and synthesis.

Learning assessment method and device using a virtual tutor

Industrial Technology Research Institute


A system for detecting a lane line of a road and a method thereof is disclosed. An image-retrieving device retrieves an image in front of a vehicle to generate a picture, and transmits the picture to a processing device. The processing device transforms one or two lane lines on the picture into a plurality of characteristic values, processes the characteristic values to generate one or two prediction lane lines, and uses them to dynamically predict and complete the lane lines, thereby forming a lane line prediction model. The processing device uses the lane line prediction model to determine whether the vehicle deviates, and transmits the picture and the lane line prediction model to a display device to display. When the vehicle deviates, the display device warns. The present invention can improve to recognize an unclear lane line, a single lane line and a far lane line.

Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for detecting a lane line of a road and a method thereof, particularly to a system for detecting a lane line of a road and a method thereof, which uses an algorithm and an image processing technology to predict lane lines of a road.
Description of the Related Art
With the popularization of vehicles, vehicles driving on a road easily form very heavy traffic, so as to cause potential dangers. Statistically, of all the traffic accidents, collision accidents of 51% are caused by deviating vehicles from lanes when drivers drive the vehicles. The frequent and serious traffic accidents are mostly caused by deviating vehicles from lanes.
As a result, many technologies and products related to vehicles are gradually developed, such as a lane departure warning (LDW) system, a lane keeping support (LKS) system, and a lane following system (LFS), which are used to improve driving safety and prevent from accidents. These systems require an algorithm to recognize lanes. In general, a method for recognizing lanes uses a vehicular camera to capture an image, and then uses a processor to fit characteristic points of all lanes in the image. However, the method is easily affected by noise points and unclear characteristic points at a far end. For example, one of two lanes of a road is unclear when damaged or shaded, whereby the processor cannot effectively establish a lane-fitting model. Alternatively, the lane at a far end in the image is unclear whereby the characteristic points thereof are difficultly recognized to achieve bad fitting effect.
To overcome the abovementioned problems, the present invention provides a system for detecting a lane line of a road and a method thereof, which cooperates with an algorithm to predict a complete lane line by using at least one lane line and characteristic point closer to the lane line in an image.

System for detecting lane line of road and method thereof


The invention relates to clog and sandal-type footwear having a sole and a heel strap. The heel strap is pivotable to be selectively secure the sole to a foot of a user or to be selectively retained by a channel formed in a heel portion of the sole. The heel strap may be permanently or removably attached to the sole.

Clog and sandal-type footwear is gaining in popularity due to such footwear's comfort, simplicity and flexible styling. A conventional clog, for example, includes a footpad or sole portion that is typically attachable to the foot by straps over the instep, toes and/or ankle. Various clog and sandal designs are available, including sandals suitable for formal wear, sporting wear, casual wear, and/or beach wear. For example, a thong is a type of sandal having a sole, such as a flat rubber sole, that is held onto the foot by a strap that slips between the big toe and the second toe of the user's foot.
With recent advances in the design and production of polymeric materials having desirable cushioning, traction, appearance, strength and resistance to wear, sandals are becoming popular that are made predominantly from elastomeric and other polymeric materials. Such sandals have advantages in design options, manufacturability, and comfort.
Many sandals, such as thong-type sandals, or flip-flops, rely on a strap attachment at the forward portion of the foot, allowing the heel portion to move away from the foot during use. An advantage of flip-flop-type sandals are that they are very easy to slip on, or take off, and they are very comfortable to many users. Another style of sandal includes a strap or other support structure that extends around the back of the user's foot, and generally over the top of the user's heel, to hold the heel portion of the sole in closer proximity to the user, and to more securely attach the sandal to the user's foot. However, sandals with a conventional heel strap can be uncomfortable to the user, and are more difficult and time-consuming to put on and take off.
Typically, a user must elect between a flip-flop style sandal and a heel strap style sandal.


Ergonomic handle for a syringe intended for puncturing blood vessel walls and establishing blood path connections. The typical syringe comprises a tube body and a needle body. The handle prevents unintended displacements between the tube body and the needle body and permits placement of the thumb and forefinger at the side and the tip of the puncture needle for more precision in use.

