M-Libraries: a survey of university library mobile website

This paper surveys mobile websites of university libraries in United States. Library mobile websites from 26 of 129 universities which are listed on http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=M-Libraries are surveyed. The home page, catalog search, informational features, assistant features, and advanced features of each mobile website are explored and analyzed. This survey provides updated view of mobile websites adapted in US university libraries. It answers the questions of what functions and services are popular on university library mobile websites, and how they are implemented. The data collected in this survey can be used to improve library mobile website design.Master of Science in Information Scienc

G2C: A Generator-to-Classifier Framework Integrating Multi-Stained Visual Cues for Pathological Glomerulus Classification

Pathological glomerulus classification plays a key role in the diagnosis of nephropathy. As the difference between different subcategories is subtle, doctors often refer to slides from different staining methods to make decisions. However, creating correspondence across various stains is labor-intensive, bringing major difficulties in collecting data and training a vision-based algorithm to assist nephropathy diagnosis. This paper provides an alternative solution for integrating multi-stained visual cues for glomerulus classification. Our approach, named generator-to-classifier (G2C), is a two-stage framework. Given an input image from a specified stain, several generators are first applied to estimate its appearances in other staining methods, and a classifier follows to combine visual cues from different stains for prediction (whether it is pathological, or which type of pathology it has). We optimize these two stages in a joint manner. To provide a reasonable initialization, we pre-train the generators in an unlabeled reference set under an unpaired image-to-image translation task, and then fine-tune them together with the classifier. We conduct experiments on a glomerulus type classification dataset collected by ourselves (there are no publicly available datasets for this purpose). Although joint optimization slightly harms the authenticity of the generated patches, it boosts classification performance, suggesting more effective visual cues are extracted in an automatic way. We also transfer our model to a public dataset for breast cancer classification, and outperform the state-of-the-arts significantly.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 201

LiDAR2Map: In Defense of LiDAR-Based Semantic Map Construction Using Online Camera Distillation

Semantic map construction under bird's-eye view (BEV) plays an essential role in autonomous driving. In contrast to camera image, LiDAR provides the accurate 3D observations to project the captured 3D features onto BEV space inherently. However, the vanilla LiDAR-based BEV feature often contains many indefinite noises, where the spatial features have little texture and semantic cues. In this paper, we propose an effective LiDAR-based method to build semantic map. Specifically, we introduce a BEV feature pyramid decoder that learns the robust multi-scale BEV features for semantic map construction, which greatly boosts the accuracy of the LiDAR-based method. To mitigate the defects caused by lacking semantic cues in LiDAR data, we present an online Camera-to-LiDAR distillation scheme to facilitate the semantic learning from image to point cloud. Our distillation scheme consists of feature-level and logit-level distillation to absorb the semantic information from camera in BEV. The experimental results on challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed LiDAR2Map on semantic map construction, which significantly outperforms the previous LiDAR-based methods over 27.9% mIoU and even performs better than the state-of-the-art camera-based approaches. Source code is available at: https://github.com/songw-zju/LiDAR2Map.Comment: Accepted by CVPR202

Uniaxial and Mixed Orientations of Poly(ethylene oxide) in Nanoporous Alumina Studied by X-ray Pole Figure Analysis

The orientation of polymers under confinement is a basic, yet not fully understood phenomenon. In this work, the texture of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) infiltrated in nanoporous anodic alumina oxide (AAO) templates was investigated by X-ray pole figures. The influence of geometry and crystallization conditions, such as pore diameter, aspect ratio, and cooling rates, was systematically examined. All the samples exhibited a single, volume-dependent crystallization temperature (Tc) at temperatures much lower than that exhibited by bulk PEO, indicating “clean” microdomains without detectable heterogeneous nucleation. An “orientation diagram” was established to account for the experimental observations. Under very high cooling rates (quenching), crystallization of PEO within AAO was nucleation-controlled, adopting a random distribution of crystallites. Under low cooling rates, growth kinetics played a decisive role on the crystal orientation. A relatively faster cooling rate (10 °C/min) and/or smaller pores lead to the * ║ pore axis (n⃗) mode (uniaxial orientation). When the cooling rate was lower (1 °C/min), and/or the pores were larger, a mixed orientation, with a coexistence of * ║ n⃗ and * ║ n⃗ , was observed. The results favor the kinetic model where the fastest growth direction tends to align parallel to the pore axis.This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, 21873109, 51820105005, 21274156). G. L. is grateful to the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2015026). G. L., D. W., and A. J. M. also acknowledge European funding by the RISE BIODEST project (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017-778092). The authors thank Dr. Zhongkai Yang for assistance with pole figure measurement

Molecular Basis and Consequences of the Cytochrome c-tRNA Interaction.

The intrinsic apoptosis pathway occurs through the release of mitochondrial cytochrome c to the cytosol, where it promotes activation of the caspase family of proteases. The observation that tRNA binds to cytochrome c revealed a previously unexpected mode of apoptotic regulation. However, the molecular characteristics of this interaction, and its impact on each interaction partner, are not well understood. Using a novel fluorescence assay, we show here that cytochrome c binds to tRNA with an affinity comparable with other tRNA-protein binding interactions and with a molecular ratio of ∼3:1. Cytochrome c recognizes the tertiary structural features of tRNA, particularly in the core region. This binding is independent of the charging state of tRNA but is regulated by the redox state of cytochrome c. Compared with reduced cytochrome c, oxidized cytochrome c binds to tRNA with a weaker affinity, which correlates with its stronger pro-apoptotic activity. tRNA binding both facilitates cytochrome c reduction and inhibits the peroxidase activity of cytochrome c, which is involved in its release from mitochondria. Together, these findings provide new insights into the cytochrome c-tRNA interaction and apoptotic regulation

Comparison between transgenic maize with exotic betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) gene and its untransformed counterpart

We investigated the performance of a transgenic maize (Zea mays L) line with an exotic betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) gene and its untransformed counterpart under drought and normal water conditions. Membrane permeability, osmoprotectant contents, and antioxidant enzyme activities of the maize lines as well as plant height and biomass were compared. The results showed that, under drought stress, compared with the untransgenic line, the contents of glycine betaine (GB), soluble sugars, soluble proteins and proline of the trans- genic line were significantly higher, so was the peroxidase (POD) activity; the contents of superoxide anion free radical, malondialdehyde (MDA) and the electrical conductivity of the transgenic line were lower; plant height and the biomass of the transgenic line were significantly higher. Under normal water conditions, the contents of soluble protein and MDA content of the transgenic line were significantly lower; but it was not the case for the content of superoxide anion free radical, electrical conductivity and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity. No significant difference was observed in GB content and, the plant height and the biomass between the 2 lines. We conclude that the transgenic maize with exotic BADH gene was superior over its untransformed counterpart under drought stress and they performed similarly under normal water conditions