RSSOD-Bench: A large-scale benchmark dataset for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery

We present the RSSOD-Bench dataset for salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing imagery. While SOD has achieved success in natural scene images with deep learning, research in SOD for remote sensing imagery (RSSOD) is still in its early stages. Existing RSSOD datasets have limitations in terms of scale, and scene categories, which make them misaligned with real-world applications. To address these shortcomings, we construct the RSSOD-Bench dataset, which contains images from four different cities in the USA. The dataset provides annotations for various salient object categories, such as buildings, lakes, rivers, highways, bridges, aircraft, ships, athletic fields, and more. The salient objects in RSSOD-Bench exhibit large-scale variations, cluttered backgrounds, and different seasons. Unlike existing datasets, RSSOD-Bench offers uniform distribution across scene categories. We benchmark 23 different state-of-the-art approaches from both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. Experimental results demonstrate that more research efforts are required for the RSSOD task.Comment: IGARSS 2023, 4 page

Glc-TOR signalling leads transcriptome reprogramming and meristem activation

Meristems encompass stem/progenitor cells that sustain postembryonic growth of all plant organs. How meristems are activated and sustained by nutrient signalling remains enigmatic in photosynthetic plants. Combining chemical manipulations and chemical genetics at the photoautotrophic transition checkpoint, we reveal that shoot photosynthesis-derived glucose drives target-of-rapamycin (TOR) signalling relays through glycolysis and mitochondrial bioenergetics to control root meristem activation, which is decoupled from direct glucose sensing, growth-hormone signalling, and stem-cell maintenance. Surprisingly, glucose-TOR signalling dictates transcriptional reprogramming of remarkable gene sets involved in central and secondary metabolism, cell cycle, transcription, signalling, transport and folding. Systems, cellular and genetic analyses uncover TOR phosphorylation of E2Fa transcription factor for an unconventional activation of S-phase genes, and glucose-signalling defects in e2fa root meristems. Our findings establish pivotal roles of glucose-TOR signalling in unprecedented transcriptional networks wiring central metabolism and biosynthesis for energy and biomass production, and integrating localized stem/progenitor-cell proliferation through inter-organ nutrient coordination to control developmental transition and growth

Anti-endometriotic effect of Angelica sinensis (Oliv.) Diels extract in human endometriotic cells and rats

Purpose: To study the anti-endometriotic effect of Angelica sinensis (Oliv.) Diels extract (ASDE) in human endometriotic cells and rats.Method: Forty female rats were randomly divided into four groups (10 rats/group): control, endometriosis+danazol, endometriosis+high dose of ASDE and low dose of ASDE. The rats were orally administered either vehicle (200 μL of PBS) alone or ASDE (140, 280 and 560 mg/kg/day) for 5 weeks. Danazol was used as the control drug. After induction of endometriosis for 4 weeks, the rats were sacrificed by cervical dislocation and the peritoneum and visceral organs examined visually to measure the number of endometriotic lesions. Serum levels of cancer antigen 125 (CA-125) and interleukin 13 (IL-13), interleukin 18 (IL-18) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) of peritoneal fluids of rats were measured using ELISA kits. Western blot assay was performed to measure the levels of matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) and matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9)  expressions after 24 h of treatment with ASDE (30, 60, and 120 μg/mL).Results: ASDE-treated rats displayed reduced numbers of total endometriotic lesions when compared with vehicle-treated controls (p < 0.01). When the rats were treated with high dose of ASDE, serum CA-125 level, as well as IL-18 and TNF-α levels in peritoneal fluids were significantly lower than that of the control group (p < 0.01); however, IL-13 level in peritoneal fluids was significantly higher than that of the control group (p < 0.01). ASDE treatment significantly suppressed the levels of MMP-2 and MMP-9 protein in 11Z cell (p < 0.01).Conclusion: The results reveal that ASDE exhibits significant anti-endometriotic effect by inhibiting inflammatory factors in rats. Thus, the plant extract can potentially be developed for the clinical management of endometriosis. Keywords: Angelica sinensis, Endometriosis, Cancer antigen, Endometriotic lesions, Matrix metalloproteinas

Cost-Effective Incentive Allocation via Structured Counterfactual Inference

We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to traditional policy optimization frameworks, we take into account the additional reward structure and budget constraints common in this setting, and develop a new two-step method for solving this constrained counterfactual policy optimization problem. Our method first casts the reward estimation problem as a domain adaptation problem with supplementary structure, and then subsequently uses the estimators for optimizing the policy with constraints. We also establish theoretical error bounds for our estimation procedure and we empirically show that the approach leads to significant improvement on both synthetic and real datasets

Catalogue of topological electrons and phonons in all allotropes of carbon

Carbon, as one of the most common element in the earth, constructs hundreds of allotropic phases to present rich physical nature. In this work, by combining the ab inito calculations and symmetry analyses method, we systematically study a large number of allotropes of carbon (703), and discovered 315 ideal topological phononic materials and 32 topological electronic materials. The ideal topological phononic nature includes single, charge-two, three, four Weyl honons, the Dirac or Weyl nodal lines phonons, and nodal surfaces phonons. And the topological electron nature ncludes topological insulator, (Type-II) Dirac points, triple nodal points, the Dirac (Weyl) nodal lines, quadratic nodal lines and so on. For convenience, we take the uni in SG 178 and pbg in SG 230 as the examples to describe the topological features in the main. We find that it is the coexistence of single pair Weyl phonons and one-nodal surfaces phonons in the uni in SG 178, which can form the single surface arc in the (100) surface BZ and isolated double-helix surface states (IDHSSs)in the (110) surface BZ. In topological semimetal pbg in SG 230, we find that the perfect triple degenerate nodal point can be found in the near Fermi level, and it can form the clear surface states in the (001) and (110) surface BZ. Our work not only greatly expands the topological features in all allotropes of carbon, but also provide many ideal platforms to study the topological electrons and phonons