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Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), also known as energy disaggregation, is a blind source separation problem where a households aggregate electricity consumption is broken down into electricity usages of individual appliances. In this way, the cost and trouble of installing many measurement devices over numerous household appliances can be avoided, and only one device needs to be installed. The problem has been well-known since Hart's seminal paper in 1992, and recently significant performance improvements have been achieved by adopting deep networks. In this work, we focus on the idea that appliances have on/off states, and develop a deep network for further performance improvements. Specifically, we propose a subtask gated network that combines the main regression network with an on/off classification subtask network. Unlike typical multitask learning algorithms where multiple tasks simply share the network parameters to take advantage of the relevance among tasks, the subtask gated network multiply the main network's regression output with the subtask's classification probability. When standby-power is additionally learned, the proposed solution surpasses the state-of-theart performance for most of the benchmark cases. The subtask gated network can be very effective for any problem that inherently has on/off states.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the healing capacity within an 8-mm rabbit calvarial defect using a polycaprolactone (PCL)/poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) scaffold blended with tri-calcium phosphate (TCP) that was constructed using solid freeform fabrication (SFF) technology. The PCL/PLGA/TCP scaffold showed a 37 % higher compressive strength and rougher surface than the PCL/PLGA scaffold. In animal experiments, new bone formation was analyzed using microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) and histological and histometric analyses. The PCL/PLGA/TCP groups had significantly greater neo-tissue areas as compared with the control groups at 4 and 8 weeks (P < 0.05). The PCL/PLGA/TCP group had significantly greater bone density as compared with the control and PCL/PLGA groups at 4 and 8 weeks (P < 0.005). The results of this study suggest that the PCL/PLGA/TCP scaffold fabricated using SFF technology is useful for recovering and enhancing new bone formation in bony defects in rabbits.

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