Semantic Part Segmentation using Compositional Model combining Shape and Appearance

In this paper, we study the problem of semantic part segmentation for animals. This is more challenging than standard object detection, object segmentation and pose estimation tasks because semantic parts of animals often have similar appearance and highly varying shapes. To tackle these challenges, we build a mixture of compositional models to represent the object boundary and the boundaries of semantic parts. And we incorporate edge, appearance, and semantic part cues into the compositional model. Given part-level segmentation annotation, we develop a novel algorithm to learn a mixture of compositional models under various poses and viewpoints for certain animal classes. Furthermore, a linear complexity algorithm is offered for efficient inference of the compositional model using dynamic programming. We evaluate our method for horse and cow using a newly annotated dataset on Pascal VOC 2010 which has pixelwise part labels. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method

Leisure Participation of Urban Chinese Adolescents

The purpose of this study was to examine the main characteristics of leisure participation among a selected group of urban Chinese adolescents. Differences in leisure participation were also described and determined according to gender and age. This study was a descriptive research design. A survey was conducted to collect data. Two hundred fifty (127 females and 123 males) Chinese adolescents from 7th to 8th grade classes at Shadong Middle School in Guangzhou, China were selected to participate in the study. The instrument for data collection was a 57-item self-report questionnaire. Percentages and frequencies were calculated for all responses to each item on the questionnaire. The data analyses were also conducted to determine statistically significant differences between the reasons of leisure participation, and leisure constraints, and gender using the chi- square test. The study found that urban Chinese adolescents liked watching television and reading for general leisure. Watching sport games, using personal computer and watching video compact discs were also popular leisure activities for the students. Fewer students participated in watching videocassette recordings, playing video games, practicing arts and crafts, and feeding In the art and drama category, the students liked to listen to music and painting or sculpture. In contrast, fewer students attended concerts and plays as well as participated in dancing. In addition, the findings showed that the female students enjoyed more art and drama activities than the males. In the area of sports, jogging and swimming are the activities that are acceptable by both male and female students. More male students than the females participated in jogging, playing ping-pong, soccer, basketball, volleyball, bowling, golf, martial art, and weightlifting. More female students liked swimming, playing badminton, tennis, practicing gymnastics and aerobics. In outdoor activities, the urban Chinese students preferred bicycling, going on outings and road skating. More male students than the females participated in camping, fishing, hiking/backpacking, hunting, and horseback riding. More female students participated in bicycling, going on outings, road skating, and canoeing than males. The younger students preferred to participate in general leisure activities and arts and drama to the older students. The older students liked to take part in sports and outdoor activities more than younger students. The differences in leisure participation among different age groups may be due to the differences in independence, life experiences, and family\u27s influence. Reducing stress, improving fitness, physical rest, and feeling good were the most important reasons for urban Chinese adolescents to participate in leisure activities. Next to these reasons listed above were to improve confidence and independence. Fewer students perceived self-achievement, seeking stimulation, and adventure in leisure. Too much homework, not safe, lack of time, lack of fees, and no friends to accompany them were regarded as the most important constraints to participating in leisure for urban Chinese adolescents. The patterns of leisure participation for urban Chinese adolescents in this study should be reviewed by the Chinese leisure professionals and government officials working at youth or in leisure departments when they develop leisure programs for urban Chinese youth. Moreover, the professionals and officials need to be aware of leisure constraints that students face. The professionals and officials should try to decrease these constraints and provide the Chinese youth with more opportunities for leisure

Edge-as-a-Service: Towards Distributed Cloud Architectures

We present an Edge-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform for realising distributed cloud architectures and integrating the edge of the network in the computing ecosystem. The EaaS platform is underpinned by (i) a lightweight discovery protocol that identifies edge nodes and make them publicly accessible in a computing environment, and (ii) a scalable resource provisioning mechanism for offloading workloads from the cloud on to the edge for servicing multiple user requests. We validate the feasibility of EaaS on an online game use-case to highlight the improvement in the QoS of the application hosted on our cloud-edge platform. On this platform we demonstrate (i) low overheads of less than 6%, (ii) reduced data traffic to the cloud by up to 95% and (iii) minimised application latency between 40%-60%.Comment: 10 pages; presented at the EdgeComp Symposium 2017; will appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing, 201

FreePSI: an alignment-free approach to estimating exon-inclusion ratios without a reference transcriptome.

Alternative splicing plays an important role in many cellular processes of eukaryotic organisms. The exon-inclusion ratio, also known as percent spliced in, is often regarded as one of the most effective measures of alternative splicing events. The existing methods for estimating exon-inclusion ratios at the genome scale all require the existence of a reference transcriptome. In this paper, we propose an alignment-free method, FreePSI, to perform genome-wide estimation of exon-inclusion ratios from RNA-Seq data without relying on the guidance of a reference transcriptome. It uses a novel probabilistic generative model based on k-mer profiles to quantify the exon-inclusion ratios at the genome scale and an efficient expectation-maximization algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer strategy and ultrafast conjugate gradient projection descent method to solve the model. We compare FreePSI with the existing methods on simulated and real RNA-seq data in terms of both accuracy and efficiency and show that it is able to achieve very good performance even though a reference transcriptome is not provided. Our results suggest that FreePSI may have important applications in performing alternative splicing analysis for organisms that do not have quality reference transcriptomes. FreePSI is implemented in C++ and freely available to the public on GitHub