Photo Editing with Face Selection and Replacement

This disclosure describes techniques to enable users to edit photos to include selected faces or facial expressions. A user can select a photo from a burst or other collection of photos. Detected faces in the selected photo are highlighted in a user interface that enables a user to select a face in the photo to modify. In response, a set of candidate faces that are suitable to replace the selected face are presented in the user interface. With user permission, the candidate faces can be obtained and/or modified from other accessible photos, such as from a burst of photos. The user can select any candidate face that seamlessly replaces the selected face in the displayed photo. The described interface allows users to quickly and easily replace undesired facial expressions in photos with preferred facial expressions

Quantitative analytical tools for bee health (Apis mellifera) assessment

Background: The number of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colony losses has grown significantly in the past decade, endangering pollination of agricultural crops. Research indicates that no single factor is sufficient to explain colony losses and that a combination of stressors appears to impact hive health. Accurate evaluation of the different factors such as pathogen load, environmental conditions, nutrition and foraging is important to understanding colony loss. Commonly used colony assessment methods are subjective and imprecise making it difficult to compare bee hive parameters between studies. Finding robust, validated methods to assess bees and hive health has become a key area of focus for bee health and bee risk assessment.Results: Our study focused on developing and implementing quantitative analytical tools that allowed us to investigate different factors contribution to colony loss. These validated methods include: adult bee and brood cell imaging and automated counting (IndiCounter, WSC Regexperts), cellular transmitting scales and weather monitoring (Phytech, ILS) and pathogen detection (QuantiGene® Plex 2.0 RNA assay platform from Affymetrix). These techniques enable accurate assessment of colony state.Conclusion: A major challenge to date for bee health is to identify the events leading to colony loss. Our study describes validated molecular and computational tools to assess colony health that can prospectively describe the etiology of potential diseases and in some cases identify the cause leading to colony collapse.Keywords: colony loss, colony assessment methods, cellular transmitting scales, weather monitoring, QuantiGene® Plex 2.0

Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound treatment of facet joint pain: summary of preclinical phase

STUDY DESIGN: A phantom experiment, two thermocouple experiments, three in vivo pig experiments, and a simulated treatment on a healthy human volunteer were conducted to test the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) for treating facet joint pain. OBJECTIVE: The goal of the current study was to develop a novel method for accurate and safe noninvasive facet joint ablation using MRgFUS. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Facet joints are a common source of chronic back pain. Direct facet joint interventions include medial branch nerve ablation and intra-articular injections, which are widely used, but limited in the short and long term. MRgFUS is a breakthrough technology that enables accurate delivery of high-intensity focused ultrasound energy to create a localized temperature rise for tissue ablation, using MR guidance for treatment planning and real-time feedback. METHODS: We validated the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of MRgFUS for facet joint ablation using the ExAblate 2000® System (InSightec Ltd., Tirat Carmel, Israel) and confirmed the system's ability to ablate the edge of the facet joint and all terminal nerves innervating the joint. A phantom experiment, two thermocouple experiments, three in vivo pig experiments, and a simulated treatment on a healthy human volunteer were conducted. RESULTS: The experiments showed that targeting the facet joint with energies of 150–450 J provides controlled and accurate heating at the facet joint edge without penetration to the vertebral body, spinal canal, or root foramina. Treating with reduced diameter of the acoustic beam is recommended since a narrower beam improves access to the targeted areas. CONCLUSIONS: MRgFUS can safely and effectively target and ablate the facet joint. These results are highly significant, given that this is the first study to demonstrate the potential of MRgFUS to treat facet joint pain

MyStyle: A Personalized Generative Prior

We introduce MyStyle, a personalized deep generative prior trained with a few shots of an individual. MyStyle allows to reconstruct, enhance and edit images of a specific person, such that the output is faithful to the person's key facial characteristics. Given a small reference set of portrait images of a person (~100), we tune the weights of a pretrained StyleGAN face generator to form a local, low-dimensional, personalized manifold in the latent space. We show that this manifold constitutes a personalized region that spans latent codes associated with diverse portrait images of the individual. Moreover, we demonstrate that we obtain a personalized generative prior, and propose a unified approach to apply it to various ill-posed image enhancement problems, such as inpainting and super-resolution, as well as semantic editing. Using the personalized generative prior we obtain outputs that exhibit high-fidelity to the input images and are also faithful to the key facial characteristics of the individual in the reference set. We demonstrate our method with fair-use images of numerous widely recognizable individuals for whom we have the prior knowledge for a qualitative evaluation of the expected outcome. We evaluate our approach against few-shots baselines and show that our personalized prior, quantitatively and qualitatively, outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives.Comment: Project webpage: https://mystyle-personalized-prior.github.io/, Video: https://youtu.be/QvOdQR3tlO

