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IMDN-Plus: Enhancing Lightweight Super-Resolution with Hybrid Attention
No full textSuper-resolution (SR) is a critical task in computer vision, aiming to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs. While deep learning-based SR models have achieved impressive results, many are computationally expensive and unsuitable for realtime applications. IMDN (Information Multi-Distillation Network) is a lightweight SR model designed for efficiency, but it has limitations in spatial attention, hierarchical feature learning, and edge preservation.
In this work, we propose IMDN-Plus, an enhanced lightweight SR model that integrates Hybrid Attention (CBAM + Swin Transformer) to refine feature extraction, Deeper Feature Distillation to improve texture recovery, and Charbonnier Loss to enhance edge sharpness. These modifications allow IMDN-Plus to achieve better perceptual quality without significantly increasing computational cost.
We evaluate IMDN-Plus on the DIV2K validation set, where it achieves an average PSNR improvement of +0.9 dB and an SSIM gain of +0.0158 over IMDN. Qualitative results further demonstrate sharper textures and reduced artifacts in high-frequency regions. These findings suggest that IMDN-Plus is a practical solution for real-time SR applications, balancing efficiency and image quality
Perception of God’s Communication: A Comparative Study of Ignatius of Loyola and Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians
No full textAlthough Ignatius’ and Pentecostal-Charismatic (P-C) frameworks differ in their structure and emphasis – Ignatius focusing on interior movements and long-term discernment, and P-C Christians emphasizing immediate prophetic messages – both traditions affirm that these various forms of God’s communication can be accessed through the same spiritual perception. This includes thoughts, intuitions, feelings, bodily sensations, and imaginative experiences.
Recognizing these shared revelatory modes invites a renewed appreciation for spiritual perception within contemporary Ignatian spirituality, highlighting the Spiritual Exercises as a school for forming and refining the senses to perceive God’s communication. Moreover, contemporary prophetic experiences among P-C Christians offer valuable perspective for interpreting Ignatius’s own prophetic experiences and reinforce the faith-building conviction that God continues to speak today.
Conversely, Ignatius’ perception of God’s communication as a gradual and transformative interaction – often unfolding through subtle interior movements – can help P-C Christians grow in awareness of God’s presence beyond explicit words or dramatic experiences. Applying the Ignatian framework of the Three Times of Election to their revelations can help P-C Christians integrate perceived words and feelings into a fuller process of discerning God’s will – by attending to affective resonance and allowing the gradual transformation of their intellectual sensibility in recognizing God’s communication
Fostering Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan’s Self-Appropriation and Its Impact on Ethical Decision-Making and Social Engagement in Korean Catholicism
No full textThis thesis explores how Bernard Lonergan\u27s theory of self-appropriation can address the knowledge-action gap in Korean Catholicism, particularly regarding social engagement. Contemporary Korean society faces increasing social fragmentation and hatred, yet the Korean Catholic Church demonstrates limited engagement with pressing social issues despite its rich tradition of social teaching. The research identifies three critical challenges: limited awareness of faith\u27s public dimension, lack of practical methodology to translate Catholic Social Teaching into action, and overreliance on reason-centered ethical discourse.
Through theological analysis and contextual application, this study demonstrates that Lonergan\u27s self-appropriation theory provides a transformative framework promoting personal authenticity and social responsibility. Self-appropriation, as a process of gaining deeper awareness of one\u27s cognitive and emotional processes, enables Catholics to integrate their faith with public responsibility through intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. By attending to the transcendental operations of consciousness— experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding—believers can move beyond privatized faith toward authentic ethical engagement.
The research further identifies how desire functions as the foundation for ethical discernment and how attentiveness to emotions as intentional responses to value can transform ethical judgment. Particularly within the Korean cultural context, which traditionally values integrated emotional, relational, and harmonious approaches, a methodology starting from attentiveness to emotions provides an effective pathway to overcome hatred and discrimination.
