The Framework for the Prediction of the Critical Turning Period for Outbreak of COVID-19 Spread in China based on the iSEIR Model

The goal of this study is to establish a general framework for predicting the so-called critical Turning Period in an infectious disease epidemic such as the COVID-19 outbreak in China early this year. This framework enabled a timely prediction of the turning period when applied to Wuhan COVID-19 epidemic and informed the relevant authority for taking appropriate and timely actions to control the epidemic. It is expected to provide insightful information on turning period for the world's current battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. The underlying mathematical model in our framework is the individual Susceptible-Exposed- Infective-Removed (iSEIR) model, which is a set of differential equations extending the classic SEIR model. We used the observed daily cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan from February 6 to 10, 2020 as the input to the iSEIR model and were able to generate the trajectory of COVID-19 cases dynamics for the following days at midnight of February 10 based on the updated model, from which we predicted that the turning period of CIVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan would arrive within one week after February 14. This prediction turned to be timely and accurate, providing adequate time for the government, hospitals, essential industry sectors and services to meet peak demands and to prepare aftermath planning. Our study also supports the observed effectiveness on flatting the epidemic curve by decisively imposing the Lockdown and Isolation Control Program in Wuhan since January 23, 2020. The Wuhan experience provides an exemplary lesson for the whole world to learn in combating COVID-19.Comment: 24 paages, 9 figures, 10 table

Optimal integration of a hybrid solar-battery power source into smart home nanogrid with plug-in electric vehicle

Hybrid solar-battery power source is essential in the nexus of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV), renewables, and smart building. This paper devises an optimization framework for efficient energy management and components sizing of a single smart home with home battery, PEV, and potovoltatic (PV) arrays. We seek to maximize the home economy, while satisfying home power demand and PEV driving. Based on the structure and system models of the smart home nanogrid, a convex programming (CP) problem is formulated to rapidly and efficiently optimize both the control decision and parameters of the home battery energy storage system (BESS). Considering different time horizons of optimization, home BESS prices, types and control modes of PEVs, the parameters of home BESS and electric cost are systematically investigated. Based on the developed CP control law in home to vehicle (H2V) mode and vehicle to home (V2H) mode, the home with BESS does not buy electric energy from the grid during the electric price's peak periods

Human motion data refinement unitizing structural sparsity and spatial-temporal information

Human motion capture techniques (MOCAP) are widely applied in many areas such as computer vision, computer animation, digital effect and virtual reality. Even with professional MOCAP system, the acquired motion data still always contains noise and outliers, which highlights the need for the essential motion refinement methods. In recent years, many approaches for motion refinement have been developed, including signal processing based methods, sparse coding based methods and low-rank matrix completion based methods. However, motion refinement is still a challenging task due to the complexity and diversity of human motion. In this paper, we propose a data-driven-based human motion refinement approach by exploiting the structural sparsity and spatio-temporal information embedded in motion data. First of all, a human partial model is applied to replace the entire pose model for a better feature representation to exploit the abundant local body posture. Then, a dictionary learning which is for special task of motion refinement is designed and applied in parallel. Meanwhile, the objective function is derived by taking the statistical and locality property of motion data into account. Compared with several state-of-art motion refine methods, the experimental result demonstrates that our approach outperforms the competitors

Influence of construction technology on the retroreflective performance of two-component traffic marking

The construction technology of traffic marking has a significant influence on its retroreflective performance. To study the effect of different construction processes on the service performance of traffic markings, two-component spraying paint and two different glass beads were chosen to produce traffic markings that were prepared by single-layer or double-layer spraying, as well as once and twice surface spraying of glass beads. The effects of glass bead coating, spraying times of glass beads and paints on the surface morphology and retroreflective performance of traffic markings were investigated, as well as the variation of the retroreflective coefficient (RC) at the early and middle stages. The results indicated that double-layer spraying was more effective than single spraying. The coated glass beads would decrease the initial RC of the markings, but improved their long-term service performance. The TP-21C has the finest overall retroreflective performance and the lower construction complexity

Rapid and non-destructive determination of tea polyphenols content in Chongzhou new loquat tea lines based on near infrared spectroscopy

Abstract Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) combined with multiple algorithms was used to determinate the tea polyphenols content in Chongzhou new loquat tea lines quickly and nondestructively. Samples of 26 Chongzhou new loquat tea lines were collected, then scanning NIRS, pretreating spectral noise information, screening characteristic spectral intervals by backward interval partial least squares, proceeding principal component analysis. Finally, the artificial neural network (BP-ANN) method with three kinds of transfer functions was applied to establish models. The best pretreated method was the combination of standard normal variation (SNV) and first derivative, and the characteristic spectral regions selected were 4381.5-4755.6 cm–1, 4759.5-5133.6 cm–1, 6266.6-6637.8 cm–1 and 7389.9-7760.2 cm–1, respectively. The cumulative contribution rate of the first three principal components of the selected characteristic spectra was 95.24%. When the BP-ANN calibration set model was established with the logistic function, NIRS model had the best results, whose root mean square error and determination coefficient of the cross validation were 0.975 and 0.372%, respectively. The root mean square error and the determination coefficient of the prediction set model were 0.962 and 0.400%, respectively. The results showed NIRS can predict the tea polyphenols content in Chongzhou new loquat tea lines quickly and accurately

