GlanceVAD: Exploring Glance Supervision for Label-efficient Video Anomaly Detection

In recent years, video anomaly detection has been extensively investigated in both unsupervised and weakly supervised settings to alleviate costly temporal labeling. Despite significant progress, these methods still suffer from unsatisfactory results such as numerous false alarms, primarily due to the absence of precise temporal anomaly annotation. In this paper, we present a novel labeling paradigm, termed "glance annotation", to achieve a better balance between anomaly detection accuracy and annotation cost. Specifically, glance annotation is a random frame within each abnormal event, which can be easily accessed and is cost-effective. To assess its effectiveness, we manually annotate the glance annotations for two standard video anomaly detection datasets: UCF-Crime and XD-Violence. Additionally, we propose a customized GlanceVAD method, that leverages gaussian kernels as the basic unit to compose the temporal anomaly distribution, enabling the learning of diverse and robust anomaly representations from the glance annotations. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we verify that the proposed labeling paradigm can achieve an excellent trade-off between annotation cost and model performance. Extensive experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our GlanceVAD approach, which significantly outperforms existing advanced unsupervised and weakly supervised methods. Code and annotations will be publicly available at https://github.com/pipixin321/GlanceVAD.Comment: 21 page

STW-MD: A Novel Spatio-Temporal Weighting and Multi-Step Decision Tree Method for Considering Spatial Heterogeneity in Brain Gene Expression Data

Motivation: Gene expression during brain development or abnormal development is a biological process that is highly dynamic in spatio and temporal. Due to the lack of comprehensive integration of spatial and temporal dimensions of brain gene expression data, previous studies have mainly focused on individual brain regions or a certain developmental stage. Our motivation is to address this gap by incorporating spatio-temporal information to gain a more complete understanding of the mechanisms underlying brain development or disorders associated with abnormal brain development, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), and to identify potential determinants of response. Results: In this study, we propose a novel two-step framework based on spatial-temporal information weighting and multi-step decision trees. This framework can effectively exploit the spatial similarity and temporal dependence between different stages and different brain regions, and facilitate differential gene analysis in brain regions with high heterogeneity. We focus on two datasets: the AD dataset, which includes gene expression data from early, middle, and late stages, and the brain development dataset, spanning fetal development to adulthood. Our findings highlight the advantages of the proposed framework in discovering gene classes and elucidating their impact on brain development and AD progression across diverse brain regions and stages. These findings align with existing studies and provide insights into the processes of normal and abnormal brain development. Availability: The code of STW-MD is available at https://github.com/tsnm1/STW-MD.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Ethnobotanical study on medicinal plants used by Maonan people in China

Abstract Background This paper is based on an ethnobotanical investigation that focused on the traditional medicinal plants used by local Maonan people to treat human diseases in Maonan concentration regions. The Maonan people have relied on traditional medicine since ancient times, especially medicinal plants. The aim of this study is to document medicinal plants used by the Maonans and to report the status of medicinal plants and associated traditional knowledge. Methods Ethnobotanical data were collected from June 2012 to September 2014 in Huanjiang Maonan Autonomous County, northern Guangxi, southwest China. In total, 118 knowledgeable informants were interviewed. Following statistically sampling method, eighteen villages from 5 townships were selected to conduct field investigations. Information was collected through the approache of participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, ranking exercises, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and participatory rural appraisals. Results A total of 368 medicinal plant species were investigated and documented together with their medicinal uses by the Maonans, most of which were obtained from the wild ecosystems. The plants were used to treat 95 human diseases. Grinding was a widely used method to prepare traditional herbal medicines. There were significant relationships between gender and age, and between gender and informants’ knowledge of medicinal plant use. Deforestation for agricultural purposes was identified as the most destructive factor of medicinal plants, followed by drought and over-harvest. Conclusions The species diversity of medicinal plants used by the Maonans in the study area was very rich. Medicinal plants played a significant role in healing various human disorders in the Maonan communities. However, the conflicts between traditional inheriting system and recent socio-economic changes (and other factors) resulted in the reduction or loss of both medicinal plants and associated indigenous knowledge. Thus, conservation efforts and policies, and innovation of inheriting system are necessary for protecting the medicinal plants and associated indigenous knowledge. Awareness is also needed to be raised among local Maonans focusing on sustainable utilization and management of both medicinal plants and traditional knowledge

Knowledge Atlas on the Relationship between Water Management and Constructed Wetlands—A Bibliometric Analysis Based on CiteSpace

Water management is a crucial resource conservation challenge that mankind faces, and encouraging the creation of manmade wetlands with the goal of achieving long-term water management is the key to long-term urban development. To summarise and analyse the status of the research on the relationship between water management and constructed wetlands, this paper makes use of the advantages of the bibliometric visualization of CiteSpace to generate country/region maps and author-collaboration maps, and to analyse research hotspots and research dynamics by using keywords and literature co-citations based on 1248 pieces of related literature in the core collection in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The existing research shows that the research content and methods in the field of constructed-wetland and water-management research are constantly being enriched and deepened, including the research methods frequently used in constructed wetlands in water management and in the research content under concern, the functions and roles of constructed wetlands, the relevant measurement indicators of the purification impact of constructed wetlands on water bodies, and the types of water bodies treated by constructed wetlands in water management. We summarise the impact pathways of constructed wetlands on water management, as well as the impact factors of constructed wetlands under water-management objectives, by analysing the future concerns in the research field to provide references for research

