Experimental Study on the Influence of Ventilated Window on Indoor Air Quality and Energy Consumption

AbstractThe ventilated window has great potential on improving indoor air quality, but it may increase energy consumption. This paper studies the influence of different running modes of ventilated window on indoor PM2.5 and CO2 concentration and the overall energy consumption. When indoor PM2.5 concentration was more than 90ug/m3, and outdoor PM2.5 concentration was less than 300ug/m3 after ventilated window operating for an hour, indoor PM2.5 concentration decreased for 9-16%, it is appropriate to operating the ventilated window, but it was still 0.18-0.27 times more than the secondary standard. Operating the ventilated window for 55mins on mid-grade and high-grade respectively could reduce the increment of CO2 concentration for 3.31% and 22.19% than that without ventilated window operating. When the ventilated window operateing on low-grade, the increment of CO2 concentration was 11.34% larger than that without ventilated window operating. By increasing air volume and operating time of different modes, indoor air quality can be improved. Comparing with the condition with ventilated window off, the maximum energy consumption after ventilated window operating for 24hours on high-grade was 2.462 kW·h-1 (2.054 kW·h-1 for air conditioning consumption). Appropriate operating mode and running time can be chosen to reduce energy consumption effectively

Mars: Modeling Context & State Representations with Contrastive Learning for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog

Traditional end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems first convert dialog context into belief state and action state before generating the system response. The system response performance is significantly affected by the quality of the belief state and action state. We first explore what dialog context representation is beneficial to improving the quality of the belief state and action state, which further enhances the generated response quality. To tackle our exploration, we propose Mars, an end-to-end task-oriented dialog system with two contrastive learning strategies to model the relationship between dialog context and belief/action state representations. Empirical results show dialog context representations, which are more different from semantic state representations, are more conducive to multi-turn task-oriented dialog. Moreover, our proposed Mars achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MultiWOZ 2.0, CamRest676, and CrossWOZ.Comment: Findings of ACL202

SegCLIP: Patch Aggregation with Learnable Centers for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Recently, the contrastive language-image pre-training, e.g., CLIP, has demonstrated promising results on various downstream tasks. The pre-trained model can capture enriched visual concepts for images by learning from a large scale of text-image data. However, transferring the learned visual knowledge to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a CLIP-based model named SegCLIP for the topic of open-vocabulary segmentation in an annotation-free manner. The SegCLIP achieves segmentation based on ViT and the main idea is to gather patches with learnable centers to semantic regions through training on text-image pairs. The gathering operation can dynamically capture the semantic groups, which can be used to generate the final segmentation results. We further propose a reconstruction loss on masked patches and a superpixel-based KL loss with pseudo-labels to enhance the visual representation. Experimental results show that our model achieves comparable or superior segmentation accuracy on the PASCAL VOC 2012 (+1.4% mIoU), PASCAL Context (+2.4% mIoU), and COCO (+5.6% mIoU) compared with baselines. We release the code at https://github.com/ArrowLuo/SegCLIP

SAFDet: a semi-anchor-free detector for effective detection of oriented objects in aerial images.

An oriented bounding box (OBB) is preferable over a horizontal bounding box (HBB) in accurate object detection. Most of existing works utilize a two-stage detector for locating the HBB and OBB, respectively, which have suffered from the misaligned horizontal proposals and the interference from complex backgrounds. To tackle these issues, region of interest transformer and attention models were proposed, yet they are extremely computationally intensive. To this end, we propose a semi-anchor-free detector (SAFDet) for object detection in aerial images, where a rotation-anchor-free-branch (RAFB) is used to enhance the foreground features via precisely regressing the OBB. Meanwhile, a center-prediction-module (CPM) is introduced for enhancing object localization and suppressing the background noise. Both RAFB and CPM are deployed during training, avoiding increased computational cost of inference. By evaluating on DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets, the efficacy of our approach has been fully validated for a good balance between the accuracy and computational cost

WNT/β-catenin signaling promotes VSMCs to osteogenic transdifferentiation and calcification through directly modulating Runx2 gene expression

