Facial Expressions of Sentence Comprehension

International audienceUnderstanding facial expressions allows access to one's intentional and affective states. Using the findings in psychology and neuroscience, in which physical behaviors of the face are linked to emotional states, this paper aims to study sentence comprehension shown by facial expressions. In our experiments, participants took part in a roughly 30-minute computer mediated task, where they were asked to answer either "true" or "false" to knowledge-based questions, then immediately given feedback of "correct" or "incorrect". Their faces, which were recorded during the task using the Kinect v2 device, are later used to identify the level of comprehension shown by their expressions. To achieve this, the SVM and Random Forest classifiers with facial appearance information extracted using a spatiotemporal local descriptor, named LPQ-TOP, are employed. Results of online sentence comprehension show that facial dynamics are promising to help understand cognitive states of the mind

How students cope with part-time study

This study provides a qualitative test and illustration of a model of how students cope with the demands of part-time study. The model shows that students who are successful in finding the time to complete the requirements of part-time courses do so by adopting three mechanisms; sacrifice, support and the negotiation of arrangements. All three mechanisms operate in four domains, namely work, family, social lives and the self. The mechanisms and domains were related together in a three by four matrix. Data to verify and illuminate the model were gathered by the researchers through an on-line forum discussion on the topic of coping with part-time study. The researchers themselves were studying part-time in a course called Adult Education and Professional Development. Analysis of the data showed that the work domain was very important but little adaptation was possible. The family was seen as the most important domain and all three mechanisms were used. Time was commonly found for part-time study by sacrificing social lives. The self-domain was interpreted as important in establishing motivation and self-determination

MicroRNA profiling study reveals MIR-150 in association with metastasis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

© 2017 The Author(s). MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play a crucial role in pathogenesis of human cancers. Several miRNAs have been shown to involve in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) pathogenesis through alteration of gene networks. A global view of the miRNA expression profile of clinical specimens would be the best way to screen out the possible miRNA candidates that may be involved in disease pathogenesis. In this study, we investigated the expression profiles of miRNA in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues from patients with undifferentiated NPC versus non-NPC controls using a miRNA real-time PCR platform, which covered a total of 95 cancer-related miRNAs. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed that NPC and non-NPC controls were clearly segregated. Promisingly, 10 miRNA candidates were differentially expressed. Among them, 9 miRNAs were significantly up-regulated of which miR-205 and miR-196a showed the most up-regulated in NPC with the highest incidence percentage of 94.1% and 88.2%, respectively, while the unique down-regulated miR-150 was further validated in patient sera. Finally, the in vitro gain-of-function and loss-of-function assays revealed that miR-150 can modulate the epithelial-mesenchymal-transition property in NPC/HK-1 cells and led to the cell motility and invasion. miR-150 may be a potential biomarker for NPC and plays a critical role in NPC tumourigenesis.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Facial Expressions of Sentence Comprehension

International audienceUnderstanding facial expressions allows access to one's intentional and affective states. Using the findings in psychology and neuroscience, in which physical behaviors of the face are linked to emotional states, this paper aims to study sentence comprehension shown by facial expressions. In our experiments, participants took part in a roughly 30-minute computer mediated task, where they were asked to answer either "true" or "false" to knowledge-based questions, then immediately given feedback of "correct" or "incorrect". Their faces, which were recorded during the task using the Kinect v2 device, are later used to identify the level of comprehension shown by their expressions. To achieve this, the SVM and Random Forest classifiers with facial appearance information extracted using a spatiotemporal local descriptor, named LPQ-TOP, are employed. Results of online sentence comprehension show that facial dynamics are promising to help understand cognitive states of the mind

A fiber Bragg grating sensor system for train axle counting

Railway signaling facilitates two main functions, namely, train detection and train control, in order to maintain safe separations among the trains. Track circuits are the most commonly used train detection means with the simple open/close circuit principles; and subsequent adoption of axle counters further allows the detection of trains under adverse track conditions. However, with electrification and power electronics traction drive systems, aggravated by the electromagnetic interference in the vicinity of the signaling system, railway engineers often find unstable or even faulty operations of track circuits and axle counting systems, which inevitably jeopardizes the safe operation of trains. A new means of train detection, which is completely free from electromagnetic interference, is therefore required for the modern railway signaling system. This paper presents a novel optical fiber sensor signaling system. The sensor operation, field setup, axle detection solution set, and test results of an installation in a trial system on a busy suburban railway line are given

Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Measurements in Myopia: An Optical Coherence Tomography Study

PURPOSE. To evaluate the relationship between retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness measured by optical coherence tomography (OCT) and the axial length/refractive error of the eye. METHODS. A total of 115 eyes of 115 healthy subjects, comprising 75 eyes with high myopia (spherical equivalent [SE] Ͻ Ϫ6.0 D) and 40 eyes with low to moderate myopia (SE between Ϫ6.0 D and Ϫ0.5D), were analyzed in this cross-sectional study. Total average and mean clock hour RNFL thicknesses were measured by OCT and compared between the two myopia groups. Associations between RNFL measurements and axial length and spherical equivalent were evaluated by linear regression analysis. RESULTS. The RNFL measurements were significantly lower in the high myopia group compared with those of the low-tomoderate myopia group at 12, 1, and 7 o'clock (right eye orientation). Apart from the temporal clock hours, significant correlations were evident between RNFL measurements and the axial length and spherical equivalent. The average RNFL thickness decreased with increasing axial length (r ϭ Ϫ0.314, P ϭ 0.001) and negative refractive power (r ϭ 0.291, P ϭ 0.002). A significant proportion of myopic eyes were classified as outside normal limits, with reference to the normative database. The most frequently abnormal sector was at 2 o'clock, where 16.5% of myopic eyes were outside normal limits. CONCLUSIONS. RNFL measurements vary with the axial length/ refractive error of the eye. Analysis of RNFL thickness in the evaluation of glaucoma should always be interpreted with reference to the refractive status. Although the normative database provided by OCT has been helpful in identifying ocular diseases involving the RNFL, it may not be reliable in the analysis of myopic eyes. (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2006;47: 5171-5176