Motivations of User Engagement in eWOM of Chinese Microblog

This study examined the motivations of user engagement in electronic word-of-mouth behavior through a netnography. The sample includes more than 2,000 posts from the Chinese microblog-Sina Weibo and 20 follow-up interviews about film reviews. 5 types of motivations were examined, including egoistic motivations, motivations for the reward, reciprocal motivations, altruistic motivations, and motivations in the sense of community. Results confirmed the effect of egoistic motivations, reciprocal motivations, and motivations in the sense of community for the increasing volume of eWOM. However, motivations for the reward and altruistic motivations were found less powerful. Hence, the reward was found to decrease the generation of eWOM.The findings would give implications for marketers to plan and leverage eWoM and help scholars understand eWoM in a microblog context

A Coarse-to-Fine Adaptive Network for Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation

Human gaze is essential for various appealing applications. Aiming at more accurate gaze estimation, a series of recent works propose to utilize face and eye images simultaneously. Nevertheless, face and eye images only serve as independent or parallel feature sources in those works, the intrinsic correlation between their features is overlooked. In this paper we make the following contributions: 1) We propose a coarse-to-fine strategy which estimates a basic gaze direction from face image and refines it with corresponding residual predicted from eye images. 2) Guided by the proposed strategy, we design a framework which introduces a bi-gram model to bridge gaze residual and basic gaze direction, and an attention component to adaptively acquire suitable fine-grained feature. 3) Integrating the above innovations, we construct a coarse-to-fine adaptive network named CA-Net and achieve state-of-the-art performances on MPIIGaze and EyeDiap.Comment: 9 pages, 7figures, AAAI-2

Chemo- and Regioselective Synthesis of Functionalized 1H-imidazo[1,5-a]indol-3(2H)-ones via a Redox-Neutral Rhodium(III)-Catalyzed [4+1] Annulation between Indoles and Alkynes

Alkynes generally serve as C2 synthons in transition-metal-catalyzed C−H annulations, herein, exploiting electron-deficient alkynes as unconventional C1 synthons, the chemo- and regiospecific synthesis of functionalized 1H-imidazo[1,5-a]indol-3(2H)-ones via a redox-neutral rhodium(III)-catalyzed [4+1] annulation of N-carbamoyl indoles has been achieved. This process is characterized by high chemo- and regioselectivity, broad substrate scope, good tolerance of functional groups, moderate to high yields and mild redox-neutral conditions, thus affording a robust approach to access valuable 1H-imidazo[1,5-a]indol-3(2H)-ones

Phase boundary engineering of metal-organic-framework-derived carbonaceous nickel selenides for sodium-ion batteries

Abstract: Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are promising power sources due to the low cost and abundance of battery-grade sodium resources, while practical SIBs suffer from intrinsically sluggish diffusion kinetics and severe volume changes of electrode materials. Metal-organic framework (MOFs) derived carbonaceous metal compound offer promising applications in electrode materials due to their tailorable composition, nanostructure, chemical and physical properties. Here, we fabricated hierarchical MOF-derived carbonaceous nickel selenides with bi-phase composition for enhanced sodium storage capability. As MOF formation time increases, the pyrolyzed and selenized products gradually transform from a single-phase Ni3Se4 into bi-phase NiSex then single-phase NiSe2, with concomitant morphological evolution from solid spheres into hierarchical urchin-like yolk-shell structures. As SIBs anodes, bi-phase NiSex@C/CNT-10h (10 h of hydrothermal synthesis time) exhibits a high specific capacity of 387.1 mAh/g at 0.1 A/g, long cycling stability of 306.3 mAh/g at a moderately high current density of 1 A/g after 2,000 cycles. Computational simulation further proves the lattice mismatch at the phase boundary facilitates more interstitial space for sodium storage. Our understanding of the phase boundary engineering of transformed MOFs and their morphological evolution is conducive to fabricate novel composites/hybrids for applications in batteries, catalysis, sensors, and environmental remediation

Dual Semantic Fusion Network for Video Object Detection

Video object detection is a tough task due to the deteriorated quality of video sequences captured under complex environments. Currently, this area is dominated by a series of feature enhancement based methods, which distill beneficial semantic information from multiple frames and generate enhanced features through fusing the distilled information. However, the distillation and fusion operations are usually performed at either frame level or instance level with external guidance using additional information, such as optical flow and feature memory. In this work, we propose a dual semantic fusion network (abbreviated as DSFNet) to fully exploit both frame-level and instance-level semantics in a unified fusion framework without external guidance. Moreover, we introduce a geometric similarity measure into the fusion process to alleviate the influence of information distortion caused by noise. As a result, the proposed DSFNet can generate more robust features through the multi-granularity fusion and avoid being affected by the instability of external guidance. To evaluate the proposed DSFNet, we conduct extensive experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset. Notably, the proposed dual semantic fusion network achieves, to the best of our knowledge, the best performance of 84.1\% mAP among the current state-of-the-art video object detectors with ResNet-101 and 85.4\% mAP with ResNeXt-101 without using any post-processing steps.Comment: 9 pages,6 figure

