Activity-conditioned continuous human pose estimation for performance analysis of athletes using the example of swimming

In this paper we consider the problem of human pose estimation in real-world videos of swimmers. Swimming channels allow filming swimmers simultaneously above and below the water surface with a single stationary camera. These recordings can be used to quantitatively assess the athletes' performance. The quantitative evaluation, so far, requires manual annotations of body parts in each video frame. We therefore apply the concept of CNNs in order to automatically infer the required pose information. Starting with an off-the-shelf architecture, we develop extensions to leverage activity information - in our case the swimming style of an athlete - and the continuous nature of the video recordings. Our main contributions are threefold: (a) We apply and evaluate a fine-tuned Convolutional Pose Machine architecture as a baseline in our very challenging aquatic environment and discuss its error modes, (b) we propose an extension to input swimming style information into the fully convolutional architecture and (c) modify the architecture for continuous pose estimation in videos. With these additions we achieve reliable pose estimates with up to +16% more correct body joint detections compared to the baseline architecture.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, accepted at WACV 201

« … penser et créer avec désintéressement » – La nouvelle revue française sous la direction de Jacques Rivière

La Première Guerre mondiale a gravement mis en cause la notion d’une littérature désintéressée, et même au sein de La NRF ce programme est désormais contesté. La reprise de La NRF après la guerre s’effectue donc sous le signe d’un double défi : réaffirmer les principes fondateurs de la revue et défendre l’autonomie littéraire contre les tendances hétéronomes à l’intérieur du champ littéraire. Le conflit interne peut être résolu par une séparation de deux champs d’activité, la création littéraire d’une part et l’intervention intellectuelle de l’autre, toutes les deux soumises au principe du désintéressement. Les débats externes pour la reconquête de l’autonomie littéraire, en revanche, sont multiples et confrontent La NRF aussi bien avec l’avant-garde littéraire de dada et du surréalisme qu’avec des tendances nationalistes. La plus grande menace pour La NRF sera finalement une contestation catholique à l’occasion de la mort de Jacques Rivière et en réaction aux écrits autobiographiques d’André Gide.The idea of purely literary values had been severely damaged during World War I, and even in La NRF this literary concept is suddenly contested by some of its editors. So, the restart of LaNRF after World War I must be seen under a double challenge, firstly the endeavours for maintaining the fundamental principles of the review, and secondly the defence of literary autonomy in the realm of the literary field. The solution of the inner conflict finally can be realized by a separation and redefinition of two fields of activity, literature on the one hand and on the other the intellectual engagement, both of them under the sign of a strict impartiality. The public debates on literary autonomy, however, are diverse, opposing LaNRF to the literary avant-garde of Dadaism and Surrealism as well as to nationalist pretension on literature. Finally, the most important threat to LaNRF in the 1920s will come from catholic groups after the decease of Jacques Rivière and in reaction to the autobiographic works of André Gide

Comparative Transcriptomic Analysis of Developmental Stages in Isolated Mammary Epithelial Cells

The mammary gland is an organ common to all mammals; it is of value for neonatal nourishment, human nutrition through dairy consumption, and is a source of pathology in humans through the development of breast cancer. While transcriptomic analyses have been applied to cultured mammary epithelial cells (MEC) and to whole gland samples, few have studied purified MEC isolated directly from the gland in vivo. To identify the differentially expressed genes influencing MEC development during pregnancy and the differences between the nulliparous and primiparous quiescent states, primary MEC were isolated from virgin, pregnant, and primiparous quiescent sibling mice. Computational analysis was attempted using two differing platforms for the analysis of RNA sequencing data, the commercially-available CLC Genomics Workbench and the recently-launched, publicly-available Green Line Analysis. In the virgin-to-pregnant and virgin-to-post-lactational quiescent developmental comparisons, 31.02% and 26.97% of differentially detected genes, respectively, were dually detected by both platforms (p-value\u3c0.05), with the remaining genes being detected in one platform but not the other. Expression was likewise compared for the dually differentially expressed genes detected with high (\u3e500 RPKM), medium (10-500 RPKM), and low (0.02-9.99 RPKM) expression between the two developmental comparisons. In the virgin-to-pregnant and virgin-to-post-lactational quiescent developmental comparisons, 30.00% and 1.04% of differentially detected genes with high expression, respectively, were dually detected by both platforms (p-value\u3c0.05); 30.51% and 7.60% of differentially detected genes with medium expression, respectively, were dually detected by both platforms (p-value\u3c0.05); and 26.68% and 11.33% of differentially detected genes with high expression, respectively, were dually detected by both platforms (p-value\u3c0.05). Although a small portion of differentially detected genes were dually detected between the two platforms, functional analysis for biological meaning revealed similar depictions of the underlying biological themes. The developmental comparison between the virgin and pregnant states suggests through enhanced mitochondrial processes, amino acid availability, cellular communication, and immune responses the lactational capacity is being established during the first half of pregnancy, when MEC are devoted to growth and proliferation and formation of the alveolus is not yet occurring. The developmental comparison between the virgin and primiparous quiescent states indicates an overall decrease in oncogenic pathways yet increase in ribosomal integrity may be associated with the parity-induced protection against breast cancer. Last, parallel analysis of the transcriptome and proteome from the same sample source allowed for the comparison of two differing means of analyzing the molecular phenotype and showed regulation of mRNA abundance may not necessarily reflect the expression pattern of the corresponding protein. A mathematical phenomenon was noted in the percent of dually detected transcripts relative to proteins, suggesting perhaps twenty percent of MEC genes are actively expressed at a given time

