bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Effects of hydrogeochemistry on the microbial ecology of terrestrial hot springs
Authors: Barbosa Carla , Tamayo-Leiva Javier , Alcorta Jaime , Salgado Oscar , Daniele Linda , Morata Diego , Díez Beatríz
Published: September 2023

Temperature, pH, and hydrochemistry of terrestrial hot springs play a critical role in shaping thermal microbial communities. However, the interactions of biotic and abiotic factors at this terrestrial-aquatic interface are still not well understood on a global scale, and the question of how underground events influence microbial communities remains open. To answer this, 11 new samples obtained from the El Tatio geothermal field were analyzed by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing (V4 region), along with 191 samples from previous publications obtained from the Taupo Volcanic Zone, the Yellowstone Plateau Volcanic Field, and the Eastern Tibetan Plateau, with their temperature, pH, and major ion concentration. Microbial alpha diversity was lower in acid-sulfate waters, and no significant correlations were found with temperature. However, moderate correlations were observed between chemical parameters such as pH (mostly constrained to temperatures below 70°C), SO
4
2−
and abundances of members of the phyla Armatimonadota, Deinococcota, Chloroflexota, Campilobacterota, and Thermoplasmatota. pH and SO
4
2−
gradients were explained by phase separation of sulfur-rich hydrothermal fluids and oxidation of reduced sulfur in the steam phase, which were identified as key processes shaping these communities. Ordination and permutational analysis of variance showed that temperature, pH, and major element hydrochemistry explain only 24% of the microbial community structure. Therefore, most of the variance remained unexplained, suggesting that other environmental or biotic factors are also involved and highlighting the environmental complexity of the ecosystem and its great potential to test niche theory ecological associated questions.

IMPORTANCE

This is the first approach to investigate whether geothermal processes could have an influence on the ecology of thermal microbial communities on a global scale. In addition to temperature and pH, microbial communities are structured by sulfate concentrations, which depends on the tectono-magmatic settings (such as the depth of magmatic chambers) and the local settings (such as the availability of a confining layer separating NaCl waters from steam after phase separation) and the possibility of mixing with more diluted fluids. Comparison of microbial communities from different geothermal areas by homogeneous sequence processing showed that no significant geographic distance decay was detected on the microbial communities according to Bray-Curtis, Jaccard, unweighted, and weighted Unifrac similarity/dissimilarity indices. Instead, an ancient potential divergence in the same taxonomic groups is suggested between globally distant thermal zones.
Molecular characterization of invasive
Streptococcus pneumoniae
clinical isolates from a tertiary children’s hospital in eastern China
Authors: Huang Xu , Tan Hua , Lu Feng , Guo Genglin , Han Mingxiao , Cai Tongbo , Zhang Haifang
Published: September 2023

Streptococcus pneumoniae
is a common opportunistic pathogen that causes invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), especially in children. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and molecular characteristics of
S. pneumoniae
isolated from children with IPD. A total of 78
S
.
pneumoniae
isolates from aseptic body fluids of 70 IPD patients were collected at the Children’s Hospital of Nanjing Medical University (Jiangsu Province, China) during 2017–2021. Whole-genome sequencing technology was used to analyze the serotype, sequence type (ST), virulence, and antibiotic resistance of the 78 invasive
S. pneumoniae
clinical isolates. Our results showed that the pneumococcal infection rate declined after the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019. Serotypes 19F, 14, 6A, 23F, 19A, and 6B were the most common strains. The pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) 13 serotype coverage rate was 87.1%. All isolates were classified by multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) analysis into 27 different STs, including 3 novel STs (ST17941, ST17942, and ST17944) and 1 novel allele [recP (558)]. The most predominant ST was ST271, followed by ST320 and ST876. All isolates carried the following virulence genes: cbpG, lytB, lytC, pce (cbpE), pavA, slrA, plr (gapA), hysA, nanA, eno, piuA, psaA, cppA, iga, htrA (degP), tig (ropA), zmpB, and ply. All isolates were multidrug resistant and had high levels of resistance to macrolides, tetracyclines, and sulfonamides. Taken together, this study revealed extensive genetic diversity among
S. pneumoniae
isolates from a single Chinese hospital. Wearing masks, universal infant vaccination with PCV13, and the launch of recombinant protein vaccine development programs could reduce the burden of IPD in children.

