Interpretable 3D Human Action Analysis with Temporal Convolutional Networks

The discriminative power of modern deep learning models for 3D human action recognition is growing ever so potent. In conjunction with the recent resurgence of 3D human action representation with 3D skeletons, the quality and the pace of recent progress have been significant. However, the inner workings of state-of-the-art learning based methods in 3D human action recognition still remain mostly black-box. In this work, we propose to use a new class of models known as Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks (TCN) for 3D human action recognition. Compared to popular LSTM-based Recurrent Neural Network models, given interpretable input such as 3D skeletons, TCN provides us a way to explicitly learn readily interpretable spatio-temporal representations for 3D human action recognition. We provide our strategy in re-designing the TCN with interpretability in mind and how such characteristics of the model is leveraged to construct a powerful 3D activity recognition method. Through this work, we wish to take a step towards a spatio-temporal model that is easier to understand, explain and interpret. The resulting model, Res-TCN, achieves state-of-the-art results on the largest 3D human action recognition dataset, NTU-RGBD.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, BNMW CVPR 2017 Submissio

A Fully Time-domain Neural Model for Subband-based Speech Synthesizer

This paper introduces a deep neural network model for subband-based speech synthesizer. The model benefits from the short bandwidth of the subband signals to reduce the complexity of the time-domain speech generator. We employed the multi-level wavelet analysis/synthesis to decompose/reconstruct the signal into subbands in time domain. Inspired from the WaveNet, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model predicts subband speech signals fully in time domain. Due to the short bandwidth of the subbands, a simple network architecture is enough to train the simple patterns of the subbands accurately. In the ground truth experiments with teacher-forcing, the subband synthesizer outperforms the fullband model significantly in terms of both subjective and objective measures. In addition, by conditioning the model on the phoneme sequence using a pronunciation dictionary, we have achieved the fully time-domain neural model for subband-based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer, which is nearly end-to-end. The generated speech of the subband TTS shows comparable quality as the fullband one with a slighter network architecture for each subband.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figur

The value of relationship banking during financial crises : evidence from the Republic of Korea

A systemic financial crisis with monetary restriction is probably the most promising occasion for assessing whether, and to what extent, relationship banking is valuable to borrowers. The authors take this question to a unique database of credit bureau, microeconomic information covering the pervasive financial crisis the Republic of Korea experienced in 1997-98. The database includes all corporate borrowers surveyed by the Korean Credit Bureau, providing details on the structure of their borrowings, and on their relationship with lending banks. The authors did not have access to the identity of the corporate borrower, and their only non-financial control variable was the borrower's Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). This restriction limited their analysis to smaller borrowers, keeping their sample focused on small, and medium-size enterprises, which were likely to rely on banks for external financing. Their findings: 1) Outstanding loans plunge more for firms with weaker pre-crisis relationship banking. 2) The drop in credit lines - arguably a proxy identifying shifts in the loan supply - is larger for firms relying less on strong relationship banking. 3) More intense pre-crisis relationship banking reduces the probability that a previously non-delinquent firm would build (increase) its loans in arrears in 1998, the year of the sharpest liquidity constraints. 4) All things equal, this probability depends on whether firms were borrowing from one (or more) of the five banks foreclosed in June 1998, showing that it might be particularly difficult for borrowers to replace distressed lending banks during a financial crisis. The authors'findings support the hypothesis that relationship banking = with surviving banks - has a positive value during a systemic financial crisis. They argue that for many viable small, and medium-size businesses in Korea, relationship banking reduced liquidity constraints, and thus, diminished the probability of unwarranted bankruptcy.Financial Intermediation,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Economic Adjustment and Lending,Housing Finance

Impacto de las actividades de lenguaje motivacional en la motivación de los maestros novatos de inglés: Una perspectiva de la teoría de la actividad

The study aims to explore the influence of languaging on novice English teachers’ motivation and to investigate the uniqueness of each English teacher’s reactions to motivational languaging activities (MLAs) from an Activity Theory (AT) perspective. Three novice English teachers at secondary schools in South Korea were interviewed using questions based on an AT framework, and they completed six sets of MLAs consisting of two parts: motivation and languaging. Our findings indicated that the two relatively motivated teachers could use MLAs to develop their ideal teacher identity and improve their teaching confidence. By participating in MLAs, a demotivated teacher can reshape her thoughts regarding teaching and motivate herself again. It has also been shown that MLAs can mediate participation in an imaginary teacher community, possibly leading to enhancement of L2 teacher motivation, but that this also might not occur depending on one’s teacher agency. (143 words)El estudio tiene como objetivo explorar la influencia del lenguaje en la motivación de los profesores de inglés novatos e investigar la singularidad de las reacciones de cada profesor de inglés a las actividades de lenguaje motivacional (MLAs) desde una perspectiva de la teoría de la actividad (AT). Se entrevistó a tres profesores de inglés novatos de escuelas secundarias en Corea del Sur con preguntas basadas en un marco de AT, y completaron seis conjuntos de MLAs que constan de dos partes: motivación y lenguaje. Nuestros hallazgos indicaron que los dos maestros relativamente motivados podrían usar los MLAs para recuperar su identidad de maestro ideal y mejorar su confianza en la enseñanza. Al participar en los MLAs, una maestra desmotivada podría remodelar sus pensamientos con respecto a la enseñanza y motivarse nuevamente. También se ha demostrado que los MLAs podrían mediar en la participación en una comunidad de maestros imaginaria, lo que posiblemente conduce a una mejora en la motivación del maestro de L2, pero esto no ocurriría dependiendo de la agencia de maestros de uno

Physiological Functions of Mitochondrial Reactive Oxygen Species

Mitochondria are the major energy producers within a cell in the form of adenosine triphosphate by oxidative phosphorylation. Normal mitochondrial metabolism inevitably generates reactive oxygen species (ROS), which have been considered to solely cause cellular damage. Increase of oxidative stress has been linked to various pathologies. Thus, mitochondrial ROS (mROS) were basically proposed as byproducts of oxidative metabolism, which undergo normalized by antioxidant enzymes. However, the mROS have extensively been esteemed to function as signalling molecules to regulate a wide variety of physiology. These phenomena are indeed dependent on mitochondrial redox status, which is dynamically altered under different physiological and pathological conditions. The oxidative stress is incurred by which the redox status is inclined to exceeded oxidation or reduction. Here, we attempt to integrate the recent advances in our understanding of the physiological functions of mROS