Experimental Study of Extracting Weak Infrared Signals of Rock Induced by Cyclic Loading under the Strong Interference Background

To understand the possibility of monitoring the crustal stress and tectonic activities via satellite remote sensing technology, an experimental study focused on the thermal infrared variation was performed for cyclic loaded rock in the outdoor condition with two types of strong interference background. The stress-induced infrared radiation was extracted using wavelet analysis. The results showed that due to the significant effect of the ambient temperature, the weak stress-induced infrared signal was indistinguishable from the original infrared radiation. However, after wavelet decomposition, the infrared radiation concurrent with the change in stress became clear, and the correlation coefficient with the stress increased significantly with the value of 0.91 after decomposition. Additionally, the amplitude of the extracted stress-induced infrared signal was close to the theoretical result, indicating that the wavelet analysis method can extract the weak infrared signals induced by cyclic loading in the background of strong interference to some degree. The results provide an experimental basis and ideas for monitoring crustal stress and tectonic activities using thermal infrared remote sensing

Knowledge Atlas on the Relationship between Water Management and Constructed Wetlands—A Bibliometric Analysis Based on CiteSpace

Water management is a crucial resource conservation challenge that mankind faces, and encouraging the creation of manmade wetlands with the goal of achieving long-term water management is the key to long-term urban development. To summarise and analyse the status of the research on the relationship between water management and constructed wetlands, this paper makes use of the advantages of the bibliometric visualization of CiteSpace to generate country/region maps and author-collaboration maps, and to analyse research hotspots and research dynamics by using keywords and literature co-citations based on 1248 pieces of related literature in the core collection in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The existing research shows that the research content and methods in the field of constructed-wetland and water-management research are constantly being enriched and deepened, including the research methods frequently used in constructed wetlands in water management and in the research content under concern, the functions and roles of constructed wetlands, the relevant measurement indicators of the purification impact of constructed wetlands on water bodies, and the types of water bodies treated by constructed wetlands in water management. We summarise the impact pathways of constructed wetlands on water management, as well as the impact factors of constructed wetlands under water-management objectives, by analysing the future concerns in the research field to provide references for research

Curcumin represses NLRP3 inflammasome activation via TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB and P2X7R signaling in PMA-induced macrophages

AbstractAims: In the NOD-like receptor (NLR) family, the pyrin domain containing 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome is closely related to the progression of atherosclerosis. This study aimed to assess the effects of curcumin on NLRP3 inflammasome in phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA)-induced macrophages and explore its underlying mechanism.Methods: Human monocytic THP-1 cells were pretreated with curcumin for 1 h and subsequently induced with PMA for 48 h. Total protein was collected for Western blot analysis. Cytokine interleukin (IL)-1β release and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) p65 translocation were detected by ELISA assay and cellular NF-κB translocation kit, respectively.Results: Curcumin significantly reduced the expression of NLRP3 and cleavage of caspase-1 and IL-1β secretion in PMA-induced macrophages. Moreover, Bay (a NF-κB inhibitor) treatment considerably suppressed the expression of NLRP3 inflammasome in PMA-induced THP-1 cells. Curcumin also markedly inhibited the upregulation of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), myeloid differentiation factor 88 (MyD88), phosphorylation level of IκB-α, and activation of NF-κB in PMA-induced macrophages. In addition, purinergic 2X7 receptor (P2X7R) siRNA was administered, and it significantly decreased NLRP3 inflammasome expression in PMA-induced macrophages. Furthermore, curcumin reversed PMA-stimulated P2X7R activation, which further reduced the expression of NLRP3 and cleavage of caspase-1 and IL-1β secretion. Silencing of P2X7R using siRNA also suppressed the activation of NF-κB pathway in PMA-induced macrophages, but P2X7R-silenced cells did not significantly decrease the expression of TLR4 and MyD88.Conclusions: Curcumin inhibited NLRP3 inflammasome through suppressing TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB and P2X7R pathways in PMA-induced macrophages

Experimental Study of the Thermal Infrared Emissivity Variation of Loaded Rock and Its Significance

Previous studies have shown that thermal infrared radiation (TIR) changes with stress for loaded rocks. TIR changes were mainly attributed to temperature change without considering the change in surface emissivity. And it remains unclear whether there was a change in emissivity during the rock loading process. Therefore, based on the spectral radiance observations in this paper, an experimental study involving the emissivity variation in the 8.0–13.0 μm range for elastic loaded quartz sandstone under outdoor conditions was conducted. The experiments yield the following results. First, a variation in the stress condition led to the emissivity change in addition to the temperature change. The spectral radiance change was the combined result of the temperature changes and emissivity changes. Second, the emissivity changes linearly with the stress change, and the amplitude is relatively large in the 8.0–10.0 μm range. The waveband features of emissivity variation are the main factor leading to the waveband features of stress-induced radiance change. Third, the explanations for the changes in temperature and emissivity during loading process are analyzed. And the significance and difficulty for further satellite remote sensing purpose is discussed. The experimental results provide an experimental foundation for crustal stress field monitoring