IMPORTANCE

Invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) caused by
Streptococcus pneumoniae
in children remains a global burden and should be given more attention due to the fact that the pneumococcal vaccine is not fully covered globally. The molecular epidemiological characteristics of
S. pneumoniae
are not so clear, especially in these years of COVID-19. In this study, we collected
S. pneumoniae
isolates from the aseptic body fluid of children with IPD from 2017 to 2021 in a tertiary children’s hospital in China and revealed the extensive genetic diversity of these isolates. Most importantly, we first found that the rate of pneumococcal infection has declined since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, which means that wearing masks could reduce the transmission of
S. pneumoniae
. In addition, it was shown that universal infant vaccination with PCV13 seems essential for reducing the burden of IPD in children.
“Wrecking the rocks”: Continental weathering by groundwater
Authors: Wood Warren W. , Sanford Ward E. , Cherry John A. , Wood Warren T.
Published: September 2023

Groundwater solute mass flux discharged from the continents to the oceans is between 56% and 63% of particulate sediment transport mass flux. Herein we utilized newly developed continental geospatial groundwater concentration estimates that were multiplied by groundwater volumetric recharge flux to provide a continental-scale discharge mass flux to the oceans of 7.3 Pg DS/yr (petagrams dissolved solutes per year). This mass flux was evaluated from six continental ecosystems: direct ocean discharge (0.28 Pg DS/yr), endorheic basins (0.59 Pg DS/yr), cold-wet exorheic basins (0.55 Pg DS/yr), cold-dry exorheic basins (1.1 Pg DS/yr), warm-dry exorheic basins (0.82 Pg DS/yr), and warm-wet exorheic basins (4.0 Pg DS/yr), thus providing insight into the role of rainfall and temperature on continental weathering and denudation. A new, robust molar silicate/carbonate ratio of 0.42 was calculated for weathering of continental rocks, which is important in the Urey model of climate change. We estimate that rock weathering accounts for ~50% of the total solute mass flux discharged from the continents, the remainder being from externally derived marine aerosols and organic-derived bicarbonate.
Supplemental Material: High-resolution geophysical and geochronological analysis of a relict shoreface deposit offshore central California: Implications for slip rate along the Hosgri fault
Authors: Kluesner Jared W. , al. et
Published: September 2023

File S1 consists of additional sediment core and chirp figures. File S2 provides additional details and figures on the optical stimulated luminescence sampling and dating. File S3 provides details on the Bayesian age modeling conducted. 
Association of early-life exposure to acid-suppressive therapy and fractures during childhood: a retrospective cohort study
Authors: Achler Tomer , Chodick Gabriel , Shaoul Ron , Cohen Shlomi , Ben-Tov Amir , Goldshtein Inbal
Published: September 2023

Objectives

Increased acid-suppressive therapy (AST) usage during infancy is seen worldwide, while the data on the risk for paediatric fractures associated with these drugs are scarce. We aimed to evaluate the risk for fractures associated with early-life usage of AST.

Methods

This population-based retrospective propensity-matched cohort study included children born between 2005 and 2016 who used AST during the first year of life, and a 3:1 matched unexposed group. Study subjects were followed from the end of the first year of life until the earliest of the following: an outcome event (either fracture or non-fracture injury, separately), age of 10 or August 2022. The cumulative incidence of fractures and the HR of AST for fracture and non-fracture injury as negative control were calculated.

Results

A total of 13 894 eligible AST users and 41 418 propensity score-matched non-users were included in the analysis. The cumulative incidence of fracture among children with AST (23.7%) was significantly (p<0.001) higher than non-users (21.7%) corresponding to an HR of 1.11 (95% CI 1.06 to 1.16). The HR for one to two AST purchases versus none was 1.09 (95% CI 1.04 to 1.14) and the HR for 3+ AST purchases versus none was 1.25 (95% CI 1.13 to 1.39). AST was also associated with injuries by an HR of 1.09 (95% CI 1.04 to 1.13).

Conclusions

AST was associated with a small but statistically significant increased incidence of fractures. We cannot exclude reporting bias or residual confounders. The clinical inference is currently unclear.
Barriers and enablers influencing female athlete return-to-sport postpartum: a scoping review
Authors: Tighe Boden Joel , Williams Susan L , Porter Courtney , Hayman Melanie
Published: September 2023

Objective

Motherhood within sport has become more common with many female athletes seeking to return-to-sport (RTS) postpartum; yet few sport organisations possess policies that support female athletes to RTS postpartum. Our aim was to synthesise existing literature to identify the barriers and enablers that influence female athlete RTS postpartum to help guide the development of evidence-based policies to support postpartum athlete RTS.

Design

Scoping review.

Data sources

Ovid-Medline, Embase, SportDiscus and Scopus were systematically searched. Reference lists of eligible studies were also searched to identify additional studies of relevance.

Eligibility criteria

Original, empirical, peer-reviewed, English-language studies reporting on female athletes and their RTS postpartum. Reviews, book chapters and grey literature were excluded.

Results

Twenty-two studies were included in this review. Identified barriers and enablers reflected 11 categories which occurred within and/or across three domains of the socioecological model. Five key factors were found to significantly influence female athlete RTS postpartum including (1) postpartum recovery time; (2) time to manage motherhood and sport demands; (3) sport organisation policies; (4) stereotypes; and (5) social support.

