Planning Water Resources Allocation Under Multiple Uncertainties Through a Generalized Fuzzy Two-Stage Stochastic Programming Method

© 2014 IEEEThis work was supported by the Natural Sciences Foundation (51190095, 51225904), the 111 Project (B14008), and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Development of a copula-based particle filter (CopPF) approach for hydrologic data assimilation under consideration of parameter interdependence

National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key Research and Development Plan, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad

Automatical Spike Sorting with Low-Rank and Sparse Representation

Spike sorting is crucial in studying neural individually and synergistically encoding and decoding behaviors. However, existent spike sorting algorithms perform unsatisfactorily in real scenarios where heavy noises and overlapping samples are commonly in the spikes, and the spikes from different neurons are similar. To address such challenging scenarios, we propose an automatic spike sporting method in this paper, which integrally combines low-rank and sparse representation (LRSR) into a unified model. In particular, LRSR models spikes through low-rank optimization, uncovering global data structure for handling similar and overlapped samples. To eliminate the influence of the embedded noises, LRSR uses a sparse constraint, effectively separating spikes from noise. The optimization is solved using alternate augmented Lagrange multipliers methods. Moreover, we conclude with an automatic spike-sorting framework that employs the spectral clustering theorem to estimate the number of neurons. Extensive experiments over various simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method, LRSR, can handle spike sorting effectively and efficiently.National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: U1701266, 61372173 and 61671163); Team Project of the Education Ministry of the Guangdong Province (Grant Number: 2017KCXTD011); Guangdong Higher Education Engineering Technology Research Center for Big Data on Manufacturing Knowledge Patent (Grant Number: 501130144); Guangdong Province Intellectual Property Key Laboratory Project (Grant Number: 2018B030322016); Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission, Enterprise Support Scheme (Grant Number: S/E/070/17); China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant Number: 2022M711812)

Development of integrated approaches for hydrological data assimilation through combination of ensemble Kalman filter and particle filter methods

Natural Science Foundation of China; National Key Research and Development Plan; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Parameter uncertainty and temporal dynamics of sensitivity for hydrologic models: A hybrid sequential data assimilation and probabilistic collocation method

This research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51190095 and 51225904) and the Program for Innovative Research Team in University (IRT1127)

Zebrafish Reproduction: Revisiting In Vitro Fertilization to Increase Sperm Cryopreservation Success

Although conventional cryopreservation is a proven method for long-term, safe storage of genetic material, protocols used by the zebrafish community are not standardized and yield inconsistent results, thereby putting the security of many genotypes in individual laboratories and stock centers at risk. An important challenge for a successful zebrafish sperm cryopreservation program is the large variability in the post-thaw in vitro fertilization success (0 to 80%). But how much of this variability was due to the reproductive traits of the in vitro fertilization process, and not due to the cryopreservation process? These experiments only assessed the in vitro process with fresh sperm, but yielded the basic metrics needed for successful in vitro fertilization using cryopreserved sperm, as well. We analyzed the reproductive traits for zebrafish males with a strict body condition range. It did not correlate with sperm volume, or motility (P>0.05), but it did correlate with sperm concentration. Younger males produced more concentrated sperm (P<0.05). To minimize the wastage of sperm during the in vitro fertilization process, 106 cells/ml was the minimum sperm concentration needed to achieve an in vitro fertilization success of ≥ 70%. During the in vitro process, pooling sperm did not reduce fertilization success (P>0.05), but pooling eggs reduced it by approximately 30 to 50% (P<0.05). This reduction in fertilization success was due not to the pooling of the females' eggs, but to the type of tools used to handle the eggs. Recommendations to enhance the in vitro process for zebrafish include: 1) using males of a body condition closer to 1.5 for maximal sperm concentration; 2) minimizing sperm wastage by using a working sperm concentration of 106 motile cells/ml for in vitro fertilization; and 3) never using metal or sharp-edged tools to handle eggs prior to fertilization

Photo collage-based photograph display system on mobile computing platform

In the last few decades, mobile computing platform technology has grown rapidly, as observed from smart phones that have quickly become ubiquitous. The mobile computing platform is the most widely used platform in our life today, and digital photographs captured through these devices have become routine for most people. In this study, we propose a novel artistic method for displaying photographs in mobile devices as a photo collage. Using our system, users can view a representative photograph as a collage of photographs associated with a certain event and access each of photographs individually. To implement this, we employ centroidal Voronoi diagram to obtain an even distribution of tiles, and use the sites as the location of tiles. We use the edge avoidance technique to prevent tiles from being located across the edges. To obtain the direction of tiles that follow near a strong edge, we employ the Edge tangent Flow field and use the field as the directions of tiles. Finally, we search for photographs that best match the tiles calculated above by using a thumbnail difference metric

Doping the holographic Mott insulator

Mott insulators form because of strong electron repulsions, being at the heart of strongly correlated electron physics. Conventionally these are understood as classical "traffic jams" of electrons described by a short-ranged entangled product ground state. Exploiting the holographic duality, which maps the physics of densely entangled matter onto gravitational black hole physics, we show how Mott-insulators can be constructed departing from entangled non-Fermi liquid metallic states, such as the strange metals found in cuprate superconductors. These "entangled Mott insulators" have traits in common with the "classical" Mott insulators, such as the formation of Mott gap in the optical conductivity, super-exchange-like interactions, and form "stripes" when doped. They also exhibit new properties: the ordering wave vectors are detached from the number of electrons in the unit cell, and the DC resistivity diverges algebraically instead of exponentially as function of temperature. These results may shed light on the mysterious ordering phenomena observed in underdoped cuprates.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures. Accepted in Nature Physic

Gain control network conditions in early sensory coding

Gain control is essential for the proper function of any sensory system. However, the precise mechanisms for achieving effective gain control in the brain are unknown. Based on our understanding of the existence and strength of connections in the insect olfactory system, we analyze the conditions that lead to controlled gain in a randomly connected network of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. We consider two scenarios for the variation of input into the system. In the first case, the intensity of the sensory input controls the input currents to a fixed proportion of neurons of the excitatory and inhibitory populations. In the second case, increasing intensity of the sensory stimulus will both, recruit an increasing number of neurons that receive input and change the input current that they receive. Using a mean field approximation for the network activity we derive relationships between the parameters of the network that ensure that the overall level of activity of the excitatory population remains unchanged for increasing intensity of the external stimulation. We find that, first, the main parameters that regulate network gain are the probabilities of connections from the inhibitory population to the excitatory population and of the connections within the inhibitory population. Second, we show that strict gain control is not achievable in a random network in the second case, when the input recruits an increasing number of neurons. Finally, we confirm that the gain control conditions derived from the mean field approximation are valid in simulations of firing rate models and Hodgkin-Huxley conductance based models