Throngs

Ceramic is an important element of my artworks. It is a material with strong bearing capacity, and at the same time, it is a tool with the attribute of nature and social function, for the similarity with humans can be found in it. Thanks to its characteristics, I am able to transform the forms, colors, and quality to complete my works. Collected from nature, carved with human hands, the clay is cultivated and my expectation of the outside world is satisfied

Effect of size, shape, and surface modification on cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles to human Hep-2 and canine MDCK cells

There have been increasing interests in applying gold nanoparticles in biological research, drug delivery, and therapy. As the interaction of gold nanoparticles with cells relies on properties of nanoparticles, the cytotoxicity is complex and still under debating. In this work, we investigate the cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles of different encapsulations, surface charge states, sizes and shapes to both human HEp-2 and canine MDCK cells. We found that cetyltrimethylammonium-bromide- (CTAB-) encapsulated gold nanorods (GNRs) were relatively higher cytotoxic than GNRs undergone further polymer coating and citrate stabilized gold nanospheres (GNSs). The toxicity of CTAB-encapsulated GNRs was mainly caused by CTAB on GNRs’ surface but not free CTAB in the solution. No obvious difference was found among GNRs of different aspect ratios. Time-lapse study revealed that cell death caused by GNRs occurred predominately within one hour through apoptosis, whereas cell death by free CTAB was in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Both positively and negatively surface-charged polymer-coated GNRs (PSS-GNRs and PAH-PSS-GNRs) showed similar levels of cytotoxic, suggesting the significance of surface functionality rather than surface charge in this case

Interplay between Social Media and Traditional Media: An Empirical Study in the Motion Picture Industry

Marketers leverage multiple media outlets to promote products. There are three media types: paid (e.g., advertising on TV), owned (e.g., company website), and earned (e.g., consumers’ word-of-mouth) media. The effects of individual media channels and the interrelationships within paid media have been examined by prior literature. However, little is known about interplay across different types of media channels. We investigate how social media marketing (both owned and earned media) and the interplay between traditional paid media and social media affect product sales. We analyze how promotional activities across different media channels influence the box office revenues of 200 movies in their opening weekends and subsequent weeks, respectively. We find empirical evidence that social media marketing is positively associated with product sales, especially in the initial product launch period. Additionally, traditional media and social media are substitutes. We discuss the implications of these results and outline our on-going research plan

Effect of size, shape, and surface modification on cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles to human Hep-2 and canine MDCK cells

There have been increasing interests in applying gold nanoparticles in biological research, drug delivery, and therapy. As the interaction of gold nanoparticles with cells relies on properties of nanoparticles, the cytotoxicity is complex and still under debating. In this work, we investigate the cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles of different encapsulations, surface charge states, sizes and shapes to both human HEp-2 and canine MDCK cells. We found that cetyltrimethylammonium-bromide- (CTAB-) encapsulated gold nanorods (GNRs) were relatively higher cytotoxic than GNRs undergone further polymer coating and citrate stabilized gold nanospheres (GNSs). The toxicity of CTAB-encapsulated GNRs was mainly caused by CTAB on GNRs’ surface but not free CTAB in the solution. No obvious difference was found among GNRs of different aspect ratios. Time-lapse study revealed that cell death caused by GNRs occurred predominately within one hour through apoptosis, whereas cell death by free CTAB was in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Both positively and negatively surface-charged polymer-coated GNRs (PSS-GNRs and PAH-PSS-GNRs) showed similar levels of cytotoxic, suggesting the significance of surface functionality rather than surface charge in this case

Effect of size, shape, and surface modification on cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles to human Hep-2 and canine MDCK cells