This study contributes to theological ethics by providing Korean Catholics with a methodological framework to raise awareness of faith\u27s public dimension and authentically internalize Catholic Social Teaching. Through this approach, believers can cultivate ethical judgment that meaningfully responds to social challenges and fulfill their vocation as transformative witnesses in public life
Intercultural Communication
Get PDFFor the survival and development of important human values, the study of intercultural communication may be one of the critical areas of communication research. One has only to witness Kojak and Starsky and Hutch bouncing off satellites into the intimacy of minds and homes in cultures of India and Thailand to realize this. Vendors of communication technology are rushing to pen a Pandora\u27s box of influences which may erode cultural ideals created over thousands of years. Once again we are not prepared to cope with the human and social implications of communication technology.
But the focus of research in intercultural communication is the subject of much debate.
Some contend that the emphasis in this field on training technical consultants, missionaries, and transnational representatives to avoid stumbling over their worst ethnocentrisms is just a new face for the old imperialism.
The interest in intercultural communication as a means to improve international relations is viewed in some quarters as a polyanna-like idealism behind which lurks an obsession for international law and order with its own self-serving motives.
Many -- both sensitive missionaries and non-Christians -- are concerned with the impact of Western Christianity on great Eastern civilizations.
Others rejoin, These civilizations are inevitably going down before the onslaught of blue jeans, rock music, and the thousand gadgets of modern technology. This \u27culture-free\u27 technology is the new world civilization. This CSCC NEWSLETTER was current research on intercultural communication and examines some of the debate of the major issues
Caltrain Redesign: Mountain View Station
No full textThe CalTrain Redesign Mountain View Station project aims to improve pedestrian and bicycle traffic efficiency and safety by designing a bypass. The main objective is to enhance traffic flow and reduce safety hazards for commuters at this busy transportation hub. We have identified a key location for the bypass: a pedestrian bridge intersecting Castro Street and the CalTrain tracks.. The scope of this project includes transportation usage analysis, structural design, geotechnical design, BIM project modeling, and construction planning. By improving pedestrian and bicycle traffic flow we anticipate creating a safer environment by reducing casualties. Ethical matters were considered to ensure that the design and construction process does not negatively impact vulnerable populations, including passengers with disabilities, the elderly, or commuters who rely on public transportation. In addition, it is important to account for potential temporary disruptions during construction, such as noise and delays. Mitigating these impacts will be important to minimize inconvenience to the community, while balancing the need for improved infrastructure at the Mountain View Station
Pajaro River Levee Remedial Design for Climate Resiliency
Get PDFWith climate change causing extreme weather events, low-income, underrepresented residents living in Pajaro, California need a more resilient flood mitigation solution because existing infrastructure– the Pajaro River Levee– has recently failed. A hydraulic analysis and overtopping analysis was performed to evaluate potential levee cross sections for a 1.7 mile stretch along the Pajaro River in California. These cross-sections were assessed based on both their material costs and ability to provide sufficient evacuation time
Transport Layer Approaches to Reducing System Resource Utilization and Improving Communication Efficiency
Get PDFTransport and security layer protocols are fundamental to ensuring reliable and secure communication between endpoints. Among transport-layer protocols, TCP is the most widely deployed; however, it su↵ers from several limitations that impact performance, including high per-packet overhead, expensive connection re-establishment, and low per-byte protocol efficiency. To address these shortcomings, the IETF standardized QUIC, a modern UDP-based transport protocol implemented in userspace. QUIC integrates transport and cryptographic features, including packet encryption, retransmission, multiplexing, and stream management, while emulating connection-oriented behavior atop UDP, which is a connectionless protocol. This thesis investigates the limitations of traditional TCP and QUIC in the context of IoT and SDN environments. It presents three enhanced variants of QUIC designed to reduce overhead and improve efficiency in these domains: (i) MQTT over QUIC for IoT messaging; (ii) quicSDN for control plane communication in SDN infrastructures; and (iii) kQUIC, a kernel-space implementation that eliminates userspace system call overhead and improves throughput. The proposed solutions are evaluated using both analytical models and empirical experiments. Results indicate that userspace QUIC is suboptimal for constrained environments and SDN due to integration complexity, communication and system call overhead. The enhanced variants significantly outperform both TCP and standard QUIC in terms of throughput, system resource utilization, connection robustness, and acknowledgment efficiency