Conclusion

Various barriers and enablers exist that influence successful RTS postpartum. These factors present opportunities for clinicians and sport organisations to improve their support of postpartum athletes. Paid maternity leave, offering job security, travel support for carer and child and affordable and accessible childcare are critical policy inclusions to appropriately support female athletes in their RTS postpartum.
Mapping the complexities of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs): development of a physiological model by a subgroup of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Consensus on REDs
Authors: Burke Louise M , Ackerman Kathryn E , Heikura Ida A , Hackney Anthony C , Stellingwerff Trent
Published: September 2023

The 2023 International Olympic Committee (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs) notes that exposure to low energy availability (LEA) exists on a continuum betweenadaptableandproblematicLEA, with a range of potential effects on both health and performance. However, there is variability in the outcomes of LEA exposure between and among individuals as well as the specific manifestations of REDs. We outline a framework for a ‘systems biology’ examination of the effect of LEA on individual body systems, with the eventual goal of creating an integrated map of body system interactions. We provide a template that systematically identifies characteristics of LEA exposure (eg, magnitude, duration, origin) and a variety of moderating factors (eg, medical history, diet and training characteristics) that could exacerbate or attenuate the type and severity of impairments to health and performance faced by an individual athlete. The REDs Physiological Model may assist the diagnosis of underlying causes of problems associated with LEA, with a personalised and nuanced treatment plan promoting compliance and treatment efficacy. It could also be used in the strategic prevention of REDs by drawing attention to scenarios of LEA in which impairments of health and performance are most likely, based on knowledge of the characteristics of the LEA exposure or moderating factors that may increase the risk of harmful outcomes. We challenge researchers and practitioners to create a unifying and dynamic physiological model for each body system that can be continuously updated and mapped as knowledge is gained.
Is alternate day dosing of oral iron an effective option for iron-deficiency anaemia?
Authors: Feather Katie , Khong Teck K
Published: September 2023

Commentary on:Kaundal R, Bhatia P, Jain A, et al. Randomized controlled trial of twice-daily versus alternate-day oral iron therapy in the treatment of iron-deficiency anemia. Ann Hematol. 2020;99:57-63.

Series Editor:Dr Teck Khong, DTB Associate Editor, Clinical Pharmacology, St George’s, University of London, UK
SSTR2 positively associates with EGFR and predicts poor prognosis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma
Authors: Xu Yue , Quan Zihan , Zhan Yuting , Wang Haihua , Luo Jiadi , Wang Weiyuan , Fan Songqing
Published: September 2023

Aims

Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) belongs to the receptor tyrosine kinases family and overexpression of EGFR has been linked to poor prognosis and cancer progression. Somatostatin receptor 2 (SSTR2) is a G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) with diverse biological functions in humans, and it is upregulated through the NF-KB signalling pathway in nasopharyngeal carcinomas (NPC). However, no studies have examined the EGFR and SSTR2 in NPC. This study aimed to investigate whether SSTR2 is associated with EGFR and clinicopathological features in NPC.

Methods

Bioinformatics analysis was performed to assess the correlation between EGFR and SSTR2 based on the GEO database. The expression of SSTR2 and EGFR was evaluated by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in 491 cases of NPC and 50 cases of non-cancerous nasopharyngeal epithelium.

Results

The bioinformatics analysis and IHC showed a positive correlation between SSTR2 and EGFR in NPC. High expression of SSTR2 and EGFR was significantly increased in NPC patients compared with non-cancerous nasopharyngeal epithelium. High expression of SSTR2 and/or EGFR was associated with a worse outcome and a higher risk of progression. The study found that patients receiving chemoradiotherapy (CR) with high expression of SSTR2, high expression of EGFR, and high coexpression of SSTR2 and EGFR had a poorer prognosis in both progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Interestingly, NPC patients with high expression of SSTR2, high expression of EGFR, high coexpression of EGFR and SSTR2, and EGFR/SSTR2 anyone high expression had a better prognosis with CR combined with targeted therapy. Cox multivariate analysis identified SSTR2 and EGFR as independent poor predictors of PFS.

Conclusion

Our study is the first to shed light on the intricate relationship between SSTR2 and EGFR in NPC and provides new insights into the potential benefits of EGFR targeted therapy for patients with high SSTR2 expression. Additionally, SSTR2 has potential as a new biomarker for poor prognosis in NPC patients.
Characterization of skin- and intestine microbial communities in migrating High Arctic lake whitefish and cisco
Authors: Hamilton Erin F. , Juurakko Collin L. , Engel Katja , van C. de Groot Peter , Casselman John M. , Greer Charles W. , Neufeld Josh D. , Walker Virginia K.
Published: September 2023

