Self-positioning Point-based Transformer for Point Cloud Understanding

Transformers have shown superior performance on various computer vision tasks with their capabilities to capture long-range dependencies. Despite the success, it is challenging to directly apply Transformers on point clouds due to their quadratic cost in the number of points. In this paper, we present a Self-Positioning point-based Transformer (SPoTr), which is designed to capture both local and global shape contexts with reduced complexity. Specifically, this architecture consists of local self-attention and self-positioning point-based global cross-attention. The self-positioning points, adaptively located based on the input shape, consider both spatial and semantic information with disentangled attention to improve expressive power. With the self-positioning points, we propose a novel global cross-attention mechanism for point clouds, which improves the scalability of global self-attention by allowing the attention module to compute attention weights with only a small set of self-positioning points. Experiments show the effectiveness of SPoTr on three point cloud tasks such as shape classification, part segmentation, and scene segmentation. In particular, our proposed model achieves an accuracy gain of 2.6% over the previous best models on shape classification with ScanObjectNN. We also provide qualitative analyses to demonstrate the interpretability of self-positioning points. The code of SPoTr is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/SPoTr.Comment: Accepted paper at CVPR 202

Direct Reprogramming of Rat Neural Precursor Cells and Fibroblasts into Pluripotent Stem Cells

Background: Given the usefulness of rats as an experimental system, an efficient method for generating rat induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells would provide researchers with a powerful tool for studying human physiology and disease. Here, we report direct reprogramming of rat neural precursor (NP) cells and rat embryonic fibroblasts (REF) into iPS cells by retroviral transduction using either three (Oct3/4, Sox2, and Klf4), four (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc), or five (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc, and Nanog) genes. Methodology and Principal Findings: iPS cells were generated from both NP and REF using only three (Oct3/4, Sox2, and Klf4) genes without c-Myc. Two factors were found to be critical for efficient derivation and maintenance of rat iPS cells: the use of rat instead of mouse feeders, and the use of small molecules specifically inhibiting mitogen-activated protein kinase and glycogen synthase kinase 3 pathways. In contrast, introduction of embryonic stem cell (ESC) extracts induced partial reprogramming, but failed to generate iPS cells. However, when combined with retroviral transduction, this method generated iPS cells with significantly higher efficiency. Morphology, gene expression, and epigenetic status confirmed that these rat iPS cells exhibited ESC-like properties, including the ability to differentiate into all three germ layers both in vitro and in teratomas. In particular, we found that these rat iPS cells could differentiate to midbrain-like dopamine neurons with a high efficiency. Conclusions/Significance: Given the usefulness of rats as an experimental system, our optimized method would be useful for generating rat iPS cells from diverse tissues and provide researchers with a powerful tool for studying human physiology and disease

Measurement and Comparison of Wi-Fi and Super Wi-Fi Indoor Propagation Characteristics in a Multi-Floored Building

Super Wi-Fi is a Wi-Fi-like service exploiting TV white space (WS) which is expected to achieve larger coverage than today???s Wi-Fi thanks to its superior propagation characteristics. Super Wi-Fi has been materialized as an international standard, IEEE 802.11af, targeting indoor and outdoor applications, and is undergoing worldwide field tests. This paper demonstrates the true potential of indoor Super Wi-Fi, by experimentally comparing the signal propagation characteristics of Super WiFi and Wi-Fi in the same indoor environment. Specifically, we measured the wall and floor attenuation factors and the pathloss distribution at 770 MHz, 2.401 GHz, and 5.540 GHz, and predicted the downlink capacity of Wi-Fi and Super Wi-Fi. The experimental results have revealed that TVWS signals can penetrate up to two floors above and below, whereas Wi-Fi signals experience significant path loss even through a single floor. It has been also shown that Super Wi-Fi mitigates shaded regions of Wi-Fi by providing almost-homogeneous data rates within its coverage, performs comparable to Wi-Fi utilizing less bandwidth, and always achieves better spectral efficiency than Wi-Fi. The observed phenomena imply that Super Wi-Fi is suitable for indoor applications and has the potential of extending horizontal and vertical coverage of today???s Wi-Fi.clos

Robust harmonic field based tooth segmentation in real-life noisy scanned mesh

Dental segmentation plays an important role in prosthetic dentistry such as crowns, implants and even orthodontics. Since people have different dental structures, it is hard to make a general dental segmentation model. Recently, there are only a few studies which try to tackle this problem. In this paper, we propose simple and intuitive algorithms for harmonic field based dental segmentation method to provide robustness for clinical dental mesh data. Our model includes additional grounds to gum, a pair of different Dirichlet boundary conditions, and convex segmentation for post-processing. Our data is generated for clinical usage and therefore has many noise, holes, and crowns. Moreover, some meshes have abraded teeth which deter the performance of harmonic field due to its dramatic gradient change. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method and experiments are the first that deals with real clinical data containing noise and fragmented areas. We evaluate the results qualitatively and quantitatively to demonstrate the performance of the model. The model separates teeth from gum and other teeth very accurately. We use intersection over union (IoU) to calculate the overlap ratio between tooth. Moreover, human evaluation is used for measuring and comparing the performance of our segmentation model to other models. We compare the segmentation results of a baseline model and our model. Ablation study shows that our model improves the segmentation performance. Our model outperforms the baseline model at the expanse of some overlap which can be ignored.N

Scaling behavior of the degree of circular polarization of surface plasmon polariton

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) carry transverse optical spin within the evanescent field, which has enabled the demonstration of various chiral light-matter interactions in classical and quantum systems. To achieve high spin selectivity in the interactions, the elliptical polarization of the evanescent field should be made circular, but the engineering principle of the degree of circular polarization (DOCP) of SPPs has been lacking. In this study, we theoretically and numerically investigate the scaling behavior of the DOCP of the SPP field with respect to the modal effective refractive index (neff). The DOCP of the SPP field exhibits power-law scalability to the effective refractive index in the 1D layered system, regardless of the material, structural geometry, and excitation wavelength. The power-law scalability is also confirmed in 2D waveguide structures for in-plane and out-of-plane SPP fields, but the scaling exponents vary depending on the distance from the waveguide boundaries by the reduced symmetry of the given system. Due to Lorentz reciprocity, the power-law scalability can be extended to the coupling directionality of chiral emitters towards the plasmonic waveguide. To this end, we propose a chiral photonic platform for enhanced light-valley interaction, which utilizes simultaneous enhancement of the DOCP and coupling directionality. An incident SPP can excite a chiral emitter with high spin selectivity that unidirectionally couples the emitted light into the plasmonic waveguide depending on the valley polarization of excitons in 2D material. Our work provides a ground rule for designing chiral nanophotonic systems and paves the way for the exploration of scale-free phenomena of electromagnetic waves