An administrative agreement (AA) was signed between NSSC and UAE FANR in January 2023 under Article 5 of the ROK-UAE Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. The AA aims to enhance regulatory efficiency in safeguards and export control. This study reviewed the export control measures for the items subject to the agreement (ISA) and implementation procedures under ROK-UAE AA by comparing them with other countries cases. First of all, the ROK-UAE AA distinguishes between ISA and the inventory management target items. Technology is divided into two categories, one requiring consent for retransfer and the other, considering the characteristics of technology that is free to be copied and deleted, and thus less useful for inventory management. Only the former is included in the annual report, which differs from the ROK-Canada or ROK-Japan NCA, which includes all technologies subject to the agreements in the annual report. When ROK notifies export information, it is mandatory to specify whether the technology requires consent for retransfer. Furthermore, some technologies should be controlled as strategic information, even if excluded from the annual report, so efforts to prevent confusion are required. Secondly, the ROK-UAE AA covers all items in INFCIRC/254/rev.9/part1, unlike the ROK-U.S. and ROK-Canada NCA, which listed equipment subject to them. This is significant because it clarifies the criteria for regulation by increasing the consistency between the trigger list items in the domestic law and the ISA. However, the expanded ISA scope could result in some changes in export control procedures. For example, when importing nuclear material (NM) from the US, only uranium was controlled as ISA, and the packages were not considered. In contrast, when exporting fuel assemblies (FA) for UAE, both uranium and zirconium cladding should be treated as ISA. To this end, NEPS was improved to implement the features of the ROK-UAE AA. Consideration of the criteria and methods for imposing obligations under the agreement is essential because this is the first case of Korea concluded AA under exporting NPP and as a supplier of FA. Generally, the obligations for NM are imposed by the country of origin, conversion, and enrichment countries. Canada and EU recognize the fuel fabrication process as a substantial transformation and impose customs origin where the process takes place. Hence, NM fabricated from Canadian equipment is also subject to the same obligations as NM of Canadian origin. From this perspective, it would be appropriate to ensure ROK acts as a supplier and controls when exporting domestically manufactured FA. Moreover, a proper national obligation code system will be required to specify Korea’s control rights.

This study aims to develop a multi-functional cage for dogs as a house to reduce their anxiety when they go out using cages. This study investigates the types and characteristics of cages and cage preference by surveying men and women in their 20s who use them. The cage product reviews are also analyzed. The research results are as follows: First, domestic dog cages are classified into crate, shoulder, cross (sling bag), backpack, carrier, and stroller types. The crate type is easy to clean and can be used as a house, but it is bulky and therefore inconvenient to carry when using public transportation. The shoulder type is a fabric material with good air permeability but has the disadvantage of being easily soiled. It can be used as a house and is light weight, making it convenient when using public transportation. Second, as a result of consumer research, respondents prefer the shoulder-type fabric over the crate-type plastic material. Third, from the shoulder-type product review, the shape stability, companion dogs’ psychological safety, the wearability of companions, and management convenience are derived. Fourth, based on the survey results, a multifunctional cage is developed taking into account the companion dog, companion person, and functional factors.

This study evaluated cell viability and cytokine release in immortalized human oral fibroblasts (hTERT-hNOFs) and keratinocytes (IHOK) exposed to a dental-impregnated gingival retraction cord. To prepare the extracts, dental gingival retraction cords impregnated with aluminum chloride hexahydrate were immersed in a cell culture medium for 24 h at 37 °C. hTERT-hNOFs and IHOK were cultured for 24 h. The cell culture medium was removed and extracts of the dental gingival retraction cords were added. After incubation with the extract solution, cell viability was evaluated using an MTT assay. The levels of the cytokines IL-1α and IL-8 were measured in the supernatants of each cell type. The cell viability after exposure to the extract solution for 10 min exceeded 70 % in both cell types. The ET50 values for hTERT-hNOF and IHOK were 35.75 and 28.98 min, respectively. For IHOK, the IL-1α level was (5.35 ± 5.22) pg/mL at 10 min, (3.58 ± 5.38) pg/mL at 20 min, and (2.85 ± 4.28) pg/mL at 60 min of exposure (p > 0.05). The IL-8 level in IHOK was (67.16 ± 18.70) pg/mL at 10 min, (78.36 ± 7.50) pg/mL at 20 min, and (111.9 ± 26.10) pg/mL at 60 min of exposure (p > 0.05). Cytokine release was not observed from hTERThNOFs. Based on these results, cell viability and cytokine release were confirmed in cells exposed to the impregnated gingival retraction cord. In addition, the application of the extracts to hTERT-hNOF and IHOK during the actual contact time and determination of ET50 may be beneficial for evaluating the biocompatibility of dental-impregnated gingival retraction cords.

Poor mechanical properties and bacterial infection are the main problems faced by dental restorative resins in clinical use. In this study, graphene quantum dots (GQDs) grafted with imidazole groups and mesoporous silica (MSN) are co-filled in a dental resin to impart excellent antimicrobial activity and mechanical properties to the dental resin. The higher specific surface area of GQDs and MSN results in an increased contact area with the resin matrix, which enhances the strength of the dental composite resin. The introduction of GQDs significantly improves the antimicrobial activity of the resin. The inhibition efficiency of the composite resin against Streptococcus mutans reached 99.9% with the addition of GQDs at only 0.2 wt.%. When MSN and GQDs are co-filled, MSN interferes with the release of GQDs, thus reducing the antimicrobial activity of the dental resin but improving the cyto-compatibility. By reasonably adjusting the amount of GQDs and MSN, the dental composite resin can exhibit excellent antimicrobial properties, mechanical properties and cyto-compatibility at the same time.

