Identification of a Cytokine-induced Antiapoptotic Molecule Anamorsin Essential for Definitive Hematopoiesis

Many growth factors and cytokines prevent apoptosis. Using an expression cloning method, we identified a novel antiapoptotic molecule named Anamorsin, which does not show any homology to known apoptosis regulatory molecules such as Bcl-2 family, caspase family, or signal transduction molecules. The expression of Anamorsin was completely dependent on stimulation with growth factors such as interleukin 3, stem cell factor, and thrombopoietin in factor-dependent hematopoietic cell lines, and forced expression of Anamorsin conferred resistance to apoptosis caused by growth factor deprivation in vitro. Furthermore, Anamorsin was found to act as an antiapoptotic molecule in vivo because Anamorsin−/− mice die in late gestation due to defective definitive hematopoiesis in the fetal liver (FL). Although the number of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells in the FL did not decrease in these mice, myeloid, and particularly erythroid colony formation in response to cytokines, was severely disrupted. Also, Anamorsin−/− erythroid cells initiated apoptosis during terminal maturation. As for the mechanism of Anamorsin-mediated cell survival, a microarray analysis revealed that the expression of Bcl-xL and Jak2 was severely impaired in the FL of Anamorsin−/− mice. Thus, Anamorsin is considered to be a necessary molecule for hematopoiesis that mediates antiapoptotic effects of various cytokines

Speech and language resources for the development of dialogue systems and problems arising from their deployment

NTT CorporationNTT CorporationNTT CorporationNTT CorporationNTT Data CorporationNTT Data CorporationNTT CorporationLREC 2018 Special Speech Sessions "Speech Resources Collection in Real-World Situations"; Phoenix Seagaia Conference Center, Miyazaki; 2018-05-09This paper introduces the dialogue systems (chat-oriented and argumentative dialogue systems) we have been developing at NTT together with the speech and language resources we used for building them. We also describe our field trials for deploying dialogue systems on actual premises, i.e., shops and banks. We found that the primary problem with dialogue systems is timing, which led to our current focus on multi-modal processing. We describe our multi-modal corpus as well as our recent research on multi-modal processing

Anti-reflection coating with mullite and Duroid for large-diameter cryogenic sapphire and alumina optics

We developed a broadband two-layer anti-reflection (AR) coating for use on a sapphire half-wave plate (HWP) and an alumina infrared (IR) filter for the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimetry. Measuring the faint CMB B-mode signals requires maximizing the number of photons reaching the detectors and minimizing spurious polarization due to reflection with an off-axis incident angle. Sapphire and alumina have high refractive indices of 3.1 and are highly reflective without an AR coating. This paper presents the design, fabrication, quality control, and measured performance of an AR coating using thermally-sprayed mullite and Duroid 5880LZ. This technology enables large optical elements with diameters of 600 mm. We also present a newly developed thermography-based nondestructive quality control technique, which is key to assuring good adhesion and preventing delamination when thermal cycling. We demonstrate the average reflectance of about 2.6% (0.9%) for two observing bands centered at 90/150 (220/280) GHz. At room temperature, the average transmittance of a 105 mm square test sample at 220/280 GHz is 83%, and it will increase to 90% at 100 K, attributed to reduced absorption losses. Therefore, our developed layering technique has proved effective for 220/280 GHz applications, particularly in addressing dielectric loss concerns. This AR coating technology has been deployed in the cryogenic HWP and IR filters of the Simons Array and the Simons observatory experiments and applies to future experiments such as CMB-S4