Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semi-Supervised DFF: Decoupling Detection and Feature Flow for Video Object Detectors

For efficient video object detection, our detector consists of a spatial module and a temporal module. The spatial module aims to detect objects in static frames using convolutional networks, and the temporal module propagates high-level CNN features to nearby frames via light-weight feature flow. Alternating the spatial and temporal module by a proper interval makes our detector fast and accurate. Then we propose a two-stage semi-supervised learning framework to train our detector, which fully exploits unlabeled videos by decoupling the spatial and temporal module. In the first stage, the spatial module is learned by traditional supervised learning. In the second stage, we employ both feature regression loss and feature semantic loss to learn our temporal module via unsupervised learning. Different to traditional methods, our method can largely exploit unlabeled videos and bridges the gap of object detectors in image and video domain. Experiments on the large-scale ImageNet VID dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code will be made publicly available.
Investigation of Small Group Social Interactions Using Deep Visual Activity-Based Nonverbal Features

Understanding small group face-to-face interactions is a prominent research problem for social psychology while the automatic realization of it recently became popular in social computing. This is mainly investigated in terms of nonverbal behaviors, as they are one of the main facet of communication. Among several multi-modal nonverbal cues, visual activity is an important one and its sufficiently good performance can be crucial for instance, when the audio sensors are missing. The existing visual activity-based nonverbal features, which are all hand-crafted, were able to perform well enough for some applications while did not perform well for some other problems. Given these observations, we claim that there is a need of more robust feature representations, which can be learned from data itself. To realize this, we propose a novel method, which is composed of optical flow computation, deep neural network based feature learning, feature encoding and classification. Additionally, a comprehensive analysis between different feature encoding techniques is also presented. The proposed method is tested on three research topics, which can be perceived during small group interactions i.e. meetings: i) emergent leader detection, ii) emergent leadership style prediction, and iii) high/low extraversion classification. The proposed method shows (significantly) better results not only as compared to the state of the art visual activity based-nonverbal features but also when the state of the art visual activity based-nonverbal features are combined with other audio-based and video-based nonverbal features.
Climate change and African trypanosomiasis vector populations in Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley: A mathematical modelling study

Background Quantifying the effects of climate change on the entomological and epidemiological components of vector-borne diseases is an essential part of climate change research, but evidence for such effects remains scant, and predictions rely largely on extrapolation of statistical correlations. We aimed to develop a mechanistic model to test whether recent increases in temperature in the Mana Pools National Park of the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe could account for the simultaneous decline of tsetse flies, the vectors of human and animal trypanosomiasis. Methods and findings The model we developed incorporates the effects of temperature on mortality, larviposition, and emergence rates and is fitted to a 27-year time series of tsetse caught from cattle. These catches declined from an average of c. 50 flies per animal per afternoon in 1990 to c. 0.1 in 2017. Since 1975, mean daily temperatures have risen by c. 0.9°C and temperatures in the hottest month of November by c. 2°C. Although our model provided a good fit to the data, it cannot predict whether or when extinction will occur. Conclusions The model suggests that the increase in temperature may explain the observed collapse in tsetse abundance and provides a first step in linking temperature to trypanosomiasis risk. If the effect at Mana Pools extends across the whole of the Zambezi Valley, then transmission of trypanosomes is likely to have been greatly reduced in this warm low-lying region. Conversely, rising temperatures may have made some higher, cooler, parts of Zimbabwe more suitable for tsetse and led to the emergence of new disease foci.
Non-Invasive Detection of Extracellular Matrix Metalloproteinase Inducer EMMPRIN, a New Therapeutic Target against Atherosclerosis, Inhibited by Endothelial Nitric Oxide

Lack of endothelial nitric oxide causes endothelial dysfunction and circulating monocyte infiltration, contributing to systemic atheroma plaque formation in arterial territories. Among the different inflammatory products, macrophage-derived foam cells and smooth muscle cells synthesize matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), playing a pivotal role in early plaque formation and enlargement. We found increased levels of MMP-9 and MMP-13 in human endarterectomies with advanced atherosclerosis, together with significant amounts of extracellular matrix (ECM) metalloproteinase inducer EMMPRIN. To test whether the absence of NO may aggravate atherosclerosis through EMMPRIN activation, double NOS3/apoE knockout (KO) mice expressed high levels of EMMPRIN in carotid plaques, suggesting that targeting extracellular matrix degradation may represent a new mechanism by which endothelial NO prevents atherosclerosis. Based on our previous experience, by using gadolinium-enriched paramagnetic fluorescence micellar nanoparticles conjugated with AP9 (NAP9), an EMMPRIN-specific binding peptide, magnetic resonance sequences allowed non-invasive visualization of carotid EMMPRIN in NOS3/apoE over apoE control mice, in which atheroma plaques were significantly reduced. Taken together, these results point to EMMPRIN as a new therapeutic target of NO-mediated protection against atherosclerosis, and NAP9 as a non-invasive molecular tool to target atherosclerosis.
CSAN: Contextual Self-Attention Network for User Sequential Recommendation