Lightweight face recognition models, as one of the most popular and long-standing topics in the field of computer vision, has achieved vigorous development and has been widely used in many real-world applications due to fewer number of parameters, lower floating-point operations, and smaller model size. However, few surveys reviewed lightweight models and reimplemented these lightweight models by using the same calculating resource and training dataset. In this survey article, we present a comprehensive review about the recent research advances on the end-to-end efficient lightweight face recognition models and reimplement several of the most popular models. To start with, we introduce the overview of face recognition with lightweight models. Then, based on the construction of models, we categorize the lightweight models into: (1) artificially designing lightweight FR models, (2) pruned models to face recognition, (3) efficient automatic neural network architecture design based on neural architecture searching, (4) Knowledge distillation and (5) low-rank decomposition. As an example, we also introduce the SqueezeFaceNet and EfficientFaceNet by pruning SqueezeNet and EfficientNet. Additionally, we reimplement and present a detailed performance comparison of different lightweight models on the nine different test benchmarks. At last, the challenges and future works are provided. There are three main contributions in our survey: firstly, the categorized lightweight models can be conveniently identified so that we can explore new lightweight models for face recognition; secondly, the comprehensive performance comparisons are carried out so that ones can choose models when a state-of-the-art end-to-end face recognition system is deployed on mobile devices; thirdly, the challenges and future trends are stated to inspire our future works.

Recently, many studies are being conducted to extract emotion from text and verify its information power in the field of finance, along with the recent development of big data analysis technology. A number of prior studies use pre-defined sentiment dictionaries or machine learning methods to extract sentiment from the financial documents. However, both methods have the disadvantage of being labor-intensive and subjective because it requires a manual sentiment learning process. In this study, we developed a financial sentiment dictionary that automatically extracts sentiment from the body text of analyst reports by using modified Bayes rule and verified the performance of the model through a binary classification model which predicts actual stock price movements. As a result of the prediction, it was found that the proposed financial dictionary from this research has about 4% better predictive power for actual stock price movements than the representative Loughran and McDonald’s (2011) financial dictionary. The sentiment extraction method proposed in this study enables efficient and objective judgment because it automatically learns the sentiment of words using both the change in target price and the cumulative abnormal returns. In addition, the dictionary can be easily updated by re-calculating conditional probabilities. The results of this study are expected to be readily expandable and applicable not only to analyst reports, but also to financial field texts such as performance reports, IR reports, press articles, and social media.

Chicken embryonic stem (ES) cells have great potential and provide a powerful tool to investigate embryonic development and to manipulate genetic modification in a genome. However, very limited studies are available on the functional characterization and robust expansion of chicken ES cells compared to other species. Here, we have developed a method to generate chicken embryonic stem cell-like cells under pluripotent culture conditions. The chicken embryonic stem cell-like cells were cultivated long-term over several passages of culture without loss of pluripotency in vitro and had the specific expression of key stem cell markers. Furthermore, they showed severe changes in morphology and a significant reduction in pluripotent genes after siRNA-mediated NANOG knockdown. Collectively, these results demonstrate the efficient generation of chicken embryonic stem cell-like cells from EGK stage X blastoderm-derived singularized cells and will facilitate their potential use for various purposes, such as biobanking genetic materials and understanding stemness in the fields of animal biotechnology.

This study aimed to verify the whitening effect of Cordyceps militaris, which is distributed in several countries worldwide, including Korea, Japan, and China, and has various medical effects. To screen the efficacy of C. militaris, the inhibitory activity of tyrosinase, which was 66% at a concentration of 1 mg/mL, was measured. Thereafter, the survival rate of melanoma cells was measured, and cell experiments were conducted at a concentration of 90% or more in which C. militaris was not toxic to cells. After measuring the inhibitory effect of TRP-1, TRP-2, tyrosinase protein, and mRNA expression, which are factors influencing melanin synthesis, C. militaris was found to decrease in all factors, with an expression level that was significantly lower compared to quercetin. This confirmed that C. militaris stimulated with LED has excellent whitening activity and can be used as a functional whitening cosmetics material.

Graphite felt is a felt-like porous material made of high-temperature carbonized polymers. It is widely used in electrode materials because of its good temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, large surface area and excellent electrical conductivity. In this paper, the surface functional group modification is of graphite felt electrodes (mainly nitrogen doping modification, nitrogen–sulfur or nitrogen–boron co-doping modification) and surface catalytic modification (metal/ion surface modification and metal oxide surface modification as Main). There are two main methods and research progresses to improve the performance of graphite felt electrodes, and the comprehensive performance of surface functional group-modified graphite felt electrodes and surface catalytically modified graphite felt electrodes are compared respectively. The results show that both surface functional group modification and surface catalytic modification can improve the comprehensive performance of graphite felt electrodes. In this paper, the future development direction of graphite felt activation modification is also prospected.

Recently, unmanned logistics delivery systems, such as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, written as drone below) and autonomous robot delivery systems, have been implemented in many countries due to the rapid development of autonomous driving technology. The development of these new types of advanced unmanned logistics delivery systems is essential not only to become a leading logistics company but also to secure national competitiveness. In this paper, the application of the unmanned logistics delivery system was investigated in terms of market trends, overall technology level of last mile delivery drone and autonomous delivery robot. The direction of response to changes in the last mile delivery service market was checked through a comparison of the technological level between domestic companies that produce last mile devices and advanced foreign companies. As a result of this technology level analysis, the difference between domestic companies and advanced companies was shown using tables and figures to show their relative levels. The results of this analysis reflect the opinions of experts in the field of last-mile delivery technology. In addition, the technology level of unmanned logistics delivery systems for each country was analyzed based on the number of related technology patents. Lastly, insights for the technology level analysis of unmanned last mile delivery systems were proposed as a conclusion.