814 research outputs found
Harvesting Multiple Views for Marker-less 3D Human Pose Annotations
Recent advances with Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have shifted the
bottleneck for many computer vision tasks to annotated data collection. In this
paper, we present a geometry-driven approach to automatically collect
annotations for human pose prediction tasks. Starting from a generic ConvNet
for 2D human pose, and assuming a multi-view setup, we describe an automatic
way to collect accurate 3D human pose annotations. We capitalize on constraints
offered by the 3D geometry of the camera setup and the 3D structure of the
human body to probabilistically combine per view 2D ConvNet predictions into a
globally optimal 3D pose. This 3D pose is used as the basis for harvesting
annotations. The benefit of the annotations produced automatically with our
approach is demonstrated in two challenging settings: (i) fine-tuning a generic
ConvNet-based 2D pose predictor to capture the discriminative aspects of a
subject's appearance (i.e.,"personalization"), and (ii) training a ConvNet from
scratch for single view 3D human pose prediction without leveraging 3D pose
groundtruth. The proposed multi-view pose estimator achieves state-of-the-art
results on standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method
in exploiting the available multi-view information.Comment: CVPR 2017 Camera Read
On Solving a Generalized Chinese Remainder Theorem in the Presence of Remainder Errors
In estimating frequencies given that the signal waveforms are undersampled
multiple times, Xia et. al. proposed to use a generalized version of Chinese
remainder Theorem (CRT), where the moduli are which are
not necessarily pairwise coprime. If the errors of the corrupted remainders are
within \tau=\sds \max_{1\le i\le k} \min_{\stackrel{1\le j\le k}{j\neq i}}
\frac{\gcd(M_i,M_j)}4, their schemes can be used to construct an approximation
of the solution to the generalized CRT with an error smaller than .
Accurately finding the quotients is a critical ingredient in their approach. In
this paper, we shall start with a faithful historical account of the
generalized CRT. We then present two treatments of the problem of solving
generalized CRT with erroneous remainders. The first treatment follows the
route of Wang and Xia to find the quotients, but with a simplified process. The
second treatment considers a simplified model of generalized CRT and takes a
different approach by working on the corrupted remainders directly. This
approach also reveals some useful information about the remainders by
inspecting extreme values of the erroneous remainders modulo . Both of
our treatments produce efficient algorithms with essentially optimal
performance. Finally, this paper constructs a counterexample to prove the
sharpness of the error bound
Thermoelectric property studies on thallium-doped lead telluride prepared by ball milling and hot pressing
Thallium doping into lead telluride has been demonstrated to increase the dimensionless thermoelectric figure-of-merit (ZT) by enhancing Seebeck coefficient due to the creation of resonant states close to Fermi level without affecting the thermal conductivity. However, the process is tedious, energy consuming, and small in quantities since it involves melting, slow cooling for crystal growth, long time annealing, post-crushing and hot pressing. Here we show that a similar ZT value about 1.3 at 400 °C is achieved on bulk samples with grain sizes of 3–7 μm by ball milling a mixture of elemental thallium, lead, and tellurium and then hot pressing the ball milled nanopowders
The proprotein convertase PC5/6 is protective against intestinal tumorigenesis: in vivo mouse model
BACKGROUND: The secretory basic amino acid-specific proprotein convertases (PCs) have often been associated with cancer/metastasis. By controlling the cleavage of cancer-associated proteins, PCs play key roles in multiple steps of cancer development. Most analyses of the implication of PCs in cancer/metastasis relied on the use of in vitro overexpression systems or inhibitors that can affect more than one PC. Aside from the role of furin in salivary gland tumorigenesis, no other in vivo genetic model of PC-knockout was reported in relation to cancer development. RESULTS: Since PC5/6 is highly expressed in the small intestine, the present study examined its in vivo role in intestinal tumorigenesis. Analysis of human intestinal tumors at various stages showed a systematic down-regulation of PC5/6 expression. Since gene inactivation of PC5/6 leads to lethality at birth, we generated mice lacking PC5/6 in enterocytes and analyzed the impact of the presence or absence of this PC in the mouse ApcMin/+ model that develops numerous adenocarcinomas along the intestinal tract. This resulted in viable mice with almost no expression of PC5/6 in small intestine, but with no overt phenotype. The data showed that by themselves ApcMin/+ tumors express lower levels of PC5/6 mRNA, and that the lack of PC5/6 in enterocytes results in a significantly higher tumor number in the duodenum, with a similar trend in other intestinal segments. Finally, the absence of PC5/6 is also associated with a premature mortality of ApcMin/+ mice. CONCLUSION: Overall, these data suggest that intestinal PC5/6 is protective towards tumorigenesis, especially in mouse duodenum, and possibly in human colon.This work was supported by Canadian Institutes of Health
Research grant # 44363, a Canada Chair # 201652, and a
Strauss foundation grant
Phenolic Profile, Antioxidant Activity and Anti-proliferative Activity of Crabapple Fruits
