Search results for " engineering"
showing 10 items of 38291 documents
The role of regional competitiveness in shaping the heterogeneous impact of the Great Recession
2020
This paper assesses the employment resilience of 202 European regions to the Great Recession by investigating the role of regional competitiveness. By using the regional shift component derived from a multiple bases shift–share analysis of employment change as a measure of regional endogenous employment growth, we show that pre‐crisis regional competitiveness determinants are associated with positive performances during the crisis period. However, the variables considered explain well the different vulnerability of the economies, but less convincingly the ability to recover. Taking into account the spatial interactions among regions, results are confirmed and allow us to identify spillover …
Polymeric nanoparticles for siRNA delivery: Production and applications
2017
Gene therapy through the use of siRNA and a polymeric carrier are becoming an efficient therapeutic option to conventional pharmaceutical formulations for the treatment of deadly diseases, such as cancer, pulmonary, ocular and neurodegenerative diseases. However, several considerations regarding the stability, formulation, and efficacy have to be faced up until these systems could be considered to be a marketable pharmaceutical products for to extend siRNA application to clinical practice. This review is focused on the key challenges of siRNA therapeutics, with special attention on the faced obstacles and on the formulation-related difficulties, providing a list of requirements needed for o…
Development of New Targeted Inulin Complex Nanoaggregates for siRNA Delivery in Antitumor Therapy.
2021
Here, a novel strategy of formulating efficient polymeric carriers based on the already described INU-IMI-DETA for gene material whose structural, functional, and biological properties can be modulated and improved was successfully investigated. In particular, two novel derivatives of INU-IMI-DETA graft copolymer were synthesized by chemical functionalisation with epidermal growth factor (EGF) or polyethylenglycol (PEG), named INU-IMI-DETA-EGF and INU-IMI-DETA-PEG, respectively, in order to improve the performance of already described “inulin complex nanoaggregates” (ICONs). The latter were thus prepared by appropriately mixing the two copolymers, by varying each component from 0 to 100 wt%…
ESTIMATING SOIL PARTICLE-SIZE DISTRIBUTION FOR SICILIAN SOILS
2009
The soil particle-size distribution (PSD) is commonly used for soil classification and for estimating soil behavior. An accurate mathematical representation of the PSD is required to estimate soil hydraulic properties and to compare texture measurements from different classification systems. The objective of this study was to evaluate the ability of the Haverkamp and Parlange (HP) and Fredlund et al. (F) PSD models to fit 243 measured PSDs from a wide range of 38 005_Bagarello(547)_33 18-11-2009 11:55 Pagina 38 soil textures in Sicily and to test the effect of the number of measured particle diameters on the fitting of the theoretical PSD. For each soil textural class, the best fitting perf…
Emulation of Sun-Induced Fluorescence from Radiance Data Recorded by the HyPlant Airborne Imaging Spectrometer
2021
The retrieval of sun-induced fluorescence (SIF) from hyperspectral radiance data grew to maturity with research activities around the FLuorescence EXplorer satellite mission FLEX, yet full-spectrum estimation methods such as the spectral fitting method (SFM) are computationally expensive. To bypass this computational load, this work aims to approximate the SFM-based SIF retrieval by means of statistical learning, i.e., emulation. While emulators emerged as fast surrogate models of simulators, the accuracy-speedup trade-offs are still to be analyzed when the emulation concept is applied to experimental data. We evaluated the possibility of approximating the SFM-like SIF output directly based…
SingleChannelNet : A model for automatic sleep stage classification with raw single-channel EEG
2022
In diagnosing sleep disorders, sleep stage classification is a very essential yet time-consuming process. Various existing state-of-the-art approaches rely on hand-crafted features and multi-modality polysomnography (PSG) data, where prior knowledge is compulsory and high computation cost can be expected. Besides, it is a big challenge to handle the task with raw single-channel electroencephalogram (EEG). To overcome these shortcomings, this paper proposes an end-to-end framework with a deep neural network, namely SingleChannelNet, for automatic sleep stage classification based on raw single-channel EEG. The proposed model utilizes a 90s epoch as the textual input and employs two multi-conv…
Image inpainting using directional wavelet packets originating from polynomial splines
2020
The paper presents a new algorithm for the image inpainting problem. The algorithm is using a recently designed versatile library of quasi-analytic complex-valued wavelet packets (qWPs) which originate from polynomial splines of arbitrary orders. Tensor products of 1D qWPs provide a diversity of 2D qWPs oriented in multiple directions. For example, a set of the fourth-level qWPs comprises 62 different directions. The properties of the presented qWPs such as refined frequency resolution, directionality of waveforms with unlimited number of orientations, (anti-)symmetry of waveforms and windowed oscillating structure of waveforms with a variety of frequencies, make them efficient in image pro…
Testing and implementing a new approach to estimating interregional output multipliers using input-output data for South Korean regions
2020
Flegg's location quotient (FLQ) is a useful tool for estimating intraregional output multipliers. This paper uses it as one component when estimating interregional multipliers. Using statistical information criteria and official data for 16 South Korean regions, it is found that the best approach is to combine the FLQ with a simple trade model. The paper explains how the proposed procedure can be implemented for both multiple and individual regions, and also how a region-specific value for the unknown parameter δ in the FLQ formula can be determined. Finally, an illustrative case study of one of the regions is carried out.
Charge Transport Mechanisms in Heavy-Ion Driven Leakage Current in Silicon Carbide Schottky Power Diodes
2016
Under heavy-ion exposure at sufficiently high reverse bias voltages silicon carbide (SiC) Schottky diodes are observed to exhibit gradual increases in leakage current with increasing ion fluence. Heavy-ion exposure alters the overall reverse current-voltage characteristics of these diodes, leaving the forward characteristics practically unchanged. This paper discusses the charge transport mechanisms in the heavy-ion damaged SiC Schottky diodes. A macro model, describing the reverse current-voltage characteristics in the degraded SiC Schottky diodes is proposed. peerReviewed
Effect of the Si doping on the properties of AZO/SiC/Si heterojunctions grown by low temperature pulsed laser deposition
2020
Abstract The structural and photoelectrical properties of Al-doped ZnO (AZO)/SiC/p-Si and AZO/SiC/n-Si heterojunctions, fabricated at low temperature by pulsed laser deposition, were investigated by means of a number of techniques. Raman analysis indicates that SiC layers have the cubic 3C-SiC phase, whilst X-ray diffraction measurements show that AZO films exhibit a hexagonal wurtzite structure, highly textured along the c-axis, with average crystallites size of 35.1 nm and lattice parameter c of 0.518 nm. The homogeneous and dense surface morphology observed by scanning electron microscopy was confirmed by atomic force microscopy images. Moreover, UV–Vis-NIR spectra indicated a high trans…