Evaluating Visual Odometry Methods for Autonomous Driving in Rain

The increasing demand for autonomous vehicles has created a need for robust navigation systems that can also operate effectively in adverse weather conditions. Visual odometry is a technique used in these navigation systems, enabling the estimation of vehicle position and motion using input from onboard cameras. However, visual odometry accuracy can be significantly impacted in challenging weather conditions, such as heavy rain, snow, or fog. In this paper, we evaluate a range of visual odometry methods, including our DROIDSLAM based heuristic approach. Specifically, these algorithms are tested on both clear and rainy weather urban driving data to evaluate their robustness. We compiled a dataset comprising of a range of rainy weather conditions from different cities. This includes, the Oxford Robotcar dataset from Oxford, the 4Seasons dataset from Munich and an internal dataset collected in Singapore. We evaluated different visual odometry algorithms for both monocular and stereo camera setups using the Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE). Our evaluation suggests that the Depth and Flow for Visual Odometry (DF-VO) algorithm with monocular setup worked well for short range distances (< 500m) and our proposed DROID-SLAM based heuristic approach for the stereo setup performed relatively well for long-term localization. Both algorithms performed consistently well across all rain conditions.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, Accepted at IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) 202

Preclinical testing of the glycogen synthase kinase-3β inhibitor tideglusib for rhabdomyosarcoma

Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common childhood soft tissue sarcoma. RMS often arise from myogenic precursors and displays a poorly differentiated skeletal muscle phenotype most closely resembling regenerating muscle. GSK3β is a ubiquitously expressed serine-threonine kinase capable of repressing the terminal myogenic differentiation program in cardiac and skeletal muscle. Recent unbiased chemical screening efforts have prioritized GSK3β inhibitors as inducers of myodifferentiation in RMS, suggesting efficacy as single agents in suppressing growth and promoting self-renewal in zebrafish transgenic embryonal RMS (eRMS) models in vivo. In this study, we tested the irreversible GSK3β-inhibitor, tideglusib for in vivo efficacy in patient-derived xenograft models of both alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (aRMS) and eRMS. Tideglusib had effective on-target pharmacodynamic efficacy, but as a single agent had no effect on tumor progression or myodifferentiation. These results suggest that as monotherapy, GSK3β inhibitors may not be a viable treatment for aRMS or eRMS

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Voicing Asia: Post-Cold War Novels, Geopolitics, and Human Rights

This dissertation explores how novels and geopolitics differently represent a voice as "Asian." By incorporating cases studies of how U.S. policy "voiced" culturally representative anti-communist voices, it highlights the historical and formal specificity of post-Cold War Asian novelisticauthor's racial identity and ideological disposition as the primary determinants of the narrator's reliability. Voicing Asia considers the narrative technique of unreliability with respect to human rights flashpoints within U.S.-Asian geopolitics. Paired with the "voices" of puppet presidents, POWs, and cultural diplomats, the post-Cold War narrative voices in my study offer a critical response to the geopolitical production of Asia's Cold War allegiances and a formal manifestation of the contradictions within a post-Cold War order. Specifically, these voices are all unreliable in ways that elicit a historically specific form of Oriental inscrutability. In the novels of Chang-rae Lee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Wei Hui, and Mian Mian, unreliability keys to ethnic betrayal, excessive patriotism, calculated disinterestedness, and uninhibited consumerism. These forms of unreliability bear out an especially insidious and morally inhumane form of capitalist modernization that is specific to post-Cold War Asian states. I argue that the formal features of first-person "Asian" narration index but also disrupt this racial economy of Human Rights Discourse. In the novels of Lee and Ishiguro, narrative unreliability doubles as a racial trope and a literary technique, eliciting both an extraordinarily inscrutable "Asian" and a normatively fallible "human." In the other novels I explore, unreliability is much less at the narrative surface. For Jin, Mian Mian, and Wei Hui, unreliability results from the recruitment of Chinese literature for the contradictory ends of globalization (which finds its most insidious manifestation in Pacific Rim economies) and human rights (which takes Asian development as paradigmatic of modernity's inhuman conditions). I contend that novelistic evocations of "Asian voice" register, without being irreducible to, Asia's geopolitical status. Most strikingly, these novelistic voices, precisely at their most unreliable moments, can produce the narrative effect of an "Asian human." I show that locating and hearing an "Asian human" voice requires first, a more nuanced account of the formal relation between Asian narrators and Asian authors and second, a less thematically oriented approach to locating in post-Cold War literature transnationalism, globalism, cosmopolitianism, and other variations of what Eric Hayot calls "world-oriented discourse." This "Asian human" challenges the geopolitical contradiction between the homo economicus of Pacific Rim Discourse and the Western liberal subject of Human Rights Discourse. As a distinctly literary voice, it also undoes the perceived correspondence between the subject of the literary humanities and that of human rights. The historical specificity of a post-Cold War historical juncture, in which Asian capitalist modernity represents the limit of humanity, helps us register the exceptionality of an inscrutable yet fallible, Asian and human voice that can be heard only within the domain of literature

Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism

Forthcomin

Crosstalk of NF-κB/P65 and LncRNA HOTAIR-Mediated Repression of MUC1 Expression Contribute to Synergistic Inhibition of Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer by Polyphyllin 1–Enzalutamide Combination Treatment

Background/Aims: Polyphyllin I (PPI), one of the steroidal saponins in Paris polyphylla, reportedly exhibits antitumor effects. However, the detailed mechanism underlying PPI, particularly in enhancing the effect of the androgen receptor inhibitor enzalutamide in controlling castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) has not been explored. Methods: Cell viability and cell cycle distribution were measured using 3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) and flow cytometry assays, respectively. Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) HOX transcript antisense RNA (HOTAIR) expression was measured by quantitative real time-PCR (qRT-PCR). Western blot analysis was performed to determine the protein expression levels of MUC1, p65, and p50. Silencing of HOTAIR was evaluated using the siRNA procedure. The promoter activity of the MUC1 gene was determined using Secrete-Pair Dual Luminescence Assay Kit. Exogenous expression of HOTAIR, p65, and MUC1 was conducted by transient transfection assay. A xenograft tumor model in nude mice was used to further evaluate the effect of the combination of PPI and enzalutamide in vivo. Results: We showed that PPI significantly inhibited growth and induced cell cycle arrest in CRPC cells. PPI also decreased p65 and MUC1 protein expression and reduced HOTAIR expression. Exogenously expressed p65 resisted the PPI-inhibited expression of HOTAIR, whereas silenced HOTAIR reduced MUC1 protein but exerted no effect on the expression of p65 and p50 proteins. Conversely, exogenously expressed HOTAIR resisted the PPI-inhibited MUC1 protein expression, and excessive expression of MUC1 antagonized the PPI-inhibited cell growth. Notably, PPI combined with enzalutamide exerted a synergistic effect. Consistent with this finding, PPI inhibited tumor growth, HOTAIR expression, as well as p65 and MUC1 protein expressions in vivo. Conclusions: Our results indicate that PPI inhibits the growth of CRPC cells by inhibiting p65 protein and concomitantly reducing HOTAIR expression, thereby suppressing MUC1 gene expression. The novel regulatory interaction of p65 and HOTAIR converge in the inhibition of MUC1 expression and overall PPI response. The combination of PPI and enzalutamide exhibits synergy. This study reveals a novel mechanism underlying the synergistic inhibitory effect of PPI and enzalutamide on the growth of CRPC cells

Revisited and Revised: Is RhoA Always a Villain in Cardiac Pathophysiology?

The neonatal rat ventricular myocyte model of hypertrophy has provided tremendous insight with regard to signaling pathways regulating cardiac growth and gene expression. Many mediators thus discovered have been successfully extrapolated to the in vivo setting, as assessed using genetically engineered mice and physiological interventions. Studies in neonatal rat ventricular myocytes demonstrated a role for the small G-protein RhoA and its downstream effector kinase, Rho-associated coiled-coil containing protein kinase (ROCK), in agonist-mediated hypertrophy. Transgenic expression of RhoA in the heart does not phenocopy this response, however, nor does genetic deletion of ROCK prevent hypertrophy. Pharmacologic inhibition of ROCK has effects most consistent with roles for RhoA signaling in the development of heart failure or responses to ischemic damage. Whether signals elicited downstream of RhoA promote cell death or survival and are deleterious or salutary is, however, context and cell-type dependent. The concepts discussed above are reviewed, and the hypothesis that RhoA might protect cardiomyocytes from ischemia and other insults is presented. Novel RhoA targets including phospholipid regulated and regulating enzymes (Akt, PI kinases, phospholipase C, protein kinases C and D) and serum response element-mediated transcriptional responses are considered as possible pathways through which RhoA could affect cardiomyocyte survival