Visually Grounding Instruction for History-Dependent Manipulation

This paper emphasizes the importance of robot's ability to refer its task history, when it executes a series of pick-and-place manipulations by following text instructions given one by one. The advantage of referring the manipulation history can be categorized into two folds: (1) the instructions omitting details or using co-referential expressions can be interpreted, and (2) the visual information of objects occluded by previous manipulations can be inferred. For this challenge, we introduce the task of history-dependent manipulation which is to visually ground a series of text instructions for proper manipulations depending on the task history. We also suggest a relevant dataset and a methodology based on the deep neural network, and show that our network trained with a synthetic dataset can be applied to the real world based on images transferred into synthetic-style based on the CycleGAN.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Visually Grounding Language Instruction for History-Dependent Manipulation

This paper emphasizes the importance of a robot's ability to refer to its task history, especially when it executes a series of pick-and-place manipulations by following language instructions given one by one. The advantage of referring to the manipulation history can be categorized into two folds: (1) the language instructions omitting details but using expressions referring to the past can be interpreted, and (2) the visual information of objects occluded by previous manipulations can be inferred. For this, we introduce a history-dependent manipulation task which objective is to visually ground a series of language instructions for proper pick-and-place manipulations by referring to the past. We also suggest a relevant dataset and model which can be a baseline, and show that our model trained with the proposed dataset can also be applied to the real world based on the CycleGAN. Our dataset and code are publicly available on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/history-dependent-manipulation

Dual-Color-Emitting Carbon Nanodots for Multicolor Bioimaging and Optogenetic Control of Ion Channels

The development of intrinsically multicolor-emitting carbon nanodots (CNDs) has been one of the great challenges for their various fields of applications. Here, the controlled electronic structure engineering of CNDs is performed to emit two distinct colors via the facile surface modification with 4-octyloxyaniline. The so-called dual-color-emitting CNDs (DC-CNDs) can be stably encapsulated within poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride) (PSMA). The prepared water-soluble DC-CNDs@PSMA can be successfully applied to in vitro and in vivo dual-color bioimaging and optogenetics. In vivo optical imaging can visualize the biodistribution of intravenously injected DC-CNDs@PSMA. In addition, the light-triggered activation of ion channel, channelrhodopsin-2, for optogenetic applications is demonstrated. As a new type of fluorophore, DC-CNDs offer a big insight into the design of charge-transfer complexes for various optical and biomedical applications.112Ysciescopu

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Dual-Color-Emitting Carbon Nanodots for Theranostic Applications

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Enhanced X-ray Attenuating Efficiency of Silicon Dioxide Nanoparticles with Cesium Lead Bromide and 2,5-Diphenyloxazole Co-Embedded Therein

An X-ray-attenuation-based in vivo imaging can be a promising candidate for real-time detection of cancer in an early stage due to its significantly longer penetration depth compared to currently investigated fluorescence-emission-based imaging techniques. It has recently been demonstrated that this novel concept of imaging is feasible using cesium lead bromide (CPB) quantum dots (QDs) stably embedded in silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanoparticles (NPs). However, further improvements are necessary to realize its practical use, especially in terms of X-ray attenuation efficiency. In this study, we have found that the X-ray attenuation capability of CPB/SiO2 NPs was significantly enhanced by embedding an organic X-ray scintillator, 2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO), together with CPB QDs in the NPs. The embedment not only solved the water dispersibility and stability problem of PPO, but also significantly increased the Hounsfield unit of the NPs, which was proportional to the degree of X-ray attenuation, by 2.7 times

Enhanced X-ray Attenuating Efficiency of Silicon Dioxide Nanoparticles with Cesium Lead Bromide and 2,5-Diphenyloxazole Co-Embedded Therein

An X-ray-attenuation-based in vivo imaging can be a promising candidate for real-time detection of cancer in an early stage due to its significantly longer penetration depth compared to currently investigated fluorescence-emission-based imaging techniques. It has recently been demonstrated that this novel concept of imaging is feasible using cesium lead bromide (CPB) quantum dots (QDs) stably embedded in silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanoparticles (NPs). However, further improvements are necessary to realize its practical use, especially in terms of X-ray attenuation efficiency. In this study, we have found that the X-ray attenuation capability of CPB/SiO2 NPs was significantly enhanced by embedding an organic X-ray scintillator, 2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO), together with CPB QDs in the NPs. The embedment not only solved the water dispersibility and stability problem of PPO, but also significantly increased the Hounsfield unit of the NPs, which was proportional to the degree of X-ray attenuation, by 2.7 times

