MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) and its subsequent variants have led to remarkable progress in neural rendering. While most of recent neural rendering works focus on objects and small-scale scenes, developing neural rendering methods for city-scale scenes is of great potential in many real-world applications. However, this line of research is impeded by the absence of a comprehensive and high-quality dataset, yet collecting such a dataset over real city-scale scenes is costly, sensitive, and technically difficult. To this end, we build a large-scale, comprehensive, and high-quality synthetic dataset for city-scale neural rendering researches. Leveraging the Unreal Engine 5 City Sample project, we develop a pipeline to easily collect aerial and street city views, accompanied by ground-truth camera poses and a range of additional data modalities. Flexible controls over environmental factors like light, weather, human and car crowd are also available in our pipeline, supporting the need of various tasks covering city-scale neural rendering and beyond. The resulting pilot dataset, MatrixCity, contains 67k aerial images and 452k street images from two city maps of total size $28km^2$. On top of MatrixCity, a thorough benchmark is also conducted, which not only reveals unique challenges of the task of city-scale neural rendering, but also highlights potential improvements for future works. The dataset and code will be publicly available at our project page: https://city-super.github.io/matrixcity/.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023. Project page: $\href{https://city-super.github.io/matrixcity/}{this\, https\, URL}

SUN: Exploring Intrinsic Uncertainties in Text-to-SQL Parsers

This paper aims to improve the performance of text-to-SQL parsing by exploring the intrinsic uncertainties in the neural network based approaches (called SUN). From the data uncertainty perspective, it is indisputable that a single SQL can be learned from multiple semantically-equivalent questions.Different from previous methods that are limited to one-to-one mapping, we propose a data uncertainty constraint to explore the underlying complementary semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent questions (many-to-one) and learn the robust feature representations with reduced spurious associations. In this way, we can reduce the sensitivity of the learned representations and improve the robustness of the parser. From the model uncertainty perspective, there is often structural information (dependence) among the weights of neural networks. To improve the generalizability and stability of neural text-to-SQL parsers, we propose a model uncertainty constraint to refine the query representations by enforcing the output representations of different perturbed encoding networks to be consistent with each other. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong competitors and achieves new state-of-the-art results. For reproducibility, we release our code and data at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/sunsql.Comment: Accepted at COLING 202

Differential recruitment of brain networks in single-digit addition and multiplication: Evidence from EEG oscillations in theta and lower alpha bands

Abstract Previous neuroimaging research investigating dissociation between single-digit addition and multiplication has suggested that the former placed more reliance on the visuo-spatial processing whereas the latter on the verbal processing. However, there has been little exploration into the disassociation in spatio-temporal dynamics of the oscillatory brain activity in specific frequency bands during the two arithmetic operations. To address this issue, the electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded from 19 participants engaged in a delayed verification arithmetic task. By analyzing oscillatory EEG activity in theta (5–7 Hz) and lower alpha frequency (9–10 Hz) bands, we found different patterns of oscillatory brain activity between single-digit addition and multiplication during the early processing stage (0–400 ms post-operand onset). Experiment results in this study showed a larger phasic increase of theta-band power for addition than for multiplication in the midline and the right frontal and central regions during the operator and operands presentation intervals, which was extended to the right parietal and the right occipito-temporal regions during the interval immediately after the operands presentation. In contrast, during multiplication higher phase-locking in lower alpha band was evident in the centro-parietal regions during the operator presentation, which was extended to the left fronto-central and anterior regions during the operands presentation. Besides, we found stronger theta phase synchrony between the parietal areas and the right occipital areas for single-digit addition than for multiplication during operands encoding. These findings of oscillatory brain activity extend the previous observations on functional dissociation between the two arithmetic operations

Vector spectrometer with Hertz-level resolution and super-recognition capability

High-resolution optical spectrometers are crucial in revealing intricate characteristics of signals, determining laser frequencies, measuring physical constants, identifying substances, and advancing biosensing applications. Conventional spectrometers, however, often grapple with inherent trade-offs among spectral resolution, wavelength range, and accuracy. Furthermore, even at high resolution, resolving overlapping spectral lines during spectroscopic analyses remains a huge challenge. Here, we propose a vector spectrometer with ultrahigh resolution, combining broadband optical frequency hopping, ultrafine microwave-photonic scanning, and vector detection. A programmable frequency-hopping laser was developed, facilitating a sub-Hz linewidth and Hz-level frequency stability, an improvement of four and six orders of magnitude, respectively, compared to those of state-of-the-art tunable lasers. We also designed an asymmetric optical transmitter and receiver to eliminate measurement errors arising from modulation nonlinearity and multi-channel crosstalk. The resultant vector spectrometer exhibits an unprecedented frequency resolution of 2 Hz, surpassing the state-of-the-art by four orders of magnitude, over a 33-nm range. Through high-resolution vector analysis, we observed that group delay information enhances the separation capability of overlapping spectral lines by over 47%, significantly streamlining the real-time identification of diverse substances. Our technique fills the gap in optical spectrometers with resolutions below 10 kHz and enables vector measurement to embrace revolution in functionality.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Association of renin–angiotensin system inhibitors use with short- and long-term mortality in patients with aortic stenosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

