SyncDiffusion: Coherent Montage via Synchronized Joint Diffusions

The remarkable capabilities of pretrained image diffusion models have been utilized not only for generating fixed-size images but also for creating panoramas. However, naive stitching of multiple images often results in visible seams. Recent techniques have attempted to address this issue by performing joint diffusions in multiple windows and averaging latent features in overlapping regions. However, these approaches, which focus on seamless montage generation, often yield incoherent outputs by blending different scenes within a single image. To overcome this limitation, we propose SyncDiffusion, a plug-and-play module that synchronizes multiple diffusions through gradient descent from a perceptual similarity loss. Specifically, we compute the gradient of the perceptual loss using the predicted denoised images at each denoising step, providing meaningful guidance for achieving coherent montages. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method produces significantly more coherent outputs compared to previous methods (66.35% vs. 33.65% in our user study) while still maintaining fidelity (as assessed by GIQA) and compatibility with the input prompt (as measured by CLIP score).Comment: Project page: https://syncdiffusion.github.i

Factors Contributing to Disaster Evacuation: The Case of South Korea

There has been increasing interest in effective evacuation in response to natural disasters, particularly in understanding human evacuation behavior. It is important to determine the factors affecting evacuation decision making to promote prompt evacuation. This study focuses on the effects of past experiences on evacuation behavior in South Korea, especially the evacuation drill experience. Additionally, the influence of demographic and socio-economic characteristics on evacuation behavior is considered. After collecting data through telephone surveys, t-tests and logit regression models were used to evaluate the data. The results reveal that an evacuation drill experience is positively related to making a decision to evacuate. The results also confirm that certain demographic factors, such as age and household size, as well as socio-economic factors, such as household income and housing type, influence evacuation decisions. Besides these, knowing the location of a shelter is another factor that improves the chances of evacuation. Finally, discussions and suggestions for increasing participation in evacuation drills are provided

FLUID-XP: Flexible User Interface Distribution for Cross-Platform Experience

Being able to use a single app across multiple devices can bring novel experiences to the users in various domains including entertainment and productivity. For instance, a user of a video editing app would be able to use a smart pad as a canvas and a smartphone as a remote toolbox so that the toolbox does not occlude the canvas during editing. However, existing approaches do not properly support the single-app multi-device execution due to several limitations, including high development cost, device heterogeneity, and high performance requirement. In this paper, we introduce FLUID-XP, a novel cross-platform multi-device system that enables UIs of a single app to be executed across heterogeneous platforms, while overcoming the limitations of previous approaches. FLUID-XP provides flexible, efficient, and seamless interactions by addressing three main challenges: i) how to transparently enable a single-display app to use multiple displays, ii) how to distribute UIs across heterogeneous devices with minimal network traffic, and iii) how to optimize the UI distribution process when multiple UIs have different distribution requirements. Our experiments with a working prototype of FLUID-XP on Android confirm that FLUID-XP successfully supports a variety of unmodified real-world apps across heterogeneous platforms (Android, iOS, and Linux). We also conduct a lab study with 25 participants to demonstrate the effectiveness of FLUID-XP with real users

Inner-Membrane-Bound Gold Nanoparticles as Efficient Electron Transfer Mediators for Enhanced Mitochondrial Electron Transport Chain Activity

Electron transfer through the mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) can be critically blocked by the dysfunction of protein complexes. Redox-active molecules have been used to mediate the electron transfer in place of the dysfunctional complexes; however, they are limited to replacing complex I and are known to be toxic. Here we report artificial mitochondrial electron transfer pathways that enhance ETC activity by exploiting inner-membrane-bound gold nanoparticles (GNPs) as efficient electron transfer mediators. The hybridization of mitochondria with GNPs, driven by electrostatic interaction, is successfully visualized in real time at the level of a single mitochondrion. By observing quantized quenching dips via plasmon resonance energy transfer, we reveal that the hybridized GNPs are bound to the inner membrane of mitochondria irrespective of the presence of the outer membrane. The ETC activity of mitochondria with GNPs such as membrane potential, oxygen consumption, and ATP production is remarkably increased in vitro

Image-feature based human identification protocols on limited display devices

We present variations and modifications of the image-feature based human identification protocol proposed by Jameel et al with application to user authentication on mobile devices with limited display capabilities. The protocols introduced are essentially reduced versions of the original protocol with a minor tradeoff between security and usability. However, the proposed protocols are not aimed for computation and memory restrained devices. A brief user survey highlights the usability. By employing realistic assumptions pertaining to mobile devices, we show that the protocols are secure under the conjectured difficulty of extracting the secret feature from the observation of images and their binary answers. The adversary considered is strictly passive

Activity-oriented access control for ubiquitous environments

Recent research on ubiquitous computing has introduced a new concept of activity-based computing as a way of thinking about supporting human activities in ubiquitous computing environment. Existing access control approaches such as RBAC, became inappropriate to support this concept because they do not consider human activities. In this paper, we propose Activity-Oriented Access Control (AOAC) model, aiming to support user's activity in ubiquitous environments. We have designed and implemented our initial AOAC system. We also built up a simple scenario in order to illustrate how it supports user activities. The results have shown that AOAC meets our objectives. Also, AOAC it takes approximately 0.26 second to give a response which proves that AOAC is suitable to work in real-time environments