In the medical field, it is frequently required to establish a connection between blood vessels (veins and arteries) and injectors or containers of different kinds. The connection must be made with total sterility. Leakage must be avoided as far as possible. Examples of treatments requiring blood vessel contact are blood transfusion inclusive blood giving, blood sampling with the assistance of test containers under negative pressure, and intravenous supply of medicine, nourishment or just liquid for blood volume expansion, commonly called a drip. In all these applications it is essential that the puncture of the vessel wall can be done without damage to the surrounding tissues. Failures are unpleasant, even under the best circumstances, but may cause serious damage as well.
A common syringe for insertion in blood vessels of different kinds is shown in FIG. 1. The syringe consists of a tube body (1) with a channel that continues in a thin plastic tube (3). The rear opening of the tube body is designed with a conical widening for attachment to a syringe or a catheter. The opening is at the beginning filled by the hollow needle (4), which continues with the needle body (5), the rear part of which has a transparent room, which gets filled with blood, when satisfactory blood vessel contact has been established. Through the channel runs the hollow puncture needle (4) with a beveled, sharpened tip, which extends a few millimeters in front of the front end of the thin plastic tube.
When establishing a blood vessel connection, one chooses a suitable, superficial blood vessel (vein or artery, depending upon type of treatment) and tries to direct the tip of the puncture needle to penetrate the skin just over the chosen blood vessel so that the tip hits the vessel centrally. After penetration of the vessel wall the puncture needle with the plastic tube can be directed axially obliquely into the blood path. When the above mentioned transparent room behind the needle starts filling with blood the needle body with the belonging puncture needle is kept still, while the tube is advanced so that the needle tip no longer is in front of the end of the plastic tube. This is done to prevent the needle tip from hurting the vessel wall, when the plastic tube afterwards is brought forward into the blood path, to the main part of its length, with the aid of the tube body. When the plastic tube has reached the desired position in the blood path, the tube body is kept still. The puncture needle, which, so far, has prevented leakage by its close fit to the inner wall of the plastic tube, is withdrawn with the needle body and the desired connection to the syringe, container or catheter is made.
For reasons of sterility the plastic tube must not be touched before or during the insertion into the blood lumen. The distance from the needle tip to the grip around the needle body is long. The grip surfaces are not well defined, especially as the hands most frequently have to be provided with gloves. The insertion demands a number of complicated changes of direction. After the skin penetration there is no visible indication of the position of the needle tip. Moreover, the blood vessels are frequently badly fixed under the skin and have troublesome tendencies to "roll away".
In spite of these, from the ergonomic point of view, very unfavorable circumstances, experienced nurses with daily training become very skilled and seldom fail. The circumstances are different for doctors, nurses, ambulance crews and apprentices, who are infrequently put to the task. Failures will cause the patient discomfort and are embarrassing to the operator. Further, loss of valuable material will arise.
Amendment proposals concerning the ergonomics at the establishment of vein and artery connections and similar operations can be found in the German "Offenlegungsschriften" 2306068 and 4244563. The solution of the problem according to the former is applicable to injection needles without a surrounding plastic tube only. While it is true that the latter reference mentions the possibility of combination with a plastic tube, the proposed design causes large risks of damages as no firm connection between the needle body and the tube body exists. As will be explained below unintended displacements between those parts cause serious moments of risk.


A lens module includes a first lens and a first spacer. The first lens includes a first optical portion and a first support portion surrounding the first optical portion. The first support portion includes a first upper surface facing an object side of the lens module and a first lower surface facing an image side of the lens module. The first lower surface includes a first annular portion, a slanted annular portion and an inner annular portion. The slanted annular portion is obliquely interconnected between the outer annular portion and the inner annular portion. The first annular portion and the inner annular portion are perpendicular to the optical axis of the lens module. The slanted annular portion faces inwardly of the first lens. The outer shield portion covers the first annular portion. The intermediate shield portion covers the slanted annular portion. The inner shield portion covers the inner annular portion.

1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to lens modules having spacers.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, a lens module includes a lens barrel, a lens group and a spacer received in the lens barrel. The lens group may include one or more lenses. The spacer is attached to the lens to position the lens at a certain critical distance. When incident light strikes an optical surface of the lens group, parts of the incident light may be easily reflected by the optical surface and is finally received by an image sensor. Such reflected light may cause flare in images captured by the image sensor, that is, the optical performance of the lens module is not optimal.
Therefore, a lens module, which can overcome the limitations described, is needed.

Lens module having light-shielding spacer


Attachment device for a data sensor for a bearing on which an encoding element is connected to a turning race that is separated by rolling elements from a fixed race, the sensor being mounted on a support that is immobile relative to the fixed race. The support has at least a first element and a second element joined together. The first element immobilizes the support relative to the fixed race, and the second element integrates functions of guiding and immobilizing the sensor on the support.

This invention relates generally to a device for attaching a data sensor and, more particularly, to a device for attaching a fixed, non-contacting data sensor opposite a bearing equipped with an encoding element capable of being read by the sensor.
Publications FR 2 703 740, FR 2 730 283, and FR 2 740 186 describe different supports for a fixed sensor in the immediate vicinity of a fixed race of a bearing. Such supports are generally annular and include a guideway on which the sensor is mounted and held by an elastic immobilization means.
As can be seen in various documents, the described bearing assemblies involve a variety of designs for the data sensor supports, which may be attached to one or another of the bearing races, depending on whether the turning race is the outer or the inner race. The supports may also be clamped between the fixed race and a bearing seat mounting element or may even be adapted to an armature on the bearing seal.
However, such sensor supports require the design and specification of special tooling in order to make a different support for each possible type of application, which results in significant cost increases. Additionally, there is a need for a device that provides an easy immobilization of the sensor on the support, a device which is also simple and economical to make.
The foregoing illustrates limitations known to exist in present devices and methods. Thus, it is apparent that it would be advantageous to provide an alternative directed to overcoming one or more of the limitations set forth above. Accordingly, a suitable alternative is provided including features more fully disclosed hereinafter.


The present invention relates to novel therapeutic uses of soluble proteins comprising the extracellular region of human CD164, in particular for treating inflammatory and/or autoimmune disorders.

The following discussion is intended to facilitate the understanding of the invention, but is not intended nor admitted to be prior art to the invention.
CD164 is a member of the mucin-like receptor or sialomucin superfamily of glycoproteins. Sialomucins are transmembrane glycoproteins ranging from 50-3000 kD exhibiting limited similarity at the cDNA and amino acid levels. Mucin-like expressed proteins share the common characteristic of bearing numerous O-glycosylations linked to serine and threonine residues, which infer multiple kinds of cell-cell or cell-extracellular matrix interactions. The dense array of O-linked side chains are characterized by an extended structure that makes many of the mucin-like molecules long enough to protrude beyond the polysaccharide glycocalyx that surrounds the cell and also by the optimal exposure and high multiplicity of the terminal sugars. By virtue of the structural configuration as well as negative charge, mucin-like glycoproteins may act as a repulsive barrier unless cells bear specific receptors for mucin (adhesion). Functions of mucin receptors depend on cell types and states of activation correlated with the core mucin peptide and with the cell-specific expression of glycosyl transferases, which in turn regulate the structure and presentation of the O-linked oligosaccharide sidechains, membrane anchorage, signal transduction abilities and or/the trafficking of the mucin to the correct cellular domain.
Human CD164 is an ortholog of murine MGC-24v (M. musculus) and rat endolyn (R. norvegicus), a membrane protein found in lysosomal and endosomal compartment of mammalian cells. The relationships amongst different isoforms, together with functionally important domains and subcellular distribution of CD164/endolyn, have been described (Chan Y H et al., J. Biol. Chem., 276: 2139-2152, 2001).
In its native state, human CD164 is a disulphide-linked homodimer of two 80-85 kDa subunits. CD164 is highly glycosylated, containing both O- and N-linked glycans. The extracellular region is comprised of two mucin domains (I and II) linked by a non-mucin domain containing intra-disulphide bridges as well as a cysteine-rich motif that resembles a consensus pattern previously found in growth factor and cytokine receptors. CD164 also contains a single-pass transmembrane domain and a 13-amino acid intracellular region that include a C-terminal motif (i.e. YHTL) able to target the protein to endosomes and lysosomes.
Four human CD164 mRNA species have been described arising by alternative splicing of six bona fide exons from a single genomic transcription unit located on human chromosome 6q21 (Zannettino A, J Biol Regul Homeost Agents, 15: 394-396, 2001; Watt and Chan, Leuk Lymph, 37(: 1-25. 2000). There are probably 4 alternative promoters, two non-overlapping alternative last exons and one internal intron which is not always spliced out. The predominant CD164 (E1-6) isoform represents a 178 amino acid type I transmembrane glycoprotein. The other described isoforms are a sialomucin CD164 or CD164 isoform delta 5 containing 178 amino acids; a 184 residues CD164 isoform delta 4; and a 200 kD principally soluble isoform termed MGC-24 (for Multi-Glycosylated Core protein of 24 kD) lacking the transmembrane anchoring motif and having 189 residues. All isoforms are highly glycosylated proteins with O- and N-linked glycosylation sites (FIG. 1).
CD164 functions include mediating, or regulating, haematopoietic progenitor cell adhesion and the negative regulation of their growth and/or differentiation. CD164 is usually expressed by CD34+ and CD34 lo/− haematopoietic stem cells and associated microenvironmental cells (Watt et al., Blood, 92: 849-866, 1998). CD164 is also expressed by committed myeloid and erythroid colony forming cells, on bone marrow stromal and endothelial cells, weakly on lymphocytes, and on mesenchymal stem cells. CD164 may play a key role in haematopoisesis by facilitating the adhesion of human CD34+ cells to bone marrow stroma and by suppressing CD34+CD38 lo/− haematopoietic progenitor cell proliferation, acting as a potent signaling molecule (Zannettino et al. Blood, 92: 2613-2628, 1998).
These effects involve the CD164 class I and/or II epitopes recognized by the monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) 105A5 and 103B2/9E10. The epitopes are carbohydrate-dependent and are located on the N-terminal mucin domain I (Watt et al., Blood, 95, 3113-3124, 2000; Doyonnas et al., J Immunol, 165: 840-851, 2000). The interaction of haemotopoietic cells with stromal/endothelial cells in their immediate microenvironment is thought to be of major importance in the regulation of haematopoietic stem self-renewal, quiescence, commitment and migration. These interactions involve cooperation between adhesion receptors, their cognate ligands and cytokines. A range of cell adhesion molecules (CAMS) including the Ig, integrin, cadherin, selectin and mucin-like protein families, participate in these processes.
In vitro, CD164 showed a role in myogenic differentiation (Lee et al., Mol Cell Biol, 21: 7696-7706, 2001). Overexpression of CD164 in myoblast cell lines accelerated expression of biochemical markers of differentiation and enhanced formation of multinucleate myotubes, whereas antisense CD164 or soluble extracellular regions of CD164 inhibited myogenesis.
The peanut agglutinin (PNA)-binding site of soluble MGC-24 represents a tumor associated carbohydrate marker expressed in many carcinomas. Total MGC-24 mRNA was found to be lower in human colorectal carcinomas as compared with normal adjacent mucosal tissues (Matsui et al., J Biochem, 127: 1103-1107, 2000). Lymphatic vessel invasion by the carcinoma was correlated to low levels of MGC-24 mRNA in colon carcinomas, whereas high levels did correlate with less venous invasion and less remote metastasis. Monoclonal antibodies specific for CD164 could prove useful for cancer diagnosis or therapy and haematopoiesis inhibition (EP889054, EP761814).
Other CD164-like proteins have been disclosed (NOV25, WO 02/098917; SEQ ID NO: 7852, EP1033401; FIG. 1), but their biological properties have not been analyzed.

Use of soluble CD164 in inflammatory and/or autoimmune disorders


A method and system for generating upstream frames in an Ethernet Passive Optical Network protocol over Coax (EPoC) network is provided. Upstream frame configuration parameters are received by a CNU from a CLT in a link info broadcast a message. The CNU can recover the upstream frame configuration parameters from the link info broadcast message and generate at least in part upstream frame.