At high latitudes, lake whitefish ( Coregonus clupeaformis) and others in the closely related Coregonus species complex (CSC) including cisco ( C. autumnalis and C. sardinella) can be diadromous, seasonally transitioning between freshwater lakes and the Arctic Ocean. CSC skin- and intestine microbiomes were collected, facilitated by Inuit fishers at sites on and around King William Island, Nunavut, at the northern range limits of lake whitefish. Community composition was explored using 16S rRNA gene sequencing and microbiota distinctly grouped depending on fishing site salinity. Overall, lake whitefish intestine communities were more variable than those of the two cisco with higher Shannon diversity, suggesting that lake whitefish and their microbiomes could be susceptible to environmental stress possibly leading to dysbiosis. Lake whitefish showed lower condition (K) in the ocean than in freshwater rivers, whereas cisco condition was similar among distinct seasonal habitats. Taken together, the impact of changing habitats on fish condition and microbial composition may inform approaches to CSC health in fisheries and aquaculture, in addition to being relevant for northern Indigenous peoples with subsistence and economic interests in these resources.
Comparing whole body and red muscle mitochondrial respiration in an active teleost fish, brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis)
Authors: Durhack Travis C. , Aminot Mélanie , Treberg Jason R. , Enders Eva C.
Published: September 2023

Understanding how metabolic costs change in relation to increasing temperature under future climate changes is important to predict how ectotherms will be affected across the globe. In fish, whole body respiration is traditionally used to estimate aerobic performance via an organism’s minimum and maximum oxygen consumption rates. However, mitochondria play a crucial role in the aerobic cascade and may be a useful surrogate of aerobic performance. To test whether whole body oxygen consumption and mitochondrial capacity are correlated, we estimated whole body metabolic and mitochondrial respiration rates (using permeabilized red muscle fibres) in brook trout ( Salvelinus fontinalis (Mitchill, 1814)) at 10, 15, and 20 °C. Standard metabolic rate increased with acclimation temperature, while maximum rates were less sensitive. All mitochondrial respiration rates increased with acclimation temperature, suggesting that red muscle mitochondrial preparations may correlate to the minimal metabolic demands in this species. When expressed as relative rates of electron flow, the red muscle fibres showed no effect of temperature on mitochondrial coupling efficiency. However, there was a pattern of declining capacity to augment respiration via complex II with increasing temperature with a concomitant increase in the capacity of the phosphorylating system relative to maximal rates of mitochondrial electron flow.
Contemporary hybridization between female mule deer and male white-tailed deer in west Texas differs from the hypothesized sex mating patterns recovered from ancient hybridization events
Authors: Wright Emily A. , Bayouth Jacob V. , Bayouth Joseph P. , Worsham Asha E. , McDaniel Grant E. , Hollinger Tess S. , Lacy Vivienne A. , Johnston Emma K. , Pipkin David R. , Roberts Emma K. , Bradley Robert D.
Published: September 2023

Introgressive hybridization between members of Odocoileus was examined using the mitochondrial cytochrome-b (maternal marker) and paternal sex-determining region Y ( Sry) genes. Eight out of 130 free-ranging individuals from the Panhandle and Trans-Pecos regions of Texas were determined to possess the mitochondrial haplotype of mule deer ( Odocoileus hemionus (Rafinesque, 1817)) and the paternal haplotype of white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus Rafinesque, 1832). Results indicated that hybridization between deer species in Texas (6.15%) was more broadly distributed than previously reported. Previous studies demonstrated that ancient hybridization events (1.32 mya) involved the capture of the white-tailed deer mitochondrial genome by mule deer, indicating a male mule deer × a female white-tailed deer directionality relevant to hybridization. Alternatively, contemporary hybridization events indicated a reversal in directionality and suggested a cross between a female mule deer × a male white-tailed deer. The Sry gene and species assignment based on morphological characters consistently were in agreement. Further, phylogenetic relationships between Odocoileus virginianus couesi and Odocoileus hemionus eremicus warrant additional investigation as recent hybridization (>200 years) may be a mechanism that allowed these two subspecies to evolve a unique evolutionary trajectory.
On the Super (Edge)-Connectivity of Generalized Johnson Graphs
Authors: Yu Zhecheng , Xu Liqiong , Wu Xuemin , Zheng Chuanye
Published: September 2023

Let [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] be non-negative integers. The generalized Johnson graph [Formula: see text] is the graph whose vertices are the [Formula: see text]-subsets of the set [Formula: see text], and two vertices are adjacent if and only if they intersect with [Formula: see text] elements. Special cases of generalized Johnson graph include the Kneser graph [Formula: see text] and the Johnson graph [Formula: see text]. These graphs play an important role in coding theory, Ramsey theory, combinatorial geometry and hypergraphs theory. In this paper, we discuss the connectivity properties of the Kneser graph [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] by their symmetric properties. Specifically, with the help of some properties of vertex/edge-transitive graphs we prove that [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] are super restricted edge-connected. Besides, we obtain the exact value of the restricted edge-connectivity and the cyclic edge-connectivity of the Kneser graph [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text], and further show that the Kneser graph [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] is super vertex-connected and super cyclically edge-connected.
MMTSA
Authors: Gao Ziqi , wang Yuntao , Chen Jianguo , Xing Junliang , Patel Shwetak , Liu Xin , Shi Yuanchun
Published: September 2023

