Late Pleistocene variation in lignin and fatty acids from core TKN-2004 in a small mountain basin in central Japan

We generated a record of lignin and fatty acid compositions from the TK-2004 core in Takano Basin, central Japan, during 39-162 ka by TMAH-thermochemolysis-GC/MS. We tested lignin and fatty acid compositions in the sediments of a small lake (1.88 km(2) watershed) as a paleovegetation proxy to understand the responses of terrestrial vegetation in central Japan to global climate change. Variation in terrestrial organic carbon contents estimated by C/N and Sigma 8 was parallel to the total organic content (TOC) variation, suggesting that the inflow of terrestrial organic matter was a major factor determining the TOC. The ratio of mid-chain C-20-C-24 n-fatty acids to short-chain C-14-C-18 n-fatty acids (MFA/SFA ratio) and the ratio of cinnamyl to vanillyl phenols (C/V ratio) of lignin gradually increased from mid-MIS 6 to early MIS 3. The increase in both parameters suggested increase in the contribution of submerged and floating plants as the flats were expanded in the lake margin. The ratio of syringyl to vanillyl phenols (S/V ratio) corresponded to the pollen vegetation index. This correspondence indicated that the S/V ratio reflected the relative abundance of angiosperms to gymnosperms in the Takano Basin. The consistency of the S/V ratio at the site of core TKN-2004 and the other two locations suggests that the S/V ratio in a small basin is a robust proxy for terrestrial vegetation on a regional scale.ArticleGEOCHEMICAL JOURNAL. 48(2):207-217 (2014)journal articl

Predicting paths of a pedestrian by using eigenspace

本論文では、学習された人物の移動軌跡をもとに、ある時点までの人物の歩行経路から、それ以降の歩行経路を予測する手法を提案する。まず、あらかじめ固定カメラで撮影した多数の移動経路を取得し、正規化する。次に、それぞれの歩行者の移動経路を各歩行経路に分類し、各経路の固有空間を生成する。そして、新たに人物を追跡する場合には、追跡中にどの経路に対応するのかを決定し、固有空間への射影・逆射影からその人物の将来の移動軌跡の予測を行う

Biosynthetic Pathway for Sex Pheromone Components Produced in a Plusiinae Moth, Plusia festucae

While many Plusiinae species commonly secrete (Z)-7-dodecenyl acetate (Z7-12:OAc) as a key pheromone component, female moths of the rice looper (Plusia festucae) exceptionally utilize (Z)-5-dodecenyl acetate (Z5-12:OAc) to communicate with their partners. GC–MS analysis of methyl esters derived from fatty acids included in the pheromone gland of P. festucae showed a series of esters monounsaturated at the ω7-position, i.e., (Z)-5-dodecenoate, (Z)-7-tetradecenoate, (Z)-9-hexadecenoate (Z9-16:Me), and (Z)-11-octadecenoate (Z11-18:Me). By topical application of D3-labled palmitic acid (16:Acid) and stearic acid (18:Acid) to the pheromone glands, similar amounts of D3-Z5-12:OAc were detected. The glands treated with D13-labeled monoenoic acids (Z9-16:Acid and Z11-18:Acid), which were custom-made by utilizing an acetylene coupling reaction with D13-1-bromohexane, also produced similar amounts of D13-Z5-12:OAc. These results suggested that Z5-12:OAc was biosynthesized by ω7-desaturase with low substrate specificity, which could introduce a double bond at the 9-position of a 16:Acid derivative and the 11-position of an 18:Acid derivative. Additional experiments with the glands pretreated with an inhibitor of chain elongation supported this speculation. Furthermore, a comparative study with another Plusiinae species (Chrysodeixis eriosoma) secreting Z7-12:OAc indicated that the β-oxidation systems of P. festucae and C. eriosoma were different

String-like occluding region extraction for background restoration

In this paper, we propose a method for extracting string-like objects in a still image for background restoration. We assume that the object regions occluding the background are long and narrow, and contrasted in intensity with background. First the method introduces a circle contrast, the intensity difference between a pixel and those on a circle around, to find the occluding string-like regions. Then the signs of the circle contrast are decided so that the occluding regions and backgrounds are well separated, and further enhanced by an optimization process. Extracted regions are removed with interpolation (inpainting) for background restoration. Experimental results on real images show the validity of the proposed method

Extraction and elimination of parallel obstacles for image restoration

10th Korea-Japan Joint Workshop on Frontiers of Computer Vision (FCV2004), Slides ; Place : Fukuoka, Japan ; Date : February 3-4, 200

String-like occluding region extraction for background restoration

The 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition : ICPR 2006, slides ; Place : Hong Kong, China ; Date : August 20-24, 200

Measuring ball spin by image registration

10th Korea-Japan Joint Workshop on Frontiers of Computer Vision (FCV2004), Slide ; Place : Fukuoka, Japan ; Date : February 3-4, 200

On R\'{e}nyi Differential Privacy in Statistics-Based Synthetic Data Generation

Privacy protection with synthetic data generation often uses differentially private statistics and model parameters to quantitatively express theoretical security. However, these methods do not take into account privacy protection due to the randomness of data generation. In this paper, we theoretically evaluate R\'{e}nyi differential privacy of the randomness in data generation of a synthetic data generation method that uses the mean vector and the covariance matrix of an original dataset. Specifically, for a fixed $\alpha > 1$, we show the condition of $\varepsilon$ such that the synthetic data generation satisfies $(\alpha, \varepsilon)$-R\'{e}nyi differential privacy under a bounded neighboring condition and an unbounded neighboring condition, respectively. In particular, under the unbounded condition, when the size of the original dataset and synthetic datase is 10 million, the mechanism satisfies $(4, 0.576)$-R\'{e}nyi differential privacy. We also show that when we translate it into the traditional $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy, the mechanism satisfies $(4.00, 10^{-10})$-differential privacy.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure