Abstract:The pulse-based charging method for battery cells has been recognized as a fast and efficient way to overcome the shortcoming of a slow charging time in distributed battery cells, which is regarded as a connection of cells such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The pulse frequency for controlling the battery charge duration is dynamically controlled within a certain range in order to inject the maximum charge current into the battery cells. The optimal frequency is determined in order to minimize battery impedance. The adaptation of the proposed pulse duty and frequency decreases the concentration of the polarization by sensing the runtime characteristics of battery cells so that it guarantees a certain level of safety in charging the distributed battery cells within the operating temperature range of 5-45 • C. The sensed terminal voltage and temperature of battery cells are dynamically monitored while the battery is charging so as to adjust the frequency and duty of the proposed charging pulse method, thereby preventing battery degradation. The evaluation results show that a newly designed charging algorithm for the implemented charger system is about 18.6% faster than the conventional constant-current (CC) charging method with the temperature rise within a reasonable range. The implemented charger system, which is based on the proposed dynamic frequency and duty control by considering the cell polarization, charges to about 80% of its maximum capacity in less than 56 min and involves a 13 • C maximum temperature rise without damaging the battery.

Modulators of the G protein-coupled A 2A adenosine receptor (A 2A AR) have been considered promising agents to treat Parkinson’s disease, inflammation, cancer, and central nervous system disorders. Herein, we demonstrate that a thiophene modification at the C8 position in the common adenine scaffold converted an A 2A AR agonist into an antagonist. We synthesized and characterized a novel A 2A AR antagonist, 2 (LJ-4517), with K i = 18.3 nM. X-ray crystallographic structures of 2 in complex with two thermostabilized A 2A AR constructs were solved at 2.05 and 2.80 Å resolutions. In contrast to A 2A AR agonists, which simultaneously interact with both Ser277 7.42 and His278 7.43 , 2 only transiently contacts His278 7.43 , which can be direct or water-mediated. The n -hexynyl group of 2 extends into an A 2A AR exosite. Structural analysis revealed that the introduced thiophene modification restricted receptor conformational rearrangements required for subsequent activation. This approach can expand the repertoire of adenosine receptor antagonists that can be designed based on available agonist scaffolds.

Electrocardiogram signal analysis is based on detecting a fiducial point consisting of the onset, offset, and peak of each waveform. The accurate diagnosis of arrhythmias depends on the accuracy of fiducial point detection. Detecting the onset and offset fiducial points is ambiguous because the feature values are similar to those of the surrounding sample. To improve the accuracy of this paper’s fiducial point detection, the signal is represented by a small number of vertices through a curvature-based vertex selection technique using polygonal approximation. The proposed method minimizes the number of candidate samples for fiducial point detection and emphasizes these sample’s feature values to enable reliable detection. It is also sensitive to the morphological changes of various QRS complexes by generating an accumulated signal of the amplitude change rate between vertices as an auxiliary signal. To verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm, error distribution is measured through comparison with the QT-DB annotation provided by Physionet. The mean and standard deviation of the onset and the offset were stable as −4.02±7.99 ms and −5.45±8.04 ms, respectively. The results show that proposed method using small number of vertices is acceptable in practical applications. We also confirmed that the proposed method is effective through the clustering of the QRS complex. Experiments on the arrhythmia data of MIT-BIH ADB confirmed reliable fiducial point detection results for various types of QRS complexes.

A particle filter (PF) has been introduced for effective position estimation of moving targets for non-Gaussian and nonlinear systems. The time difference of arrival (TDOA) method using acoustic sensor array has normally been used to for estimation by concealing the location of a moving target, especially underwater. In this paper, we propose a GPU -based acceleration of target position estimation using a PF and propose an efficient system and software architecture. The proposed graphic processing unit (GPU)-based algorithm has more advantages in applying PF signal processing to a target system, which consists of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT)-driven sensors because of the parallelization which is scalable. For the TDOA measurement from the acoustic sensor array, we use the generalized cross correlation phase transform (GCC-PHAT) method to obtain the correlation coefficient of the signal using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and we try to accelerate the calculations of GCC-PHAT based TDOA measurements using FFT with GPU compute unified device architecture (CUDA). The proposed approach utilizes a parallelization method in the target position estimation algorithm using GPU-based PF processing. In addition, it could efficiently estimate sudden movement change of the target using GPU-based parallel computing which also can be used for multiple target tracking. It also provides scalability in extending the detection algorithm according to the increase of the number of sensors. Therefore, the proposed architecture can be applied in IoT sensing applications with a large number of sensors. The target estimation algorithm was verified using MATLAB and implemented using GPU CUDA. We implemented the proposed signal processing acceleration system using target GPU to analyze in terms of execution time. The execution time of the algorithm is reduced by 55% from to the CPU standalone operation in target embedded board, NVIDIA Jetson TX1. Also, to apply large-scaled IoT sensing applications, we use NVIDIA Tesla K40c as target GPU. The execution time of the proposed multi-state-space model-based algorithm is similar to the one-state-space model algorithm because of GPU-based parallel computing. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture is a feasible solution in terms of high-performance and area-efficient architecture.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more pervasive in our daily lives, the number of devices that connect to IoT edges and data generated at the edges are rapidly increasing. On account of the bottlenecks in servers, due to the increase in data, as well as security and privacy issues, the IoT paradigm has shifted from cloud computing to edge computing. Pursuant to this trend, embedded devices require complex computation capabilities. However, due to various constraints, edge devices cannot equip enough hardware to process data, so the flexibility of operation is reduced, because of the limitations of fixed hardware functions, relative to cloud computing. Recently, as application fields and collected data types diversify, and, in particular, applications requiring complex computation such as artificial intelligence (AI) and signal processing are applied to edges, flexible processing and computation capabilities based on hardware acceleration are required. In this paper, to meet these needs, we propose a new IoT platform, called a metamorphic IoT (mIoT) platform, which can various hardware acceleration with limited hardware platform resources, through on-demand transmission and reconfiguration of required hardware at edges instead of via transference of sensing data to a server. The proposed platform reconfigures the edge’s hardware with minimal overhead, based on a probabilistic value, known as callability. The mIoT consists of reconfigurable edge devices based on RISC-V architecture and a server that manages the reconfiguration of edge devices based on callability. Through various experimental results, we confirmed that the callability-based mIoT platform can provide the hardware required by the edge device in real time. In addition, by performing various functions with small hardware, power consumption, which is a major constraint of IoT, can be reduced.

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Recently, there have been many studies on the automatic extraction of facial information using machine learning. Age estimation from front face images is becoming important, with various applications. Our proposed work is based on the binary classifier, which only determines whether two input images are clustered in a similar class, and trains the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) model using the deep metric learning method based on the Siamese network. To converge the results of the training Siamese network, two classes, for which age differences are below a certain level of distance, are considered as the same class, so the ratio of positive database images is increased. The deep metric learning method trains the CNN model to measure similarity based on only age data, but we found that the accumulated gender data can also be used to compare ages. From this experimental fact, we adopted a multi-task learning approach to consider the gender data for more accurate age estimation. In the experiment, we evaluated our approach using MORPH and MegaAge-Asian datasets, and compared gender classification accuracy only using age data from the training images. In addition, from the gender classification, we found that our proposed architecture, which is trained with only age data, performs age comparison by using the self-generated gender feature. The accuracy enhancement by multi-task learning, for the simultaneous consideration of age and gender data, is discussed. Our approach results in the best accuracy among the methods based on deep metric learning on MORPH dataset. Additionally, our method is also the best results compared with the results of the state of art in terms of age estimation on MegaAge Asian and MORPH datasets.