BER: Balanced Error Rate For Speaker Diarization

DER is the primary metric to evaluate diarization performance while facing a dilemma: the errors in short utterances or segments tend to be overwhelmed by longer ones. Short segments, e.g., `yes' or `no,' still have semantic information. Besides, DER overlooks errors in less-talked speakers. Although JER balances speaker errors, it still suffers from the same dilemma. Considering all those aspects, duration error, segment error, and speaker-weighted error constituting a complete diarization evaluation, we propose a Balanced Error Rate (BER) to evaluate speaker diarization. First, we propose a segment-level error rate (SER) via connected sub-graphs and adaptive IoU threshold to get accurate segment matching. Second, to evaluate diarization in a unified way, we adopt a speaker-specific harmonic mean between duration and segment, followed by a speaker-weighted average. Third, we analyze our metric via the modularized system, EEND, and the multi-modal method on real datasets. SER and BER are publicly available at https://github.com/X-LANCE/BER.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Enhancing thermoelectric figure-of-merit by low-dimensional electrical transport in phonon-glass crystals

Low-dimensional electronic and glassy phononic transport are two important ingredients of highly-efficient thermoelectric material, from which two branches of the thermoelectric research emerge. One focuses on controlling electronic transport in the low dimension, while the other on multiscale phonon engineering in the bulk. Recent work has benefited much from combining these two approaches, e.g., phonon engineering in low-dimensional materials. Here, we propose to employ the low-dimensional electronic structure in bulk phonon-glass crystal as an alternative way to increase the thermoelectric efficiency. Through first-principles electronic structure calculation and classical molecular dynamics simulation, we show that the $\pi$-$\pi$ stacking Bis-Dithienothiophene molecular crystal is a natural candidate for such an approach. This is determined by the nature of its chemical bonding. Without any optimization of the material parameter, we obtain a maximum room-temperature figure of merit, $ZT$, of $1.48$ at optimal doping, thus validating our idea.Comment: Nano Lett.201

Focal Mechanism Solutions of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake sequence from P-wave polarities and SH/P amplitude ratios: new results and implications

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, a major intraplate earthquake with Mw 7.9, occurred on the slowly deforming Longmenshan fault. To better understand the causes of this devastating earthquake, we need knowledge of the regional stress field and the underlying geodynamic processes. Here, we determine focal mechanism solutions (FMSs) of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake sequence (WES) using both P-wave first-motion polarity data and SH/P amplitude ratio (AR) data. As P-wave polarities are more reliable information, they are given priority over SH/P AR, the latter of which are used only when the former has loose constraint on the FMSs. We collect data from three categories: (1) permanent stations deployed by the China Earthquake Administration (CEA); (2) the Western Sichuan Passive Seismic Array (WSPSA) deployed by Institute of Geology, CEA; (3) global stations from Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. Finally, 129 events with magnitude over Ms 4.0 in the 2008 WES are identified to have well-constrained FMSs. Among them, 83 are well constrained by P-wave polarities only as shown by Cai et al. (Earthq Sci 24(1):115–125, 2011), and the rest of which are newly constrained by incorporating SH/P AR. Based on the spatial distribution and FMSs of the WES, we draw following conclusions: (1) the principle compressional directions of most FMSs of the WES are subhorizontal, generally in agreement with the conclusion given by Cai et al. (2011) but with a few modifications that the compressional directions are WNW–ESE around Wenchuan and ENE–WSW around Qingchuan, respectively. The subhorizontal compressional direction along the Longmenshan fault from SW to NE seems to have a left-lateral rotation, which agrees well with regional stress field inverted by former researchers (e.g., Xu et al., Acta Seismol Sin 30(5), 1987; Acta Geophys Sin 32(6), 1989; Cui et al., Seismol Geol 27(2):234–242, 2005); (2) the FMSs of the events not only reflected the regional stress state of the Longmenshan region, but also were obviously controlled by the faults to some extent, which was pointed out by Cai et al. (2011) and Yi et al. (Chin J Geophys 55(4):1213–1227, 2012); (3) while the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and some of its strong aftershocks released most of the elastic energy accumulated on the Longmenshan fault, some other aftershocks seem to occur just for releasing the elastic energy promptly created by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and some of its strong aftershocks. (4) Our results further suggest that the Longmenshan fault from Wenchuan to Beichuan was nearly fully destroyed by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and accordingly propose that there is less probability for great earthquakes in the middle part of the Longmenshan fault in the near future, although there might be a barrier to the southwest of Wenchuan and it is needed to pay some attention on it in the near future.Wenchuan Fault Scientific Drilling Progra

