DramaQA: Character-Centered Video Story Understanding with Hierarchical QA

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing video understanding intelligence is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of story in video. Moreover, there is not a theoretical metric for evaluating the degree of video understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focused on two perspectives: 1) hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama "Another Miss Oh" and it contains 16,191 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors, and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we provide analyses of the dataset as well as Dual Matching Multistream model which effectively learns character-centered representations of video to answer questions about the video. We are planning to release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes and expect that our work will provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ECCV 202

Cut-Based Graph Learning Networks to Discover Compositional Structure of Sequential Video Data

Conventional sequential learning methods such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) focus on interactions between consecutive inputs, i.e. first-order Markovian dependency. However, most of sequential data, as seen with videos, have complex dependency structures that imply variable-length semantic flows and their compositions, and those are hard to be captured by conventional methods. Here, we propose Cut-Based Graph Learning Networks (CB-GLNs) for learning video data by discovering these complex structures of the video. The CB-GLNs represent video data as a graph, with nodes and edges corresponding to frames of the video and their dependencies respectively. The CB-GLNs find compositional dependencies of the data in multilevel graph forms via a parameterized kernel with graph-cut and a message passing framework. We evaluate the proposed method on the two different tasks for video understanding: Video theme classification (Youtube-8M dataset) and Video Question and Answering (TVQA dataset). The experimental results show that our model efficiently learns the semantic compositional structure of video data. Furthermore, our model achieves the highest performance in comparison to other baseline methods.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2020). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1907.0170

Effect of biochars pyrolyzed in N2 and CO2, and feedstock on microbial community in metal(loid)s contaminated soils

Little is known about the effects of applying amendments on soil for immobilizing metal(loid)s on the soil microbial community. Alterations in the microbial community were examined after incubation of treated contaminated soils. One soil was contaminated with Pb and As, a second soil with Cd and Zn. Red pepper stalk (RPS) and biochars produced from RPS in either N2 atmosphere (RPSN) or CO2 atmosphere (RPSC) were applied at a rate of 2.5% to the two soils and incubated for 30 days. Bacterial communities of control and treated soils were characterized by sequencing 16S rRNA genes using the Illumina MiSeq sequencing. In both soils, bacterial richness increased in the amended soils, though somewhat differently between the treatments. Evenness values decreased significantly, and the final overall diversities were reduced. The neutralization of pH, reduced available concentrations of Pb or Cd, and supplementation of available carbon and surface area could be possible factors affecting the community changes. Biochar amendments caused the soil bacterial communities to become more similar than those in the not amended soils. The bacterial community structures at the phylum and genus levels showed that amendment addition might restore the normal bacterial community of soils, and cause soil bacterial communities in contaminated soils to normalize and stabilize

Characteristic Impedance Adjustment of Thin-Metal Mesh Transmission Lines for mmWave Display-Integrated Antennas

This paper proposes four methods and empirical formulas of adjusting characteristic impedances for thin-metal mesh transmission lines. The characteristic impedances are discretely adjusted by changing the number and the size of unit meshes, which provides macro-tuning capability, and the discrete values can be tuned more precisely by varying the thin-metal line width and the aspect ratio of mesh geometry. The validity of proposed methods is confirmed by full-wave numerical simulations, and the simulated impedance variations are well-described by our empirical formulas. For further verifications, 26 distinguished samples of thin-metal mesh transmission lines and a 28-GHz thin-metal mesh antenna are fabricated, and their characteristics are measured in millimeter-wave spectrums. The measured results confirm that the proposed methods and empirical formulas can provide accurate and more flexible design rules for impedance adjustment, which allows potential advances in display-integrated antenna applications

\u27It Could be Worse ... Lot\u27s Worse!\u27 Why Health-Related Quality of Life is Better in Older Compared with Younger Individuals with Heart Failure

Background: health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is markedly impaired in patients with heart failure (HF). Despite worse prognosis and physical status, older patients have better HRQOL than younger patients. Objective: to determine reasons for differences in HRQOL in older compared with younger HF patients. Methods: a mixed methods approach was used. HRQOL was assessed using the Minnesota Living with HF Questionnaire and compared among HF patients (n = 603) in four age groups (≤53, 54–62, 63–70 and ≥71 years). Socio-demographic/clinical and psychological factors related to HRQOL were determined in four groups using multiple regressions. Patients (n = 20) described their views of HRQOL during semi-structured interviews. Results: HRQOL was worse in the youngest group, and best in the two oldest groups. The youngest group reported higher levels of depression and anxiety than the oldest group. Anxiety, depression and functional capacity predicted HRQOL in all age groups. Qualitatively, patients in all age groups acknowledged the negative impact of HF on HRQOL; nonetheless older patients reported that their HRQOL exceeded their expectations for their age. Younger patients bemoaned the loss of activities and roles, and reported their HRQOL as poor. Conclusions: better HRQOL among older HF patients is the result, in part, of better psychosocial status. The major factor driving better HRQOL among older patients is a change with advancing age in expectations about what constitutes good HRQOL

Cognitive and behavioral effects of lamotrigine and carbamazepine monotherapy in patients with newly diagnosed or untreated partial epilepsy

AbstractPurposeIn this prospective study, we compared the long-term cognitive and behavioral effects of lamotrigine (LTG) and carbamazepine (CBZ) in patients with newly diagnosed or untreated partial epilepsy.MethodsThis was a multicenter, open-label, randomized study that compared monotherapy with LTG and CBZ in newly diagnosed or untreated patients with partial epilepsy. We employed an 8-week titration period and a 40-week maintenance period. Neuropsychological tests, Symptom Check List-90, and QOLIE-31 were assessed at baseline, 16 weeks, and 48 weeks after drug treatment. A group-by-time interaction was the primary outcome measure and was analyzed by use of the linear mixed model.ResultsA total of 110 patients were eligible and 73 completed the 48-week study (LTG, n=39; CBZ, n=34). Among the cognitive tests, significant group-by-time interaction was identified only in phonemic fluency of Controlled Oral Word Association Task (p=0.0032) and Stroop Color–Word Interference (p=0.0283), with a significant better performance for LTG group. All other neuropsychological tests included did not show significant group-by-time interactions. Among the subscales of Symptom Check List-90, significant group-by-time interactions were identified in Obsessive-Compulsive (p=0.0005), Paranoid Ideation (p=0.0454), Global Severity Index (p=0.0194), and Positive Symptom Total (p=0.0197), with a significant improvement for CBZ group. QOLIE-31 did not show significant group-by-time interactions.ConclusionOur data suggest that epilepsy patients on LTG have better performance on phonemic fluency and the task of Stroop Color–Word Interference than do patients on CBZ, whereas patients on CBZ had more favorable behavioral effects on two subscales and two global scores of Symptom Check List-90 than did patients on LTG