Recycling, clustering, and endocytosis jointly maintain PIN auxin carrier polarity at the plasma membrane

A combination of super-resolution microscopy in live cells and computational modeling provides new insights into the dynamic and interwoven mechanism that maintains the polar distribution of an important plant cargo

Reduced Rate Ultra Low Delay Audio Coder using Multistage Vector Quantization

Communication applications are usually delay restricted, especially for the instance of musicians playing over the Internet. This requires a one-way delay of maximum 25 msec and also a high audio quality is desired at feasible bit rates. The ultra low delay (ULD) audio coding structure is well suited to this application and we investigate further the application of multistage vector quantization (MSVQ) to reach a bit rate range below 64 Kb/s, in a scalable manner. Results at 32 Kb/s and 64 Kb/s show that the trained codebook MSVQ performs best, better than KLT normalization followed by a simulated Gaussian MSVQ or simulated Gaussian MSVQ alone. The results also show that there is only a weak dependence on the training data, and that we indeed converge to the perceptual quality of our previous ULD coder at 64 Kb/s

DIRAC: Detection and Identification of Rare Audio-Visual Events

The DIRAC project was an integrated project that was carried out between January 1 st 2006 and December 31 st 2010. It was funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Research Programme (FP6) under contract number IST-027787. Ten partners joined forces to investigate the concept of rare events in machine and cognitive systems, and developed multi-modal technology to identify such events and deal with them in audio-visual applications. This document summarizes the project and its achievements. In Section 2 we present the research and engineering problem that the project set out to tackle, and discuss why we believe that advance made on solving these problems will get us closer to achieving the general objective of building artificial cognitive system with cognitive capabilities. We describe the approach taken to solving the problem, detailing the theoretical framework we came up with. We further describe how the inter-disciplinary nature of our research and evidence collected from biological and cognitive systems gave us the necessary insights and support for the proposed approach. In Section 3 we describe our efforts towards system design that follow the principles identified in our theoretical investigation. In Section 4 we describe a variety of algorithms we have developed in the context of different applications, to implement the theoretical framework described in Section 2. In Section 5 we describe algorithmic progress on a variety of questions that concern the learning of those rare events as defined in our Section 2. Finally, in Section 6 we describe our application scenarios, an integrated test-bed developed to test our algorithms in an integrated way. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Anemüller J., Caputo B., Hermansky H., Ohl F.W., Pajdla T., Pavel M., Van Gool L., Vogels R., Wabnik S., Weinshall D., ''DIRAC: Detection and Identification of Rare Audio-Visual Events'', Detection and identification of rare audiovisual cues (series : studies in computational intelligence), vol. 384, pp. 3-35, Weinshall Daphna, Anemüller Jörn and Van Gool Luc, eds., 2012, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.status: publishe

Two orthogonal differentiation gradients locally coordinate fruit morphogenesis

Abstract Morphogenesis requires the coordination of cellular behaviors along developmental axes. In plants, gradients of growth and differentiation are typically established along a single longitudinal primordium axis to control global organ shape. Yet, it remains unclear how these gradients are locally adjusted to regulate the formation of complex organs that consist of diverse tissue types. Here we combine quantitative live imaging at cellular resolution with genetics, and chemical treatments to understand the formation of Arabidopsis thaliana female reproductive organ (gynoecium). We show that, contrary to other aerial organs, gynoecium shape is determined by two orthogonal, time-shifted differentiation gradients. An early mediolateral gradient controls valve morphogenesis while a late, longitudinal gradient regulates style differentiation. Local, tissue-dependent action of these gradients serves to fine-tune the common developmental program governing organ morphogenesis to ensure the specialized function of the gynoecium

The Lower Saxony research network design of environments for ageing : towards interdisciplinary research on information and communication technologies in ageing societies

Worldwide, ageing societies are bringing challenges for independent living and healthcare. Health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare and sensor-enhanced health information systems offer new opportunities for care. In order to identify, implement and assess such new information and communication technologies (ICT) the 'Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing' (GAL) has been launched in 2008 as interdisciplinary research project. In this publication, we inform about the goals and structure of GAL, including first outcomes, as well as to discuss the potentials and possible barriers of such highly interdisciplinary research projects in the field of health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare. Although GAL's high interdisciplinarity at the beginning slowed down the speed of research progress, we can now work on problems, which can hardly be solved by one or few disciplines alone. Interdisciplinary research projects on ICT in ageing societies are needed and recommended