Multimodal sensors provide complementary information to develop accurate machine-learning methods for human activity recognition (HAR), but introduce significantly higher computational load, which reduces efficiency. This paper proposes an efficient multimodal neural architecture for HAR using an RGB camera and inertial measurement units (IMUs) called Multimodal Temporal Segment Attention Network (MMTSA). MMTSA first transforms IMU sensor data into a temporal and structure-preserving gray-scale image using the Gramian Angular Field (GAF), representing the inherent properties of human activities. MMTSA then applies a multimodal sparse sampling method to reduce data redundancy. Lastly, MMTSA adopts an inter-segment attention module for efficient multimodal fusion. Using three well-established public datasets, we evaluated MMTSA's effectiveness and efficiency in HAR. Results show that our method achieves superior performance improvements (11.13% of cross-subject F1-score on the MMAct dataset) than the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The ablation study and analysis suggest that MMTSA's effectiveness in fusing multimodal data for accurate HAR. The efficiency evaluation on an edge device showed that MMTSA achieved significantly better accuracy, lower computational load, and lower inference latency than SOTA methods.
Radio2Text
Authors: Zhao Running , Yu Jiangtao , Zhao Hang , Ngai Edith C.H.
Published: September 2023

Millimeter wave (mmWave) based speech recognition provides more possibility for audio-related applications, such as conference speech transcription and eavesdropping. However, considering the practicality in real scenarios, latency and recognizable vocabulary size are two critical factors that cannot be overlooked. In this paper, we propose Radio2Text, the first mmWave-based system for streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) with a vocabulary size exceeding 13,000 words. Radio2Text is based on a tailored streaming Transformer that is capable of effectively learning representations of speech-related features, paving the way for streaming ASR with a large vocabulary. To alleviate the deficiency of streaming networks unable to access entire future inputs, we propose the Guidance Initialization that facilitates the transfer of feature knowledge related to the global context from the non-streaming Transformer to the tailored streaming Transformer through weight inheritance. Further, we propose a cross-modal structure based on knowledge distillation (KD), named cross-modal KD, to mitigate the negative effect of low quality mmWave signals on recognition performance. In the cross-modal KD, the audio streaming Transformer provides feature and response guidance that inherit fruitful and accurate speech information to supervise the training of the tailored radio streaming Transformer. The experimental results show that our Radio2Text can achieve a character error rate of 5.7% and a word error rate of 9.4% for the recognition of a vocabulary consisting of over 13,000 words.
Echo
Authors: Xue Meng , Peng Kuang , Gong Xueluan , Zhang Qian , Chen Yanjiao , Li Routing
Published: September 2023

Intelligent audio systems are ubiquitous in our lives, such as speech command recognition and speaker recognition. However, it is shown that deep learning-based intelligent audio systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a physical adversarial attack that exploits reverberation, a natural indoor acoustic effect, to realize imperceptible, fast, and targeted black-box attacks. Unlike existing attacks that constrain the magnitude of adversarial perturbations within a fixed radius, we generate reverberation-alike perturbations that blend naturally with the original voice sample 1. Additionally, we can generate more robust adversarial examples even under over-the-air propagation by considering distortions in the physical environment. Extensive experiments are conducted using two popular intelligent audio systems in various situations, such as different room sizes, distance, and ambient noises. The results show that Echo can invade into intelligent audio systems in both digital and physical over-the-air environment.
LapTouch
Authors: Mi Tzu-Wei , Wang Jia-Jun , Chan Liwei
Published: September 2023

Use of virtual reality while seated is common, but studies on seated interaction beyond the use of controllers or hand gestures have been sparse. This work present LapTouch, which makes use of the lap as a touch interface and includes two user studies to inform the design of direct and indirect touch interaction using the lap with visual feedback that guides the user touch, as well as eye-free interaction in which users are not provided with such visual feedback. The first study suggests that direct interaction can provide effective layouts with 95% accuracy with up to a 4×4 layout and a shorter completion time, while indirect interaction can provide effective layouts with up to a 4×5 layout but a longer completion time. Considering user experience, which revealed that 4-row and 5-column layouts are not preferred, it is recommended to use both direct and indirect interaction with a maximum of a 3×4 layout. According to the second study, increasing the eye-free interaction with support vector machine (SVM) allows for a 2×2 layout with a generalized model and 2×2, 2×3 and 3×2 layouts with personalized models.
MR Object Identification and Interaction
Authors: Strecker Jannis , Akhunov Khakim , Carbone Federico , García Kimberly , Bektaş Kenan , Gomez Andres , Mayer Simon , Yildirim Kasim Sinan
Published: September 2023

