Adversarial Disentanglement with Grouped Observations

We consider the disentanglement of the representations of the relevant attributes of the data (content) from all other factors of variations (style) using Variational Autoencoders. Some recent works addressed this problem by utilizing grouped observations, where the content attributes are assumed to be common within each group, while there is no any supervised information on the style factors. In many cases, however, these methods fail to prevent the models from using the style variables to encode content related features as well. This work supplements these algorithms with a method that eliminates the content information in the style representations. For that purpose the training objective is augmented to minimize an appropriately defined mutual information term in an adversarial way. Experimental results and comparisons on image datasets show that the resulting method can efficiently separate the content and style related attributes and generalizes to unseen data.Comment: Accepted at the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20

The Drug Candidate BGP-15 Delays the Onset of Diastolic Dysfunction in the Goto-Kakizaki Rat Model of Diabetic Cardiomyopathy

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Evidence for diagnosis of early chronic pancreatitis after three episodes of acute pancreatitis : a cross-sectional multicentre international study with experimental animal model

Chronic pancreatitis (CP) is an end-stage disease with no specific therapy; therefore, an early diagnosis is of crucial importance. In this study, data from 1315 and 318 patients were analysed from acute pancreatitis (AP) and CP registries, respectively. The population from the AP registry was divided into AP (n=983), recurrent AP (RAP, n=270) and CP (n=62) groups. The prevalence of CP in combination with AP, RAP2, RAP3, RAP4 and RAP5+was 0%, 1%, 16%, 50% and 47%, respectively, suggesting that three or more episodes of AP is a strong risk factor for CP. Laboratory, imaging and clinical biomarkers highlighted that patients with RAP3+do not show a significant difference between RAPs and CP. Data from CP registries showed 98% of patients had at least one AP and the average number of episodes was four. We mimicked the human RAPs in a mouse model and found that three or more episodes of AP cause early chronic-like morphological changes in the pancreas. We concluded that three or more attacks of AP with no morphological changes to the pancreas could be considered as early CP (ECP).The new diagnostic criteria for ECP allow the majority of CP patients to be diagnosed earlier. They can be used in hospitals with no additional costs in healthcare.Peer reviewe

How did the Austrian public attitude change towards universal basic income, due to the Covid-19 virus, since the 2016 European Social Survey?

Diese Thesis analysiert, wie sich die Einstellung der österreichischen Öffentlichkeit zum bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen seit 2016 verändert hat, und ob sie von der COVID-19-Pandemie beeinflusst wurde. Zu diesem Zweck wurden Daten der Europäischen Sozialerhebung mit jenen des Corona-Panels im Rahmen einer multiplen linearen Regressionsanalyse verglichen, wobei der Einfluss möglicher Faktoren getestet wurde. Die Ergebnisse zeigten einen trivialen Effekt der Arbeitslosigkeit, der die Unterstützung für das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen erhöht. Die Ergebnisse zeigten auch, dass jede Art von politischen Präferenzen, sowie Ruhestand, Alter, Geschlecht, Sozialarbeit und Militärdienst die Unterstützung verringern. Schließlich sagte das Modell voraus, dass die Unterstützung für die Idee des Grundeinkommens im Laufe der Zeit abnehmen wird. Die Resultate dieser Studie deuten darauf hin, dass das Coronavirus bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt keine direkte Auswirkung auf die öffentliche Meinung der österreichischen Bevölkerung bezüglich des universellen Grundeinkommens hatte.This paper analyses how the Austrian public´s attitude has changed since 2016 and if the current coronavirus affected their opinion. To answer this question, the European Social Survey Round 8 questionnaire has been compared with the Corona Panel Wave 5 survey thorough a multiple linear regression analysis based on influencing factors determined by academic literature. Results showed a trivial effect of unemployment increasing the support for universal basic income. Outcomes also revealed that political preference, retirement, age, gender, social workers & military personal decreases support. Finally, the model predicted that as time passes there is a decline for the support of the idea of basic income. This study revealed, that to this point the coronavirus had no direct effect on the public belief of the Austrian population concerning universal basic income

Recovering planar homographies between 2D shapes

Images taken from different views of a planar object are related by planar homography. Recovering the parameters of such transformations is a fundamental problem in computer vision with various applications. This paper proposes a novel method to estimate the parameters of a homography that aligns two binary images. It is obtained by solving a system of nonlinear equations generated by integrating linearly independent functions over the domains determined by the shapes. The advantage of the proposed solution is that it is easy to implement, less sensitive to the strength of the deformation, works without established correspondences and robust against segmentation errors. The method has been tested on synthetic as well as on real images and its efficiency has been demonstrated in the context of two different applications: alignment of hip prosthesis X-ray images and matching of traffic signs. 1