Design of a silicon cochlea system with biologically faithful response

This paper presents the design and simulation results of a silicon cochlea system that has closely similar behavior as the real cochlea. A cochlea filter-bank based on the improved three-stage filter cascade structure is used to model the frequency decomposition function of the basilar membrane; a filter tuning block is designed to model the adaptive response of the cochlea; besides, an asynchronous event-triggered spike codec is employed as the system interface with bank-end spiking neural networks. As shown in the simulation results, the system has biologically faithful frequency response, impulse response, and active adaptation behavior; also the system outputs multiple band-pass channels of spikes from which the original sound input can be recovered. The proposed silicon cochlea is feasible for analog VLSI implementation so that it not only emulates the way that sounds are preprocessed in human ears but also is able match the compact physical size of a real cochlea

Representation Learning for Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network

Network embedding (or graph embedding) has been widely used in many real-world applications. However, existing methods mainly focus on networks with single-typed nodes/edges and cannot scale well to handle large networks. Many real-world networks consist of billions of nodes and edges of multiple types, and each node is associated with different attributes. In this paper, we formalize the problem of embedding learning for the Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network and propose a unified framework to address this problem. The framework supports both transductive and inductive learning. We also give the theoretical analysis of the proposed framework, showing its connection with previous works and proving its better expressiveness. We conduct systematical evaluations for the proposed framework on four different genres of challenging datasets: Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, and Alibaba. Experimental results demonstrate that with the learned embeddings from the proposed framework, we can achieve statistically significant improvements (e.g., 5.99-28.23% lift by F1 scores; p<<0.01, t-test) over previous state-of-the-art methods for link prediction. The framework has also been successfully deployed on the recommendation system of a worldwide leading e-commerce company, Alibaba Group. Results of the offline A/B tests on product recommendation further confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework in practice.Comment: Accepted to KDD 2019. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/gatn

SegICP: Integrated Deep Semantic Segmentation and Pose Estimation

Recent robotic manipulation competitions have highlighted that sophisticated robots still struggle to achieve fast and reliable perception of task-relevant objects in complex, realistic scenarios. To improve these systems' perceptive speed and robustness, we present SegICP, a novel integrated solution to object recognition and pose estimation. SegICP couples convolutional neural networks and multi-hypothesis point cloud registration to achieve both robust pixel-wise semantic segmentation as well as accurate and real-time 6-DOF pose estimation for relevant objects. Our architecture achieves 1cm position error and <5^\circ$ angle error in real time without an initial seed. We evaluate and benchmark SegICP against an annotated dataset generated by motion capture.Comment: IROS camera-read

Nucleotide Excision Repair- and Polymerase Eta-Mediated Error-Prone Removal of Mitomycin C Interstrand Cross-Links

Interstrand cross-links (ICLs) make up a unique class of DNA lesions in which both strands of the double helix are covalently joined, precluding strand opening during replication and transcription. The repair of DNA ICLs has become a focus of study since ICLs are recognized as the main cytotoxic lesion inflicted by an array of alkylating compounds used in cancer treatment. As is the case for double-strand breaks, a damage-free homologous copy is essential for the removal of ICLs in an error-free manner. However, recombination-independent mechanisms may exist to remove ICLs in an error-prone fashion. We have developed an in vivo reactivation assay that can be used to examine the removal of site-specific mitomycin C-mediated ICLs in mammalian cells. We found that the removal of the ICL from the reporter substrate could take place in the absence of undamaged homologous sequences in repair-proficient cells, suggesting a cross-link repair mechanism that is independent of homologous recombination. Systematic analysis of nucleotide excision repair mutants demonstrated the involvement of transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair and a partial requirement for the lesion bypass DNA polymerase eta encoded by the human POLH gene. From these observations, we propose the existence of a recombination-independent and mutagenic repair pathway for the removal of ICLs in mammalian cells

Does habitat stability structure intraspecific genetic diversity? It’s complicated...

Regional phylogeographic studies have long been conducted in the southeastern United States for a variety of species. With some exceptions, many of these studies focus on single species or single clades of organisms, and those considering multiple species tend to focus on deep historical breaks causing differentiation. However, in many species more recent factors may be influencing genetic diversity. To understand the roles of historic and contemporary processes in structuring genetic diversity, we reanalyzed existing genetic data from Southeast of North America using approaches gleaned from phylogeographic and landscape genetic literature that were implemented across species including AMOVAs, PCoAs, Species Distribution Modelling, and tests of isolation by distance, environment, and habitat instability. Genetic variance was significantly partitioned by ecoregions, watersheds, and across phylogeographic breaks in the majority of species. Similarly, genetic variation was significantly associated with some combination of geographic or environmental distance or habitat instability in most species. Patterns of genetic variation were largely idiosyncratic across species. While habitat instability over time is significantly correlated with genetic diversity in some species, it appears generally less important than isolation by geographic or environmental distance. Our results suggest that many factors, both historical and contemporary, impact genetic diversity within a species, and more so, that these patterns aren’t always similar in closely related species. This supports the importance of species- specific factors and cautions against assumptions that closely related species will respond to historical and contemporary forces in similar ways

A PAR-1–dependent orientation gradient of dynamic microtubules directs posterior cargo transport in the Drosophila oocyte

A PAR-1–mediated bias in microtubule organization in the Drosophila oocyte underlies posterior-directed mRNA transport

Large-Scale Automatic Audiobook Creation

An audiobook can dramatically improve a work of literature's accessibility and improve reader engagement. However, audiobooks can take hundreds of hours of human effort to create, edit, and publish. In this work, we present a system that can automatically generate high-quality audiobooks from online e-books. In particular, we leverage recent advances in neural text-to-speech to create and release thousands of human-quality, open-license audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg e-book collection. Our method can identify the proper subset of e-book content to read for a wide collection of diversely structured books and can operate on hundreds of books in parallel. Our system allows users to customize an audiobook's speaking speed and style, emotional intonation, and can even match a desired voice using a small amount of sample audio. This work contributed over five thousand open-license audiobooks and an interactive demo that allows users to quickly create their own customized audiobooks. To listen to the audiobook collection visit \url{https://aka.ms/audiobook}