A Passive Optical Network (PON) includes a shared optical fiber and inexpensive optical splitters to divide the fiber into separate strands feeding individual subscribers. An Ethernet PON (EPON) is a PON based on the Ethernet standard. EPONs provide simple, easy-to-manage connectivity to Ethernet-based, IP equipment, both at customer premises and at the central office. As with other Gigabit Ethernet media, EPONs are well-suited to carry packetized traffic. An Ethernet Passive Optical Network Protocol Over Coax (EPoC) is a network that enables EPON connectivity over a coaxial network.
The embodiments of the present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding, reference number.

Upstream frame configuration for ethernet passive optical network protocol over coax (EPoC) networks

Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd.


A monolithic inductor (10) comprises an elongated substrate having opposite distal ends (14) and (16), each end having an end cap extending from the opposite ends to support the substrate (12) in spaced relation from a PC board, the end caps being formed with non-mounting areas and a deflection area for preventing the substrate resting on the non-mounting area, a substantially steep side wall (16) on the substrate side of the end cap (14) at the non-mounting area, and an inclined ramp extending up to a top of the end cap on the substrate side substantially opposite the non-mounting area, an electrically conductive soldering band (30) extending partially around each end cap, each soldering band having a gap (34) at the non-mounting area for thereby reducing parasitic conduction in the band (30), and an electrically conductive layer formed on the substrate in a helical path extending between the opposite ends and in electrical contact with the conductive soldering bands (30) at the ramps (120).

The present invention relates to miniature inductors and pertains particularly to improved monolithic inductors and a method of manufacturing the same.
Miniature inductors are widely used in radio frequency electric circuits. The inductors are made in two basic configurations: wire wound and monolithic. Wire-wound inductors are made with a wire wound on a dielectric or a ferrite core, or they can be made free-standing, provided a wire of sufficient thickness is used to ensure stability. There are several types of monolithic inductors: multilayer ceramic and ferrite, a single-layer spiral, and helical.
Wire-wound inductors, especially the ones wound on dielectric cores or free-standing, generally have high Q-factor values, but are characterized by high cost. It is also relatively complicated to provide an inductor having an exact inductance value, due to the fact that the locations of wire termination points are usually fixed on a core, so fractional wire turns are sometimes not possible. One solution to this problem has been to select cores of different diameters for various inductance values, but this leads further to increased costs due to the need to adjust winding and handling machinery and the need for expanded core inventories.
In addition, the repeatability of the winding process, especially in cases where the inductance value is relatively low and only a few wire turns are required, is limited by the same need to attach the ends of the wire to the fixed locations on the core.
The multi-layer monolithic inductors are made of a series of stacked ceramic or ferrite layers each having a conductive trace deposited on its surface. The traces on adjacent ceramic layers are electrically interconnected. Multi-layer inductors are generally less expensive than wire-wound but have significantly lower Q-values, which limits their usefulness in some applications.
A spiral-type of inductor consists of a flat ceramic substrate on which single layer flat spiral metal pattern is defined. They have the same limitations as the multi-layer inductors.
A helical-type monolithic inductor consists of a substrate forming an elongated ceramic or ferrite core. The substrate is covered with one or more metal layers which are then etched or cut in a helical fashion, either mechanically or with a laser beam. The cut defines a helical winding similar to a wire coil. The ends of the core usually have metal caps in electrical contact with the conducting layer. The metal caps customarily have a solderable coating defining terminals to facilitate soldering of the inductor to a printed circuit board.
I have discovered through extensive testing that the end caps on the current helical monolithic inductors act as shortened windings. These shortened windings introduce parasitic losses which lead to diminished Q-values and lower inductance values. I have also discovered that without continuous metallization at the end caps significantly increased Q-values, and inductance values are obtained.
It is desirable to reduce cost of electrical components such as inductors without sacrificing performance of the systems they are made part of. It is also desirable to provide inductors as close to the stated nominal value as possible, with minimal process variations. This is known in the art as "high tolerance". Having inductors with high tolerance is desirable since it may obviate the use of tunable components, such as inductors and capacitors in end products.

Method of manufacture of an improved monolithic inductor