Temporal Dynamic Appearance Modeling for Online Multi-Person Tracking

Robust online multi-person tracking requires the correct associations of online detection responses with existing trajectories. We address this problem by developing a novel appearance modeling approach to provide accurate appearance affinities to guide data association. In contrast to most existing algorithms that only consider the spatial structure of human appearances, we exploit the temporal dynamic characteristics within temporal appearance sequences to discriminate different persons. The temporal dynamic makes a sufficient complement to the spatial structure of varying appearances in the feature space, which significantly improves the affinity measurement between trajectories and detections. We propose a feature selection algorithm to describe the appearance variations with mid-level semantic features, and demonstrate its usefulness in terms of temporal dynamic appearance modeling. Moreover, the appearance model is learned incrementally by alternatively evaluating newly-observed appearances and adjusting the model parameters to be suitable for online tracking. Reliable tracking of multiple persons in complex scenes is achieved by incorporating the learned model into an online tracking-by-detection framework. Our experiments on the challenging benchmark MOTChallenge 2015 demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-person tracking algorithms

Liquid Crystalline Polymer Vesicles: Thermotropic Phases in Lyotropic Structures

This paper reviews the research work on the liquid crystalline (LC) polymer vesicles (polymersomes), where the thermotropic nematic and smectic phases are displayed in the lyotropic bilayer polymer membrane. LC polymersomes possess the properties of both liquid crystals and polymers, the two essential soft matters. LC polymersomes offer, on the one hand, novel examples of the interplay between orientational order and the curved geometry of a two dimensional membrane. Spherical, ellipsoidal and tetrahedral vesicles are discussed. On the other hand, LC polymersomes enable novel design of stimuli-responsive polymersomes using intramolecular conformational transition from nematic to isotropic phase of LC blocks. Photo-responsive polymersome bursting is highlighted.Comment: 35 pages, 17 figure

A Hybrid Data Association Framework for Robust Online Multi-Object Tracking

Global optimization algorithms have shown impressive performance in data-association based multi-object tracking, but handling online data remains a difficult hurdle to overcome. In this paper, we present a hybrid data association framework with a min-cost multi-commodity network flow for robust online multi-object tracking. We build local target-specific models interleaved with global optimization of the optimal data association over multiple video frames. More specifically, in the min-cost multi-commodity network flow, the target-specific similarities are online learned to enforce the local consistency for reducing the complexity of the global data association. Meanwhile, the global data association taking multiple video frames into account alleviates irrecoverable errors caused by the local data association between adjacent frames. To ensure the efficiency of online tracking, we give an efficient near-optimal solution to the proposed min-cost multi-commodity flow problem, and provide the empirical proof of its sub-optimality. The comprehensive experiments on real data demonstrate the superior tracking performance of our approach in various challenging situations

Gate-controlled magnonic-assisted switching of magnetization in ferroelectric/ferromagnetic junctions

Interfacing a ferromagnet with a polarized ferroelectric gate generates a non-uniform, interfacial spin density coupled to the ferroelectric polarization allowing so for an electric field control of effective transversal field to magnetization. Here we study the dynamic magnetization switching behavior of such a multilayer system based on the Landau-Lifshitz-Baryakhtar equation, demonstrating that interfacial magnetoelectric coupling is utilizable as a highly localized and efficient tool for manipulating magnetism.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

First eigenvalue of the pp-Laplace operator along the Ricci flow

In this paper, we mainly investigate continuity, monotonicity and differentiability for the first eigenvalue of the $p$-Laplace operator along the Ricci flow on closed manifolds. We show that the first $p$-eigenvalue is strictly increasing and differentiable almost everywhere along the Ricci flow under some curvature assumptions. In particular, for an orientable closed surface, we construct various monotonic quantities and prove that the first $p$-eigenvalue is differentiable almost everywhere along the Ricci flow without any curvature assumption, and therefore derive a $p$-eigenvalue comparison-type theorem when its Euler characteristic is negative.Comment: 28 pages, added statements and references, deleted verbose statements and corrected typo

Mergers in Higher Education: A Case Study of Organizational Culture, Communication, and Conflict Management Strategies in the University System of Georgia

Abstract By 2018, the University System of Georgia will have 18 institutions merged with each other. This qualitative case study focuses on how organizational culture, communication strategies, and conflict management strategies affect a merger in higher education in the state of Georgia. This study attempts to answer the following questions: How is organizational culture preserved and/or changed in the process of consolidation? How was information about consolidation communicated to various group of people? How do various groups of people make sense of the information provided regarding consolidation? What aspects of consolidation generated the most conflicts? What conflict management strategies were adopted by administrators and faculty leaders in order to solve conflicts during consolidation? Based on 35 in-depth interviews with faculty, staff, and administrators, the study reveals how new organizational cultures emerge, how to manage different types of conflicts, and how to make sense of organizational changes during the complex situations of mergers in higher education. The results show how organizational culture, communication, and conflict management strategies are closely connected with each other, and can have a major impact on the merger process in higher education. The findings of this study may have policy implications, and provide guidance to future institutions and decision makers who are considering mergers in higher education

