Compressive sensing based velocity estimation in video data

This paper considers the use of compressive sensing based algorithms for velocity estimation of moving vehicles. The procedure is based on sparse reconstruction algorithms combined with time-frequency analysis applied to video data. This algorithm provides an accurate estimation of object's velocity even in the case of a very reduced number of available video frames. The influence of crucial parameters is analysed for different types of moving vehicles.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Gene therapy of malignant glioma with retroviral vectors and tumor-infiltrating progenitor cells

Gene therapy as a therapeutic strategy in the treatment of human gliomas is limited by the efficacy of gene transfer and intratumoral distribution of viral vectors. The major goals of this study were to enhance the gene transfer to glioma cells in vivo by using lentiviral vectors and to improve intratumoral distribution by selecting migratory progenitor cells that could function as packaging cells for the viral vectors. Therefore, the final goal was to establish tumor infiltrating packaging cells that release viral vectors within glioma in vivo. Lentiviral vectors were chosen to deliver genes into glioma cells. In contrast to currently used retroviral vectors, they transduce quiescent as well as mitotic cells. This is of major importance as within a defined treatment window, the majority of tumor cells are not mitotically active. However, lentiviral vectors can also infect normal brain cells. To define vectors with a specific tropism for glioma cells, lentiviral vectors pseudotyped with two different glycoproteins were used. Vectors pseudotyped with glycoproteins of the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV-GP) mediated efficient and specific transduction of rat glioma cells in vitro and in vivo, whereas vectors pseudotyped with the glycoproteins of the vesicular stomatatitis virus (VSV-G) preferentially transduced normal brain cells [Miletic et al., 2004]. Bone marrow derived progenitor cells were isolated to establish the tumor-infiltrating cells (BM-TICs) that could also serve as packaging cells. BM-TICs have a high passaging capacity in vitro, which is necessary for genetic modification and large scale production in the clinic. They were also found to show specific migration towards and into malignant glioma in vivo. In a therapeutic approach using BM-TICs stably expressing a suicide gene, an efficient therapeutic effect was demonstrated. The modified cells were also detected in vivo by non-invasive positron emission tomography (PET) and therapeutic outcome was followed-up by imaging methods and correlated with histopathology [Miletic et al., 2007]. To test packaging capabilities of BMTICs, the cells were modified with packaging constructs for retroviral LCMV-GP pseudotypes (BM-TIPCs). BM-TIPCs continuously produced retroviral vector particles for several weeks. Upon injection into experimental rat glioma, these cells migrated and were widely distributed within the tumor. Furthermore, released vector particles transduced glioma cells in solid as well as border areas [Fischer, Miletic et al., 2007]. In conclusion, the presented packaging system is highly attractive for future therapeutic applications in human glioblastoma especially in conjunction with an imaging-guided approach

A piezoelectric Euler-Bernoulli beam with dynamic boundary control: stability and dissipative FEM

We present a mathematical and numerical analysis on a control model for the time evolution of a multi-layered piezoelectric cantilever with tip mass and moment of inertia, as developed by Kugi and Thull [31]. This closed-loop control system consists of the inhomogeneous Euler-Bernoulli beam equation coupled to an ODE system that is designed to track both the position and angle of the tip mass for a given reference trajectory. This dynamic controller only employs first order spatial derivatives, in order to make the system technically realizable with piezoelectric sensors. From the literature it is known that it is asymptotically stable [31]. But in a refined analysis we first prove that this system is not exponentially stable. In the second part of this paper, we construct a dissipative finite element method, based on piecewise cubic Hermitian shape functions and a Crank-Nicolson time discretization. For both the spatial semi-discretization and the full x - t-discretization we prove that the numerical method is structure preserving, i.e. it dissipates energy, analogous to the continuous case. Finally, we derive error bounds for both cases and illustrate the predicted convergence rates in a simulation example

Plagiarism frenzy in Serbia: In deep mud

A spate of plagiarism scandals has been shaking Serbia’s political and university life, with issues being raised about political parties’ and public officials’ malpractices in obtaining PhD degrees, and about the integrity of Serbian higher education in general

TALC-sef, Un corpus étiqueté de traductions littéraires en serbe, anglais et français

International audienceLe corpus TALC-sef (TAgged Literary Corpus in Serbian, English, French) est un corpus parallèle d'ouvrages littéraires en serbe, anglais et français, étiquetés en parties du discours et librement consultables via une interface en ligne. Il a été constitué par l'Université d'Arras, en collaboration avec l'Université Lille 3 et l'Université de Belgrade, dans une perspective d'études comparées en stylistique et linguistique. Le corpus TALC-sef représente au total plus de 2 millions de mots, il intègre notamment un corpus étiqueté, corrigé manuellement pour la langue serbe, de 150 000 mots. Dans cet article, nous présentons le mode de constitution du corpus parallèle dans son ensemble, puis nous nous attachons plus spécifiquement à l'élaboration du sous-corpus serbe étiqueté. Nous détaillons les choix linguistiques et techniques sous-jacents à la constitution de ce sous-corpus, qui vient compléter l'offre existante pour la linguistique sur corpus en serbe: à ce jour, le seul corpus librement disponible consiste en une traduction du roman 1984 de G. Orwell (100 000 mots), alors que nous proposons un corpus d'œuvres écrites à l'origine en Serbe, de 150 000 mots. La constitution de ce sous-corpus a permis l'élaboration de modèles d'étiquetage automatique pour trois étiqueteurs syntaxiques, dont Treetagger, TnT et BTagger, le plus efficace d'entre eux. Enfin, nous présentons les perspectives d'évolution du corpus existant, en termes d'enrichissement des annotations syntaxiques (analyses en dépendance en parallèle sur les trois langues), ainsi que les apports d'un tel corpus parallèle étiqueté pour la linguistique du français