There have been increasing interests in applying gold nanoparticles in biological research, drug delivery, and therapy. As the interaction of gold nanoparticles with cells relies on properties of nanoparticles, the cytotoxicity is complex and still under debating. In this work, we investigate the cytotoxicity of gold nanoparticles of different encapsulations, surface charge states, sizes and shapes to both human HEp-2 and canine MDCK cells. We found that cetyltrimethylammonium-bromide- (CTAB-) encapsulated gold nanorods (GNRs) were relatively higher cytotoxic than GNRs undergone further polymer coating and citrate stabilized gold nanospheres (GNSs). The toxicity of CTAB-encapsulated GNRs was mainly caused by CTAB on GNRs’ surface but not free CTAB in the solution. No obvious difference was found among GNRs of different aspect ratios. Time-lapse study revealed that cell death caused by GNRs occurred predominately within one hour through apoptosis, whereas cell death by free CTAB was in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Both positively and negatively surface-charged polymer-coated GNRs (PSS-GNRs and PAH-PSS-GNRs) showed similar levels of cytotoxic, suggesting the significance of surface functionality rather than surface charge in this case

Tunable interlayer delocalization of excitons in layered organic-inorganic halide perovskites

Layered organic-inorganic halide perovskites exhibit remarkable structural and chemical diversity and hold great promise for optoelectronic devices. In these materials, excitons are thought to be strongly confined within the inorganic metal halide layers with interlayer coupling generally suppressed by the organic cations. Here, we present an in-depth study of the energy and spatial distribution of the lowest-energy excitons in layered organic-inorganic halide perovskites from first-principles many-body perturbation theory, within the GW approximation and the Bethe-Salpeter equation. We find that the quasiparticle band structures, linear absorption spectra, and exciton binding energies depend strongly on the distance and the alignment of adjacent metal halide perovskite layers. Furthermore, we show that exciton delocalization can be modulated by tuning the interlayer distance and alignment, both parameters determined by the chemical composition and size of the organic cations. Our calculations establish the general intuition needed to engineer excitonic properties in novel halide perovskite nanostructures

Low-resource Personal Attribute Prediction from Conversation

Personal knowledge bases (PKBs) are crucial for a broad range of applications such as personalized recommendation and Web-based chatbots. A critical challenge to build PKBs is extracting personal attribute knowledge from users' conversation data. Given some users of a conversational system, a personal attribute and these users' utterances, our goal is to predict the ranking of the given personal attribute values for each user. Previous studies often rely on a relative number of resources such as labeled utterances and external data, yet the attribute knowledge embedded in unlabeled utterances is underutilized and their performance of predicting some difficult personal attributes is still unsatisfactory. In addition, it is found that some text classification methods could be employed to resolve this task directly. However, they also perform not well over those difficult personal attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework PEARL to predict personal attributes from conversations by leveraging the abundant personal attribute knowledge from utterances under a low-resource setting in which no labeled utterances or external data are utilized. PEARL combines the biterm semantic information with the word co-occurrence information seamlessly via employing the updated prior attribute knowledge to refine the biterm topic model's Gibbs sampling process in an iterative manner. The extensive experimental results show that PEARL outperforms all the baseline methods not only on the task of personal attribute prediction from conversations over two data sets, but also on the more general weakly supervised text classification task over one data set.Comment: Accepted by AAAI'2

Personal Attribute Prediction from Conversations

Personal knowledge bases (PKBs) are critical to many applications, such as Web-based chatbots and personalized recommendation. Conversations containing rich personal knowledge can be regarded as a main source to populate the PKB. Given a user, a user attribute, and user utterances from a conversational system, we aim to predict the personal attribute value for the user, which is helpful for the enrichment of PKBs. However, there are three issues existing in previous studies: (1) manually labeled utterances are required for model training; (2) personal attribute knowledge embedded in both utterances and external resources is underutilized; (3) the performance on predicting some difficult personal attributes is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a framework DSCGN based on the pre-trained language model with a noise-robust loss function to predict personal attributes from conversations without requiring any labeled utterances. We yield two categories of supervision, i.e., document-level supervision via a distant supervision strategy and contextualized word-level supervision via a label guessing method, by mining the personal attribute knowledge embedded in both unlabeled utterances and external resources to fine-tune the language model. Extensive experiments over two real-world data sets (i.e., a profession data set and a hobby data set) show our framework obtains the best performance compared with all the twelve baselines in terms of nDCG and MRR.Comment: Accepted by WWW'22 Companio