A Novel Pre-fluorescent Nitroxide Probe for the Highly Sensitive Determination of Peroxyl and Other Radical Oxidants

ABSTRACT Peroxyl and other radical oxidants react with stable cyclic nitroxides, such as the piperidinyl and pyrrolidinyl nitroxides to form initially the one electron oxidation product, the oxoammonium cation. For most of the nitroxides studied thus far, the oxoammonium cation can in part be regenerated to the nitroxide through reduction by solution constituents. The reaction mechanisms, however, remain a matter of debate. Further, the highly-sensitive, quantitative determination of peroxyl and other radical oxidants has yet to be achieved, posing a major hurdle to a further understanding of the impact of peroxyl radicals in many biological and environmental processes. A unique, amino-pyrrolidinyl nitroxide, 3-amino-2,2,5,5,-tetramethyl-1-pyrrolidinyloxy (3-ap) is shown to undergo an irreversible reaction with peroxyl radicals and other radical oxidants to generate a diamagnetic product. When a fluorophore, fluorescamine is covalently linked through the amino group on the nitroxide, the resulting compound (3-apf, or I) has very low fluorescence quantum yield. Upon reaction with peroxyl and other radical oxidants, the quantum yield of the product increases dramatically (~100 fold), and thus 3-ap or 3-apf can be used as a highly sensitive and versatile probe to determine oxidant production optically, either by monitoring the changes in fluorescence intensity using a spectrofluorometer, by HPLC analysis with fluorescence detection, or by a combination of both approaches. By changing the [O2]/[nitroxide] ratio, it is shown that peroxyl radicals can be detected and quantified preferentially in the presence of other radical oxidants, such as *NO2 and CO3*-. When decreasing the [O2]/[nitroxide] ratio, the oxidation product decreases, with a concomitant increase of the alkoxylamine product resulting from reaction of 3-ap (3-apf) with carbon centered radicals. Preliminary studies suggest that the reactions of 3-ap and 3-apf with peroxyl radical produce different final products. High resolution mass spectrometry and NMR studies indicate that 3-ap is oxidized to form a cyclic peroxide structure, while 3-apf is oxidized to form a cyclic -NH-O- structure, with this difference resulting possibly from the presence of the fluorescamine moiety in 3-apf. Detection of photochemically produced peroxyl radicals is achieved by employing 3-amino-2,2,5,5,-tetramethyl-1-pyrrolidinyloxy (3-ap) alone, followed by derivatization with fluorescamine, while detection of thermally-generated peroxyl radicals employs 3-apf. Preliminary applications include the detection of peroxyl radicals generated thermally in soybean phosphatidylcholine liposomes by 3-apf and produced photochemically in tap water by 3-ap

Notes on Chern's Affine Bernstein Conjecture

There were two famous conjectures on complete affine maximal surfaces, one due to E. Calabi, the other to S.S. Chern. Both were solved with different methods about one decade ago by studying the associated Euler-Lagrange equation. Here we survey two proofs of Chern's conjecture in our recent monograph [L-X-S-J], in particular we add some details of the proofs of auxiliary material that were omitted in [L-X-S-J]. We describe the related background in our Introduction. Our survey is suitable as a report about recent developments and techniques in the study of certain Monge-Ampere equations

A deep near-infrared survey toward the Aquila molecular cloud - I. Molecular hydrogen outflows

We have performed an unbiased deep near-infrared survey toward the Aquila molecular cloud with a sky coverage of ~1 deg2. We identified 45 molecular hydrogen emission-line objects(MHOs), of which only 11 were previously known. Using the Spitzer archival data we also identified 802 young stellar objects (YSOs) in this region. Based on the morphology and the location of MHOs and YSO candidates, we associate 43 MHOs with 40 YSO candidates. The distribution of jet length shows an exponential decrease in the number of outflows with increasing length and the molecular hydrogen outflows seem to be oriented randomly. Moreover, there is no obvious correlation between jet lengths, jet opening angles, or jet H2 1-0 S(1) luminosities and spectral indices of the possible driving sources in this region. We also suggest that molecular hydrogen outflows in the Aquila molecular cloud are rather weak sources of turbulence, unlikely to generate the observed velocity dispersion in the region of survey.Comment: 77 pages, 2 tables, 53 figures, accepted by ApJ

Relaxation rates of gene expression kinetics reveal the feedback signs of autoregulatory gene networks

The transient response to a stimulus and subsequent recovery to a steady state are the fundamental characteristics of a living organism. Here we study the relaxation kinetics of autoregulatory gene networks based on the chemical master equation model of single-cell stochastic gene expression with nonlinear feedback regulation. We report a novel relation between the rate of relaxation, characterized by the spectral gap of the Markov model, and the feedback sign of the underlying gene circuit. When a network has no feedback, the relaxation rate is exactly the decaying rate of the protein. We further show that positive feedback always slows down the relaxation kinetics while negative feedback always speeds it up. Numerical simulations demonstrate that this relation provides a possible method to infer the feedback topology of autoregulatory gene networks by using time-series data of gene expression.Comment: 17 page