PurposeThe present study aimed to investigate the association of renin–angiotensin system inhibitors (RASi) with short- and long-term mortality in patients with aortic stenosis (AS).MethodsA systematic search was performed in PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane library databases for relevant studies published before March 2022. Studies meeting the inclusion criteria were included to assess the effect of RASi on short-term (≤30 days) and long-term (≥1 year) mortality in patients with AS.ResultsA total of 11 studies were included in the meta-analysis. Our results demonstrated that RASi reduced short-term mortality (OR = 0.76, 95% CI 0.63–0.93, p = 0.008) after aortic valve replacement (AVR). Subgroup analysis revealed that RASi was still associated with lower short-term mortality after transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR); however, the association was relatively weak in patients who underwent surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR). For long-term mortality, the pooled OR was 1.04 (95% CI 0.88–1.24, p = 0.63) after sensitivity analysis in patients who did not undergo AVR. In addition, our study confirmed that RASi significantly reduced long-term mortality (OR = 0.57, 95% CI 0.44–0.74, p < 0.0001) in patients who underwent AVR. Subgroup analysis showed that both TAVR and SAVR groups treated with RASi had lower long-term mortality.ConclusionRenin–angiotensin system inhibitors did not change long-term mortality in AS patients who did not undergo AVR. However, RASi reduced short- and long-term mortality in patients who underwent AVR

Promoting clean energy adoption for enhanced food security in Africa

The research investigated the idea of clean energy and how it affects food security utilizing panel data from selected African nations. The World Development Indicators (WDI) for the years 2005 to 2022, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) were the sources of data. The study engaged the generalized method of moments (GMM), and the results showed that clean energy indicators have both beneficial and adverse effects on food security. This is crucial for policy toward the actualization of sustainable development goals of no poverty (SDG1), no hunger (SDG2), clean and affordable energy (SDG7), sustainable cities (SDG11), and climate action (SDG13). The findings of this study will benefit policymakers, governments, and organizations working toward promoting clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and food security in Africa. It will also benefit farmers and communities who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. By implementing the recommendations of the study, these stakeholders can work toward a more sustainable and secure future for Africa. Additionally, the environment and global efforts to mitigate climate change will also benefit from the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions

Clinical Observation of Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills Alone and Its Combination with Fugui Guanshitong Granules in the Treatment of Advanced Esophageal Cancer

Background Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has become an important option for patients with advanced esophageal cancer (EC) who are not able to undergo surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or with disease progression after chemotherapy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the application effects of Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills alone and its combination with Fugui Guanshitong Granules, in order to improve the quality of life of patients with advanced EC, and provide an effective TCM treatment schemes for EC. Objective To evaluate the effects of Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills alone and its combination with Fugui Guanshitong Granules on survival rate and quality of life of patients with EC after 6 weeks of treatment. Methods A total of 109 patients with advanced EC admitted to nine centers such as the First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of CM, Linzhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Jia County Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine from January 2020 to April 2021 were selected as the research objects and divided into the control group, experimental group 1 and experimental group 2 by block randomization method. The control group received Danggui Buxue Decoction and Guizhi Renshen Decoction Granules, the experimental group 1 received Fugui Guanshitong Granules and Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills, the experimental group 2 received Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills, with the course of 6 weeks in the above three groups. The survival rate after 6 weeks of treatment, Quality of Life (QOL) score, Karnofsky Performance Status (KPS) score, TCM syndrome score (dysphagia, poststernal chest pain, mucus vomiting, loss of appetite, fatigue) before and after treatment of the three groups were compared, and safety evaluation was conducted. Results After 6 weeks of treatment, the survival rate was 72.7% in the control group, 88.6% in the experimental group 1, and 86.8% in the experimental group 2, and there was no statistically significant difference in the survival rates among the three groups after 6 weeks of treatment (χ2=4.036, P=0.133). There was no interaction effect of group and time on QOL score, KPS score, and TCM syndrome score (Pinteraction>0.05). The main effect of group was not significant on QOL score, KPS score and TCM syndrome score (Pinterclass>0.05). The main effect of time was significant on QOL score, KPS score and TCM syndrome score (Ptime<0.05). There was an interaction effect of group and time on mucus vomiting score (Pinteraction<0.05), the scores of loss of appetite and mucus vomiting in the experimental group 2 were significantly lower than the experimental group 1 (P<0.05). Adverse events in the three groups included diarrhea, fever, dry mouth, sore throat, inability to eat, lung infection, without serious complications. There was no significant difference in the incidence of adverse events among the three groups (χ2=0.063, P=0.969) . Conclusion All three treatment schemes can relieve the clinical symptoms and improve the quality of life of the patients with advanced EC. Moreover, the efficacy of Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills alone on appetite loss and mucus vomiting was better than that of Danggui Buxue Decoction and Guizhi Renshen Decoction Granules and the combination of Dingxiang Guanshitong Hanhua Pills and Fugui Guanshitong Granules