Most Popular Books by Hoang Nguyen

The main focus of my Ph.D. research is synthetic methodology development to effectively construct nitrogen-containing heterocycles from readily accessible building blocks. During the course of my graduate studies in the Kurth lab, I have developed synthetic routes to forge these novel heterocyclic structures: Indazolones, triazepines, and triazoles are important N-heterocycles present in the structures of many bioactive compounds and natural products. The pharmacological significances of these heterocycles prompt us to develop an effective route to construct a novel fused-ring system embodying these three substructures. As illustrated in Chapter 1, we have developed an operationally-simple, one-pot, cascade route to a series of novel triazolotriazepinoindazolones from oxazolino-2H-indazoles via an electrophilic indazole --u003e indazolone reaction with a subsequent intramolecular azide-alkyne 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition. We also show the utilization of palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions to further diversify these novel heterocycles. The indole scaffold is a privileged core structure present in numerous natural products and synthetic pharmaceuticals. Belonging to this heterocyclic class, substituted nitroindoles are versatile intermediates in the synthesis of biologically active molecules. As described in Chapter 2, we have developed a method to transform a variety of N-aryl [beta]-nitroenamines into 3-nitroindoles in good yields and with complete regioselectivity via a rapid microwave ([mu]W) assisted intramolecular arene-alkene coupling reaction. This method utilizes catalytic amounts of relatively inexpensive Pd(PPh3)4. The enamines required for this transformation are readily available in one synthetic step from commercially available o-bromoanilines. We further demonstrate the versatility of this method by constructing 3-carboalkoxy- and 3-cyanoindoles. Optimization data, substrate scope, and mechanistic insights are discussed. The 1,4-benzodiazepine core is a ubiquitous motif found in numerous psychoactive pharmaceutical agents. Prompted by the synthetic interest and applications of imidazole/triazole/benzodiazepine-fused skeletons, we have developed an operationally simple, one-pot, multicomponent reaction for the assembly of 9H-benzo[f]imidazo[1,2-d][1,2,3]triazolo[1,5-a][1,4]diazepines adorned with three diversification points via an atom-economical transformation incorporating four starting materials: [alpha]-diketones, o-azidobenzaldehydes, propargylic amines, and ammonium acetate. This process involves tandem InCl3-catalyzed cyclocondensation and intramolecular azide-alkyne 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reactions. Optimization data, substrate scope, and mechanistic insights are discussed in Chapter 3. The family of indoloquinoline alkaloids has been isolated from the root bark extracts of Cryptolepis sanguinolenta (Asclepiadaceae), a Ghanaian medicinal shrub native to West Africa. Well-recognized as components in folk remedies for malaria, these alkaloids also display other interesting pharmacology. In Chapter 4, we have reported a transition metal-free, one-pot protocol for the synthesis of 11H-indolo[3,2-c]isoquinolin-5-amines via the atom economical annulation of ethyl (2-cyanophenyl)carbamates and 2-cyanobenzyl bromides. This method proceeds via sequential N-alkylation and base-promoted cyclization. Optimization data, substrate scope, mechanistic insights, and photoluminescence properties are discussed. The other portion of my Ph.D. research focuses on the development of small-molecule therapies for Cystic Fibrosis, a fatal recessive genetic disease in Caucasians caused by mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene. Our group has identified a lead compound containing a methylbithiazole core, which is capable of partially correcting the misfolding of [delta]F508-CFTR proteins and restoring the functional channels to the cell surface. Our follow-up report showed the conformational constrained bithiazole exhibited an improved corrector activity. This was achieved by locking the two free-rotating thiazoles in the s-cis conformation by an annulated cycloalkane ring. With this encouraging result, two sets of novel constrained bithiazole correctors were synthesized and evaluated in-vitro with FRT epithelial cells coexpressed with human [delta]F508-CFTR. The objective is to investigate the effect of constrained ring sizes and peripheral groups on the corrector activity. The potency and efficacy of the cyclooctabithiazole library were compared to cycloheptabithiazole library in order to identify the better corrector type. The outcome of this study would provide insights into the mechanisms of the protein-corrector interactions and hints towards the design of more potent analogs. This work is described in Chapter 5.