The increasing number of objects in ubiquitous computing environments creates a need for effective object detection and identification mechanisms that permit users to intuitively initiate interactions with these objects. While multiple approaches to such object detection -- including through visual object detection, fiducial markers, relative localization, or absolute spatial referencing -- are available, each of these suffers from drawbacks that limit their applicability. In this paper, we propose ODIF, an architecture that permits the fusion of object situation information from such heterogeneous sources and that remains vertically and horizontally modular to allow extending and upgrading systems that are constructed accordingly. We furthermore present BLEARVIS, a prototype system that builds on the proposed architecture and integrates computer-vision (CV) based object detection with radio-frequency (RF) angle of arrival (AoA) estimation to identify BLE-tagged objects. In our system, the front camera of a Mixed Reality (MR) head-mounted display (HMD) provides a live image stream to a vision-based object detection module, while an antenna array that is mounted on the HMD collects AoA information from ambient devices. In this way, BLEARVIS is able to differentiate between visually identical objects in the same environment and can provide an MR overlay of information (data and controls) that relates to them. We include experimental evaluations of both, the CV-based object detection and the RF-based AoA estimation, and discuss the applicability of the combined RF and CV pipelines in different ubiquitous computing scenarios. This research can form a starting point to spawn the integration of diverse object detection, identification, and interaction approaches that function across the electromagnetic spectrum, and beyond.
What and When to Explain?
Authors: Kim Gwangbin , Yeo Dohyeon , Jo Taewoo , Rus Daniela , Kim SeungJun
Published: September 2023

Explanations in automated vehicles help passengers understand the vehicle's state and capabilities, leading to increased trust in the technology. Specifically, for passengers of SAE Level 4 and 5 vehicles who are not engaged in the driving process, the enhanced sense of control provided by explanations reduces potential anxieties, enabling them to fully leverage the benefits of automation. To construct explanations that enhance trust and situational awareness without disturbing passengers, we suggest testing with people who ultimately employ such explanations, ideally under real-world driving conditions. In this study, we examined the impact of various visual explanation types (perception, attention, perception+attention) and timing mechanisms (constantly provided or only under risky scenarios) on passenger experience under naturalistic driving scenarios using actual vehicles with mixed-reality support. Our findings indicate that visualizing the vehicle's perception state improves the perceived usability, trust, safety, and situational awareness without adding cognitive burden, even without explaining the underlying causes. We also demonstrate that the traffic risk probability could be used to control the timing of an explanation delivery, particularly when passengers are overwhelmed with information. Our study's on-road evaluation method offers a safe and reliable testing environment and can be easily customized for other AI models and explanation modalities.
RealityReplay
Authors: Cho Hyunsung , Komar Matthew L. , Lindlbauer David
Published: September 2023

Humans easily miss events in their surroundings due to limited short-term memory and field of view. This happens, for example, while watching an instructor's machine repair demonstration or conversing during a sports game. We present RealityReplay, a novel Mixed Reality (MR) approach that tracks and visualizes these significant events using in-situ MR visualizations without modifying the physical space. It requires only a head-mounted MR display and a 360-degree camera. We contribute a method for egocentric tracking of important motion events in users' surroundings based on a combination of semantic segmentation and saliency prediction, and generating in-situ MR visual summaries of temporal changes. These summary visualizations are overlaid onto the physical world to reveal which objects moved, in what order, and their trajectory, enabling users to observe previously hidden events. The visualizations are informed by a formative study comparing different styles on their effects on users' perception of temporal changes. Our evaluation shows that RealityReplay significantly enhances sensemaking of temporal motion events compared to memory-based recall. We demonstrate application scenarios in guidance, education, and observation, and discuss implications for extending human spatiotemporal capabilities through technological augmentation.
VibPath
Authors: Choi Seokmin , Yim Junghwan , Kim Se Jun , Jin Yincheng , Wu Di , Jin Zhanpeng
Published: September 2023

Technical advances in the smart device market have fixated smartphones at the heart of our lives, warranting an ever more secure means of authentication. Although most smartphones have adopted biometrics-based authentication, after a couple of failed attempts, most users are given the option to quickly bypass the system with passcodes. To add a layer of security, two-factor authentication (2FA) has been implemented but has proven to be vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we introduce VibPath, a simultaneous 2FA scheme that can understand the user's hand neuromuscular system through touch behavior. VibPath captures the individual's vibration path responses between the hand and the wrist with the attention-based encoder-decoder network, authenticating the genuine users from the imposters unobtrusively. In a user study with 30 participants, VibPath achieved an average performance of 0.98 accuracy, 0.99 precision, 0.98 recall, 0.98 f1-score for user verification, and 94.3% accuracy for user identification across five passcodes. Furthermore, we also conducted several extensive studies, including in-the-wile, permanence, vulnerability, usability, and system overhead studies, to assess the practicability and viability of the VibPath from multiple aspects.
Environment-aware Multi-person Tracking in Indoor Environments with MmWave Radars
Authors: Chen Weiyan , Yang Hongliu , Bi Xiaoyang , Zheng Rong , Zhang Fusang , Bao Peng , Chang Zhaoxin , Ma Xujun , Zhang Daqing
Published: September 2023

