Through the Eyes of Citizen Journalists : A Comparative Study of User-generated video reports and Professional TV news reports on 2011 Wenzhou Bullet Train Accident and Last Rescued Survivor “Little Yiyi”

This study aims to examine the difference between user-generated online video reports and professional TV news reports on covering the last rescued survivor Xiang Weiyi, widely referred in media as 'Little Yiyi', in 2011 Wenzhou bullet train accident in China. By comparing two different types of reports, this study focuses on several aspects, including the knowledge and skill in using camera and editing videos; the representation of experts and the general population; access to media materials and information sources; and style in narratives. Semiotic analysis is used in this study as the research method in order to compare and interpret video materials collected from online sources. Literature in this study includes discussions on theories of democracy, the media, and citizen journalism. Democracy and media theories provide knowledge in understanding the role of media and journalism in representing interests from different social groups in public discussion. Pluralistic viewpoints in news coverage, therefore, are argued to be crucial aspects in construction of public discussions that are capable of representing multiple social interests. Theories on citizen journalism provide knowledge of the nature of user-generated media content. By reviewing existing studies, this thesis argues that citizen journalism has the capability to provide additional viewpoints which are more likely to be ignored by the mainstream media due to reasons such as financial pressures and professional standards. Several studies on Chinese media system are also reviewed in this study in order to provide contextual information for the interpretation of data. Furthermore, discussions on video journalism and video witnessing are used to improve the interpretation of data. Results of this study show that citizen video reports are different from TV news videos. Citizen journalists are representing the news with a more subjective viewpoint and narration than professional TV news. Citizen journalists in China lack knowledge and skills in making and editing videos. They are able to report from a closer standpoint toward the community, but they cannot bring opinions from the community to their audience. Thus this study concludes that citizen journalists in China have not been able to bring different viewpoints into public discussion. However, they still have potential since it is shown that citizen journalists are aware of the importance of opinions from ordinary citizens

Exploring the Benefits of Differentially Private Pre-training and Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning for Table Transformers

For machine learning with tabular data, Table Transformer (TabTransformer) is a state-of-the-art neural network model, while Differential Privacy (DP) is an essential component to ensure data privacy. In this paper, we explore the benefits of combining these two aspects together in the scenario of transfer learning -- differentially private pre-training and fine-tuning of TabTransformers with a variety of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, including Adapter, LoRA, and Prompt Tuning. Our extensive experiments on the ACSIncome dataset show that these PEFT methods outperform traditional approaches in terms of the accuracy of the downstream task and the number of trainable parameters, thus achieving an improved trade-off among parameter efficiency, privacy, and accuracy. Our code is available at github.com/IBM/DP-TabTransformer.Comment: submitted to ICASSP 202

ICStega: Image Captioning-based Semantically Controllable Linguistic Steganography

Nowadays, social media has become the preferred communication platform for web users but brought security threats. Linguistic steganography hides secret data into text and sends it to the intended recipient to realize covert communication. Compared to edit-based linguistic steganography, generation-based approaches largely improve the payload capacity. However, existing methods can only generate stego text alone. Another common behavior in social media is sending semantically related image-text pairs. In this paper, we put forward a novel image captioning-based stegosystem, where the secret messages are embedded into the generated captions. Thus, the semantics of the stego text can be controlled and the secret data can be transmitted by sending semantically related image-text pairs. To balance the conflict between payload capacity and semantic preservation, we proposed a new sampling method called Two-Parameter Semantic Control Sampling to cutoff low-probability words. Experimental results have shown that our method can control diversity, payload capacity, security, and semantic accuracy at the same time.Comment: 5 pages, 5 tables, 3 figures. Accepted by ICASSP 202

OpenPneu: Compact platform for pneumatic actuation with multi-channels

This paper presents a compact system, OpenPneu, to support the pneumatic actuation for multi-chambers on soft robots. Micro-pumps are employed in the system to generate airflow and therefore no extra input as compressed air is needed. Our system conducts modular design to provide good scalability, which has been demonstrated on a prototype with ten air channels. Each air channel of OpenPneu is equipped with both the inflation and the deflation functions to provide a full range pressure supply from positive to negative with a maximal flow rate at 1.7 L/min. High precision closed-loop control of pressures has been built into our system to achieve stable and efficient dynamic performance in actuation. An open-source control interface and API in Python are provided. We also demonstrate the functionality of OpenPneu on three soft robotic systems with up to 10 chambers

Acute type A dissection without intimal tear in arch: Proximal or extensive repair?

ObjectiveFor acute type A dissection without an intimal tear in the arch, the optimal surgical strategy is unknown. The present study was designed to clarify the issue by comparing the early and late outcomes of proximal (PR) and extensive repair (ER).MethodsFrom January 2002 to June 2010, 331 patients with acute type A dissection were treated surgically at our institute. Of these 331 patients, 197 were identified without an arch tear on the preoperative imaging examination and by intraoperative inspection. Of these 197 patients, 74 underwent proximal repair, including the aortic root, ascending aortic, or hemiarch repair, and 88 underwent extensive repair, including proximal repair, total arch replacement and a stented elephant trunk technique. The perioperative variables and late results were statistically analyzed.ResultsNo significant difference was found in the rates of early mortality and morbidity between the 2 groups, despite the shorter duration of circulatory arrest in the PR group. During long-term follow-up (mean, 55.7 ± 33.1 months; maximum, 129), the overall survival rate in the whole cohort was 100%, 90.8%, and 71.1% at 1, 5, and 8 years, respectively. No difference was found in survival between the 2 groups (P > .05). However, complete thrombosis of the false lumen in the proximal descending aorta was achieved in 100% of the ER group and 24.6% of the PR group (P < .001). For patients with a patent false lumen in the PR group, distal anastomosis leakage and unclosed small intimal tears were identified in 53.3% and 35.6% patients, respectively. The reintervention rate was also lower in the ER group than in the PR group (4.9% vs 15.9%, P < .05) during follow-up. Moreover, the reintervention rate for patients with Marfan syndrome was 9.5% in the ER group and 38.5% in the PR group (P < .05).ConclusionsFor patients with acute type A dissection without an intimal tear in the arch, extensive repair could promote the occlusion of distal false lumen and decrease the reintervention rate without increasing the operative risk