Technologies and tools for electronic tracking and recording personal data have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. These tracking and recording technologies (TRTs) often work implicitly, in the background, without explicit effort nor full understanding on the part of the users (or those being tracked and recorded). Little is understood about how individuals make decisions about adoption or rejection of such implicit TRTs. A significant challenge then is to understand the processes by which the general public perceives and responds to these technologies, balanced along with their concerns for information privacy. Using multiple methods - interviews, the day reconstruction method, and paratyping, in concurrence with the deployment of a validated survey instrument for the concern for information privacy (CFIP) - this dissertation shows that participants are simultaneously highly concerned about information privacy and not always concerned about the specific technologies they use everyday that can track and record their personal data. There are three primary contributions in this dissertation. One, I catalog contextualized perceptions and attitudes towards the concern for information privacy and TRTs. Two, by showing that traditional models of information privacy, such as CFIP, can be helpful but not sufficient to analyze the perceptions and attitudes towards TRTs, I identify the issues associated with applying the CFIP model to analyze TRTs. And three, I provide recommendations for the expansion of the CFIP model for use on TRTs.

This study explores the benefits of incorporating fat-tailed innovations, asymmetric volatility response, and an extended information set into crude oil return modeling and forecasting. To this end, we utilize standard volatility models such as Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (GARCH), Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS), and Stochastic Volatility (SV), along with Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regressions, which enable us to incorporate the impacts of relevant financial/macroeconomic news into asset price movements. For inference and prediction, we employ an innovative Bayesian estimation approach called the density-tempered sequential Monte Carlo method. Our findings indicate that the inclusion of exogenous variables is beneficial for GARCH-type models while offering only a marginal improvement for GAS and SV-type models. Notably, GAS-family models exhibit superior performance in terms of in-sample fit, out-of-sample forecast accuracy, as well as Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall prediction.

Abstract: "This doctoral thesis is one of the few empirical studies which investigated systematically the role of humour in the EFL classroom. Specifically, it examined university teachers'' and students'' perceptions of the roles of humour in EFL teaching, teachers'' practices of humour use, the reasons behind their use (or not use) of humour, teachers'' preferences regarding humour types, and students'' response to teachers'' use of humour. It investigated humour in English teaching/learning in the context of Vietnam - a developing country in Asia where English had a prestigious position and the mastery of English was an advantage for success in many fields and professions."

Since Circular 34 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam required the head of the national project to have project results published in ISI/Scopus journals in 2014, the field of economics has been dominating the number of nationally-funded projects in social sciences and humanities. However, there has been no scientometric study that focuses on the difference in productivity among fields in Vietnam. Thus, harnessing the power of the SSHPA database (sshpa.com), a comprehensive dataset of 1,564 Vietnamese authors (854 males, 705 females) with 2,410 publications in the 2008-2018 period was extracted and analyzed. Various factors were considered including age, gender, new authors, leading authors, co-authorship, and Impact Factor. The findings suggest a high level of contribution from authors at the age of 40-44 in economics (858 publications) in a 12-years period, which is equivalent to the social medicine total output, and two times more than the total output of the education. Moreover, the presence and reinforcement of male researchers are still dominating in Economics and other fields, with the only exception of education. Despite the rapid rise in the number of Vietnamese lead authors, gender disparity among disciplines is an issue. Contrary to the strong international collaboration-oriented tendency in social medicine, economics, and other fields, educational authors are not open to international collaborating. Finally, most of the publications in economics belong to the group with JIF from 0 to 2, in contrast with the high number of social medicine publications with JIF from 2 to 5, which suggesting the field of economics is fulfilling the quantity, but still, need more quality publications.

ABSTRACT: The objective of this study was to develop three-dimensional finite element models that can be used to investigate the effect of externally bonded carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) on the reinforced concrete beam-column connection (TJoint). The study emphasizes the particular aspects of the finite element modeling using ABAQUS software. The details of the developed models are presented. The accuracy of the results obtained from these models is verified by the experimental results. During the nonlinear FE analysis, although there was some success in modeling the structural behaviour before the ultimate load, significant numerical difficulties were encountered especially during the final loading stages. The experimental data are compared with the FEA results. A parametric study was performed to investigate the effect of CFRP sheets to increase shear strength of T-Joint model, considering: wrapping schemes, CFRP amount, laminate combination, and compressive concrete strength. The results showed that changing the CFRP laminate had an effect on the shear strength obtained.

