Tracking the 6-DOF Flight Trajectory of Windborne Debris using Stereophotogrammetry

Numerous post-windstorm investigations have reported that windborne debris can cause costly damage to the envelope of buildings in urban areas under strong winds (e.g., during hurricanes or tornados). Thus, understanding the physics of debris flight is of critical importance. Previously developed numerical models describing debris flight physics have not been validated for the complex urban flow environment; such a validation requires experimentally measuring the debris flight trajectory in wind tunnel tests. In this context, this paper proposes a debris measurement algorithm using stereophotogrammetry. This algorithm aims to determine the six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) trajectory and velocity of flying debris, addressing the research gap, i.e., the lack of an algorithm/software for measuring three-rotational-DOF using stereophotogrammetry. This is a civil engineering problem, but computer graphics is the foundation to solve it. This paper focuses on the theoretical development of the algorithm. The developed algorithm can be readily implemented in modern wind tunnel experiments

System Identification for Time-Varying Systems under Non-White Excitations

Accurate identification of structural properties such as natural frequency and damping under extreme wind conditions is critical for assessing the structural performances. Full-scale monitoring has witnessed that dynamic properties of structures may change over time under extreme winds. System identification (SI) is non-trivial in this case. While wavelet and short time Fourier transforms have been used in tracking time-varying frequencies, they have seldom been used to identify the time-varying damping ratio. This is because the short window (required to capture the temporal information) will amplify the bandwidth significantly and lead to considerably overestimated damping ratios. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel non-stationary SI approach to identify time-varying systems under general non-white excitations by extending an earlier approach proposed by the authors. To solve this problem, this study innovatively adapted theoretical frequency response functions (FRF) of systems for marginal spectra of the wavelet transform by adding short window effects explicitly. In this way, both the natural frequency and damping ratio at each time instant can be identified accurately. However, the initially proposed method assumed the excitation to be white in the vicinity of the structural natural frequencies. This assumption might not be strictly valid in some cases. For example, for wind-excited structures, the spectrum of wind force is a function of frequency derived from the turbulent wind spec-trum and aerodynamic admittance function. To better handle these non-white excitations, the method proposed in this paper directly models the non-white spectrum of excitation in the frequency domain. Then both the parameters of the force spectrum and the system properties are identified using the out-put data. The uncertainties of the SI results are evaluated. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical examples considering structures under extreme wind conditions

Implications of Ape1 in reactive oxygen signaling response following cisplatin treatment of dorsal root ganglion neurons

Peripheral neuropathy is one of the major side-effects of the anticancer drug, cisplatin. Although previous work suggests that this neuropathy correlates with formation of DNA adducts in sensory neurons, growing evidence suggests that cisplatin also increases the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which could cause DNA damage. Apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease/redox factor-1 (Ape1/Ref-1) is a multifunctional protein involved in DNA base excision repair (BER) of oxidative DNA damage and in redox regulation of a number of transcription factors. Therefore, we asked whether altering Ape1 functions would influence cisplatin induced neurotoxicity. Sensory neurons in culture were exposed to cisplatin for 24 hrs and several endpoints of toxicity were measured including production of ROS, cell death, apoptosis, and release of the immunoreactive calcitonin gene-related peptide (iCGRP). Reducing expression of Ape1 in neuronal cultures using siRNA enhances cisplatin-induced cell killing, apoptosis, ROS generation and the cisplatin-induced reduction in iCGRP release. Overexpressing wild-type (WT)-Ape1 attenuates all the toxic effects of cisplatin in cells containing normal endogenous levels of Ape1 and in cells with reduced Ape1 levels following Ape1siRNA treatment. Overexpressing the redox deficient/repair competent C65-Ape1 provides partial rescue, while the repair deficient Ape1 (N226A+R177A) does not protect neurons from cisplatin toxicity. We also observe an increase in phosphorylation of p53 following a decrease in Ape1 levels in sensory neuronal cultures. These results strongly support the notion that Ape1 is a potential translational target such that protecting Ape1 levels and particularly its DNA repair function could reduce peripheral neuropathy in patients undergoing cisplatin treatment