AbstractArterial medial calcification (AMC) is prevalent in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and contributes to elevated risk of cardiovascular events and mortality. Vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) to osteogenic transdifferentiation (VOT) in a high-phosphate environment is involved in the pathogenesis of AMC in CKD. WNT/β-catenin signaling is indicated to play a crucial role in osteogenesis via promoting Runx2 expression in osteoprogenitor cells, however, its role in Runx2 regulation and VOT remains incompletely clarified. In this study, Runx2 was induced and β-catenin was activated by high-phosphate in VSMCs. Two forms of active β-catenin, dephosphorylated on Ser37/Thr41 and phosphorylated on Ser675 sites, were upregulated by high-phosphate. Activation of β-catenin, through ectopic expression of stabilized β-catenin, inhibition of GSK-3β, or WNT-3A protein, induced Runx2 expression, whereas blockade of WNT/β-catenin signaling with Porcupine (PORCN) inhibitor or Dickkopf-1 (DKK1) protein inhibited Runx2 induction by high-phosphate. WNT-3A promoted osteocalcin expression and calcium deposition in VSMCs, whereas DKK1 ameliorated calcification of VSMCs induced by high-phosphate. Two functional T cell factor (TCF)/lymphoid enhancer-binding factor binding sites were identified in the promoter region of Runx2 gene in VSMCs, which interacted with TCF upon β-catenin activation. Site-directed mutation of each of them attenuated Runx2 response to β-catenin, and deletion or destruction of both of them completely abolished this responsiveness. In the aortic tunica media of rats with chronic renal failure, followed by AMC, Runx2 and β-catenin was induced, and the Runx2 mRNA level was positively associated with the abundance of phosphorylated β-catenin (Ser675). Collectively, our study suggested that high-phosphate may activate WNT/β-catenin signaling through different pathways, and the activated WNT/β-catenin signaling, through direct downstream target Runx2, could play an important role in promoting VOT and AMC

A CIRCULATION DYNAMICS MODEL IN THE ECOSYSTEM FOR THE WEST LAKE, HANGZHOU

This paper focuses the researches on an eutrophication model after drainage of wastewater and drawing water from the Qiantang River to West Lake. The model describes the circulation of nutritive matters (such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon) in the ecosystem of the Lake. The model was established according to observed values of water quality and relevant parameters in 1995. The results of model calibration and verification show that the model can reasonably respond to the changes of forcing functions for drawing quantity and temperature of water. The model has been used to forecast the water quality in different drawing quantities. The predictions given by the model are also believed to be useful to comprehensively harness the West Lake.Article信州大学理学部附属諏訪臨湖実験所報告 11: 87-98(1999)departmental bulletin pape

Shared Biological Pathways Between Alzheimer’s Disease and Ischemic Stroke

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and ischemic stroke (IS) are an immense socioeconomic burden worldwide. There is a possibility that shared genetic factors lead to their links at epidemiological and pathophysiological levels. Although recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have provided profound insights into the genetics of AD and IS, no shared genetic variants have been identified to date. This prompted us to initiate this study, which sought to identify shared pathways linking AD and IS. We took advantage of large-scale GWAS summary data of AD (17,008 AD cases and 37,154 controls) and IS (10,307 cases and 19,326 controls) to conduct pathway analyses using genetic pathways from multiple well-studied databases, including GO, KEGG, PANTHER, Reactome, and Wikipathways. Collectively, we discovered that AD and IS shared 179 GO categories (56 biological processes, 95 cellular components, and 28 molecular functions); and the following pathways: six KEGG pathways; two PANTHER pathways; four Reactome pathways; and one in Wikipathways pathway. The more fine-grained GO terms were mainly summarized into different functional categories: transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation, synapse, endocytic membrane traffic through the endosomal system, signaling transduction, immune process, multi-organism process, protein catabolic metabolism, and cell adhesion. The shared pathways were roughly classified into three categories: immune system; cancer (NSCLC and glioma); and signal transduction pathways involving the cadherin signaling pathway, Wnt signaling pathway, G-protein signaling and downstream signaling mediated by phosphoinositides (PIPs). The majority of these common pathways linked to both AD and IS were supported by convincing evidence from the literature. In conclusion, our findings contribute to a better understanding of common biological mechanisms underlying AD and IS and serve as a guide to direct future research