A rapid quantitative PCR (qPCR) method was developed for the detection and quantification of fungi that are potentially present in dairy commodities. Genes of interest that were considered and used in the method development were the following: 18S rRNA, actin, beta-tubulin, and elongation factor 1-alpha. The following organisms were screened in this method development: Galactomyces candidus, Debaryomyces hansenii, Yarrowia lipolytica, Penicillium roqueforti, Penicillium verrocosum and Cladosporium cladosporioides. The developed method has a standard curve based on the organism, Galactomyces candidus, and the primers based on the elongation factor 1-alpha gene. Using this yeast and primers, this method can detect fungal counts above 102 CFU/mL. This method was compared to traditional plate counting on DRBC agar and currently available commercial methods (3M Rapid Yeast and Mold Petrifilms, Hygiena Qualicon BAX PCR Assay for Yeasts and Molds, and BIOTECON’s FoodProof Yeast and Mold Quantification LyoKit -5’Nuclease- RP). The method comparison was performed at 4 set concentrations (106, 104, 102, and 0) in culture material and inoculated dairy samples. After this method comparison was performed in triplicate by two technicians, a survey testing 38 assorted dairy products (fluid milk, cottage cheese, yogurt, sour cream, and cheese) was performed. 16 of the 38 samples exhibited amplification using the developed PCR method and with an estimated fungal presence in these samples between 102 and 105 CFU/mL. Of all the methods tested in the survey and the comparison work, the 3M Petrifilm provided the most consistent results that were comparable to the standard plate counting method on DRBC. The developed qPCR method was comparable in performance to the commercially available BIOTECON kit..

Economic activity in Australia continued to improve in 2017-2018 with growth spreading across the mainland state economies. Labour market conditions in Australia improved markedly in 2017-2018 while the inflation rate was steady around the lower end of the Reserve Bank of Australia''s 2-3 per cent target band. Real wage growth was weak and is likely to remain weak in 2018-2019, putting downward pressure on household consumption. Output growth in 2018-2019 is likely to be solid with prospects of the Chinese economy and trade tensions between China and the United States posing the greatest downside risk to the Australian economy.

Končni rezultat projekta (Deliverable D3.1) v sklopu projekta FLOW (Lightweight alkali activated composite foams based on secondary raw materials).

Ein Mobil Ad-Hoc-Netzwerk (MANET) ist eine Sammlung von mobilen Knoten, welchen ohne zentralisierte Access Points oder Infrastruktur miteinander kommunizieren können. Jeder Knoten kann sich frei im Netzwerk und in jede Richtung bewegen. Es wird daher eine Herausforderung für die Routing Protokolle sein. Die Mobilität gibt bereits verschiedene Typen von MANET Routing-Protokollen, zum Beispiel das Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), Dynamic MANET On-demand Routing (DYMO). Das sind die herkömmlichen Routing-Protokolle. Außerdem gibt es ein neues Paradigma in Routing für das drahtlose Netzwerke, welches immer beliebter wird, namens Opportunistic Routing. Epidemic und SimBeT sind zwei Beispiele solcher Routing-Protokolle. Die meisten Forschungen, die MANET und Opportunistic Routing-Protokolle untersucht haben, achten jedoch nicht auf die Wirkung des Geländes. Im realen irregulären Gelände gibt es viele Hindernisse, die zu einer instabilen Verbindung zwischen Knoten führen können und damit viele Änderungen in den Routing-Tabellen erfordern. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Auswertung der Wirkung von 3-dimensionalen (3D) Gelände auf konventionelle MANET und Opportunistic-Routing-Protokolle mit OMNET++. Die Simulationen haben gezeigt, dass das Netzwerke im 3D Gelände empfindlicher auf Änderungen reagiert als in 2D Gelände. Eine geringfügige Änderung der Knotengeschwindigkeit oder eine längere Simulationszeit kann einen großen Unterschied in der Paketzustellung bestimmter Routing-Protokolle bringen. Für einen kleinen Bereich und dichtes Netzwerk oder in flachen Gelände hat die Performance der herkömmlichen beziehungsweise Opportunistic-Routing-Protokollen keinen signifikanten Unterschied, daher können die beiden eine gute Lösung für die Implementierung des Ad-Hoc-Netzwerk. Jedoch in einen großen Bereich und wenigen Netzwerkknoten oder in extremen bergigen Bereich könnten Opportunistic-Routing-Protokolle bessere Leistungen erzielen.