The sequential recommendation is an important task for online user-oriented services, such as purchasing products, watching videos, and social media consumption. Recent work usually used RNN-based methods to derive an overall embedding of the whole behavior sequence, which fails to discriminate the significance of individual user behaviors and thus decreases the recommendation performance. Besides, RNN-based encoding has fixed size and makes further recommendation application inefficient and inflexible. The online sequential behaviors of a user are generally heterogeneous, polysemous, and dynamically context-dependent. In this paper, we propose a unified Contextual Self-Attention Network (CSAN) to address the three properties. Heterogeneous user behaviors are considered in our model that are projected into a common latent semantic space. Then the output is fed into the feature-wise self-attention network to capture the polysemy of user behaviors. In addition, the forward and backward position encoding matrices are proposed to model dynamic contextual dependency. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms.
I read, I saw, I tell: Texts Assisted Fine-Grained Visual Classification

In visual classification tasks, it is hard to tell the subtle differences from one species to another similar breeds. Such a challenging problem is generally known as Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC). In this paper, we propose a novel FGVC approach called Texts Assisted Fine-Grained Visual Classification (TA-FGVC). TA-FGVC reads from texts to gain attention, sees the images with the gained attention and then tells the subtle differences. Technically, we propose a deep neural network which learns a visual-semantic embedding model. The proposed deep architecture mainly consists of two parts: one for visual localization, and the other for visual to semantic projection. The model is fed with both visual features which are extracted from raw images and semantic information which are learned from two sources: gleaned from unannotated texts and gathered from image attributes. At the very last layer of the model, each image is embedded into the semantic space which is related to class labels. Finally, the categorization results from both visual stream and visual-semantic stream are combined to achieve the ultimate decision. Extensive experiments on open standard benchmarks verify the superiority of our model against several state of the art work.
Downregulation of long noncoding RNA PVT1 attenuates paclitaxel resistance in glioma cells.

BACKGROUND Drug resistance in clinical cancer treatment has become an issue. OBJECTIVE We focus on abnormally expressed lncRNAs in glioma and investigating the function of PVT1. METHODS The paclitaxel-resistant glioma cells SHG-44 RE was obtained through screening the SHG 44 cells that were cultured in medium containing a certain concentration of paclitaxel. Cell survival of SHG 44 RE and SHG 44 cells under the treatment of paclitaxel was detected by MTT assay. The aberrant expressed lncRNAs were screened out with microarray analysis. Further qRT-PCR was utilized to validate the expression of lncRNA PVT1 in the two cells. After manipulating the expression of PVT1, cell viability and apoptosis were measured by MTT and flow cytometry respectively. RESULTS LncRNA PVT1 was overexpressed in glioma cells SHG-44 RE compared with parent SHG-44 cells. Down-regulation of lncRNA PVT1 inhibited the SHG-44 RE cell viability and increased glioma SHG-44 RE cells apoptosis after paclitaxel treatment, suggesting that inhibition of lncRNA PVT1 improved paclitaxel sensibility in human glioma cells. CONCLUSION Down-regulation of PVT1 could enhance chemosensitivity of paclitaxel, induce apoptosis of glioma cells and noteworthy inhibit glioma cells proliferation. Our findings of PVT1 could contribute to attenuate paclitaxel resistance in clinical medicine.
Hemolysis risk after packed red blood cells transfusion with infusion pumps*

ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate the hemolysis biomarkers of packed red blood cells transfused by two different linear peristaltic infusion pumps at two infusion rates. Method: An experimental and randomized study was designed simulating the clinical practice of transfusion. Two linear peristaltic infusion pumps from different manufactures were studied in triplicate at 100 mL/h and 300mL/h infusion rates. The chosen hemolysis biomarkers were total hemoglobin, free hemoglobin, hematocrit, potassium and degree of hemolysis. They were analyzed before and after each infusion. Results: Potassium showed statistically significant variations in all scenarios of the experiment (P<0.010). In a separated analysis, potassium increased mainly at 300mL/h rate (P=0.021) and free hemoglobin had significant variation when comparing infusion pumps from different manufacturers (P=0.026). Although hematocrit, total hemoglobin and degree of hemolysis had increased after infusion, no statistically significance variations were identified. Conclusions: Hemolysis risk induced by a linear peristaltic infusion pump was identified by an increase in free hemoglobin and potassium markers. As the potassium biomarker is often increased in aged packed red blood cells, we do not recommend using them in this scenario. Additional studies should be performed about other markers and using larger samples in order to reinforce the transfusion practice in nursing.
Synergy-based Gaussian Process Estimation of Ankle Angle and Torque: Conceptualization for High level Controlling of Active Foot Prostheses/Orthoses.

Human gait is the result of a complex and fascinating cooperation between different joints and segments in the lower extremity. This study aims at investigating the existence of this cooperation or the so-called synergy between the shank motion and the ankle motion. One potential use of this synergy is to develop the high level controllers for active foot prostheses/orthoses. The central point in this paper is to develop a high level controller that is able to continuously map shank kinematics (inputs) to ankle angles and torques (outputs). At the same time, it does not require speed determination, gait percent identification, switching rules and look-up tables. Furthermore, having those targets in mind, an important part of this study is to determine which input type is required to achieve such targets. This should be fulfilled through using minimum number of inputs. To do this, the Gaussian Process (GP) regression has been used to estimate the ankle angles and torques for 11 subjects at three walking speeds (0.5, 1, 1.5 m/s) based on the shank angular velocity and angle. The results show that it is possible to estimate ankle motion based on the shank motion. It was found that the estimation achieved less quality with only shank angular velocity or angle, whereas, the aggregated angular velocity and angle resulted in much higher output estimation quality. The pros and cons of the proposed method are investigated at different scenarios.
Structure-guided disruption of the pseudopilus tip complex inhibits the Type II secretion in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Pseudomonas aeruginosa utilizes the Type II secretion system (T2SS) to translocate a wide range of large, structured protein virulence factors through the periplasm to the extracellular environment for infection. In the T2SS, five pseudopilins assemble into the pseudopilus that acts as a piston to extrude exoproteins out of cells. Through structure determination of the pseudopilin complexes of XcpVWX and XcpVW and function analysis, we have confirmed that two minor pseudopilins, XcpV and XcpW, constitute a core complex indispensable to the pseudopilus tip. The absence of either XcpV or -W resulted in the non-functional T2SS. Our small-angle X-ray scattering experiment for the first time revealed the architecture of the entire pseudopilus tip and established the working model. Based on the interaction interface of complexes, we have developed inhibitory peptides. The structure-based peptides not only disrupted of the XcpVW core complex and the entire pseudopilus tip in vitro but also inhibited the T2SS in vivo. More importantly, these peptides effectively reduced the virulence of P. aeruginosa towards Caenorhabditis elegans.
Learning Semantic Structure-preserved Embeddings for Cross-modal Retrieval

This paper learns semantic embeddings for multi-label cross-modal retrieval. Our method exploits the structure in semantics represented by label vectors to guide the learning of embeddings. First, we construct a semantic graph based on label vectors which incorporates data from both modalities, and enforce the embeddings to preserve the local structure of this semantic graph. Second, we enforce the embeddings to well reconstruct the labels, i.e., the global semantic structure. In addition, we encourage the embeddings to preserve local geometric structure of each modality. Accordingly, the local and global semantic structure consistencies as well as the local geometric structure consistency are enforced, simultaneously. The mappings between inputs and embeddings are designed to be nonlinear neural network with larger capacity and more flexibility. The overall objective function is optimized by stochastic gradient descent to gain the scalability on large datasets. Experiments conducted on three real world datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over the state-of-the-art methods.
Fly Ash Modified Coalmine Solid Wastes for Stabilization of Trace Metals in Mining Damaged Land Reclamation: A Case Study in Xuzhou Coalmine Area