Device-free indoor localization and tracking using commercial millimeter wave radars have attracted much interest lately due to their non-intrusive nature and high spatial resolution. However, it is challenging to achieve high tracking accuracy due to rich multipath reflection and occlusion in indoor environments. Static objects with non-negligible reflectance of mmWave signals interact with moving human subjects and generate time-varying multipath ghosts and shadow ghosts, which can be easily confused as real subjects. To characterize the complex interactions, we first develop a geometric model that estimates the location of multipath ghosts given the locations of humans and static reflectors. Based on this model, the locations of static reflectors that form a reflection map are automatically estimated from received radar signals as a single person traverses the environment along arbitrary trajectories. The reflection map allows for the elimination of multipath and shadow ghost interference as well as the augmentation of weakly reflected human subjects in occluded areas. The proposed environment-aware multi-person tracking system can generate reflection maps with a mean error of 15.5cm and a 90-percentile error of 30.3cm, and achieve multi-person tracking accuracy with a mean error of 8.6cm and a 90-percentile error of 17.5cm, in four representative indoor spaces with diverse subjects using a single mmWave radar.
Diagnosing Medical Score Calculator Apps
Authors: Rahaman Sydur , Samuel Raina , Neamtiu Iulian
Published: September 2023

Mobile medical score calculator apps are widely used among practitioners to help make decisions regarding patient treatment and diagnosis. Errors in score definition, input, or calculations can result in severe and potentially life-threatening situations. Despite these high stakes, there has been no systematic or rigorous effort to examine and verify score calculator apps. We address these issues via a novel, interval-based score checking approach. Based on our observation that medical reference tables themselves may contain errors (which can propagate to apps) we first introduce automated correctness checking of reference tables. Specifically, we reduce score correctness checking to partition checking (coverage and non-overlap) over score parameters' ranges. We checked 12 scoring systems used in emergency, intensive, and acute care. Surprisingly, though some of these scores have been used for decades, we found errors in 5 score specifications: 8 coverage violations and 3 non-overlap violations. Second, we design and implement an automatic, dynamic analysis-based approach for verifying score correctness in a given Android app; the approach combines efficient, automatic GUI extraction and app exploration with partition/consistency checking to expose app errors. We applied the approach to 90 Android apps that implement medical score calculators. We found 23 coverage violations in 11 apps; 32 non-overlap violations in 12 apps, and 16 incorrect score calculations in 16 apps. We reported all findings to developers, which so far has led to fixes in 6 apps.
AttFL
Authors: Park JaeYeon , Lee Kichang , Lee Sungmin , Zhang Mi , Ko JeongGil
Published: September 2023

This work presents AttFL, a federated learning framework designed to continuously improve a personalized deep neural network for efficiently analyzing time-series data generated from mobile and embedded sensing applications. To better characterize time-series data features and efficiently abstract model parameters, AttFL appends a set of attention modules to the baseline deep learning model and exchanges their feature map information to gather collective knowledge across distributed local devices at the server. The server groups devices with similar contextual goals using cosine similarity, and redistributes updated model parameters for improved inference performance at each local device. Specifically, unlike previously proposed federated learning frameworks, AttFL is designed specifically to perform well for various recurrent neural network (RNN) baseline models, making it suitable for many mobile and embedded sensing applications producing time-series sensing data. We evaluate the performance of AttFL and compare with five state-of-the-art federated learning frameworks using three popular mobile/embedded sensing applications (e.g., physiological signal analysis, human activity recognition, and audio processing). Our results obtained from CPU core-based emulations and a 12-node embedded platform testbed shows that AttFL outperforms all alternative approaches in terms of model accuracy and communication/computational overhead, and is flexible enough to be applied in various application scenarios exploiting different baseline deep learning model architectures.
FewShotBP
Authors: Fan Feiyi , Gu Yang , Shen Jianfei , Dong Fan , Chen Yiqiang
Published: September 2023

Deep learning-based methods demonstrate promising results in continuous non-invasive blood pressure measurement, whereas those models trained on large public datasets suffer from severe performance degradation in predicting from real-world user data collected in home settings. Transfer learning has been recently introduced to personalize the pre-trained model with unseen users' data to solve the problem. However, the existing methods based on network fine-tuning for model personalization require a large amount of labeled data, lacking practicality due to labeling using a cuff-based blood pressure monitor is extremely tedious and laborious for home users. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot transfer learning approach named FewShotBP, which addresses the above-mentioned challenges by introducing a personalization adapter at the personalization stage (i.e., the transfer learning stage), and a multi-modal spectro-temporal neural network at the pre-train stage, to bridge the gap between data-hungry models and limited labeled data in realistic scenarios. To evaluate the approach's significance, we conducted experiments using both a publicly available dataset and a real-world user experiment. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves similar accuracy of blood pressure prediction with 10× less data for personalization compared with the state-of-the-art method in the public dataset and achieves a mean absolute error of 6.68 mmHg (systolic blood pressure) and 3.91 mmHg (diastolic blood pressure) with only 10 personal data samples in the real-world user experiment.
Surveying the Social Comfort of Body, Device, and Environment-Based Augmented Reality Interactions in Confined Passenger Spaces Using Mixed Reality Composite Videos
Authors: Medeiros Daniel , Dubus Romane , Williamson Julie , Wilson Graham , Pöhlmann Katharina , McGill Mark
Published: September 2023