Radiology reports are the primary medium through which physicians communicate findings and diagnoses from patients'' medical scans. Examples include radiology reports for chest radiographs, CT scans of the brain, medical reports of retinal images, and more. However, the process of writing medical reports is tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming, even for experienced radiologists. Moreover, a Covid-19 or similar pandemic could exacerbate the existing problems to all health care systems worldwide. Therefore, this thesis explores the ability to automate diagnosing diseases and accurately generate radiology reports to alleviate the burdens of medical doctors. This thesis describes a new fully end-to-end differentiable paradigm that consists of three major complementary modules: Classifier, Generator, and Interpreter. Particularly, taking the chest radiographs and related information as inputs, the classifier module produces state-aware disease embeddings by polarizing visual disease features into different directions, referred to as disease states (e.g., positive, negative, uncertain, or unmentioned). With the awareness of the disease states, a semantic version of the disease representation is formed, referred to as EnricheD DIsease Embeddings (EDDIE), and passed to a transformer-based generator to produce meaningful medical reports. The generated reports are fed to the interpreter to ensure consistency with respect to the disease classification checklist. This three-step approach ensures that the visual information is always semantic enough to generate medical reports. Meanwhile, the generated reports must exactly describe the detected diseases, avoiding overfitting to any dominant class (e.g., due to imbalanced datasets) or language metric (i.e., by cheating the generation process). The proposed model is evaluated on different datasets with commonly-used metrics concerning language fluency, clinical accuracy, and human evaluation. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model can make more accurate diagnoses and generate more fluent and precise reports than existing baselines. Moreover, noticeable performance gains are consistently observed when additional contextual information is available, such as the patients'' clinical background documents and extra scans from different views.

Cette thèse présente la synthèse de complexes des groupes 4 et 6 pour l''oligomérisation et/ou la polymérisation de l''éthylène. Nous détaillons la synthèse de nouveaux pro-ligands, les études de complexation et la réactivité catalytique de ces nouveaux composés vis-à-vis de l''oligomérisation et de la polymérisation de l''éthylène. Dans le premier chapitre, nous présentons nos objectifs et une partie bibliographie sur les complexes imido de titane ainsi que brièvement sur les systèmes catalytiques d''oligomérisation et de polymérisation de l''éthylène. Le chapitre 2 contient la synthèse détaillée des anilines fonctionnalisées préparées lors de ce travail et qui ont été utilisées comme pro-ligands pour générer la fonction imido comme décrit au chapitre suivant. Le chapitre 3 traite de la complexation des anilines fonctionnalisées et de l''étude de leur propriété de chélation et d''hémilabilité. La complexation des anilines fonctionnalisées se fait par la réaction entre les anilines et Ti(NMe2)4/TMSCl. Cette complexation conduit au complexe imido de titane correspondant avec un bon rendement. La plupart de ces complexes sont de formule Ti(=NAr)Cl2(NHMe2)2 (ArNH2 : aniline fonctionnalisée), comportant un ligand imido monodentate, à l''exception de ceux qui ont un substituant pyridine. Dans ces derniers cas, il se forme des complexes neutres ou ioniques où le ligand imido est chélate. Les études catalytiques en oligomérisation/polymérisation de l''éthylène, réalisées en collaboration avec l''IFP Energie Nouvelle, sont décrites au chapitre 4. Nous avons testé les complexes imido de titane et de tungstène en présence d''un activateur (MAO, Et3Al, Et2AlCl). Les complexes imido de titane sont actifs en catalyse de polymérisation de l''éthylène, alors que les complexes imido de tungstène se sont montrés actifs en dimérisation de l''éthylène. Le dernier chapitre présente la synthèse, la caractérisation, et les propriétés catalytiques de complexes triscarbèniques de chrome.