Murine Trophoblast Stem Cells and Their Differentiated Cells Attenuate Zika Virus In Vitro By Reducing Glycosylation of the Viral Envelope Protein

Zika virus (ZIKV) infection during pregnancy can cause devastating fetal neuropathological abnormalities, including microcephaly. Most studies of ZIKV infection in pregnancy have focused on post-implantation stage embryos. Currently, we have limited knowledge about how a pre-implantation stage embryo deals with a viral infection. This study investigates ZIKV infection on mouse trophoblast stem cells (TSCs) and their in vitro differentiated TSCs (DTSCs), which resemble the cellular components of the trophectoderm layer of the blastocyst that later develops into the placenta. We demonstrate that TSCs and DTSCs are permissive to ZIKV infection; however, ZIKV propagated in TSCs and DTSCs exhibit substantially lower infectivity, as shown in vitro and in a mouse model compared to ZIKV that was generated in Vero cells or mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs). We further show that the low infectivity of ZIKV propagated in TSCs and DTSCs is associated with a reduced level of glycosylation on the viral envelope (E) proteins, which are essential for ZIKV to establish initial attachment by binding to cell surface glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). The decreased level of glycosylation on ZIKV E is, at least, partially due to the low-level expression of a glycosylation-related gene, Hexa, in TSCs and DTSCs. Furthermore, this finding is not limited to ZIKV since similar observations have been made as to the chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and West Nile virus (WNV) propagated in TSCs and DTSCs. In conclusion, our results reveal a novel phenomenon suggesting that murine TSCs and their differentiated cells may have adapted a cellular glycosylation system that can limit viral infectivity by altering the glycosylation of viral envelope proteins, therefore serving as a unique, innate anti-viral mechanism in the pre-implantation stage embryo

Modeling Orders of User Behaviors via Differentiable Sorting: A Multi-task Framework to Predicting User Post-click Conversion

User post-click conversion prediction is of high interest to researchers and developers. Recent studies employ multi-task learning to tackle the selection bias and data sparsity problem, two severe challenges in post-click behavior prediction, by incorporating click data. However, prior works mainly focused on pointwise learning and the orders of labels (i.e., click and post-click) are not well explored, which naturally poses a listwise learning problem. Inspired by recent advances on differentiable sorting, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-task framework that leverages orders of user behaviors to predict user post-click conversion in an end-to-end approach. Specifically, we define an aggregation operator to combine predicted outputs of different tasks to a unified score, then we use the computed scores to model the label relations via differentiable sorting. Extensive experiments on public and industrial datasets show the superiority of our proposed model against competitive baselines.Comment: The paper is accepted as a short research paper by SIGIR 202

A Comprehensive RNA Expression Signature for Cervical Squamous Cell Carcinoma Prognosis

Clinicopathological characteristics alone are not enough to predict the survival of patients with cervical squamous cell carcinoma (CESC) due to clinical heterogeneity. In recent years, many genes and non-coding RNAs have been shown to be oncogenes or tumor-suppressors in CESC cells. This study aimed to develop a comprehensive transcriptomic signature for CESC patient prognosis. Univariate, multivariate, and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator penalized Cox regression were used to identify prognostic signatures for CESC patients from transcriptomic data of The Cancer Genome Atlas. A normalized prognostic index (NPI) was formulated as a synthetical index for CESC prognosis. Time-dependent receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to compare prognostic signatures. A prognostic transcriptomic signature was identified, including 1 microRNA, 1 long non-coding RNA, and 6 messenger RNAs. Decreased survival was associated with CESC patients being in the high-risk group stratified by NPI. The NPI was an independent predictor for CESC patient prognosis and it outperformed the known clinicopathological characteristics, microRNA-only signature, gene-only signature, and previously identified microRNA and gene signatures. Function and pathway enrichment analysis revealed that the identified prognostic RNAs were mainly involved in angiogenesis. In conclusion, we proposed a transcriptomic signature for CESC prognosis and it may be useful for effective clinical risk management of CESC patients. Moreover, RNAs in the transcriptomic signature provided clues for downstream experimental validation and mechanism exploration

