Dual Skipping Networks

Inspired by the recent neuroscience studies on the left-right asymmetry of the human brain in processing low and high spatial frequency information, this paper introduces a dual skipping network which carries out coarse-to-fine object categorization. Such a network has two branches to simultaneously deal with both coarse and fine-grained classification tasks. Specifically, we propose a layer-skipping mechanism that learns a gating network to predict which layers to skip in the testing stage. This layer-skipping mechanism endows the network with good flexibility and capability in practice. Evaluations are conducted on several widely used coarse-to-fine object categorization benchmarks, and promising results are achieved by our proposed network model.Comment: CVPR 2018 (poster); fix typ

Identification and Characterization of a SEPALLATA-like MADS-box Gene from Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.)

SEPALLATA (SEP) genes encode the E class MADS-box transcription factors that play vital roles in various aspects of plant growth and development. In this study, we isolated a SEP-like gene from cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.), which was previously named as CsMADS01. CsMADS01 had a coding sequence (CDS) of 741 bp, and coded a deduced protein of 246 amino acid residues that was predicted to be located in the nucleus. The putative CsMADS01 protein was typically characterized by the MIKC-type MADS (including MADS, I, K, and C domains) and shared high homology with other SEP-like proteins. Phylogenetic analysis of CsMADS01 and SEP proteins from other plants revealed that CsMADS01 was a member of the SEP1/2 clade of SEP proteins and was the most closely related to ZjMADS48 from Chinese jujube. Promoter analysis showed that several cis-elements related to stress response and hormones were present in the promoter region of CsMADS01. Expression analysis indicated that CsMADS01 was highly expressed during the development of male and female flowers, and the expression increased gradually along with fruit development. Ectopic expression of CsMADS01 in Arabidopsis resulted in a phyllody-like phenotype and the transgenic plants never flowered. These results suggest that CsMADS01 plays an important role in the growth and development of cucumber

Electrochemical CO reduction builds solvent water into oxygenate products

Numerous studies have examined the electrochemical reduction of CO (COR) to oxygenates (e.g., ethanol). None have considered the possibility that oxygen in the product might arise from water rather than from CO. To test this assumption, C^(16)O reduction was performed in H_2^(18)O electrolyte. Surprisingly, we found that 60–70% of the ethanol contained 18O, which must have originated from the solvent. We extended our previous all-solvent density functional theory metadynamics calculations to consider the possibility of incorporating water, and indeed, we found a new mechanism involving a Grotthuss chain of six water molecules in a concerted reaction with the *C–CH intermediate to form *CH–CH(^(18)OH), subsequently leading to (^(18)O)ethanol. This competes with the formation of ethylene that also arises from *C–CH. These unforeseen results suggest that all previous studies of COR under aqueous conditions must be reexamined

Faster OreFSDet : A Lightweight and Effective Few-shot Object Detector for Ore Images

For the ore particle size detection, obtaining a sizable amount of high-quality ore labeled data is time-consuming and expensive. General object detection methods often suffer from severe over-fitting with scarce labeled data. Despite their ability to eliminate over-fitting, existing few-shot object detectors encounter drawbacks such as slow detection speed and high memory requirements, making them difficult to implement in a real-world deployment scenario. To this end, we propose a lightweight and effective few-shot detector to achieve competitive performance with general object detection with only a few samples for ore images. First, the proposed support feature mining block characterizes the importance of location information in support features. Next, the relationship guidance block makes full use of support features to guide the generation of accurate candidate proposals. Finally, the dual-scale semantic aggregation module retrieves detailed features at different resolutions to contribute with the prediction process. Experimental results show that our method consistently exceeds the few-shot detectors with an excellent performance gap on all metrics. Moreover, our method achieves the smallest model size of 19MB as well as being competitive at 50 FPS detection speed compared with general object detectors. The source code is available at https://github.com/MVME-HBUT/Faster-OreFSDet.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure

Park 7: A Novel Therapeutic Target for Macrophages in Sepsis-Induced Immunosuppression

Sepsis remains a serious and life-threatening condition with high morbidity and mortality due to uncontrolled inflammation together with immunosuppression with few therapeutic options. Macrophages are recognized to play essential roles throughout all phases of sepsis and affect both immune homeostasis and inflammatory processes, and macrophage dysfunction is considered to be one of the major causes for sepsis-induced immunosuppression. Currently, Parkinson disease protein 7 (Park 7) is known to play an important role in regulating the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) through interaction with p47phox, a subunit of NADPH oxidase. ROS are key mediators in initiating toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling pathways to activate macrophages. Emerging evidence has strongly implicated Park 7 as an antagonist for sepsis-induced immunosuppression, which suggests that Park 7 may be a novel therapeutic target for reversing immunosuppression compromised by sepsis. Here, we review the main characteristics of sepsis-induced immunosuppression caused by macrophages and provide a detailed mechanism for how Park 7 antagonizes sepsis-induced immunosuppression initiated by the macrophage inflammatory response. Finally, we further discuss the most promising approach to develop innovative drugs that target Park 7 in patients whose initial presentation is at the late stage of sepsis