Overlapping Mechanisms of Peripheral Nerve Regeneration and Angiogenesis Following Sciatic Nerve Transection

Peripheral nervous system owns the ability of self-regeneration, mainly in its regenerative microenvironment including vascular network reconstruction. More recently, more attentions have been given to the close relationship between tissue regeneration and angiogenesis. To explore the overlap of molecular mechanisms and key regulation molecules between peripheral nerve regeneration and angiogenesis post peripheral nerve injury, integrative and bioinformatic analysis was carried out for microarray data of proximal stumps after sciatic nerve transection in SD rats. Nerve regeneration and angiogenesis were activated at 1 day immediately after sciatic nerve transection simultaneously. The more obvious changes of transcription regulators and canonical pathways suggested a phase transition between 1 and 4 days of both nerve regeneration and angiogenesis after sciatic nerve transection. Furthermore, 16 differentially expressed genes participated in significant biological processes of both nerve regeneration and angiogenesis, a few of which were validated by qPCR and immunofluorescent staining. It was demonstrated that STAT3, EPHB3, and Cdc42 co-expressed in Schwann cells and vascular endothelial cells to play a key role in regulation of nerve regeneration and angiogenesis simultaneously response to sciatic nerve transection. We provide a framework for understanding biological processes and precise molecular correlations between peripheral nerve regeneration and angiogenesis after peripheral nerve transection. Our work serves as an experimental basis and a valuable resource to further understand molecular mechanisms that define nerve injury-induced micro-environmental variation for achieving desired peripheral nerve regeneration

Huber- L1 -based non-isometric surface registration

© 2019, The Author(s). Non-isometric surface registration is an important task in computer graphics and computer vision. It, however, remains challenging to deal with noise from scanned data and distortion from transformation. In this paper, we propose a Huber-L 1 -based non-isometric surface registration and solve it by the alternating direction method of multipliers. With a Huber-L 1 -regularized model constrained on the transformation variation and position difference, our method is robust to noise and produces piecewise smooth results while still preserving fine details on the target. The introduced as-similar-as-possible energy is able to handle different size of shapes with little stretching distortion. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that our method is more accurate and robust to noise in comparison with the state-of-the-arts

Consistent as-similar-as-possible non-isometric surface registration

© 2017 The Author(s)Non-isometric surface registration, aiming to align two surfaces with different sizes and details, has been widely used in computer animation industry. Various existing surface registration approaches have been proposed for accurate template fitting; nevertheless, two challenges remain. One is how to avoid the mesh distortion and fold over of surfaces during transformation. The other is how to reduce the amount of landmarks that have to be specified manually. To tackle these challenges simultaneously, we propose a consistent as-similar-as-possible (CASAP) surface registration approach. With a novel defined energy, it not only achieves the consistent discretization for the surfaces to produce accurate result, but also requires a small number of landmarks with little user effort only. Besides, CASAP is constrained as-similar-as-possible so that angles of triangle meshes are preserved and local scales are allowed to change. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of CASAP in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches

Fast character modeling with sketch-based PDE surfaces

© 2020, The Author(s). Virtual characters are 3D geometric models of characters. They have a lot of applications in multimedia. In this paper, we propose a new physics-based deformation method and efficient character modelling framework for creation of detailed 3D virtual character models. Our proposed physics-based deformation method uses PDE surfaces. Here PDE is the abbreviation of Partial Differential Equation, and PDE surfaces are defined as sculpting force-driven shape representations of interpolation surfaces. Interpolation surfaces are obtained by interpolating key cross-section profile curves and the sculpting force-driven shape representation uses an analytical solution to a vector-valued partial differential equation involving sculpting forces to quickly obtain deformed shapes. Our proposed character modelling framework consists of global modeling and local modeling. The global modeling is also called model building, which is a process of creating a whole character model quickly with sketch-guided and template-based modeling techniques. The local modeling produces local details efficiently to improve the realism of the created character model with four shape manipulation techniques. The sketch-guided global modeling generates a character model from three different levels of sketched profile curves called primary, secondary and key cross-section curves in three orthographic views. The template-based global modeling obtains a new character model by deforming a template model to match the three different levels of profile curves. Four shape manipulation techniques for local modeling are investigated and integrated into the new modelling framework. They include: partial differential equation-based shape manipulation, generalized elliptic curve-driven shape manipulation, sketch assisted shape manipulation, and template-based shape manipulation. These new local modeling techniques have both global and local shape control functions and are efficient in local shape manipulation. The final character models are represented with a collection of surfaces, which are modeled with two types of geometric entities: generalized elliptic curves (GECs) and partial differential equation-based surfaces. Our experiments indicate that the proposed modeling approach can build detailed and realistic character models easily and quickly