Switching Temporary Teachers for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

The teacher-student framework, prevalent in semi-supervised semantic segmentation, mainly employs the exponential moving average (EMA) to update a single teacher's weights based on the student's. However, EMA updates raise a problem in that the weights of the teacher and student are getting coupled, causing a potential performance bottleneck. Furthermore, this problem may become more severe when training with more complicated labels such as segmentation masks but with few annotated data. This paper introduces Dual Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that employs dual temporary teachers aiming to alleviate the coupling problem for the student. The temporary teachers work in shifts and are progressively improved, so consistently prevent the teacher and student from becoming excessively close. Specifically, the temporary teachers periodically take turns generating pseudo-labels to train a student model and maintain the distinct characteristics of the student model for each epoch. Consequently, Dual Teacher achieves competitive performance on the PASCAL VOC, Cityscapes, and ADE20K benchmarks with remarkably shorter training times than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach is model-agnostic and compatible with both CNN- and Transformer-based models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/naver-ai/dual-teacher}.Comment: NeurIPS-202

Attitudes toward Using and Teaching Confidence Intervals: A Latent Profile Analysis on Elementary Statistics Instructors

The use of confidence intervals (CIs) for making a statistical inference is gaining popularity in research communities. To evaluate college statistics instructors’ readiness to teach CIs, this study explores their attitudes toward teaching CIs in elementary statistics courses, and toward using CIs in inferential statistics. Data were collected with a survey that classifies instructors’ attitudes on the basis of three previously established pedagogical components: affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Based on the survey responses from 270 participants, we created three profiles (subgroups) via latent profile analysis, and identified each profile’s pattern of attitudes toward CIs and common characteristics of the instructors that fit each profile. In addition, we compared the profiles across groupings created by six variables: gender, academic background, statistics teaching experience, subject preference, degree level, and desire to improve teaching. The results of the latent profile analysis support three profiles within the population of statistics instructors, and the results of the comparative analysis of teacher characteristics indicate that the six variables are moderate to strong predictors of the grouping of the sample into three profiles

Characterization of the ATP transporter in the reconstituted rough endoplasmic reticulum proteoliposomes

AbstractAdenosine triphosphate (ATP) transporter from rat liver rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) was solubilized and reconstituted into phosphatidylcholine liposomes. The RER proteoliposomes, resulting from optimizing some reconstitution parameters, had an apparent Km value of 1.5 μM and a Vmax of 286 pmol min−1 (mg protein)−1 and showed higher affinity for ATP and a lower Vmax value than intact RER (Km of 6.5 μM and Vmax of 1 nmol). ATP transport was time- and temperature-dependent, inhibited by 4,4′-diisothiocyanostilbene-2,2′-disulfonic acid, which is known as an inhibitor of anion transporters including ATP transporter, but was not affected by atractyloside, a specific inhibitor of mitochondrial ADP/ATP carrier. The internal and external effects of various nucleotides on the ATP transport were examined. ATP transport was cis-inhibited strongly by ADP and weakly by AMP. ADP-preloaded RER proteoliposomes showed a specific increase of ATP transport activity while AMP-preloaded RER proteoliposomes did not show the enhanced overshoot peak in the ATP uptake plot. These results demonstrate the ADP/ATP antiport mechanism of ATP transport in rat liver RER

Total Laparoscopic Hysterectomy and Laparoscopy-Assisted Vaginal Hysterectomy

This study suggests that total laparoscopic hysterectomy and laparoscopic-assisted vaginal hysterectomy are safe and feasible with laparoscopic-assisted hysterectomy preferred in patients with a mass involving the lower uterine segment or those with a large uterus

Design for Sharing Emotional Touches during Phone Calls: A Quantitative Evaluation of Four Tactile Representations

Background As the importance of mobile phones as an emotional communication medium is growing, non-verbal behaviors such as facial expressions, touching behaviors and gestures ought to be considered to enhance phone conversations. Among various non-verbal signals, we focus on sharing specific touches that could be used for exchanging contextual and emotional cues. Along with this, to make the new phone conversation involving touching more natural, we consider maintaining natural audio conversation with phones by keeping the receiver on the ear and the transmitter on the mouth while holding the phone to the cheek. Methods In this paper, we focus on investigating ways to deliver four touches: pat, slap, tickle and kiss with sound and tactile feedback while holding the phone to the cheek as in typical phone calls. The interaction technique is called CheekTouch, and it is based on enabling users to share touches by representing finger gestures on one phone screen to the other party???s cheek using a vibrotactile display and sound stimulations. We asked the 30 students who participated to put the device on their cheek and wear earphones, and we provided them with 24 different stimulations. Results An evaluation was conducted to propose the most appropriate type of stimulation to deliver a pat, slap, tickle and kiss using CheekTouch. We showed that the best way to deliver a pat was to use a vibrotactile display combined with sound; however, a tickle was best delivered with only the vibrotactile display. A kiss and slap, on the other hand, were best delivered when there was only sound. Conclusions Considering the trends in sharing delicate emotions during phone-mediated communications, it is significant to investigate ways to convey touches during phone conversations beyond sharing visual emoticons. Here, we focused on findings ways to pat, slap, tickle and kiss by using existing phone technologies (vibrotactile motors and sound). Through the quantitative evaluation of those four touches, we discovered which stimulation type is best for delivering each of the touches. The results do not show whether those touches can deliver emotions, however, we believe CheekTouch and the findings from the evaluation can be used for sharing different types of non-verbal signals during audio-based phone conversations and enable further studies in the field of remote tactile interaction.clos