Lack of Association Between DJ-1 Gene Promoter Polymorphism and the Risk of Parkinson’s Disease

Low DJ-1 protein level caused by DJ-1 gene mutation leads to autosomal recessive Parkinson’s disease (PD) due to impaired antioxidative activity. In sporadic PD patients, although mutations were rarely found, lower DJ-1 protein level was also reported. Dysregulation of DJ-1 gene expression might contribute to low DJ-1 protein level. Since the promoter is the most important element to initiate gene expression, whether polymorphisms in the DJ-1 promoter result in the dysregulation of gene expression, thus leading to low protein level and causing PD, is worth exploring. The DJ-1 promoter region was sequenced in a Chinese cohort to evaluate possible links between DJ-1 promoter polymorphisms, PD risk and clinical phenotypes. Dual-luciferase reporter assay was conducted to evaluate the influence of promoter polymorphisms on DJ-1 transcriptional activity. Related information in an existing genome-wide association studies (GWAS) database were looked up, meta-analysis of the present study and other previous reports was conducted, and expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) analysis was performed to further explore the association. Three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs17523802, rs226249, and rs35675666) and one 18 bp deletion (rs200968609) were observed in our cohort. However, there was no significant association between the four detected genetic variations and the risk of PD either in allelic or genotype model, in single-point analysis or haplotype analysis. This was supported by the meta-analysis of this study and previous reports as well as that of GWAS database PDGene. Dual luciferase reporter assay suggested these promoter polymorphisms had no influence on DJ-1 transcriptive activity, which is consistent with the eQTL analysis results using the data from GTEx database. Thus, DJ-1 promoter polymorphisms may play little role in the dysregulation of DJ-1 expression and PD susceptibility in sporadic PD

MEASURING FINANCIAL RISKS WITH COPULAS

Bachelor'sBACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS

Influence of Urban Geometry on Thermal Environment of Urban Street Canyons in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a typical high-density city in a subtropical climate region, and deep street canyons are among the main features of its urban planning. How the urban geometry influences the urban thermal environment in this city has become a hot topic these days. The height-to-width ratio (H/W) and sky view factor (SVF) are commonly used to indicate the outdoor thermal environment performance, while previous studies in Hong Kong rarely analysed the importance bias of these two influencing factors systematically in this context. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we chose four typical sites in Hong Kong as research objects. Firstly, we conducted a field investigation to calculate the main influencing factors of urban street geometry (H/W and SVF) and then used field measurements to collect climatic data, including air temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity, and finally used regression to analyse the correlation between H/W, SVF, and temperature. The results indicate the following: (1) There is a greater correlation between H/W and air temperature than between SVF and air temperature by regression analysis, and H/W is more effective at improving the thermal environment within urban street canyons. (2) After field measurements, it was found that H/W at the measurement sites was 0.60 to 6.02, with an average of 2.13. (3) In the study area, H/W of 2.31–2.48 and 3.35–3.60 had a positive correlation with air temperature, and H/W had a dominant influence on outdoor air temperature, and H/W of 2.09–2.31 and H/W > 3.60 was inversely related to air temperature. The conclusions can provide support for urban planning in Hong Kong

Risk Factors of Portal Vein Thrombosis after Devascularization Treatment in Patients with Liver Cirrhosis: A Nested Case-Control Study

Background and Aim. To investigate the incidence of portal vein thrombosis (PVT) after devascularization treatment and to explore the risk factors of perioperative PVT and PVT diagnosed during the follow-up period after surgery. Methods. We retrospectively reviewed medical records from cirrhosis patients who underwent devascularization for the treatment of portal hypertension in our hospital between January 1, 2008, and December 20, 2014. Patients were followed up to investigate the PVT incidence at different times after surgery. Patients were divided into two groups (PVT, no PVT), and the risk factors for PVT after surgery were determined. Results. Until October 16, 2015, the median follow-up time of the 124 patients enrolled into this study was 41.43 months (range, 5.47–95.30 months). 61 patients had perioperative PVT, and 21 (16.94%) patients had PVT diagnosed during the follow-up period. Those who had lower preoperative white blood cell counts, larger preoperative portal vein trunk diameter, and no gastric varices were more likely to have perioperative thrombosis. In those without perioperative PVT, a history of hypertension, higher grade of splenomegaly, and higher preoperative levels of creatinine were independent predictors of PVT occurrence during the follow-up period. Conclusions. The risk factors for perioperative PVT in cirrhotic patients after devascularization were lower preoperative white blood cell count and larger portal vein trunk diameter, with no gastric varices. A history of hypertension, a larger spleen, and higher preoperative creatinine level are independent predictors of PVT during follow-up after surgery in patients without perioperative PVT