Synchronized audio-visual frames with fractional positional encoding for transformers in video-to-text translation

Video-to-Text (VTT) is the task of automatically generating descriptions for short audio-visual video clips, which can support visually impaired people to understand scenes of a YouTube video for instance. Transformer architectures have shown great performance in both machine translation and image captioning, lacking a straightforward and reproducible application for VTT. However, there is no comprehensive study on different strategies and advice for video description generation including exploiting the accompanying audio with fully self-attentive networks. Thus, we explore promising approaches from image captioning and video processing and apply them to VTT by developing a straightforward Transformer architecture. Additionally, we present a novel way of synchronizing audio and video features in Transformers which we call Fractional Positional Encoding (FPE). We run multiple experiments on the VATEX dataset to determine a configuration applicable to unseen datasets that helps describe short video clips in natural language and improved the CIDEr and BLEU-4 scores by 37.13 and 12.83 points compared to a vanilla Transformer network and achieve state-of-the-art results on the MSR-VTT and MSVD datasets. Also, FPE helps increase the CIDEr score by a relative factor of 8.6%

Uplift and upsample: efficient 3D human pose estimation with uplifting transformers

The state-of-the-art for monocular 3D human pose esti- mation in videos is dominated by the paradigm of 2D-to- 3D pose uplifting. While the uplifting methods themselves are rather efficient, the true computational complexity de- pends on the per-frame 2D pose estimation. In this paper, we present a Transformer-based pose uplifting scheme that can operate on temporally sparse 2D pose sequences but still produce temporally dense 3D pose estimates. We show how masked token modeling can be utilized for temporal upsampling within Transformer blocks. This allows to de- couple the sampling rate of input 2D poses and the target frame rate of the video and drastically decreases the total computational complexity. Additionally, we explore the op- tion of pre-training on large motion capture archives, which has been largely neglected so far. We evaluate our method on two popular benchmark datasets: Human3.6M and MPI- INF-3DHP. With an MPJPE of 45.0 mm and 46.9 mm, re- spectively, our proposed method can compete with the state- of-the-art while reducing inference time by a factor of 12. This enables real-time throughput with variable consumer hardware in stationary and mobile applications. We re- lease our code and models at https://github.com/ goldbricklemon/uplift-upsample-3dhp

Methods of amorphization and investigation of the amorphous state

The amorphous form of pharmaceutical materials represents the most energetic solid state of a material. It provides advantages in terms of dissolution rate and bioavailability. This review presents the methods of solid-state amorphization described in literature (supercooling of liquids, milling, lyophilization, spray drying, dehydration of crystalline hydrates), with the emphasis on milling. Furthermore, we describe how amorphous state of pharmaceuticals differ depending on method of preparation and how these differences can be screened by a variety of spectroscopic (X-ray powder diffraction, solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, atomic pairwise distribution, infrared spectroscopy, terahertz spectroscopy) and calorimetry methods

Biomimetic engineering of colloidal nanoarchitectures with "in vitro" and "in vivo" functionality

