StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective. For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications, such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code

Multimodal sensor fusion for real-time location-dependent defect detection in laser-directed energy deposition

Real-time defect detection is crucial in laser-directed energy deposition (L-DED) additive manufacturing (AM). Traditional in-situ monitoring approach utilizes a single sensor (i.e., acoustic, visual, or thermal sensor) to capture the complex process dynamic behaviors, which is insufficient for defect detection with high accuracy and robustness. This paper proposes a novel multimodal sensor fusion method for real-time location-dependent defect detection in the robotic L-DED process. The multimodal fusion sources include a microphone sensor capturing the laser-material interaction sound and a visible spectrum CCD camera capturing the coaxial melt pool images. A hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to fuse acoustic and visual data. The key novelty in this study is that the traditional manual feature extraction procedures are no longer required, and the raw melt pool images and acoustic signals are fused directly by the hybrid CNN model, which achieved the highest defect prediction accuracy (98.5 %) without the thermal sensing modality. Moreover, unlike previous region-based quality prediction, the proposed hybrid CNN can detect the onset of defect occurrences. The defect prediction outcomes are synchronized and registered with in-situ acquired robot tool-center-point (TCP) data, which enables localized defect identification. The proposed multimodal sensor fusion method offers a robust solution for in-situ defect detection.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures. This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of IDETC-CIE 202

Clinical significance of circulating tumor cells in predicating the outcomes of patients with colorectal cancer

Background: Relapse and metastasis of patients with Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is the major obstacle to the long-term life of patients. Its mechanisms remain defined. Methods: A total of 48 CRC patients were enrolled and 68 samples were obtained from the peripheral blood of patients before or after treatments in this study. Twenty non-cancer patients were also detected as a negative control. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs), including Epithelial CTCs (eCTCs), Mesenchymal (MCTCs), and epithelial/mesenchymal mixed phenotypes (mixed CTCs), were identified by CanPatrolTM CTC enrichment and RNA in situ hybridization. The relationship between CTCs number and Progression-Free Survival (PFS) or Overall Survival (OS) was evaluated. Results: Thirty-four of 48 patients (70.8%) were found to have positive CTCs. Total CTCs and MCTCs in the post-treatment had a significant correlation PFS and OS. When total CTCs or MCTCs in 5 mL blood of patients were more than 6 CTCs or 5 MCTCs, PFS of the patients was significantly shorter (p < 0.05) than that in patients with less than 6 CTCs or 5 MCTCs. The patients with > 5 CTCs count changes were found to exhibit poor PFS and OS rates (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Total CTCs and MCTCs number detection in patients with colorectal cancer was very useful biomarker for predicting the prognosis of patients. Higher CTCs or MCTCs had poorer PFS and OS rates

Three-Dimensional Simulation of the Shrinkage Behavior of Injection-Molded Poly Lactic Acid (PLA): Effects of Temperature, Shear Rate and Part Thickness

The effects of injection temperature, shear and part thickness on the linear shrinkage of injection-molded poly (lactic acid) (PLA) were intensively analyzed using the Autodesk Moldflow software. The obtained results showed that both melt temperature and shear rate had obvious effects on the linear shrinkage of PLA, i.e., the linear shrinkage of PLA increases significantly with the increase of melt temperature and shear rate. In addition, the shrinkage of high-crystallinity PLA was remarkably larger than that of low-crystallinity PLA, and thin-walled parts was larger than thick-walled ones in shrinkage

Compared the efficacy of mitoxantrone hydrochloride injection for tracing with radionuclide in sentinel lymph node biopsy of breast cancer

Background and purpose: Both domestic and foreign guidelines recommend the use of radionuclide as sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy (SLNB) tracer, however this technique has not been popularized in China for a variety of reasons. Mitoxantrone hydrochloride injection for tracing (MHI), a new strategy to identify lymph nodes, has not been tested for axillary node staging in breast cancer. This multicenter, self-controlled, non-inferiority trial aimed to evaluate the differences between MHI and radionuclide in SLNB tracing. Methods: The trial was conducted across 7 hospitals from December 2019 to December 2020. Patients with early-stage breast cancer received MHI and radionuclide (technetium 99 labeled sulfur colloid, 99mTc-Sc) as SLN tracers during the surgery. The number of SLNs detected and sentinel node detection rates of MHI and radionuclide were counted to evaluate differences in the tracing effects between the two tracers. Results: SLN detection rates of MHI and radionuclide were 96.9% (370/382) and 97.4% (372/382), respectively, with no significant difference (P>0.05). SLNs were co-detected by both tracers in 362 (94.7%) patients; 16 (4.1%) had adverse events possibly related to the trial drugs. Conclusion: In this study, it was found that the lymphatic tracing ability of MHI was not inferior to that of radionuclide. Meanwhile, the use of MHI does not require special instrument/equipment assistance

Analysis of labour market needs for engineers with enhanced knowledge in sustainable renewable energy solutions in the built environment in some Asian countries

Despite the rapid growth in the uptake of renewable energy technologies, the educational profile and the skills gained at University level do not always comply with the practical needs of the organisations working in the field. Furthermore, even though the residential sector has very high potential in curbing its CO2 emissions worldwide thus meeting the challenging goals set out by the international agreements, such reduction has been limited so far. Within this context, the 'Skybelt' project, co-funded by the EU under the framework of the Erasmus + programme aims at enhancing in several Universities of Asia and Europe the engineering skills of students of all level for application of sustainable renewable energy solutions in the built environment. With the target of increasing the employability of graduates and the impact of the project, a survey on the labour market needs for specialists with enhanced knowledge and skills in the topic of the project has been conducted in the related Asian countries. Hence, relevant industries, labour market organisations and other stakeholders have been interviewed and the main results of this analysis is reported in the present paper. As first outcome of this activity, the obtained results have been considered in the selection of the modules to be improved according to a student centred study approach