9,196 research outputs found
CGIAR modeling approaches for resource-constrained scenarios: I. Accelerating crop breeding for a changing climate.
Crop improvement efforts aiming at increasing crop production (quantity, quality) and adapting to climate change have been subject of active research over the past years. But, the question remains 'to what extent can breeding gains be achieved under a changing climate, at a pace sufficient to usefully contribute to climate adaptation, mitigation and food security?'. Here, we address this question by critically reviewing how model-based approaches can be used to assist breeding activities, with particular focus on all CGIAR (formerly the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research but now known simply as CGIAR) breeding programs. Crop modeling can underpin breeding efforts in many different ways, including assessing genotypic adaptability and stability, characterizing and identifying target breeding environments, identifying tradeoffs among traits for such environments, and making predictions of the likely breeding value of the genotypes. Crop modeling science within the CGIAR has contributed to all of these. However, much progress remains to be done if modeling is to effectively contribute to more targeted and impactful breeding programs under changing climates. In a period in which CGIAR breeding programs are undergoing a major modernization process, crop modelers will need to be part of crop improvement teams, with a common understanding of breeding pipelines and model capabilities and limitations, and common data standards and protocols, to ensure they follow and deliver according to clearly defined breeding products. This will, in turn, enable more rapid and better-targeted crop modeling activities, thus directly contributing to accelerated and more impactful breeding efforts.Online Version of Record before inclusion in an issue
Control Theory for Synthetic Biology: Recent Advances in System Characterization, Control Design, and Controller Implementation for Synthetic Biology
Living organisms are differentiated by their genetic material-millions to billions of DNA bases encoding thousands of genes. These genes are translated into a vast array of proteins, many of which have functions that are still unknown. Previously, it was believed that simply knowing the genetic sequence of an organism would be the key to unlocking all understanding. However, as DNA sequencing technology has become affordable, it has become clear that living cells are governed by complex, multilayered networks of gene regulation that cannot be deduced from sequence alone. Synthetic biology as a field might best be characterized as a learn-by-building approach, in which scientists attempt to engineer molecular pathways that do not exist in nature. In doing so, they test the limits of both natural and engineered organisms
HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN
Predicting and understanding human motion dynamics has many applications,
such as motion synthesis, augmented reality, security, and autonomous vehicles.
Due to the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), there has
been much interest in probabilistic estimation and synthetic data generation
using deep neural network architectures and learning algorithms.
We propose a novel sequence-to-sequence model for probabilistic human motion
prediction, trained with a modified version of improved Wasserstein generative
adversarial networks (WGAN-GP), in which we use a custom loss function designed
for human motion prediction. Our model, which we call HP-GAN, learns a
probability density function of future human poses conditioned on previous
poses. It predicts multiple sequences of possible future human poses, each from
the same input sequence but a different vector z drawn from a random
distribution. Furthermore, to quantify the quality of the non-deterministic
predictions, we simultaneously train a motion-quality-assessment model that
learns the probability that a given skeleton sequence is a real human motion.
We test our algorithm on two of the largest skeleton datasets: NTURGB-D and
Human3.6M. We train our model on both single and multiple action types. Its
predictive power for long-term motion estimation is demonstrated by generating
multiple plausible futures of more than 30 frames from just 10 frames of input.
We show that most sequences generated from the same input have more than 50\%
probabilities of being judged as a real human sequence. We will release all the
code used in this paper to Github
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