Augmented Reality (AR) headsets could significantly improve the passenger experience, freeing users from the restrictions of physical smartphones, tablets and seatback displays. However, the confined space of public transport and the varying proximity to other passengers may restrict what interaction techniques are deemed socially acceptable for AR users - particularly considering current reliance on mid-air interactions in consumer headsets. We contribute and utilize a novel approach to social acceptability video surveys, employing mixed reality composited videos to present a real user performing interactions across different virtual transport environments. This approach allows for controlled evaluation of perceived social acceptability whilst freeing researchers to present interactions in any simulated context. Our resulting survey (N=131) explores the social comfort of body, device, and environment-based interactions across seven transit seating arrangements. We reflect on the advantages of discreet inputs over mid-air and the unique challenges of face-to-face seating for passenger AR.
Can You Ear Me?
Authors: Stanke Dennis , Duente Tim , Demir Kerem Can , Rohs Michael
Published: September 2023

The earlobe is a well-known location for wearing jewelry, but might also be promising for electronic output, such as presenting notifications. This work elaborates the pros and cons of different notification channels for the earlobe. Notifications on the earlobe can be private (only noticeable by the wearer) as well as public (noticeable in the immediate vicinity in a given social situation). A user study with 18 participants showed that the reaction times for the private channels (Poke, Vibration, Private Sound, Electrotactile) were on average less than 1 s with an error rate (missed notifications) of less than 1 %. Thermal Warm and Cold took significantly longer and Cold was least reliable (26 % error rate). The participants preferred Electrotactile and Vibration. Among the public channels the recognition time did not differ significantly between Sound (738 ms) and LED (828 ms), but Display took much longer (3175 ms). At 22 % the error rate of Display was highest. The participants generally felt comfortable wearing notification devices on their earlobe. The results show that the earlobe indeed is a suitable location for wearable technology, if properly miniaturized, which is possible for Electrotactile and LED. We present application scenarios and discuss design considerations. A small field study in a fitness center demonstrates the suitability of the earlobe notification concept in a sports context.
VidAdapter
Authors: Ram Ashwin , Xiao Han , Zhao Shengdong , Fu Chi-Wing
Published: September 2023

Video lectures are increasingly being used by learners in a ubiquitous manner. However, existing video designs are not optimised for ubiquitous use, creating the need to adapt the style of these videos to meet the constraints of the learning platform and context of use. Our formative study with experienced video editing users, however, found that performing these adaptations using traditional video editors can be a challenging and time-consuming task. We developed VidAdapter, a tool that facilitates lecture video adaptation by allowing direct manipulation of the video content. For this, VidAdapter automatically extracts meaningful elements from the video, enables spatial and temporal reorganisation of the elements, and streamlines the modification of an element's visual appearance. We demonstrate the capabilities and specific use cases of VidAdapter within the domain of adapting existing blackboard lecture videos for on-the-go learning on Optical Head-Mounted Displays. Our evaluation of the tool with experienced video editing users revealed that VidAdapter was strongly preferred over traditional approaches and can improve the efficiency of the adaptation process by over 53% on average.
Wi-Flex
Authors: Torun Mert , Mostofi Yasamin
Published: September 2023

In this paper, we are interested in startle reflex detection with WiFi signals. We propose that two parameters related to the received signal bandwidth, maximum normalized bandwidth and bandwidth-intense duration, can successfully detect reflexes and robustly differentiate them from non-reflex events, even from those that involve intense body motions (e.g., certain exercises). In order to confirm this, we need a massive RF reflex dataset which would be prohibitively laborious to collect. On the other hand, there are many available reflex/non-reflex videos online. We then propose an efficient way of translating the content of a video to the bandwidth of the corresponding received RF signal that would have been measured if there was a link near the event in the video, by drawing analogies between our problem and the classic bandwidth modeling work of J. Carson in the context of analog FM radios (Carson's Rule). This then allows us to translate online reflex/non-reflex videos to an instant large RF bandwidth dataset, and characterize optimum 2D reflex/non-reflex decision regions accordingly, to be used during real operation with WiFi. We extensively test our approach with 203 reflex events, 322 non-reflex events (including 142 intense body motion events), over four areas (including several through-wall ones), and with 15 participants, achieving a correct reflex detection rate of 90.15% and a false alarm rate of 2.49% (all events are natural). While the paper is extensively tested with startle reflexes, it is also applicable to sport-type reflexes, and is thus tested with sport-related reflexes as well. We further show reflex detection with multiple people simultaneously engaged in a series of activities. Optimality of the proposed design is also demonstrated experimentally. Finally, we conduct experiments to show the potential of our approach for providing cost-effective and quantifiable metrics in sports, by quantifying a goalkeeper's reaction. Overall, our results confirm a fast, robust, and cost-effective reflex detection system, without collecting any RF training data, or training a neural network.