Enriched Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network for Facial Micro-Expression Recognition

Facial micro-expression (ME) recognition has posed a huge challenge to researchers for its subtlety in motion and limited databases. Recently, handcrafted techniques have achieved superior performance in micro-expression recognition but at the cost of domain specificity and cumbersome parametric tunings. In this paper, we propose an Enriched Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network (ELRCN) that first encodes each micro-expression frame into a feature vector through CNN module(s), then predicts the micro-expression by passing the feature vector through a Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) module. The framework contains two different network variants: (1) Channel-wise stacking of input data for spatial enrichment, (2) Feature-wise stacking of features for temporal enrichment. We demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to achieve reasonably good performance, without data augmentation. In addition, we also present ablation studies conducted on the framework and visualizations of what CNN "sees" when predicting the micro-expression classes.Comment: Published in Micro-Expression Grand Challenge 2018, Workshop of 13th IEEE Facial & Gesture 201

The relationship between systemic inflammation and stoma formation following anterior resection for rectal cancer: a cross-sectional study

Introduction: There is evidence that temporary defunctioning stoma formation in patients undergoing anterior resection reduces the risk of anastomotic leakage. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between stoma formation, the postoperative systemic inflammatory response and complications following anterior resection for rectal cancer. Methods: Data was recorded prospectively for patients who underwent anterior resection for histologically proven rectal cancer, from 2008 to 2015 at a single centre, n = 167. Patients had routine preoperative and postoperative blood sampling including serum C-reactive protein (CRP). Postoperative complications including anastomotic leakage were recorded. Results: Of the 167 patients, the majority were male (61%) and over 65 years old (56%) with node negative disease (60%). 36 patients (22%) underwent preoperative neoadjuvant treatment. 100 patients (60%) had a stoma formed at the time of surgery. Stoma formation was significantly associated with male sex (69% vs. 50%, p = 0.017), neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (30% vs 9%, p = 0.001) and open surgery (71% vs. 55%, p = 0.040). Of those 100 patients who had a stoma formed, 80 had it reversed. Permanent stoma was significantly associated with increasing age (p = 0.011), exceeding the established CRP threshold of 150 mg/L on postoperative day 4 (67% vs 37%, p = 0.039), higher incidence of postoperative complications (76% vs 47%, p = 0.035), anastomotic leakage (24% vs 2%, p = 0.003) and higher Clavien Dindo score (p = 0.036). Conclusions: There was no significant association between stoma formation during anterior resection and the postoperative systemic inflammatory response. However, in these patients both the postoperative systemic inflammatory response and complications were associated with permanent stoma

Shared pathways to infectious disease susceptibility?

The recent advent of genomic approaches for association testing is starting to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the role of human immune response in determining infectious disease outcomes. Progressing from traditional linkage approaches using microsatellite markers to high-resolution genome-wide association scans, these new approaches are leading to the robust discovery of a large number of disease susceptibility genes and the beginnings of an appreciation of their connections. In this commentary, we discuss how this technology development has led to increasingly complex and common infectious diseases being unraveled, and how this is starting to dissect pathogen-specific human responses. Intriguingly, these still preliminary findings suggest that pathogen innate detection mechanisms may not be as shared among diseases as immune response mechanisms

Integrating rhythmic syllable with tonguing drills in elementary brass instruments instruction

Various rhythm syllable systems that are based on the concept that prioritises ‘sound before symbol’ are known to be able to enhance students’ ability to read music notations. To date, these systems are yet to be integrated with basic brass instrumental skills such as tonguing. This research examines the effect of the rhythm syllable system when it is applied as an integrated teaching approach for novice brass instrument learners by combining rhythm learning with articulation. A teaching experiment was conducted with 90 elementary trumpet students assigned randomly into three groups. Each group underwent five weeks of intervention with a single content but using different approaches of rhythm learning. Data analysis showed significant differences among the groups, and the group that used the adapted rhythmic syllable approach achieved the highest both in rhythm accuracy and articulation clarity, followed by the group that used Kodaly syllables and the control group that did not apply any particular syllable system. The integrated rhythmic syllable reduces the time of learning the brass instrument while eliminating the redundancies resulting from compartmentalised teaching. This research has extended the scope of application of the rhythmic syllable system beyond musicianship training. It indicates that methods in musicianship training can be localised for specific purposes in instrumental learning

Bond option pricing under the CKLS model

Consider the European call option written on a zero coupon bond. Suppose the call option has maturity T and strike price K while the bond has maturity S T . We propose a numerical method for evaluating the call option price under the Chan, Karolyi, Longstaff and Sanders (CKLS) model in which the increment of the short rate over a time interval of length dt , apart from being independent and stationary, is having the quadratic-normal distribution with mean zero and variance dt. The key steps in the numerical procedure include (i) the discretization of the CKLS model; (ii) the quadratic approximation of the time-T bond price as a function of the short rate rT at time T; and (iii) the application of recursive formulas to find the moments of r(t+dt) given the value of r(t). The numerical results thus found show that the option price decreases as the parameter in the CKLS model increases, and the variation of the option price is slight when the underlying distribution of the increment departs from the normal distribution