High-Fidelity Lake Extraction via Two-Stage Prompt Enhancement: Establishing a Novel Baseline and Benchmark

The extraction of lakes from remote sensing images is a complex challenge due to the varied lake shapes and data noise. Current methods rely on multispectral image datasets, making it challenging to learn lake features accurately from pixel arrangements. This, in turn, affects model learning and the creation of accurate segmentation masks. This paper introduces a unified prompt-based dataset construction approach that provides approximate lake locations using point, box, and mask prompts. We also propose a two-stage prompt enhancement framework, LEPrompter, which involves prompt-based and prompt-free stages during training. The prompt-based stage employs a prompt encoder to extract prior information, integrating prompt tokens and image embeddings through self- and cross-attention in the prompt decoder. Prompts are deactivated once the model is trained to ensure independence during inference, enabling automated lake extraction. Evaluations on Surface Water and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Lake datasets show consistent performance improvements compared to the previous state-of-the-art method. LEPrompter achieves mIoU scores of 91.48% and 97.43% on the respective datasets without introducing additional parameters or GFLOPs. Supplementary materials provide the source code, pre-trained models, and detailed user studies.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Lentivirus-mediated RNA interference of vascular endothelial growth factor in monkey eyes with iris neovascularization

Purpose: To explore the in vivo anti-angiogenesis effects resulting from lentivirus-mediated RNAi of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in monkeys with iris neovascularization (INV). Methods: Five specific recombinant lentiviral vectors for RNA interference, targeting Macaca mulatta VEGFA, were designed and the one with best knock down efficacy (LV-GFP-VEGFi1) in H1299 cells and RF/6A cells was selected by real-time PCR for in vivo use. A laser-induced retinal vein occlusion model was established in one eye of seven cynomolgus monkeys. In monkeys number1, 3, and 5 (Group 1), the virus (1x10(8) particles) was intravitreally injected into the preretinal space of the animal's eye immediately after laser coagulation; and in monkeys number 2, 4, and 6 (Group 2), the virus (1x10(8) particles) was injected at 10 days after laser coagulation. In monkey number 7, a blank control injection was performed. In monkeys number 1 and 2, virus without RNAi sequence was used; in monkeys number 3 and 4, virus with nonspecific RNAi sequence was used; and in monkeys 5 and 6, LV-GFP-VEGFi1 was used. Results: In monkey number 5, at 23 days after laser treatment, no obvious INV was observed, while fluorescein angiography of the iris revealed high fluorescence at the margin of pupil and point posterior synechiae. At 50 days after laser treatment, only a slight ectropion uvea was found. However, in the other eyes, obvious INV or hyphema was observed. The densities of new iridic vessels all significantly varied: between monkey number 5 and number 3 (36.01 +/- 4.49/mm(2) versus 48.68 +/- 9.30/mm(2), p=0.025), between monkey number 3 and monkey number 7 (48.68 +/- 9.30/mm(2) versus 74.38 +/- 9.23/mm(2), p=0.002), and between monkey number 5 and number 7 (36.01 +/- 4.49/mm(2) versus 74.38 +/- 9.23/mm(2), p<0.001). Conclusions: Lentivirus-mediated RNAi of VEGF may be a new strategy to treat iris neovascularization, while further studies are needed to investigate the long-term effect.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000281341400003&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Biochemistry & Molecular BiologyOphthalmologySCI(E)PubMed7ARTICLE187-891743-17531