Detaching and Boosting: Dual Engine for Scale-Invariant Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) in the self-supervised scenario has emerged as a promising method as it refrains from the requirement of ground truth depth. Despite continuous efforts, MDE is still sensitive to scale changes especially when all the training samples are from one single camera. Meanwhile, it deteriorates further since camera movement results in heavy coupling between the predicted depth and the scale change. In this paper, we present a scale-invariant approach for self-supervised MDE, in which scale-sensitive features (SSFs) are detached away while scale-invariant features (SIFs) are boosted further. To be specific, a simple but effective data augmentation by imitating the camera zooming process is proposed to detach SSFs, making the model robust to scale changes. Besides, a dynamic cross-attention module is designed to boost SIFs by fusing multi-scale cross-attention features adaptively. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the detaching and boosting strategies are mutually complementary in MDE and our approach achieves new State-of-The-Art performance against existing works from 0.097 to 0.090 w.r.t absolute relative error. The code will be made public soon.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL

Towards Semantic e-Science for Traditional Chinese Medicine

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent advances in Web and information technologies with the increasing decentralization of organizational structures have resulted in massive amounts of information resources and domain-specific services in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The massive volume and diversity of information and services available have made it difficult to achieve seamless and interoperable e-Science for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. Therefore, information integration and service coordination are two major challenges in e-Science for TCM. We still lack sophisticated approaches to integrate scientific data and services for TCM e-Science.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a comprehensive approach to build dynamic and extendable e-Science applications for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM based on semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The semantic e-Science infrastructure for TCM supports large-scale database integration and service coordination in a virtual organization. We use domain ontologies to integrate TCM database resources and services in a semantic cyberspace and deliver a semantically superior experience including browsing, searching, querying and knowledge discovering to users. We have developed a collection of semantic-based toolkits to facilitate TCM scientists and researchers in information sharing and collaborative research.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Semantic and knowledge-based techniques are suitable to knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. It's possible to build on-demand e-Science system for TCM based on existing semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The presented approach in the paper integrates heterogeneous distributed TCM databases and services, and provides scientists with semantically superior experience to support collaborative research in TCM discipline.</p

Gemcitabine enhances cell invasion via activating HAb18G/CD147-EGFR-pSTAT3 signaling

Pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal cancers, has very poor 5-year survival partly due to gemcitabine resistance. Recently, it was reported that chemotherapeutic agents may act as stressors to induce adaptive responses and to promote chemoresistance in cancer cells. During long-term drug treatment, the minority of cancer cells survive and acquire an epithelial-mesenchymal transition phenotype with increased chemo-resistance and metastasis. However, the short-term response of most cancer cells remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the short-term response of pancreatic cancer cells to gemcitabine stress and to explore the corresponding mechanism. Our results showed that gemcitabine treatment for 24 hours enhanced pancreatic cancer cell invasion. In gemcitabine-treated cells, HAb18G/CD147 was up-regulated; and HAb18G/CD147 down-regulation or inhibition attenuated gemcitabine-enhanced invasion. Mechanistically, HAb18G/CD147 promoted gemcitabine-enhanced invasion by activating the EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor)-STAT3 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 3) signaling pathway. Inhibition of EGFR-STAT3 signaling counteracted gemcitabine-enhanced invasion, and which relied on HAb18G/CD147 levels. In pancreatic cancer tissues, EGFR was highly expressed and positively correlated with HAb18G/CD147. These data indicate that pancreatic cancer cells enhance cell invasion via activating HAb18G/CD147-EGFR-pSTAT3 signaling. Our findings suggest that inhibiting HAb18G/CD147 is a potential strategy for overcoming drug stress-associated resistance in pancreatic cancer

Targeted Methotrexate Prodrug Conjugated With Heptamethine Cyanine Dye Improving Chemotherapy and Monitoring Itself Activating by Dual-Modal Imaging

Theranostic prodrug plays a vital role in reducing the side effects and evaluating the therapeutic efficiency of prodrug in vivo. In particular, small conjugate-based theranostic prodrugs have attracted much attention because of their clear and simple structures. In this work, we synthesized a novel tumor-targeting and glutathione-activated conjugate-based theranostic prodrug (Cy-SS-MTX). The prodrug was constructed by conjugating Cy (IR780) to methotrexate (MTX) via a disulfide bond. The Cy dye as targeting molecule bring prodrug to cancer cells and then the prodrug was activated by the high levels of glutathione in tumor. In cell experiments, the results showed the excellent ability of prodrug to target tumor. Meanwhile, the prodrug apparently improved the anti-tumor ability and hugely reduced toxicity of free MTX on normal cells. Furthermore, owing to intramolecular charge transfer between Cy and MTX, the Cy structure in the prodrug showed an absorption peak at 654 nm in UV-Vis spectroscopy. However, when the disulfide bond of prodrug was broken by glutathione, a new UV-Vis absorption peak at 802 nm of Cy structure in prodrug was arised. At the same time, the fluorescence (FL) emission peak at 750 nm (excitation at 640 nm) would turn into 808 nm (excitation at 745 nm). What's more, the photoacoustic (PA) signal with excitation at 680 and 808 nm also changed. The experimental results in vivo showed that the prodrug has been successfully utilized for real-timely tracking MTX activation by FL and PA imaging upon near infrared laser excitation and cancer targeting therapy. Our studies further encourage application of small conjugate-based prodrug based on tumor-targeted heptamethine cyanine dye as reporter group for targeted therapy and real-timely tracking activation of drug

Defeat Your Enemy Hiding Behind Public WiFi:WiGuard Can Protect Your Sensitive information from CSI-based Attack

Channel state information (CSI) has been recently shown to be useful in performing security attacks in public WiFi environments. By analyzing how CSI is affected by finger motions, CSI-based attacks can effectively reconstruct text-based passwords and locking patterns. This paper presents WiGuard, a novel system to protect sensitive on-screen input information in a public place. Our approach carefully exploits WiFi channel interference to introduce noise to attacker’s CSI measurements to reduce the success rate of CSI-based attacks. Our approach automatically detects when a CSI-based attack happens. We evaluate our approach by applying it to protect text-based passwords and pattern locks on mobile devices. Experimental results show that our approach is able to reduce the success rate of CSI-based attacks from 92–42% for text-based passwords and from 82–22% for pattern lock

Structure, optical, and magnetic properties of sputtered manganese and nitrogen-codoped ZnOZnO films

To realize the hole-mediated ferromagnetism, manganese and nitrogen-codoped ZnOZnO (Zn1−xMnxO:N)(Zn1−xMnxO:N) films were prepared on sapphire (0001)(0001) by reactive radio-frequency (rf) magnetron sputtering from Zn0.97Mn0.03OZn0.97Mn0.03O ceramic targets using N2N2 gas. X-ray photon spectra reveal that the doped Mn ions are mainly in divalent states and the coexistence of O–ZnO–Zn and N–ZnN–Zn bonds in the films. According to the absorption spectra, the band gap of Zn0.97Mn0.03O:NZn0.97Mn0.03O:N films is about 3.15 eV3.15eV, which is slightly lower than that of ZnOZnO films (3.20 eV)(3.20eV). Compared with Zn0.97Mn0.03OZn0.97Mn0.03O films, ferromagnetic behavior of Zn0.97Mn0.03O:NZn0.97Mn0.03O:N films were significantly changed with a coercivity of about 70 Oe70Oe, a saturation magnetization of 0.92 μB/Mn2+0.92μB∕Mn2+ and a remanance over 0.15 μB/Mn2+0.15μB∕Mn2+ at 300 K300K, while at 10 K10K, they increased to be about 110 Oe110Oe, 1.05 μB/Mn2+1.05μB∕Mn2+ and 0.23 μB/Mn2+0.23μB∕Mn2+, respectively. However, rapid thermal annealing treatment in pure oxygen results in a significant decrease on the magnetic properties of the films.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87789/2/082111_1.pd

Succession in soil and vegetation caused by coastal embankment in southern Laizhou Bay, China-Flourish or degradation?

Coastal wetland degradation and loss caused by intensive human activities, such as land reclamation and embankment, is a serious environmental problem. In this paper, we studied the succession of soil and vegetation in a coastal wetland dominated by Chinese tamarisk (Tamarix chinensis) community after the construction of a seawall. When the intertidal wetland became supratidal wetland, soil salinity firstly decreased and the gradient from sea to land became weaker. Next, the area of vegetation and plant species diversity increased, and the phenomenon of plant zonation disappeared. We reasoned that the rooted cause of soil and vegetation succession was the change in hydrological environment. Moreover, a Drivers-Pressures-State-Impacts-Response (DPSIR) model was used to analyze the relationship between human activities and coastal wetland. Using this model, we presented the potential problems that might arise in this wetland and predicted that vegetation flourishing was only a short term phenomenon but wetland degradation was the final consequences due to excessive exploitation of groundwater. At last, we proposed a few of operable measures as responses to these potential problems from the perspective of coastal management. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

VMGuards:A Novel Virtual Machine Based Code Protection System with VM Security as the First Class Design Concern

Process-level virtual machine (PVM) based code obfuscation is a viable means for protecting software against runtime code tampering and unauthorized code reverse engineering. PVM-based approaches rely on a VM to determine how instructions of the protected code region are scheduled and executed. Therefore, it is crucial to protect the VM against runtime code tampering that alters the instructions and behavior of the VM. This paper presents VMGuards, a novel PVM-based code protection system that puts the security of VM as the first class design concern. Our approach advances prior work by promoting security of the VM as the first class design constraint. We achieve this by introducing two new instruction sets to protect the internal implementations of critical code segments and the host runtime environment where the VM runs in. Our new instruction sets not only have an identical code structure as standard virtual instructions, but also provide additional information to allow the VM to check whether the critical internal implementation or the runtime environment is affected. We evaluate our approach by using a set of real-life applications. Experimental results show that our approach provides stronger and more fine-grained protection when compared to the state-of-the-art with little extra overhead