ROLES OF VISUAL WORKING MEMORY, GLOBAL PERCEPTION AND EYE-MOVEMENT IN VISUAL COMPLEX PROBLEM SOLVING

In this dissertation, I explore roles of visual working memory, global perception and eye-movement in complex visual problem solving. Four experiments were conducted and two models were built and tested. Experiment one and model one showed that global information plays an important role and there is an interaction between external representation and internal VWM on global information representation. Experiment two and model two showed that this interaction is achieved by encoding global information with eye-movements throughout the duration of solving a problem. A very regular eye-movement pattern is observed in experiment two. Experiment three further tested the hypothesis that this eye-movement pattern is a result of the individual's VWM limitation by measuring the correlation between individual differences in the quantitative features of the eye-movement pattern and VWM size. The second model assumes that global and local information share a unified VWM capacity limitation. In the fourth experiment, I tested this hypothesis along with several alternative hypotheses. Results of the fourth experiment support the unified capacity hypothesis best and thus make a complete story for the interaction between VWM, global information processing and eye-movements in complex visual problem solving. Even with such a limited amount of VWM capacity, human visual cognition is able to solve complex visual problems by keeping a balanced amount of global and local information in VWM. This balance is achieved by eye-movements that encode both types of information into a unified VWM. Thus, although VWM has such a limited capacity, through frequent eye-movements, visual cognition is able to encode complex visual information in a temporal manner. At each instance, the amount of information encoded is limited by the capacity limitation of VWM but the global information encoded can further guide eye-movements to acquire information that is needed to make the next decision

Emergency Operations of Sudden Water Pollution Accidents

Emergency operation technologies can help to make reasonable operation measures of hydraulic structures, which are important to control the scope of the effect arising from an event and reduce the harm caused thereby. The main canal of MRP is divided into three parts in case of sudden water pollution accidents: the accident pool, the upstream section of the accident pool, and the downstream section of the accident pool. For each part, the target and strategy for emergency operation technologies are discussed. With regard to an accident pool, multiple kinds of check gate closing methods, synchronous, asynchronous, identical speed, and different speed are put forward; for the upstream section, a new method of equal-volume operation is introduced; and for the downstream section, three emergency operation methods are proposed. The simulation result of case study shows that the methods raised in this chapter can be used to determine suitable emergency operation measures

Adaptive Graphical Model Network for 2D Handpose Estimation

In this paper, we propose a new architecture called Adaptive Graphical Model Network (AGMN) to tackle the task of 2D hand pose estimation from a monocular RGB image. The AGMN consists of two branches of deep convolutional neural networks for calculating unary and pairwise potential functions, followed by a graphical model inference module for integrating unary and pairwise potentials. Unlike existing architectures proposed to combine DCNNs with graphical models, our AGMN is novel in that the parameters of its graphical model are conditioned on and fully adaptive to individual input images. Experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method used in 2D hand keypoints estimation by a notable margin on two public datasets.Comment: 30th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC

Spatiotemporal variations in vegetation cover on the Loess Plateau, China, between 1982 and 2013: possible causes and potential impacts

Vegetation is a key component of the ecosystem and plays an important role in water retention and resistance to soil erosion. In this study, we used a multiyear normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) dataset (1982-2013) and corresponding datasets for observed climatic variables to analyze changes in the NDVI at both temporal and spatial scales. The relationships between NDVI, climate change, and human activities were also investigated. The annual average NDVI showed an upward trend over the 32-year study period, especially in the center of the Loess Plateau. NDVI variations lagged behind monthly temperature changes by approximately 1 month. The contribution of human activities to variations in NDVI has become increasingly significant in recent years, with human activities responsible for 30.4% of the change in NDVI during the period 2001-2013. The increased vegetation coverage has reduced soil erosion on the Loess Plateau in recent years. It is suggested that natural restoration of vegetation is the most effective measure for control of erosion; engineering measures that promote this should feature in the future governance of the Loess Plateau

M2-like macrophages in the fibrotic liver protect mice against lethal insults through conferring apoptosis resistance to hepatocytes.

Acute injury in the setting of liver fibrosis is an interesting and still unsettled issue. Most recently, several prominent studies have indicated the favourable effects of liver fibrosis against acute insults. Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms governing this hepatoprotection remain obscure. In the present study, we hypothesized that macrophages and their M1/M2 activation critically involve in the hepatoprotection conferred by liver fibrosis. Our findings demonstrated that liver fibrosis manifested a beneficial role for host survival and apoptosis resistance. Hepatoprotection in the fibrotic liver was tightly related to innate immune tolerance. Macrophages undertook crucial but divergent roles in homeostasis and fibrosis: depleting macrophages in control mice protected from acute insult; conversely, depleting macrophages in fibrotic liver weakened the hepatoprotection and gave rise to exacerbated liver injury upon insult. The contradictory effects of macrophages can be ascribed, to a great extent, to the heterogeneity in macrophage activation. Macrophages in fibrotic mice exhibited M2-preponderant activation, which was not the case in acutely injured liver. Adoptive transfer of M2-like macrophages conferred control mice conspicuous protection against insult. In vitro, M2-polarized macrophages protected hepatocytes against apoptosis. Together, M2-like macrophages in fibrotic liver exert the protective effects against lethal insults through conferring apoptosis resistance to hepatocytes