Contrastive Learning based Semantic Communication for Wireless Image Transmission

Recently, semantic communication has been widely applied in wireless image transmission systems as it can prioritize the preservation of meaningful semantic information in images over the accuracy of transmitted symbols, leading to improved communication efficiency. However, existing semantic communication approaches still face limitations in achieving considerable inference performance in downstream AI tasks like image recognition, or balancing the inference performance with the quality of the reconstructed image at the receiver. Therefore, this paper proposes a contrastive learning (CL)-based semantic communication approach to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we regard the image corruption during transmission as a form of data augmentation in CL and leverage CL to reduce the semantic distance between the original and the corrupted reconstruction while maintaining the semantic distance among irrelevant images for better discrimination in downstream tasks. Moreover, we design a two-stage training procedure and the corresponding loss functions for jointly optimizing the semantic encoder and decoder to achieve a good trade-off between the performance of image recognition in the downstream task and reconstructed quality. Simulations are finally conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the competitive approaches. In particular, the proposed method can achieve up to 56\% accuracy gain on the CIFAR10 dataset when the bandwidth compression ratio is 1/48

Recent Advances in Electrospun Sustainable Composites for Biomedical, Environmental, Energy, and Packaging Applications.

Electrospinning has gained constant enthusiasm and wide interest as a novel sustainable material processing technique due to its ease of operation and wide adaptability for fabricating eco-friendly fibers on a nanoscale. In addition, the device working parameters, spinning solution properties, and the environmental factors can have a significant effect on the fibers\u27 morphology during electrospinning. This review summarizes the newly developed principles and influence factors for electrospinning technology in the past five years, including these factors\u27 interactions with the electrospinning mechanism as well as its most recent applications of electrospun natural or sustainable composite materials in biology, environmental protection, energy, and food packaging materials

A Simple Graphene NH₃ Gas Sensor via Laser Direct Writing.

Ammonia gas sensors are very essential in many industries and everyday life. However, their complicated fabrication process, severe environmental fabrication requirements and desorption of residual ammonia molecules result in high cost and hinder their market acceptance. Here, laser direct writing is used to fabricate three parallel porous 3D graphene lines on a polyimide (PI) tape to simply construct an ammonia gas sensor. The middle one works as an ammonia sensing element and the other two on both sides work as heaters to improve the desorption performance of the sensing element to ammonia gas molecules. The graphene lines were characterized by scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. The response and recovery time of the sensor without heating are 214 s and 222 s with a sensitivity of 0.087% ppm-1 for sensing 75 ppm ammonia gas, respectively. The experimental results prove that under the optimized heating temperature of about 70 °C the heaters successfully help implement complete desorption of residual NH₃ showing a good sensitivity and cyclic stability

Immobilizing Ni (II)-Exchanged Heteropolyacids on Silica as Catalysts for Acid-Catalyzed Esterification Reactions

Biodiesel was synthesized from oleic acid using Ni (II)-exchanged heteropolyacids immobilized on silica (Ni0.5H3SiW / SiO2 ) as a solid acid catalyst. Based on detailed analyses of FT-IR, XRD, TG and SEM, the structural, surface and thermal stability of Ni0.5H3SiW / SiO2 were investigated. Obtained results demonstrated that the Keggin structure was well in the immobilization process and possess a high thermal stability. Various esterification reaction conditions and reusability of catalyst were studied. High oleic acid conversion of 81.4 % was observed at a 1:22 mole ratio (oleic acid: methanol), 3 wt. % catalyst at 70 °C for 4 h. The Ni0.5H3SiW / SiO2 catalyst was reused for several times and presented relatively stable. More interestingly, the kinetic studies revealed the esterification process was compatible with the first order model, and a lower activation energy was obtained in this catalytic system

Controllability results of neutral Caputo fractional functional differential equations

In this paper, using the properties of the phase space on infinite delay, generalized Gronwall inequality and fixed point theorems, the existence and controllability results of neutral fractional functional differential equations with multi-term Caputo fractional derivatives were obtained under Lipschitz and non-Lipschitz conditions

Novel NIR-II organic fluorophores for bioimaging beyond 1550 nm

This work was partially supported by grants from NSFC (81773674, 81573383, and 21473041), NSFHP (2017CFA024, 2017CFB711, and 2016ACA126), the Applied Basic Research Program of WMBST (2019020701011429), Tibet Autonomous Region Science and Technology Plan Project Key Project (XZ201901-GB-11), Project First-Class Disciplines Development Supported by Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (CZYJC1903), and Health Commission of Hubei Province Scientific Research Project (WJ2019M177 and WJ2019M178).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Pan-cancer analysis reveals potential of FAM110A as a prognostic and immunological biomarker in human cancer

BackgroundDespite great success, immunotherapy still faces many challenges in practical applications. It was previously found that family with sequence similarity 110 member A (FAM110A) participate in the regulation of the cell cycle and plays an oncogenic role in pancreatic cancer. However, the prognostic value of FAM110A in pan-cancer and its involvement in immune response remain unclear.MethodsThe Human Protein Atlas (HPA) database was used to detect the expression of FAM110A in human normal tissues, the Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER) and TIMER 2.0 databases were used to explore the association of FAM110A expression with immune checkpoint genes and immune infiltration, and the Gene Set Cancer Analysis (GSCA) database was used to explore the correlation between FAM110A expression and copy number variations (CNV) and methylation. The LinkedOmics database was used for Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analysis. Statistical analysis and visualization of data from the The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) or the Genotype–Tissue Expression (GTEx) databases were performed using the R software (version 3.6.3). Clinical samples were validated using immunohistochemistry.ResultsFAM110A expression was elevated in most tumor tissues compared with that in normal tissues. CNV and methylation were associated with abnormal FAM110A mRNA expression in tumor tissues. FAM110A affected prognosis and was associated with the expression of multiple immune checkpoint genes and abundance of tumor-infiltrating immune cells across multiple types of cancer, especially in liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC). FAM110A-related genes were involved in multiple immune-related processes in LIHC.ConclusionFAM110A participates in regulating the immune infiltration and affecting the prognosis of patients in multiple cancers, especially in LIHC. FAM110A may serve as a prognostic and immunological biomarker for human cancer