Towards a Semantic Perceptual Image Metric

We present a full reference, perceptual image metric based on VGG-16, an artificial neural network trained on object classification. We fit the metric to a new database based on 140k unique images annotated with ground truth by human raters who received minimal instruction. The resulting metric shows competitive performance on TID 2013, a database widely used to assess image quality assessments methods. More interestingly, it shows strong responses to objects potentially carrying semantic relevance such as faces and text, which we demonstrate using a visualization technique and ablation experiments. In effect, the metric appears to model a higher influence of semantic context on judgments, which we observe particularly in untrained raters. As the vast majority of users of image processing systems are unfamiliar with Image Quality Assessment (IQA) tasks, these findings may have significant impact on real-world applications of perceptual metrics

Autonomous Land Vehicle

The demand for the autonomous land vehicle industry has been increasing tremendously, and continues to grow; nearly 30 million autonomous vehicles are expected to be sold by 2040.1 Through the Autonomous Lands Vehicle (ALV) VIP team, students develop both the hardware and software to help enhance knowledge and gain experience in vehicle autonomy. An automatic pilot has been built that can drive the vehicle in real time. The purpose of this pilot is to generate vehicle control commands that will direct the vehicle from the starting point to the finishing point, without hitting unforeseen obstacles. A remote controlled vehicle has been transformed into an autonomous vehicle by implementing appropriate steering logic based on incoming data from ultrasonic distance sensors. The Team has strategized that the use of the Raspberry Pi single board computer would be the best candidate to function as the brain of the project due to open source software and familiarity of use.The current steering logic has been refined through an obstacle course based testing in scenarios with low gradient surfaces.For future iterations of this project, implementation of object recognition via a Pi CAM can relay what the ALV is seeing and with the introduction of a GPS module the user can actively monitor the coordinates of the vehicle . In addition to this, the project could be improved with a wider variation of testing in less controlled environments. Reference: https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/automotive/autonomous-vehicle-sales-surpass-33-million-annually-2040-enabling-new-aut

The Rotation of the halo of NGC 6822 from the radial velocities of carbon stars

© The Authors 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Using spectra taken with the AAOmega spectrograph, we measure the radial velocities of over 100 stars, many of which are intermediate age carbon stars, in the direction of the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822. Kinematic analysis suggests that the carbon stars in the sample are associated with NGC 6822, and estimates of its radial velocity and galactic rotation are made from a star-by-star analysis of its carbon star population. We calculate a heliocentric radial velocity for NGC 6822 of −51±3 kms-1 and show that the population rotates with a mean rotation speed of 11.2±2.1 kms-1 at a mean distance of 1.1 kpc from the galactic centre, about a rotation axis with a position angle of 26 ∘ ±13 ∘ , as projected on the sky. This is close to the rotation axis of the HI gas disk and suggests that NGC 6822 is not a polar ring galaxy, but is dynamically closer to a late type galaxy. However, the rotation axis is not aligned with the minor axis of the AGB isodensity profiles and this remains a mystery.Peer reviewe

X-rays from Superbubbles in the Large Magellanic Cloud IV: The Blowout Structure of N44

We have used optical echelle spectra along with ROSAT and ASCA X-ray spectra to test the hypothesis that the southern portion of the N44 X-ray bright region is the result of a blowout structure. Three pieces of evidence now support this conclusion. First, the filamentary optical morphology corresponding with the location of the X-ray bright South Bar suggests the blowout description (Chu et al 1993). Second, optical echelle spectra show evidence of high velocity (~90 km/sec) gas in the region of the blowout. Third, X-ray spectral fits show a lower temperature for the South Bar than the main superbubble region of Shell 1. Such a blowout can affect the evolution of the superbubble and explain some of the discrepancy discussed by Oey & Massey (1995) between the observed shell diameter and the diameter predicted on the basis of the stellar content and Weaver et al.'s (1977) pressure-driven bubble model.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX + psfig, 1 tex file, 2 sty files, 7 PS files, also available at: http://www.astro.washington.edu/gene/papers/papers.htm

Identification and optimization of soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors with dual potency towards fatty acid amide hydrolase

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Multi-target inhibitors have become increasing popular as a means to leverage the advantages of poly-pharmacology while simplifying drug delivery. Here, we describe dual inhibitors for soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) and fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH), two targets known to synergize when treating inflammatory and neuropathic pain. The structure activity relationship (SAR) study described herein initially started with t-TUCB (trans-4-[4-(3-trifluoromethoxyphenyl-l-ureido)-cyclohexyloxy]-benzoic acid), a potent sEH inhibitor that was previously shown to weakly inhibit FAAH. Inhibitors with a 6-fold increase of FAAH potency while maintaining high sEH potency were developed by optimization. Interestingly, compared to most FAAH inhibitors that inhibit through time-dependent covalent modification, t-TUCB and related compounds appear to inhibit FAAH through a time-independent, competitive mechanism. These inhibitors are selective for FAAH over other serine hydrolases. In addition, FAAH inhibition by t-TUCB appears to be higher in human FAAH over other species; however, the new dual sEH/FAAH inhibitors have improved cross-species potency. These dual inhibitors may be useful for future studies in understanding the therapeutic application of dual sEH/FAAH inhibition

Quantum metrology with two-mode squeezed vacuum: Parity detection beats the heisenberg limit

We study the sensitivity and resolution of phase measurement in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with two-mode squeezed vacuum (n̄ photons on average). We show that superresolution and sub-Heisenberg sensitivity is obtained with parity detection. In particular, in our setup, dependence of the signal on the phase evolves n̄ times faster than in traditional schemes, and uncertainty in the phase estimation is better than 1/n̄, and we saturate the quantum Cramer-Rao bound. © 2010 The American Physical Society