Biomimetic engineering opens unprecedented possibilities of combining biomolecules (i.e. proteins, DNA, polysaccharides) with synthetic materials (i.e. synthetic polymers). This combination results in unique hybrid systems with functionalities that mimic processes in living organisms. While the translational value of functional biomimetically engineered structures is of exceptional importance in fields such as technology, engineering, chemistry, biology and medicine, due to the properties the structures inherit from both the synthetic and bio-materials, the understanding of how biomimetically engineered systems self-assemble and function is equally important, as it gives insight in how non-living systems progressed to living organisms. Some of the most prominent examples of functional biomimics include polymersome based catalytic nanocompartments, multicompartment systems that mimic cellular organization and artificial organelles. In this thesis, the focus lies on understanding and applying the fundamental principles of biomimetic engineering by equipping colloidal nanoarchitectures (soft polymer nanoparticles and hollow sphere polymersomes) with functional biomolecules (transmembrane proteins and enzymes). First, the most important questions are addressed – why do polymer nanoarchitectures present ideal building blocks for creating novel biomimics, how do biomimics self-assemble in solution, which methods are most frequently used for their characterization, and where the applications of biomimics are in technology and medicine. Both colloidal and 2D supported/free standing polymeric nanoarchitectures structures are discussed in order to familiarize the reader with the wide range of nanoarchitectures that can be formed by polymers, however the focus primarily rests on biomimetic design of colloidal nanoarchitectures, as their colloidal nature favours them as therapeutic agents that can act on the cellular level. To develop a pH responsive protein delivery agent, a biomimetic approach is applied in equipping self-assembled poly(ethylene glycol)-b-poly(methylcaprolactone)-b-poly(2- (N,Ndiethylamino)ethyl methacrylate) (PEG-b-PMCL-b-PDMAEMA) polymer nanoparticles with a therapeutic enzyme, acid sphingomyelinase. Due to the electrostatic interactions between the negatively charged enzyme and the positively charged PDMAEMA groups present in the nanoparticle corona, the biomimetically engineered nanoparticles display a distinct protein localization on their corona and a pH dependent release behavior of the attached protein. The application of the self-assembled system as a very efficient delivery agent for catalytically active biomolecules is demonstrated in human epithelial HeLa cells. Next, a more complex nanoscale biomimic - a pH triggered catalytic nanocompartment - is built by biomimetically engineering the nanoarchitecture of poly(2-methyl-2-oxazoline)- block-polydimethylsiloxane-block-poly(2-methyl-2-oxazoline) (PMOXA-b-PDMS-b- PMOXA) polymersomes. Aqueous cavities of polymersomes are loaded with horseradish peroxidase while a chemically modified Outer membrane protein F (OmpF) is reconstituted in polymersome membranes. The chemical modification of OmpF transforms the otherwise unspecific pore into a selective and pH responsive pore, through which molecules can only diffuse once the attached molecular cap blocking the pore is cleaved. Hence, once the modified OmpF is functionally reconstituted in polymersome membranes it allows the developed biomimic to present an on demand catalytic activity. As a first proof of concept of a pH responsive catalytic nanocompartment the system demonstrates that a spatial control of a reaction inside a nanocompartment can be achieved and supports the further development of complex reaction spaces that can act in an analogous manner to cellular compartments, where in situ reactions are modulated by a plethora of responsive proteins. Finally, biomimetically engineered polymersomes are designed for an in vitro and in vivo application as artificial organelles. In order to mimic processes taking place in lipid membranes of cellular organelles, polymersome membranes are equipped with a genetically and chemically modified OmpF. The structural modifications done at the rim of the OmpF pore, limit the OmpF permeability to small molecular weight molecules, but make it capable of responding to the presence of small signaling molecules. When the modified OmpF is reconstituted in membranes of enzyme loaded polymersomes it prevents the enzyme to access enzymatic substrates. However, the presence of of glutathione, which for example is found in abundant concentrations in the cytoplasm, readily cleaves the chemical modification of OmpF and opens the pore, thereby allowing the encapsulated enzyme to catalyze a reaction. The responsiveness of the self-assembled system to glutathione, abundantly present in the cytoplasm, makes the developed biomimic a suitable candidate for intracellular functionality as an artificial organelle. To demonstrate this, we not only show that the system is functional in the cellular microenvironment of human epithelial HeLa cells but also that it is robust enough to function in vivo in Zebrafish embryos

Coastal Adaptation to Sea Level Rise

Sustainability GES100 Infographi

Untersuchungen zur Optimierung der in vitro-Vermehrung von Drosera rotundifolia in Temporärimmersions-System

In der vorliegenden Arbeit galt es, die in vitro-Vermehrung von Drosera rotundifolia L. im Temporärimmersions-System zu optimieren. Dazu wurden in Kulturgefäßen mit 750, 1500 und 2000 ml unterschiedliche Immersionsbedingungen untersucht und bezüglich Vermehrungsrate und Biomasseproduktion ausgewertet. Es zeigte sich, dass vor allem die Wahl des Gefäßvolumens für die Kultur von entscheidender Bedeutung ist. Generell wurden in den Gefäßen mit 2000 ml Volumen nicht nur mehr Biomasse, sondern auch mehr Sprosse gebildet. Dabei stieg vor allem der Anteil an Sprossen >5 mm, die für eine Akklimatisation und anschließende Freilandkultur ohne zusätzliche Elongationsphase geeignet scheinen. Während bei der Versuchsreihe mit 60 Minuten Immersionszeit noch eine Verbesserung der Vermehrungsrate mit zunehmender Immersionshäufigkeit beobachtet werden konnte, scheint es, dass die optimalen Kulturbedingungen bei 120 Minuten Immersionsdauer vor allem bei den höheren Immersionsfrequenzen bereits überschritten wurden. Beim produzierten Frisch- und Trockengewicht dürfte die optimale Immersionsdauer schon bei 60 Minuten überschritten worden sein, da hier die Ausbeute ähnlich wie bei 120 Minuten, wenngleich in weitaus geringerem Ausmaße, mit steigender Immersionshäufigkeit sank. Bei entsprechender Wahl der Immersionsbedingungen und möglichst großvolumigen Kulturgefäßen konnte eine Steigerung der Vermehrungsrate und der Biomasseproduktion in TI-Systemen gegenüber Submerskultur beobachtet werden. Die Wahl der Immersionsbedingungen hängt dabei davon ab, welche Qualitätskriterien an das zu gewinnenden Pflanzenmaterial gestellt werden