To explore the potential of crabapples as functional food, polyphenols in crabapples and ‘Fuji’ apples were extracted, and the phenolic profile, total polyphenols, antioxidant activity and anti-proliferative activity against several human cancer cells were determined. The results indicated that crabapple extracts have more abundant phenols and higher total polyphenols (from 4.46 to 46.63 mg GAE·g−1 DW) compared to ‘Fuji’ apples. Crabapple extracts possessed higher antioxidant activity than apple by DPPH and ABTS analysis. All fruit extracts exhibited inhibitory effects on proliferation in different cancer cells; however, crabapple extracts performed significantly better, with half inhibitory concentration (IC50) values varied from 48.34 µg·mL−1 to 974.81 µg·mL−1 for colon cancer cells SW480, 64.67–1 466.35 µg·mL−1 for stomach cancer cells BGC-803, 78.88–910.64 µg·mL−1 for esophageal cancer cells CaEs-17. Besides, the red crabapples had higher antioxidant activity and anti-proliferative activity than yellow fruits. These results showed that crabapples, especially red crabapples, have great potential as a healthy food, as they are rich in phenolic compounds with high antioxidant and anti-proliferative activities to cancer cells
In situ growth of SnO2 on graphene nanosheets as advanced anode materials for rechargeable lithium batteries
Graphene with a single layer of carbon atoms densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice is one of attractive materials for the intercalation of lithium ion, but it has low volumetric capacity owing to low tap density. We report a method for in situ growth of SnO2 on graphene nanosheets (SGN) as anode materials for rechargeable lithium batteries. The results indicated that the SnO2 nanoparticles with size in the range of 5-10 nm and a polycrystalline structure are homogeneously supported on graphene nanosheets. The charge and discharge capacities of SGN attained to 1559.7 and 779.7 mAh/g in the first cycle at a current density of 300 mA/g. The specific discharge capacities remained at 620 mAhâ‹…g-1 in the 200th cycle. The SGN exhibits a superior Listorage performance with good cycle life and high capacity
Interactive effects of aging and aerobic capacity on energy metabolism-related metabolites of serum, skeletal muscle, and white adipose tissue
Aerobic capacity is a strong predictor of longevity. With aging, aerobic capacity decreases concomitantly with changes in whole body metabolism leading to increased disease risk. To address the role of aerobic capacity, aging, and their interaction on metabolism, we utilized rat models selectively bred for low and high intrinsic aerobic capacity (LCRs/HCRs) and compared the metabolomics of serum, muscle, and white adipose tissue (WAT) at two time points: Young rats were sacrificed at 9 months of age, and old rats were sacrificed at 21 months of age. Targeted and semi-quantitative metabolomics analysis was performed on the ultra-pressure liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS) platform. The effects of aerobic capacity, aging, and their interaction were studied via regression analysis. Our results showed that high aerobic capacity is associated with an accumulation of isovalerylcarnitine in muscle and serum at rest, which is likely due to more efficient leucine catabolism in muscle. With aging, several amino acids were downregulated in muscle, indicating more efficient amino acid metabolism, whereas in WAT less efficient amino acid metabolism and decreased mitochondrial beta-oxidation were observed. Our results further revealed that high aerobic capacity and aging interactively affect lipid metabolism in muscle and WAT, possibly combating unfavorable aging-related changes in whole body metabolism. Our results highlight the significant role of WAT metabolism for healthy aging.Peer reviewe
Runtime-guided management of stacked DRAM memories in task parallel programs
Stacked DRAM memories have become a reality in High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures. These memories provide much higher bandwidth while consuming less power than traditional off-chip memories, but their limited memory capacity is insufficient for modern HPC systems. For this reason, both stacked DRAM and off-chip memories are expected to co-exist in HPC architectures, giving raise to different approaches for architecting the stacked DRAM in the system. This paper proposes a runtime approach to transparently manage stacked DRAM memories in task-based programming models. In this approach the runtime system is in charge of copying the data accessed by the tasks to the stacked DRAM, without any complex hardware support nor modifications to the application code. To mitigate the cost of copying data between the stacked DRAM and the off-chip memory, the proposal includes an optimization to parallelize the copies across idle or additional helper threads. In addition, the runtime system is aware of the reuse pattern of the data accessed by the tasks, and can exploit this information to avoid unworthy copies of data to the stacked DRAM. Results on the Intel Knights Landing processor show that the proposed techniques achieve an average speedup of 14% against the state-of-the-art library to manage the stacked DRAM and 29% against a stacked DRAM architected as a hardware cache.This work has been supported by the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant (GA 321253), by the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence, by
the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272) and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement
779877). M. Moreto has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal fellowship number RYC-2016-21104.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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