Recent insights into Aeromonas salmonicida and its bacteriophages in aquaculture: A comprehensive review

The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance in pathogenic bacteria of fish and shellfish have caused serious concerns in the aquaculture industry, owing to the potential health risks to humans and animals. Among these bacteria, Aeromonas salmonicida, which is one of the most important primary pathogens in salmonids, is responsible for significant economic losses in the global aquaculture industry, especially in salmonid farming because of its severe infectivity and acquisition of antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, interest in the use of alternative approaches to prevent and control A. salmonicida infections has increased in recent years, and several applications of bacteriophages (phages) have provided promising results. For several decades, A. salmonicida and phages infecting this fish pathogen have been thoroughly investigated in various research areas including aquaculture. The general overview of phage usage to control bacterial diseases in aquaculture, including the general advantages of this strategy, has been clearly described in previous reviews. Therefore, this review specifically focuses on providing insights into the phages infecting A. salmonicida, from basic research to biotechnological application in aquaculture, as well as recent advances in the study of A. salmonicida

Supercapacitive Properties of 3D-Arrayed Polyaniline Hollow Nanospheres Encaging RuO₂ Nanoparticles

A major limitation of polyaniline (PANi) electrodes for supercapacitors is the slow rate of ion transport during redox reactions and the resultant easy saturation of areal capacitance with film thickness. In this study, three-dimensionally (3D)-arrayed PANi nanospheres with highly roughened surface nanomorphology were fabricated to overcome this limitation. A hierarchical nanostructure was obtained by polymerizing aniline monomers on a template of 3D-arrayed polystyrene (PS) nanospheres and appropriate oxidative acid doping. The structure provided dramatically increased surface area and porosity that led to the efficient diffusion of ions. Thus, the specific capacitance (<i>C</i>_sp) reached 1570 F g^–1, thereby approaching a theoretical capacitance of PANi. In addition, the retention at a high scan rate of 100 mV s^–1 was 77.6% of the <i>C</i>_sp at a scan rate of 10 mV s^–1. Furthermore, 3D-arrayed hollow PANi (H-PANi) nanospheres could be obtained by dissolving the inner PS part of the PS/PANi core/shell nanospheres with tetrahydrofuran. The ruthenium oxide (RuO₂) nanoparticles (NPs) were also encaged in the H-PANi nanospheres by embedding RuO₂ NPs on the PS nanospheres prior to polymerization of PANi. The combination of the two active electrode materials indicated synergetic effects. The areal capacitance of the RuO₂-encaged PANi electrode was significantly larger than that of the RuO₂-free PANi electrode and could be controlled by varying the amount of encaged RuO₂ nanoparticles. The encagement could also solve the problem of detachment of RuO₂ electrodes from the current collector. The effects of the nanostructuring and RuO₂ encagement were also quantitatively analyzed by deconvoluting the total capacitance into the surface capacitive and insertion elements

Evaluation of Weather Information for Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting with Various Types of Models

The rising share of renewable energy in the energy mix brings with it new challenges such as power curtailment and lack of reliable large-scale energy grid. The forecasting of wind power generation for provision of flexibility, defined as the ability to absorb and manage fluctuations in the demand and supply by storing energy at times of surplus and releasing it when needed, is important. In this study, short-term forecasting models of wind power generation were developed using the conventional time-series method and hybrid models using support vector regression (SVR) based on rolling origin recalibration. For the application of the methodology, the meteorological database from Korea Meteorological Administration and actual operating data of a wind power turbine (2.3 MW) from 1 January to 31 December 2015 were used. The results showed that the proposed SVR model has higher forecasting accuracy than the existing time-series methods. In addition, the conventional time-series model has high accuracy under proper curation of wind turbine operation data. Therefore, the analysis results reveal that data curation and weather information are as important as the model for wind power forecasting