The qualitative behavior at the free boundary for approximate harmonic maps from surfaces

Let $\{u_n\}$ be a sequence of maps from a compact Riemann surface $M$ with smooth boundary to a general compact Riemannian manifold $N$ with free boundary on a smooth submanifold $K\subset N$ satisfying $$\sup_n \ \left(\|\nabla u_n\|_{L^2(M)}+\|\tau(u_n)\|_{L^2(M)}\right)\leq \Lambda,$$ where $\tau(u_n)$ is the tension field of the map $u_n$. We show that the energy identity and the no neck property hold during a blow-up process. The assumptions are such that this result also applies to the harmonic map heat flow with free boundary, to prove the energy identity at finite singular time as well as at infinity time. Also, the no neck property holds at infinity time.Comment: to appear in Mathematische Annalen. First version online MPI MIS Preprint: 26/2016, 21. Mar. 201

Simultaneous Stereo Video Deblurring and Scene Flow Estimation

Videos for outdoor scene often show unpleasant blur effects due to the large relative motion between the camera and the dynamic objects and large depth variations. Existing works typically focus monocular video deblurring. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to deblurring from stereo videos. In particular, we exploit the piece-wise planar assumption about the scene and leverage the scene flow information to deblur the image. Unlike the existing approach [31] which used a pre-computed scene flow, we propose a single framework to jointly estimate the scene flow and deblur the image, where the motion cues from scene flow estimation and blur information could reinforce each other, and produce superior results than the conventional scene flow estimation or stereo deblurring methods. We evaluate our method extensively on two available datasets and achieve significant improvement in flow estimation and removing the blur effect over the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 201

Plastoquinone and Ubiquinone in Plants: Biosynthesis, Physiological Function and Metabolic Engineering

Plastoquinone (PQ) and ubiquinone (UQ) are two important prenylquinones, functioning as electron transporters in the electron transport chain of oxygenic photosynthesis and the aerobic respiratory chain, respectively, and play indispensable roles in plant growth and development through participating in the biosynthesis and metabolism of important chemical compounds, acting as antioxidants, being involved in plant response to stress, and regulating gene expression and cell signal transduction. UQ, particularly UQ10, has also been widely used in people’s life. It is effective in treating cardiovascular diseases, chronic gingivitis and periodontitis, and shows favorable impact on cancer treatment and human reproductive health. PQ and UQ are made up of an active benzoquinone ring attached to a polyisoprenoid side chain. Biosynthesis of PQ and UQ is very complicated with more than thirty five enzymes involved. Their synthetic pathways can be generally divided into two stages. The first stage leads to the biosynthesis of precursors of benzene quinone ring and prenyl side chain. The benzene quinone ring for UQ is synthesized from tyrosine or phenylalanine, whereas the ring for PQ is derived from tyrosine. The prenyl side chains of PQ and UQ are derived from glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate and pyruvate through the 2-C-methyl-D-erythritol 4-phosphate pathway and/or acetyl-CoA and acetoacetyl-CoA through the mevalonate pathway. The second stage includes the condensation of ring and side chain and subsequent modification. Homogentisate solanesyltransferase, 4-hydroxybenzoate polyprenyl diphosphate transferase and a series of benzene quinone ring modification enzymes are involved in this stage. PQ exists in plants, while UQ widely presents in plants, animals and microbes. Many enzymes and their encoding genes involved in PQ and UQ biosynthesis have been intensively studied recently. Metabolic engineering of UQ10 in plants, such as rice and tobacco, has also been tested. In this review, we summarize and discuss recent research progresses in the biosynthetic pathways of PQ and UQ and enzymes and their encoding genes involved in side chain elongation and in the second stage of PQ and UQ biosynthesis. Physiological functions of PQ and UQ played in plants as well as the practical application and metabolic engineering of PQ and UQ are also included

A load-balancing mechanism for distributed SDN control plane using response time.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become a popular paradigm for managing large-scale networks including cloud servers and data centers because of its advantages of centralized management and programmability. The issues of scalability and reliability that a single centralized controller suffers makes distributed controller architectures emerge. One key limitation of distributed controllers is the statically configured switch-controller mapping, easily causing uneven load distribution among controllers. Previous works have proposed load-balancing methods with switch migration to address this issue. However, the higher-load controller is always directly considered as the overloaded controller that need to shift its load to other controllers, even if it has no response time delay. The pursuit of absolute load-balancing effect can also result in frequent network delays and service interruptions. Additionally, if there are several overloaded controllers, just one controller with the maximum load can be addressed within a single load-balancing operation, reducing load-balancing efficiency. To address these problems, we propose SMCLBRT, a load-balancing strategy of multiple SDN controllers based on response time, considering the changing features of real-time response times versus controller loads. By selecting the appropriate response time threshold and dealing with multiple overloading controllers simultaneously, it can well solve load-balancing problem in SDN control plane with multiple overloaded controllers. Simulation experiments exhibit the effectiveness of our scheme.N/

Modeling Three-dimensional Invasive Solid Tumor Growth in Heterogeneous Microenvironment under Chemotherapy

A systematic understanding of the evolution and growth dynamics of invasive solid tumors in response to different chemotherapy strategies is crucial for the development of individually optimized oncotherapy. Here, we develop a hybrid three-dimensional (3D) computational model that integrates pharmacokinetic model, continuum diffusion-reaction model and discrete cell automaton model to investigate 3D invasive solid tumor growth in heterogeneous microenvironment under chemotherapy. Specifically, we consider the effects of heterogeneous environment on drug diffusion, tumor growth, invasion and the drug-tumor interaction on individual cell level. We employ the hybrid model to investigate the evolution and growth dynamics of avascular invasive solid tumors under different chemotherapy strategies. Our simulations reproduce the well-established observation that constant dosing is generally more effective in suppressing primary tumor growth than periodic dosing, due to the resulting continuous high drug concentration. In highly heterogeneous microenvironment, the malignancy of the tumor is significantly enhanced, leading to inefficiency of chemotherapies. The effects of geometrically-confined microenvironment and non-uniform drug dosing are also investigated. Our computational model, when supplemented with sufficient clinical data, could eventually lead to the development of efficient in silico tools for prognosis and treatment strategy optimization.Comment: 41 pages, 8 figure