In China, coalmine wastes, such as gangues, are used for reclamation of mining subsided land. However, as waste rocks, gangues contain several trace metal elements, which could be released under natural weathering and hydrodynamic leaching effects and then migrate into the reclamed soil layer. However, it is very difficult to find adequate other backfill materials for substitution of gangues. In this paper, we present a novel method and case study to restrict the migration ability of trace metal elements in gangues by using another kind of coalmine solid waste—fly ashes from coal combustion. In this study, fly ashes were mixed with gangues in different mass proportions 1:0.2, 1:0.4, 1:0.6 and 1:0.8 as new designed backfill materials. Due to the help of fly ash, the occurrence states of studied trace metal elements were greatly changed, and their releasing and migration ability under hydrodynamic leaching effect were also significantly restricted. In this research seven trace metal elements in gangues Cu, Zn, Pb, Cd, Cr, Mn and Ni were studied by using soil column hydrodynamical leaching method and simulated precipitation for one year. The results show that under the driving of natural precipitation trace metal elements were generally transported deep inside the reconstructed land base, i.e., far away from soil layer and most of the trace metal elements were transformed into a bonded state, or combined in inert occurrence states, especially the residual state. With this method, the migration activities of tested trace metal elements were greatly restricted and the environmental potential risk could be significantly reduced.
Perceptual Temporal Incoherence Aware Stereo Video Retargeting

Stereo video retargeting aims to avoid shape and depth distortions while maintaining temporal coherence of shape and depth while resizing a stereo video to a desired size. Existing methods resort to extending stereo image retargeting schemes to stereo video retargeting by imposing temporal constraints to consistently resize all corresponding regions so as to maintain temporal coherence. However, such a direct extension often incurs conflicts among the requirements for preserving shape information and depth information and maintaining their temporal coherence, thereby failing to meet one or more of these requirements. We find that properly relaxing temporal constraints for non-paired regions at frame boundaries can effectively mitigate conflicts among depth, shape, and temporal constraints without severely degrading temporal coherence perceptually. Based on this new finding, we derive effective temporal constraints to improve the viewing experience of a 3D scene for stereo video retargeting. Accordingly, we propose an efficient grid-based implementation for our method. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior visual quality over existing methods.
Medical student’s academic performance: The role of academic emotions and motivation

Introduction: Identification of the factors that promote academic performance is of importance in the success rate of medical students. This study aimed to find the relationship between emotions, motivation and academic performance of medical students. Methods: This descriptive-correlative study was conducted among 370 medical students in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences using convenience sampling. Academic emotions questionnaire (AEQ) including 75 items and college student version of work preference inventory including 30 items were used to collect the data. The Cronbach’s alpha for the eight types of academic emotions ranged from 0.73 to 0.86, and for the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation it was 0.81 and 0.87, respectively. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlation, multiple regression, independent t-test and one-way ANOVA through SPSS, 14. Results: Results indicated a positive and significant correlation between positive emotions (enjoyment, hope, pride) and students' academic performance (r=0.37, r=0.27 and r=0.39, respectively, with p<0.01). A negative and significant correlation was found between negative emotions (anger, anxiety, hopelessness, shame and boredom) with students' academic performance (r=-0.15, r=-0.24, r=-0.23, r=-0.215 and r=-0.21, respectively, with p<0.01). There was a positive and significant correlation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and academic performance (r=0.63, r=0.14, with p<0.01, p<0.05, respectively). Emotions related to enjoyment, hope, pride, hopelessness, boredom and intrinsic motivation were shown as the key predictors of students’ academic performance. Conclusion: The results of this study showed the key role of motivation and positive emotions in increasing medical students’ academic performance.
Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) signaling ameliorates dysfunctional immunity in COPD patients

Background The glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) agonist – liraglutide (LIR) – is an insulin secretagogue for the treatment of diabetes and has been proven to have therapeutic potential in the treatment of COPD. Evidence suggested that activating GLP-1R signaling might have immunomodulating and anti-inflammatory effects. COPD is characterized by dysregulation of immunity, oxidative stress, and excessive inflammation responses. The aim of this study was to investigate whether GLP-1R signaling had a regulatory role in COPD immunity. Patients and methods Fifty-seven COPD patients in a stable condition and 51 age-, sex-, and smoking history-matched non-COPD subjects provided blood samples for isolation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). GLP-1R expression was measured, and its association with clinical parameters and plasma cytokines was analyzed. T cell function was assessed at baseline and after regulating GLP-1R expression. Results GLP-1R expression decreased in circulating PBMCs of COPD patients, which was associated with decreased interferon (IFN)-γ expression. Reduced IFN-γ production stimulated by phytohemagglutinin (PHA) and increased programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) expression on T cells were observed in COPD patients compared with non-COPD subjects. Treatment with LIR could upregulate the GLP-1R expression, and this was observed to restore the antigen-stimulated IFN-γ production and downregulate PD-1 expression in T cells. Conclusion PBMCs of COPD patients showed defective GLP-1R signaling and functional T-lymphocyte abnormalities that could be rescued by LIR treatment.