Prediction of synergistic transcription factors by function conservation

A new strategy is proposed for identifying synergistic transcription factors by function conservation, leading to the identification of 51 homotypic transcription-factor combinations

Comparison between qualitative and quantitative measurement in assessing thermal comfort in an elementary school

We compare qualitative and quantitative measurements to assess an elementary school building’s thermal comfort. Quantitative measurements of the physical environment are useful but not sufficient, since different people respond differently in the same indoor environment. A qualitative survey of the school employees shows the thermal comfort level has a 3.73 out of 7 score and 40% of subjects rated it unsatisfactory, even though the temperature and humidity level are measured within the comfort range recommended by ASHERA 90.1 – 2004. This gap occurs because human metabolism is not taken into account in current design guidelines, even though there is a clear correlation between human metabolic level and perceived thermal comfort. The gap between design guidelines and occupants’ thermal comfort presents an opportunity to improve indoor environmental quality. School buildings are especially challenging because they have a mix of adult and child occupants with widely varying metabolic rates. Therefore, an elementary school was used as a case study to compare differences between quantitative and qualitative measurement. We conducted a series of simulations to compare the thermal comfort in relation to adult and children’s metabolism and their thermal responses. We demonstrate that the negligence of occupants’ metabolism can lead to inaccurate design guidelines for the physical environment’s thermal comfort. Our results could potentially improve design manuals to accommodate buildings with mixed occupants to maximize comfort levels

An MPC-based Optimal Motion Control Framework for Pendulum-driven Spherical Robots

Motion control is essential for all autonomous mobile robots, and even more so for spherical robots. Due to the uniqueness of the spherical robot, its motion control must not only ensure accurate tracking of the target commands, but also minimize fluctuations in the robot's attitude and motors' current while tracking. In this paper, model predictive control (MPC) is applied to the control of spherical robots and an MPC-based motion control framework is designed. There are two controllers in the framework, an optimal velocity controller ESO-MPC which combines extend states observers (ESO) and MPC, and an optimal orientation controller that uses multilayer perceptron (MLP) to generate accurate trajectories and MPC with changing weights to achieve optimal control. Finally, the performance of individual controllers and the whole control framework are verified by physical experiments. The experimental results show that the MPC-based motion control framework proposed in this work is much better than PID in terms of rapidity and accuracy, and has great advantages over sliding mode controller (SMC) for overshoot, attitude stability, current stability and energy consumption.Comment: This paper has been submitted to Control Engineering Practic

Survey of Image Adversarial Example Defense Techniques

The rapid and extensive growth of artificial intelligence introduces new security challenges. The generation and defense of adversarial examples for deep neural networks is one of the hot spots. Deep neural networks are  most widely used in the field of images and most easily cheated by image adversarial examples. The research on the defense techniques for image adversarial examples is an important tool to improve the security of AI applications. There is no standard explanation for the existence of image adversarial examples, but it can be observed and understood from different dimensions, which can provide insights for proposing targeted defense approaches. This paper sorts out and analyzes current mainstream hypotheses of the reason for the existence of adversarial examples, such as the blind spot hypothesis, linear hypothesis, decision boundary hypothesis, and feature hypothesis, and the correlations between various hypotheses and typical adversarial example generation methods. Based on this, this paper summarizes the image adversarial example defense techniques in two dimensions, model-based and data-based, and compares and analyzes the adaptation scenarios, advantages and disadvantages of different technical methods. Most of the existing image adversarial example defense techniques are aimed at defending against specific adversarial example generation methods, and there is no universal defense theory and method yet. In the real application, it needs to consider the specific application scenarios, potential security risks and other factors, optimize and combine the configuration in the existing defense methods. Future researchers can deepen their technical research in terms of generalized defense theory, evaluation of defense effectiveness, and systematic protection strategies

Integrability of the Heisenberg Chains with Boundary Impurities and Their Bethe Ansatz

In this paper, we show the integrability of spin-1/2 XXZ Heisenberg chain with two arbitrary spin boundary Impurities. By using the fusion method, we generalize it to the spin-1 XXZ chain. Then the eigenvalues of Hamiltonians of these models are obtained by the means of Bethe ansatz method.Comment: 13 pages, latex, no figures, to be appeared in J.Phys.

TRPV1 Channel Contributes to the Behavioral Hypersensitivity in a Rat Model of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type 1

Complex regional pain syndrome type 1 (CRPS-I) is a debilitating pain condition that significantly affects life quality of patients. It remains a clinically challenging condition and the mechanisms of CRPS-I have not been fully elucidated. Here, we investigated the involvement of TRPV1, a non-selective cation channel important for integrating various painful stimuli, in an animal model of CRPS-I. A rat model of chronic post-ischemia pain (CPIP) was established to mimic CRPS-I. TRPV1 expression was significantly increased in hind paw tissue and small to medium-sized dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons of CPIP rats. CPIP rats showed increased TRPV1 current density and capsaicin responding rate in small-sized nociceptive DRG neurons. Local pharmacological blockage of TRPV1 with the specific antagonist AMG9810, at a dosage that does not produce hyperthermia or affect thermal perception or locomotor activity, effectively attenuated thermal and mechanical hypersensitivity in bilateral hind paws of CPIP rats and reduced the hyperexcitability of DRG neurons induced by CPIP. CPIP rats showed bilateral spinal astrocyte and microglia activations, which were significantly attenuated by AMG9810 treatment. These findings identified an important role of TRPV1 in mediating thermal and mechanical hypersensitivity in a CRPS-I animal model and further suggest local pharmacological blocking TRPV1 may represent an effective approach to ameliorate CRPS-I