A survey of qualitative spatial representations

Representation and reasoning with qualitative spatial relations is an important problem in artificial intelligence and has wide applications in the fields of geographic information system, computer vision, autonomous robot navigation, natural language understanding, spatial databases and so on. The reasons for this interest in using qualitative spatial relations include cognitive comprehensibility, efficiency and computational facility. This paper summarizes progress in qualitative spatial representation by describing key calculi representing different types of spatial relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of current research and glimpse of future work

Vectored immunoprophylaxis protects humanized mice from mucosal HIV transmission

Background: Recently, a number of antibodies capable of broadly neutralizing HIV have been isolated from HIV infected patients, stimulating efforts to develop vaccines capable of eliciting their production in naive individuals. As an alternative to vaccination, we recently described vectored immunoprophylaxis (VIP) as an approach capable of generating high serum concentrations of a desired monoclonal antibody in mice following a single intramuscular injection of a specialized adeno associated viral vector (AAV). Mice that received VIP encoding b12 and VRC01 antibodies demonstrated long-term circulating antibody expression in serum, and VIP-treated humanized mice exhibited remarkable protection against high dose, intravenous challenge with CXCR4-tropic HIV. However, most human infections are initiated by transmission of CCR5- tropic strains through mucosal tissues. Methods: To measure the efficacy of VIP against clinically relevant strains, we humanized VIP-treated mice by adoptive transfer of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and challenged these animals with CCR5-tropic HIV strains including JR-CSF, as well as REJO.c, a transmitted molecular founder. To determine the ability of VIP to prevent mucosal transmission of HIV, we developed a repetitive intravaginal challenge model in VIP-treated BLT humanized mice that were challenged weekly with JR-CSF and monitored for infection. Results: PBMC humanized mice expressing either b12 or VRC01 were protected from intravenous challenge with JR-CSF. In contrast, the b12-resistant REJO.c strain readily infected PBMC humanized mice expressing b12 antibody, while mice expressing VRC01 demonstrated nearly complete protection following challenge. Intravaginally challenged BLT animals expressing a luciferase negative control protein all became infected over the study period while a majority of animals expressing VRC01 had no detectable HIV infection despite fourteen intravaginal challenges with JR-CSF. Conclusion: VIP is capable of protecting humanized mice from challenge by diverse HIV strains and can substantially inhibit mucosal transmission. These findings warrant continued development of VIP as a novel approach for HIV prevention in humans

The 1.083 micron tunable CW semiconductor laser

A tunable CW laser is desired to produce light equivalent to the helium spectral line at 1.08 microns. This laser will serve as an optical pumping source for He-3 and He-4 atoms used in space magnetometers. This light source can be fabricated either as a semiconductor laser diode or a pumped solid state laser. Continuous output power of greater than 10 mW is desired. Semiconductor lasers can be thermally tuned, but must be capable of locking onto the helium resonance lines. Solid state lasers must have efficient pumping sources suitable for space configuration. Additional requirements are as follows: space magnetometer applications will include low mass (less than 0.5 kg), low power consumption (less than 0.75 W), and high stability/reliability for long missions (5-10 years)

Causality-inspired single-source domain generalization for medical image segmentation

Deep learning models usually suffer from the domain shift issue, where models trained on one source domain do not generalize well to other unseen domains. In this work, we investigate the single-source domain generalization problem: training a deep network that is robust to unseen domains, under the condition that training data are only available from one source domain, which is common in medical imaging applications. We tackle this problem in the context of cross-domain medical image segmentation. In this scenario, domain shifts are mainly caused by different acquisition processes. We propose a simple causality-inspired data augmentation approach to expose a segmentation model to synthesized domain-shifted training examples. Specifically, 1) to make the deep model robust to discrepancies in image intensities and textures, we employ a family of randomly-weighted shallow networks. They augment training images using diverse appearance transformations. 2) Further we show that spurious correlations among objects in an image are detrimental to domain robustness. These correlations might be taken by the network as domain-specific clues for making predictions, and they may break on unseen domains. We remove these spurious correlations via causal intervention. This is achieved by resampling the appearances of potentially correlated objects independently. The proposed approach is validated on three cross-domain segmentation scenarios: cross-modality (CT-MRI) abdominal image segmentation, cross-sequence (bSSFP-LGE) cardiac MRI segmentation, and cross-site prostate MRI segmentation. The proposed approach yields consistent performance gains compared with competitive methods when tested on unseen domains

Virtual Machines Performance Modeling with Support Vector Regressions

Virtualization is a key technology in cloudcomputing to render on-demand provisioning of virtual services.Xen, an open source paravirtualized virtual machine monitor(hypervisor), has been adopted by many leading data centersof the world today. A scheduler in Xen handles CPU resourcessharing among virtual machines hosted on the same physicalsystem. This study is focused on a scheduler in the currentXen release - the Credit scheduler. Credit uses two parameters(weight and cap) to fine tune CPU resources sharing. Previousstudies have shown that these two parameters can impact variousperformance measures of virtual machines hosted on Xen. In thisstudy, we present a holistic procedure to establish performancemodels of virtual machines. Empirical data of two commonly usedmeasures, namely calculation power and network throughput,were collected by simulations under various settings of weightand cap. We then employed a powerful machine learning tool(multi-kernel support vector regression) to learn performancemodels from the empirical data. These models were evaluatedsatisfactorily by using established procedures in machinelearning

Flavor brane on the baryonic branch of moduli space

We study an extra flavor in the cascading SU((k+1)M)xSU(k M) gauge theory by adding probe D7-brane to the geometry. By finding a solution to the kappa-symmetry equation we establish that the D7-brane is mutually supersymmetric with the background everywhere on the baryonic branch of moduli space. We also discuss possible applications of this result.Comment: 15 pages; v2 typo corrected, references adde

Trace doping of multiple elements enables stable battery cycling of LiCoO2 at 4.6 V

LiCoO2 is a dominant cathode material for lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries due to its high volumetric energy density, which could potentially be further improved by charging to high voltages. However, practical adoption of high-voltage charging is hindered by LiCoO2’s structural instability at the deeply delithiated state and the associated safety concerns. Here, we achieve stable cycling of LiCoO2 at 4.6 V (versus Li/Li+) through trace Ti–Mg–Al co-doping. Using state-of-the-art synchrotron X-ray imaging and spectroscopic techniques, we report the incorporation of Mg and Al into the LiCoO2 lattice, which inhibits the undesired phase transition at voltages above 4.5 V. We also show that, even in trace amounts, Ti segregates significantly at grain boundaries and on the surface, modifying the microstructure of the particles while stabilizing the surface oxygen at high voltages. These dopants contribute through different mechanisms and synergistically promote the cycle stability of LiCoO2 at 4.6 V

Electrically Driven Light Emission from Individual CdSe Nanowires

We report electroluminescence (EL) measurements carried out on three-terminal devices incorporating individual n-type CdSe nanowires. Simultaneous optical and electrical measurements reveal that EL occurs near the contact between the nanowire and a positively biased electrode or drain. The surface potential profile, obtained by using Kelvin probe microscopy, shows an abrupt potential drop near the position of the EL spot, while the band profile obtained from scanning photocurrent microscopy indicates the existence of an n-type Schottky barrier at the interface. These observations indicate that light emission occurs through a hole leakage or an inelastic scattering induced by the rapid potential drop at the nanowire-electrode interface.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure