Personalized Cinemagraphs using Semantic Understanding and Collaborative Learning

Cinemagraphs are a compelling way to convey dynamic aspects of a scene. In these media, dynamic and still elements are juxtaposed to create an artistic and narrative experience. Creating a high-quality, aesthetically pleasing cinemagraph requires isolating objects in a semantically meaningful way and then selecting good start times and looping periods for those objects to minimize visual artifacts (such a tearing). To achieve this, we present a new technique that uses object recognition and semantic segmentation as part of an optimization method to automatically create cinemagraphs from videos that are both visually appealing and semantically meaningful. Given a scene with multiple objects, there are many cinemagraphs one could create. Our method evaluates these multiple candidates and presents the best one, as determined by a model trained to predict human preferences in a collaborative way. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with multiple results and a user study.Comment: To appear in ICCV 2017. Total 17 pages including the supplementary materia

Long-range adiabatic quantum state transfer through a tight-binding chain as a quantum data bus

We introduce a scheme based on adiabatic passage that allows for long-range quantum communication through tight-binding chain with always-on interaction. By adiabatically varying the external gate voltage applied on the system, the electron can be transported from the sender's dot to the aim one.We numerically solve the Schr\"odinger equation for a system with a given number of quantum dots. It is shown that this scheme is a simple and efficient protocol to coherently manipulate the population transfer under suitable gate pulses. The dependence of the energy gap and the transfer time on system parameters is analyzed and shown numerically. Our method provides a guidance for future realization of adiabatic quantum state transfer in experiments.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1206.671

Uniform approximation of homeomorphisms by diffeomorphisms

We prove that a compactly supported homeomorphism of a smooth manifold of dimension greater or equal to 5 can be approximated uniformly by compactly supported diffeomorphisms if and only if it is isotopic to a diffeomorphism. If the given homeomorphism is in addition volume preserving, then it can be approximated uniformly by volume preserving diffeomorphisms.Comment: v4: 5 pages; long overdue revision; clarified and improved statements, notation, and proofs. The main theorem may already be known, but I have not been able to find a precise reference. After talking to a number of topologists without getting a satisfactory answer, I decided to write up the proof myself. Comments and references welcom

Quantum phase transition of two-mode Bose-Einstein condensates with an entanglement order parameter

The ground state entanglement of the two-mode Bose-Einstein condensate is investigated through a quantum phase transition approach. The entanglement measure is taken as the order parameter and this is a non-local order parameter, which is different from the conventional order parameter of the Mott insulator-superfluid phase transitions. For this non-local order parameter, scaling behavior corresponding to a continuous phase transition is obtained and a power-law divergence near the critical region follows it. This scaling behavior of quantum entanglement is analyzed by the finite-size scaling and the critical exponents are obtained as $\nu = 1.01$ and $\gamma = 0.86$. A close connection between quantum fluctuations and the phase transition of entanglement is also obtained.Comment: 4 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev. A, 201

Efficacy and safety of pembrolizumab monotherapy in patients with advanced thyroid cancer in the phase 2 KEYNOTE-158 study

Immunotherapy; Pembrolizumab; Thyroid neoplasmsInmunoterapia; Pembrolizumab; Neoplasias de tiroidesImmunoteràpia; Pembrolizumab; Neoplàsies de tiroidesBackground The authors report results from the thyroid carcinoma cohort of the multicohort phase 2 KEYNOTE-158 study (NCT02628067), which evaluated pembrolizumab monotherapy in patients with previously treated cancers. Methods Eligible patients had histologically and/or cytologically confirmed papillary or follicular thyroid carcinoma, failure of or intolerance to prior therapy, and measurable disease per Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) v1.1. Patients received pembrolizumab (200 mg) every 3 weeks for up to 35 cycles. The primary end point was objective response rate (ORR) per RECIST v1.1 by independent central review. Results A total of 103 patients were enrolled and received pembrolizumab. Median duration from first dose to data cutoff (October 5, 2020) was 49.4 (range, 43.9–54.9) months. ORR was 6.8% (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.8%–13.5%), and median duration of response was 18.4 (range, 4.2‒47.2+) months. ORR was 8.7% (95% CI, 2.4%‒20.8%) among patients with programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) combined positive score (CPS) ≥1 (n = 46) and 5.7% (95% CI, 1.2%‒15.7%) among patients with PD-L1 CPS <1 (n = 53). Median overall survival and progression-free survival were 34.5 (95% CI, 21.2 to not reached) and 4.2 (95% CI, 3.9‒6.2) months, respectively. Treatment-related adverse events occurred in 69.9% of patients (grade 3‒5, 14.6%). Conclusions Pembrolizumab demonstrated manageable toxicity and durable antitumor activity in a small subset of patients with advanced thyroid cancer. These results provide evidence of modest antitumor activity in this setting regardless of tumor PD-L1 expression. Future studies evaluating immune checkpoint inhibitors in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer should focus on biomarker-driven patient selection or combination of immune checkpoint inhibitors with other agents, in order to achieve higher response rates than observed in this study

Evaluating two concepts for the modelling of intermediates accumulation during biological denitrification in wastewater treatment

The accumulation of the denitrification intermediates in wastewater treatment systems is highly undesirable, since both nitrite and nitric oxide (NO) are known to be toxic to bacteria, and nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone depleting substance. To date, two distinct concepts for the modelling of denitrification have been proposed, which are represented by the Activated Sludge Model for Nitrogen (ASMN) and the Activated Sludge Model with Indirect Coupling of Electrons (ASM-ICE), respectively. The two models are fundamentally different in describing the electron allocation among different steps of denitrification. In this study, the two models were examined and compared in their ability to predict the accumulation of denitrification intermediates reported in four different experimental datasets in literature. The N-oxide accumulation predicted by the ASM-ICE model was in good agreement with values measured in all four cases, while the ASMN model was only able to reproduce one of the four cases. The better performance of the ASM-ICE model is due to that it adopts an “indirect coupling” modelling concept through electron carriers to link the carbon oxidation and the nitrogen reduction processes, which describes the electron competition well. The ASMN model, on the other hand, is inherently limited by its structural deficiency in assuming that carbon oxidation is always able to meet the electron demand by all denitrification steps, therefore discounting electron competition among these steps. ASM-ICE therefore offers a better tool for predicting and understanding intermediates accumulation in biological denitrification

Five-quark components in baryons

Evidence has been accumulating for the existence of significant intrinsic non-perturbative five-quark components in various baryons. The inclusion of the five-quark components gives a natural explanation of the excess of $\bar d$ over $\bar u$, significant quark orbital angular momentum in the proton, the problematic mass and decay pattern of the lowest $1/2^-$ baryon nonet, etc.. A breathing mode of $qqq\leftrightarrow qqqq\bar q$ is suggested for the lowest $1/2^-$ baryon octet. Evidence of a predicted member of the new scheme, $\Sigma^*(1/2^-)$ around 1380 MeV, is introduced.Comment: invited plenary talk at the 10th International Conference on Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics (HypX09) September 14th - 18th, 2009, Tokai, Ibaraki, Japa

Synchronization on community networks

In this Letter, we propose a growing network model that can generate scale-free networks with a tunable community strength. The community strength, $C$, is directly measured by the ratio of the number of external edges to internal ones; a smaller $C$ corresponds to a stronger community structure. According to the criterion obtained based on the master stability function, we show that the synchronizability of a community network is significantly weaker than that of the original Barab\'asi-Albert network. Interestingly, we found an unreported linear relationship between the smallest nonzero eigenvalue and the community strength, which can be analytically obtained by using the combinatorial matrix theory. Furthermore, we investigated the Kuramoto model and found an abnormal region ($C\leq 0.002$), in which the network has even worse synchronizability than the uncoupled case (C=0). On the other hand, the community effect will vanish when $C$ exceeds 0.1. Between these two extreme regions, a strong community structure will hinder global synchronization.Comment: 4 figures and 4 page

Relations between Average Distance, Heterogeneity and Network Synchronizability

By using the random interchanging algorithm, we investigate the relations between average distance, standard deviation of degree distribution and synchronizability of complex networks. We find that both increasing the average distance and magnifying the degree deviation will make the network synchronize harder. Only the combination of short average distance and small standard deviation of degree distribution that ensures strong synchronizability. Some previous studies assert that the maximal betweenness is a right quantity to estimate network synchronizability: the larger the maximal betweenness, the poorer the network synchronizability. Here we address an interesting case, which strongly suggests that the single quantity, maximal betweenness, may not give a comprehensive description of network synchronizability.Comment: 14 pages, and 7 figures (to be published in Physica A

Penta-quark states with hidden charm and beauty

More and more hadron states are found to be difficult to be accommodated by the quenched quark models which describe baryons as 3-quark states and mesons as antiquark-quark states. Dragging out an antiquark-quark pair from the gluon field in hadrons should be an important excitation mechanism for hadron spectroscopy. Our recent progress on the penta-quark states with hidden charm and beauty is reviewed.Comment: Plenary talk at the 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics 2011 (APFB2011), 22-26 Aug., 2011, Seoul, Kore