Detecting events and key actors in multi-person videos

Multi-person event recognition is a challenging task, often with many people active in the scene but only a small subset contributing to an actual event. In this paper, we propose a model which learns to detect events in such videos while automatically "attending" to the people responsible for the event. Our model does not use explicit annotations regarding who or where those people are during training and testing. In particular, we track people in videos and use a recurrent neural network (RNN) to represent the track features. We learn time-varying attention weights to combine these features at each time-instant. The attended features are then processed using another RNN for event detection/classification. Since most video datasets with multiple people are restricted to a small number of videos, we also collected a new basketball dataset comprising 257 basketball games with 14K event annotations corresponding to 11 event classes. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods for both event classification and detection on this new dataset. Additionally, we show that the attention mechanism is able to consistently localize the relevant players.Comment: Accepted for publication in CVPR'1

Analysis of Tokamak fusion device parameters affecting the efficiency of Tokamak operation

Nuclear Power has been available as a relatively clean and reliable energy source for several decades. While tokamak engines have been in existence almost as long as successful fission-powered nuclear generators, they have not yet reached operational success for energy generation. This meta study collates key fusion device parameters and determines ideas on the applicability of fusion devices for energy. This paper supports the argument that toroidal tokamaks are not limited by volume whereas spherical designs have a potential volume limit, spherical tokamaks use a lower magnetic field current than toroidal tokamaks. Further scientific and engineering progress is required before tokamak devices can be a viable technology to be used for energy generation

Old country passions: an international examination of country image, animosity, and affinity among ethnic consumers

Ethnic consumers are an important market segment in both traditionally multicultural countries as well as newer recipients of growing immigration movements. Such consumers may carry with them views toward "old friends and foes" which may influence their attitudes toward the products of countries perceived as friendly or hostile in relation to their original home countries. This study examines together for the first time four place-related constructs, namely, country and people images, product images, affinity, and animosity, and their potential effects on purchase intentions, juxtaposing these measures against views toward countries that may be perceived as friendly or hostile from the perspective of the ethnic consumers' homeland, alongside a neutral "benchmark" country for comparison. The results show that country/people and product images, affinity, and animosity work differently depending on the target country, product and people evaluations are influenced by both affective and cognitive factors, and attitudes vary in their predictive ability on purchase intentions, sometimes in line with earlier findings and sometimes not. Implications and directions for future research are discussed

The Effectiveness of Dietary-Induced Ketogenesis on Cognition in Older Adults: A Scoping Review of the Literature

There is growing interest in the effect of dietary interventions in people living with memory impairment and delaying cognitive decline. Investigation of alterations in glucose metabolism and dietary-induced ketogenesis in older adults is a recent growing area of research. Ketone bodies are an important alternative energy source in the brain and may be beneficial to people developing or who already have memory impairment or those with Alzheimer’s disease. This scoping review aims to evaluate the available evidence on dietary-induced ketogenesis and its effect on cognition in older adults and the factors affecting feasibility of the dietary interventions to inform the design of future studies. The scoping review methodology explored the current knowledge about dietary interventions related to dietary-induced ketogenesis and cognition in older adults and identify gaps in the literature. Eleven dietary intervention studies included in the review demonstrated that both medium-chain triglyceride supplementation and ketogenic diets induce ketosis. Nine of these studies demonstrated that dietary-induced ketogenesis could lead to an improvement in cognitive functions, but the evidence remains inconclusive. Most of the included studies showed evidence to suggest that dietary-induced ketogenesis improves cognitive functions in older adults. However, the number of published papers is small and there were differences in the design and types of the dietary interventions (medium-chain triglyceride supplementation, ketogenic diet) along with high drop-out rates in some studies which limits the generalization of the findings. Although methodologies used in the studies vary, the findings warrant the need for further research with larger sample sizes in people at different stages of cognitive impairment, and to develop strategies to improve adherence to the intervention

Click-PEGylation - a mobility shift approach to assess the redox state of cysteines in candidate proteins

The redox state of cysteine thiols is critical for protein function. Whereas cysteines play an important role in the maintenance of protein structure through the formation of internal disulfides, their nucleophilic thiol groups can become oxidatively modified in response to diverse redox challenges and thereby function in signalling and antioxidant defences. These oxidative modifications occur in response to a range of agents and stimuli, and can lead to the existence of multiple redox states for a given protein. To assess the role(s) of a protein in redox signalling and antioxidant defence, it is thus vital to be able to assess which of the multiple thiol redox states are present and to investigate how these alter under different conditions. While this can be done by a range of mass spectrometric-based methods, these are time-consuming, costly, and best suited to study abundant proteins or to perform an unbiased proteomic screen. One approach that can facilitate a targeted assessment of candidate proteins, as well as proteins that are low in abundance or proteomically challenging, is by electrophoretic mobility shift assays. Redox-modified cysteine residues are selectively tagged with a large group, such as a polyethylene glycol (PEG) polymer, and then the proteins are separated by electrophoresis followed by immunoblotting, which allows the inference of redox changes based on band shifts. However, the applicability of this method has been impaired by the difficulty of cleanly modifying protein thiols by large PEG reagents. To establish a more robust method for redox-selective PEGylation, we have utilised a Click chemistry approach, where free thiol groups are first labelled with a reagent modified to contain an alkyne moiety, which is subsequently Click-reacted with a PEG molecule containing a complementary azide function. This strategy can be adapted to study reversibly reduced or oxidised cysteines. Separation of the thiol labelling step from the PEG conjugation greatly facilitates the fidelity and flexibility of this approach. Here we show how the Click-PEGylation technique can be used to interrogate the redox state of proteins

Using HHsearch to tackle proteins of unknown function: A pilot study with PH domains

Advances in membrane cell biology are hampered by the relatively high proportion of proteins with no known function. Such proteins are largely or entirely devoid of structurally significant domain annotations. Structural bioinformaticians have developed profile-profile tools such as HHsearch (online version called HHpred), which can detect remote homologies that are missed by tools used to annotate databases. Here we have applied HHsearch to study a single structural fold in a single model organism as proof of principle. In the entire clan of protein domains sharing the pleckstrin homology domain fold in yeast, systematic application of HHsearch accurately identified known PH-like domains. It also predicted 16 new domains in 13 yeast proteins many of which are implicated in intracellular traffic. One of these was Vps13p, where we confirmed the functional importance of the predicted PH-like domain. Even though such predictions require considerable work to be corroborated, they are useful first steps. HHsearch should be applied more widely, particularly across entire proteomes of model organisms, to significantly improve database annotations

Ethnic identity, consumer ethnocentrism, and purchase intentions among bi-cultural ethnic consumers: "divided loyalties" or “dual allegiance”?

Consumer ethnocentrism has been studied extensively in international marketing in the context of one's country of residence. This paper investigates for the first time the notion of "dual ethnocentrism", which may be encountered among ethnic consumers who have an allegiance toward, or divided loyalties between, two countries: One with which they are ethnically linked, or "home", and one where they presently live and work, or "host". The study examines the relationship between ethnic identity, dual ethnocentrism, and purchase intentions among ethnic consumers, a market segment of growing importance in research and practice. The analysis focuses on differences in the respondents' home- and host-related ethnocentrism and finds that indeed ethnocentric feelings and their effects differ depending on the country of reference. In this light, the study suggests that ethnocentrism is a considerably more complex construct than previously thought, advances our understanding of ethnicity and ethnocentrism, and discusses the theoretical and managerial implications arising from dual ethnocentrism