Intracranial Arteriovenous Malformation Combined with Multiple Aneurysms Diagnosed by CTA: A Case Report

Arteriovenous malformation (AVM) combined with aneurysms is not uncommon, but AVM of the basilar artery, brainstem, and right middle cerebral artery combined with multiple intracranial aneurysms (IAs) is rare. Cases of aneurysm protrusion into the optic canal are also rare. We report a distinctive case of intracranial AVM combined with multiple IAs and partial protrusion of a cavernous segment aneurysm of the right internal carotid artery into the optic nerve canal. Teaching Point: Cases of partial protrusion of a cavernous segment aneurysm of the right internal carotid artery into the optic canal, resulting in widening of the optic canal compared to the contralateral side, compression, thickening and swelling of the subocular veins, and obstruction of venous drainage warrant the clinician’s attention

Long Non-Coding RNA Urothelial Carcinoma Associated 1 Promotes Proliferation, Migration and Invasion of Osteosarcoma Cells by Regulating microRNA-182

Background/Aims: Previous studies demonstrated the oncogenic roles of lncRNA UCA1 in osteosarcoma. This study aimed to explore the internal molecular mechanism of UCA1 on promoting osteosarcoma cell proliferation, migration and invasion. Methods: qRT-PCR was conducted to measure the expression levels of UCA1, miR-182 and TIMP2. Cell transfection was used to change the expression levels of UCA1, miR-182 and TIMP2. Cell viability, migration, invasion and apoptosis were measured using CCK-8 assay, two-chamber migration (invasion) assay and Guava Nexin assay, respectively. The associations between UCA1, miR-182 and iASPP were analyzed by dual luciferase activity assay. The protein expression levels of key factors involved in cell apoptosis, PI3K/AKT/GSK3β pathway and NF-κB pathway, as well as p53, Rb, RECQ family and iASPP were evaluated by western blotting. Results: UCA1 was highly expressed in osteosarcoma MG63 and OS-732 cells. Knockdown of UCA1 inhibited OS-732 cell viability, migration and invasion, but promoted cell apoptosis. miR-182 was up-regulated in OS-732 cells after UCA1 knockdown and participated in the effects of UCA1 on OS-732 cells. TIMP2 was downstream factor of miR-182 and involved in the regulatory roles of miR-182 on OS-732 cell viability, migration, invasion, apoptosis, as well as PI3K/AKT/GSK3β and NF-κB pathways. UCA1 knockdown up-regulated p53, Rb and RECQL5 levels in OS-732 cells, while down-regulated the expression of iASPP. TGF-β or TNF-α treatment could enhance the expression of UCA1 in OS-732 cells. Conclusion: Our research verified that UCA1 exerted oncogenic roles in osteosarcoma cells by regulating miR-182 and TIMP2, as well as PI3K/AKT/GSK3β and NF-κB pathways

FuseFPS: Accelerating Farthest Point Sampling with Fusing KD-tree Construction for Point Clouds

Point cloud analytics has become a critical workload for embedded and mobile platforms across various applications. Farthest point sampling (FPS) is a fundamental and widely used kernel in point cloud processing. However, the heavy external memory access makes FPS a performance bottleneck for real-time point cloud processing. Although bucket-based farthest point sampling can significantly reduce unnecessary memory accesses during the point sampling stage, the KD-tree construction stage becomes the predominant contributor to execution time. In this paper, we present FuseFPS, an architecture and algorithm co-design for bucket-based farthest point sampling. We first propose a hardware-friendly sampling-driven KD-tree construction algorithm. The algorithm fuses the KD-tree construction stage into the point sampling stage, further reducing memory accesses. Then, we design an efficient accelerator for bucket-based point sampling. The accelerator can offload the entire bucket-based FPS kernel at a low hardware cost. Finally, we evaluate our approach on various point cloud datasets. The detailed experiments show that compared to the state-of-the-art accelerator QuickFPS, FuseFPS achieves about 4.3$\times$ and about 6.1$\times$ improvements on speed and power efficiency, respectively.Comment: conference for ASP-DAC 202

RIS-Aided Wireless Communications: Prototyping, Adaptive Beamforming, and Indoor/Outdoor Field Trials

The prospects of using a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) to aid wireless communication systems have recently received much attention from academia and industry. Most papers make theoretical studies based on elementary models, while the prototyping of RIS-aided wireless communication and real-world field trials are scarce. In this paper, we describe a new RIS prototype consisting of 1100 controllable elements working at 5.8 GHz band. We propose an efficient algorithm for configuring the RIS over the air by exploiting the geometrical array properties and a practical receiver-RIS feedback link. In our indoor test, where the transmitter and receiver are separated by a 30 cm thick concrete wall, our RIS prototype provides a 26 dB power gain compared to the baseline case where the RIS is replaced by a copper plate. A 27 dB power gain was observed in the short-distance outdoor measurement. We also carried out long-distance measurements and successfully transmitted a 32 Mbps data stream over 500 m. A 1080p video was live-streamed and it only played smoothly when the RIS was utilized. The power consumption of the RIS is around 1 W. Our paper is vivid proof that the RIS is a very promising technology for future wireless communications.Comment: 13 pages, 18 figures, submitte