Determination of folate content in commonly consumed Malaysian foods

Currently, data concerning the content of naturally occurring dietary folate in Malaysian foods is scarce. The aim of this study was to determine the folate content of vegetables, fruits, legumes and cereals that were commonly consumed among Malaysians. The total folate content of 156 samples (51 vegetables, 33 fruits, 22 legumes and legume products, and 50 cereals and cereal products) available in Malaysia was determined by microbiological assay using Lactobacillus casei (L. casei) after trienzyme treatment with protease, α-amylase and folate conjugase (from rat serum). An internal quality control system was used throughout the study by analyzing CRM 121 (wholemeal flour) and CRM 485 (lyophilized mixed vegetables); percent recovery (as mean ± SD) of 97 ± 2.0 and 101 ± 4.0 was obtained. The range of folate content in vegetables, fruits, legumes and cereals were 1-11 μg/100 g and 1-31on the basis of fresh weight and 1-31 μg/100 g and 2-156 μg/100 g on the basis of dry weight, respectively. This study has shown that some of these underutilized vegetables and fruits are good sources of folate and could fulfill the recommended dietary intake of total folate

Saybolt color prediction for condensates and light crude oils

Abstract Saybolt color determination is one of the techniques used to evaluate the quality of petroleum products as an indicator of the degree of refinement. As color is a property readily observed by operators, conventional procedures require operators to determine Saybolt color either through direct visual observation or through Saybolt chromometers. These methods are subjective due to the variability in perception of colors across different observers and may be influenced by external factors such as the level of illuminance. Digital oil color analyzers, on the other hand, cost almost four times as much as Saybolt chromometers. An alternative approach to color measurement is to develop a correlation model between Saybolt color with the physical and chemical properties of condensates and light crude oils from Malaysian oil and gas fields. This work applies several multiple linear regression techniques (such as stepwise regression) performed both manually and using the R software (version 3.6.1) to obtain statistically significant results. The step, regsubsets and glmulti functions from R are explored to develop the correlation model which predicts Saybolt color using only identified key properties, overcoming the possible drawbacks associated with conventional laboratory analysis. The models developed through these different techniques are analyzed and compared based on criteria indicated through the coefficient of multiple determination, R 2 and F-tests to infer on suitable regression approaches. Results obtained from these regression methods for models with and without interaction terms report deviations of less than 5% for 75% of the samples used for validation

Mechanisms Of Fracturing In Structures Built From Topologically Interlocked Blocks

Failure of materials is in many cases associated with initiation and subsequent propagation of macroscopic fractures. Consequently, in order to increase the strength, one needs to inhibit either crack initiation or propagation. The principle of topological interlocking provides a unique opportunity to construct materials and structures in which both routes of the strength increase can be realised. Materials and structures built on the basis of this principle consist of many elements which are hold together by the special geometry of their shape, together with an external constrain. The absence of the binder phase between the elements allows the interfaces to arrest macroscopic crack propagation. In addition, with sufficiently small size of the elements an increase in local strength and, possibly, in the stress for crack initiation can be achieved by capitalising on the size effect. Furthermore, the ability of some interlocking structures to tolerate missing elements can serve to prevent the avalanche-type failure initiated by failure of one of the elements. In this paper, experimental results and a theoretical analysis with regard to this possibility are presented

Effects of Solder Temperature on Pin Through-Hole during Wave Soldering: Thermal-Fluid Structure Interaction Analysis

An efficient simulation technique was proposed to examine the thermal-fluid structure interaction in the effects of solder temperature on pin through-hole during wave soldering. This study investigated the capillary flow behavior as well as the displacement, temperature distribution, and von Mises stress of a pin passed through a solder material. A single pin throughhole connector mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB) was simulated using a 3D model solved by FLUENT. The ABAQUS solver was employed to analyze the pin structure at solder temperatures of 456.15 K (183∘C)

An Evolutionary Algorithm with Advanced Goal and Priority Specification for Multi-objective Optimization

This paper presents an evolutionary algorithm with a new goal-sequence domination scheme for better decision support in multi-objective optimization. The approach allows the inclusion of advanced hard/soft priority and constraint information on each objective component, and is capable of incorporating multiple specifications with overlapping or non-overlapping objective functions via logical 'OR' and 'AND' connectives to drive the search towards multiple regions of trade-off. In addition, we propose a dynamic sharing scheme that is simple and adaptively estimated according to the on-line population distribution without needing any a priori parameter setting. Each feature in the proposed algorithm is examined to show its respective contribution, and the performance of the algorithm is compared with other evolutionary optimization methods. It is shown that the proposed algorithm has performed well in the diversity of evolutionary search and uniform distribution of non-dominated individuals along the final trade-offs, without significant computational effort. The algorithm is also applied to the design optimization of a practical servo control system for hard disk drives with a single voice-coil-motor actuator. Results of the evolutionary designed servo control system show a superior closed-loop performance compared to classical PID or RPT approaches