Towards an Understanding of Large Language Models in Software Engineering Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn widespread attention and research due to their astounding performance in tasks such as text generation and reasoning. Derivative products, like ChatGPT, have been extensively deployed and highly sought after. Meanwhile, the evaluation and optimization of LLMs in software engineering tasks, such as code generation, have become a research focus. However, there is still a lack of systematic research on the application and evaluation of LLMs in the field of software engineering. Therefore, this paper is the first to comprehensively investigate and collate the research and products combining LLMs with software engineering, aiming to answer two questions: (1) What are the current integrations of LLMs with software engineering? (2) Can LLMs effectively handle software engineering tasks? To find the answers, we have collected related literature as extensively as possible from seven mainstream databases, and selected 123 papers for analysis. We have categorized these papers in detail and reviewed the current research status of LLMs from the perspective of seven major software engineering tasks, hoping this will help researchers better grasp the research trends and address the issues when applying LLMs. Meanwhile, we have also organized and presented papers with evaluation content to reveal the performance and effectiveness of LLMs in various software engineering tasks, providing guidance for researchers and developers to optimize

Numerical analysis of initial imperfection influence on the performance of buckling-restrained brace

Potrebno je razmotriti interakciju između jezgre i vanjskih ograničavajućih elemenata kod spojnice ograničenog izvijanja (buckling-restrained brace - BRB) zbog značajnog učinka na ukupnu performansu spojnica. Mehanizam deformacije elementa jezgre u obliku nekoliko valova, po prvi se puta analizira u ovom istraživanju i predstavlja element jezgre kao savojni valoviti oblik s povećavajućim aksijalnim opterećenjem te pokazuje distribuciju i razvoj dodirne sile između vanjskih i ograničavajućih elemenata jezgre analizom konačnih elemenata. Objektno orijentiran programski jezik Python primijenjen je u ABAQUS parametrijskoj analizi, a također se analiziraju utjecaji inicijalne nesavršenosti jezgre i vanjskih elemenata ograničenja kao i amplitude razmaka na performansu BRB. Rezultati numeričke simulacije pokazuju da je povratno savijanje elementa jezgre rezultiralo iznenadnim izvijanjem kod viših tipova oscilacije kao i sveukupno smanjenje naprezanja u vanjskom ograničavajućem elementu, dok je lokalno naprezanje poraslo s razvojem valovitog oblika deformacije jezgre. Spojnica (BRB) s jezgrom simetrične inicijalne nesavršenosti funkcionirala je lošije od one s jezgrom protu-simetrične početne nesavršenosti u kompresiji. Nadalje, manji početni progib vanjskih ograničavajućih elemenata i amplitude razmaka rezultira manjom dodirnom silom te spojnica može stoga učinkovitije funkcionirati.The interaction between the core and external restraining members of the buckling-restrained brace (BRB) should be considered because of the significant effect it may cause on the overall performance of BRBs. The mechanism of core member multi-wave deformation is studied for the first time in this research, which presents an actual flexural wave-shape development of core member with increasing axial load and reveals the contact force distribution and development between the core and external restraining members by employing the refined finite element (FE) analysis. The object-oriented programming language Python is applied in the ABAQUS parameter analysis, and the influences of initial imperfection of the core and external restraining members, as well as that of the gap amplitude, on BRB performance are also investigated. Numerical simulation results show that the reverse bending of core member triggered sudden buckling in high-order modes, as well as the overall stress decrease in the external restraining member, whereas the local stress increased with the development of the core deformation waveform. The BRB with the core of symmetric initial imperfection performed worse than that with the core of anti-symmetric initial imperfection in compression. Furthermore, less initial deflection of external restraining members and gap amplitude leads to smaller contact force, thus the BRB can perform more effectively