THE REGIONAL STRUCTURE OF SERBIA

This paper approaches some of the characteristics of the regional development of Serbia, from the perspective of two models of territorial organization: one is governmental (administrative and statistical), and the other is functional. The imbalances in the levels of development of various territorial units of Serbia (regional disproportions) are the consequence of many structural disharmonies, material limitations, and problems with populationstructure, during many years, all worsened by political and economic events at the end of the twentieth century. Also, in this paper we point out the main characteristics of undeveloped regions, the criteria with which we can define them, and a typology of the municipalities inside each such region

Mise au point d'une méthode d'annotation morphosyntaxique fine du serbe

International audienceDevelopping a method for detailed morphosyntactic tagging of Serbian This paper presents an experience in detailed morphosyntactic tagging of the Serbian subcorpus of the parallel Serbian-French-English ParCoLab corpus. We enriched an existing POS annotation with finer-grained morphosyntactic properties in order to prepare the corpus for subsequent parsing stages. We compared three approaches: 1) manual annotation; 2) pre-annotation with a tagger trained on Croatian, followed by manual correction; 3) retraining the model on a small validated sample of the corpus (20K tokens), followed by automatic annotation and manual correction. The Croatian model maintains its global stability when applied to Serbian texts, but due to the differences between the two tagsets, important manual interventions were still required. A new model was trained on a validated sample of the corpus: it has the same accuracy as the existing model, but the observed acceleration of the manual correction confirms that it is better suited to the task than the first one. MOTS-CLES : Annotation morphosyntaxique, corpus d'entraînement, serbe.Cet article présente une expérience d'annotation morphosyntaxique fine du volet serbe du corpus parallèle ParCoLab (corpus serbe-français-anglais). Elle a consisté à enrichir une annotation existante en parties du discours avec des traits morphosyntaxiques fins, afin de préparer une étape ultérieure de parsing. Nous avons comparé trois approches : 1) annotation manuelle ; 2) pré-annotation avec un étiqueteur entraîné sur le croate suivie d'une correction manuelle ; 3) ré-entraînement de l'outil sur un petit échantillon validé du corpus, suivi de l'annotation automatique et de la correction manuelle. Le modèle croate maintient une stabilité globale en passant au serbe, mais les différences entre les deux jeux d'étiquettes exigent des interventions manuelles importantes. Le modèle ré-entraîné sur un échantillon de taille limité (20K tokens) atteint la même exactitude que le modèle existant et le gain de temps observé montre que cette méthode optimise la phase de correction

A case of a femoral neck tumor: painless osteoid osteoma?

We report herein a unique, previously unreported, successful outcome for a patient untreated for a tumor affecting a femoral neck considered as painless osteoid osteoma. The lesion was detected by chance at examination for groin injury. Diagnosis was based on the plain radiography, bone scan, and computed tomography. The results of the full blood examination were normal. Neither pharmacomedical nor surgical treatments were given. Two years later, radiological resolution of the lesion was revealed. The patient was observed between 1995 and 2002. We conclude that painless osteoid osteoma should be included in the differential diagnosis of asymptomatic femoral neck lesions. Our case suggests that osteoid osteoma has a tendency to regress over time and that conservative management appears to be a reliable option.</p

Responses of substantia gelatinosa neurons to putative neurotransmitters in an in vitro preparation of the adult rat spinal cord

Extracellular recordings were performed from neurons of the substantia gelatinosa (SG) in an in vitro preparation obtained from the spinal cord of adult rats. About 40% of neurons were spontaneously active. They could be synaptically influenced by low and high threshold fiber input entering the spinal cord through dorsal and ventral and ventral roots. Repetitive low threshold stimulation led to a transient increase in activity of a number of these neurons, whereas high intensity stimulation predominantly reduced excitability. The majority of non-spontaneously active neurons responded to an increase of stimulus intensity covariantly with an increase in firing rate. The excitatory effect of phoretically administeredl-glutamate as well as synaptically induced and spontaneous activity was reduced or abolished by phoretically administered GABA, glycine or the enkephalin-analogued-Ala2-d-Leu5-enkephalin. The actions of the enkephalin analogue were blocked by phoretically applied naloxone. The findings are consistent with the notion from in vivo investigations of a structurally and functionally heterogeneous population of neurons which display a responsiveness to microtopically applied putative neurotransmitters resembling dorsal horn neurons in deeper layers

Onco-miR-155 targets SHIP1 to promote TNFalpha-dependent growth of B cell lymphomas.

Non-coding microRNAs (miRs) are a vital component of post-transcriptional modulation of protein expression and, like coding mRNAs harbour oncogenic properties. However, the mechanisms governing miR expression and the identity of the affected transcripts remain poorly understood. Here we identify the inositol phosphatase SHIP1 as a bonafide target of the oncogenic miR-155. We demonstrate that in diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) elevated levels of miR-155, and consequent diminished SHIP1 expression are the result of autocrine stimulation by the pro-inflammatory cytokine tumour necrosis factor a (TNFalpha). Anti-TNFalpha regimen such as eternacept or infliximab were sufficient to reduce miR-155 levels and restored SHIP1 expression in DLBCL cells with an accompanying reduction in cell proliferation. Furthermore, we observed a substantial decrease in tumour burden in DLBCL xenografts in response to eternacept. These findings strongly support the concept that cytokine-regulated miRs can function as a crucial link between inflammation and cancer, and illustrate the feasibility of anti-TNFalpha therapy as a novel and immediately accessible (co)treatment for DLBCL