Single Neurons in M1 and Premotor Cortex Directly Reflect Behavioral Interference

Some motor tasks, if learned together, interfere with each other's consolidation and subsequent retention, whereas other tasks do not. Interfering tasks are said to employ the same internal model whereas noninterfering tasks use different models. The division of function among internal models, as well as their possible neural substrates, are not well understood. To investigate these questions, we compared responses of single cells in the primary motor cortex and premotor cortex of primates to interfering and noninterfering tasks. The interfering tasks were visuomotor rotation followed by opposing visuomotor rotation. The noninterfering tasks were visuomotor rotation followed by an arbitrary association task. Learning two noninterfering tasks led to the simultaneous formation of neural activity typical of both tasks, at the level of single neurons. In contrast, and in accordance with behavioral results, after learning two interfering tasks, only the second task was successfully reflected in motor cortical single cell activity. These results support the hypothesis that the representational capacity of motor cortical cells is the basis of behavioral interference and division between internal models

Playing Both Sides of the Market: Success and Reciprocity on Crowdfunding Platforms

Crowdfunding platforms enable the financing of projects by soliciting small investments from a large base of potential backers over the internet. These platforms create a dynamic funding network. We use data collected from Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding platform, to study some of these network dynamics. We focus on project owners who choose to operate on both sides of the market, backing the projects of others. We study the impact of such out-of-project actions on the successful financing of projects. We find that an owner’s backing-history has a significant effect on financing outcomes. We also show that owners who are backers form a sub-community which is active in backing projects, especially those initiated by its members. We find evidence for both direct and indirect reciprocity. Backing the projects of other is a rewarding strategy. Projects created by active backers have higher success rates, attract more backers and collect more funds

Profiles in COVID-19: peritraumatic stress symptoms and their relation with death anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and emotion dysregulation

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic might be experienced as an ongoing traumatic event and could result in peritraumatic stress symptoms. Evidence implies that individuals’ levels of death anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and difficulties in emotion regulation may contribute to their peritraumatic stress symptomatology in the aftermath of trauma exposure. Objective: The current study aimed to explore these hypotheses in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: An online survey was conducted among a convenience sample of 846 Israeli adults from April 2 to 19 April 2020. COVID-19-related stressors, death anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, difficulties in emotion regulation, and peritraumatic stress symptoms were assessed via self-report questionnaires. Results: Analyses indicated significant relations between death anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and emotion regulation difficulties, on the one hand, and peritraumatic stress symptoms, on the other. Three distinct profiles were identified. Furthermore, profile type – namely having low, medium, and high levels of death anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and emotion dysregulation – had a significant effect in explaining peritraumatic stress symptoms. Conclusions: Results suggest that during the pandemic, levels of death anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, and emotion dysregulation may explain heterogeneity in individuals’ trauma-related symptomatology

The Impact of Social vs. Non-Social Referral Sources on Online News Consumption

As news consumption shifts online, referring channels assume a growing role in the market for online news, creating new challenges and opportunities for news organizations. This research combines field and lab experiments, and analysis of large-scale clickstream data, to study the effects of social versus non-social referral sources on news consumption on a news outlet’s website. We propose that referring channels create a new type of priming effect, denoted the referral effect, as unique features of the referring channel affect user behavior in a subsequent news visit. We find that social referral effects manifest as more focused reading - visits with fewer articles, shorter durations, yet higher reading completion rates, compared to non-social referrals. We further find lower sharing rates following social media referrals, likely due to a lower perceived novelty to peers of content discovered via social channels. The results provide insights applicable to news outlets’ social media strategies