VE-KWS: Visual Modality Enhanced End-to-End Keyword Spotting

The performance of the keyword spotting (KWS) system based on audio modality, commonly measured in false alarms and false rejects, degrades significantly under the far field and noisy conditions. Therefore, audio-visual keyword spotting, which leverages complementary relationships over multiple modalities, has recently gained much attention. However, current studies mainly focus on combining the exclusively learned representations of different modalities, instead of exploring the modal relationships during each respective modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel visual modality enhanced end-to-end KWS framework (VE-KWS), which fuses audio and visual modalities from two aspects. The first one is utilizing the speaker location information obtained from the lip region in videos to assist the training of multi-channel audio beamformer. By involving the beamformer as an audio enhancement module, the acoustic distortions, caused by the far field or noisy environments, could be significantly suppressed. The other one is conducting cross-attention between different modalities to capture the inter-modal relationships and help the representation learning of each modality. Experiments on the MSIP challenge corpus show that our proposed model achieves 2.79% false rejection rate and 2.95% false alarm rate on the Eval set, resulting in a new SOTA performance compared with the top-ranking systems in the ICASSP2022 MISP challenge.Comment: 5 pages. Accepted at ICASSP202

EGFR as a Negative Regulatory Protein Adjusts the Activity and Mobility of NHE3 in the Cell Membrane of IPEC-J2 Cells With TGEV Infection

Transmissible gastroenteritis (TGE) has caused devastating economic losses to the swine industry worldwide, despite extensive research focusing on the pathogenesis of virus infection. The molecular pathogenic mechanism of TGEV-induced diarrhea in piglets is unknown. Intestinal diarrhea is closely related to the function of the Na+/H+ exchanger protein NHE3 in the brush border membrane of small intestine epithelial cells. The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) may act to regulate NHE3 expression. In addition, EGFR may promote viral invasion of host cells. The present study aimed to determine whether NHE3 activity is regulated by altering EGFR expression to affect Na+ absorption in TGEV-infected intestinal epithelial cells. Porcine intestinal epithelial cells were used as models for TGEV infection. The results showed that Na+ absorption and NHE3 expression levels decreased in TGEV-infected cells. Proliferation of TGEV within IPEC-J2 cells could be inhibited by treatment with the EGFR inhibitor AG1478 and knockdown; resulting in recovery of Na+ absorption in TGEV infected cells and increasing the activity and expression of NHE3. Moreover, we demonstrated that NHE3 activity was regulated through the EGFR/ERK pathway. Importantly, NHE3 mobility on the plasma membrane of TGEV infected cells was significantly weaker than that in normal cells, and EGFR inhibition and knockdown recovered this mobility. Our research indicated that NHE3 activity was negatively regulated by EGFR in TGEV-infected intestinal epithelial cells

Expounding the role of tick in Africa swine fever virus transmission and seeking effective prevention measures: A review

African swine fever (ASF), a highly contagious, deadly infectious disease, has caused huge economic losses to animal husbandry with a 100% mortality rate of the most acute and acute infection, which is listed as a legally reported animal disease by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). African swine fever virus (ASFV) is the causative agent of ASF, which is the only member of the Asfarviridae family. Ornithodoros soft ticks play an important role in ASFV transmission by active biological or mechanical transmission or by passive transport or ingestion, particularly in Africa, Europe, and the United States. First, this review summarized recent reports on (1) tick species capable of transmitting ASFV, (2) the importance of ticks in the transmission and epidemiological cycle of ASFV, and (3) the ASFV strains of tick transmission, to provide a detailed description of tick-borne ASFV. Second, the dynamics of tick infection with ASFV and the tick-induced immune suppression were further elaborated to explain how ticks spread ASFV. Third, the development of the anti-tick vaccine was summarized, and the prospect of the anti-tick vaccine was recapitulated. Then, the marked attenuated vaccine, ASFV-G-ΔI177L, was compared with those of the anti-tick vaccine to represent potential therapeutic or strategies to combat ASF

Large creditors and corporate governance: the case of Chinese banks

Purpose – Banks are the major suppliers of external funds for companies in China. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Chinese banks exercise effective monitoring over borrowers in two lending decisions, including loan interest rates and loan renewals. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of Chinese public industrial firms from 2000 to 2005, the authors perform multivariate regression analysis to investigate whether banks adjust their loan interest rates and consider loan renewal decisions in response to borrowers financial performance. The authors also examine these bank lending decisions before and after 2003, when the major banking reforms started to take place in China. Findings – A negative relation was found between the loan interest rate spread and the financial performance of borrowers. However, a negative relation was found between loan renewals and the financial performance of borrowers, consistent with firms in financial difficulties being in need of more funding and hence more likely to get its bank loans renewed. Additionally, it was found that the factors banks consider when making loan decisions vary before and after 2003. Originality/value – The authors' findings suggest that Chinese banks play a limited role in monitoring and disciplining borrowers through adjustments of loan interest rates, and that their loan renewal decisions for firms with poor financial performance highlight banks' financing, instead of monitoring role in this transition economy. These findings provide empirical evidence on bank governance in a transition economy dominated by state-owned enterprises. The paper contributes to the literature by constructing an alternative loan renewal measure using financial statement information.Bank monitoring, Banks, China, Corporate finances, Creditors, Interest rates, Loan renewals, Loans, Transition economies

The pre-activated immune response induced by LPS protects host from leptospirosis.

Leptospirosis is an important global zoonosis caused by pathogenic Leptospira. It is estimated that more than 1 million people are infected by Leptospira each year, and the death toll is about 60,000. Some studies showed that delayed immune response was associated with severe leptospirosis, and TLR4 was very important in the control of leptospirosis. In this study, we aimed to explore the effect of the classical activator (LPS) of TLR4 on leptospirosis in susceptible and resistant hosts. The results showed that LPS pretreatment increased the survival rate of hamsters to 80%. And LPS pre-treatment also significantly reduced the leptospiral load and alleviated the pathological injury in organs of hamsters and mice. The result detected by ELISA in mice showed that the levels of TNF-α and IL-1β were increased in the LPS-treated group compared to the control group before infection. However, two days after infection, the level of cytokines in LPS group was down-regulated compared with that in control group. In addition, in vitro results showed that LPS pre-treatment enhanced the phagocytosis and bactericidal ability of macrophages on Leptospira. Collectively, our results indicated that the pre-activated immune response induced by LPS enhanced the ability of host against leptospirosis

Hydrogen Sulfide Interacts with 5-Aminolevulinic Acid to Enhance the Antioxidant Capacity of Pepper (<i>Capsicum annuum</i> L.) Seedlings under Chilling Stress

5-Aminolevulinic acid (ALA) is the precursor of tetrapyrrole synthesis, and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a gas signal molecule. Studies have shown that exogenous ALA and H2S can alleviate abiotic stress. This study evaluated the roles of ALA and H2S and their interactions in regulating antioxidant activity in pepper seedlings under chilling stress. Chilling stress significantly inhibited the growth of pepper seedlings and increased the amounts of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), superoxide anion (O2•−), and malondialdehyde (MDA). ALA and/or H2S increased the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), and catalase (CAT). Moreover, ALA and/or H2S enhanced the ascorbate (AsA)-glutathione (GSH) cycle by increasing the contents of AsA and GSH, the ratio of AsA to dehydroascorbic acid and GSH to glutathione disulfide increased, and the activities of ascorbate peroxidase (APX), glutathione reductase (GR), dehydroascorbate reductase (DHAR) and monodehydroascorbate reductase (MDHAR) also increased. At the transcriptional level, ALA and/or H2S upregulated the expressions of CaSOD, CaPOD, CaCAT, CaAPX, CaGR, CaDHAR, and CaMDHAR in seedlings under chilling stress. ALA and/or H2S also reduced the contents of H2O2, O2•− and MDA, eventually mitigating the inhibitory effects of chilling stress on pepper seedling growth. The combination of ALA and H2S had a better effect than ALA or H2S alone. Moreover, ALA and H2S interact to regulate the oxidative stress response of pepper seedlings under chilling stress