Deep Image Harmonization

Compositing is one of the most common operations in photo editing. To generate realistic composites, the appearances of foreground and background need to be adjusted to make them compatible. Previous approaches to harmonize composites have focused on learning statistical relationships between hand-crafted appearance features of the foreground and background, which is unreliable especially when the contents in the two layers are vastly different. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network for image harmonization, which can capture both the context and semantic information of the composite images during harmonization. We also introduce an efficient way to collect large-scale and high-quality training data that can facilitate the training process. Experiments on the synthesized dataset and real composite images show that the proposed network outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods

Periodic Radio Variability in NRAO 530: Phase Dispersion Minimization Analysis

In this paper, a periodicity analysis of the radio light curves of the blazar NRAO 530 at 14.5, 8.0, and 4.8 GHz is presented employing an improved Phase Dispersion Minimization (PDM) technique. The result, which shows two persistent periodic components of $\sim 6$ and $\sim 10$ years at all three frequencies, is consistent with the results obtained with the Lomb-Scargle periodogram and weighted wavelet Z-transform algorithms. The reliability of the derived periodicities is confirmed by the Monte Carlo numerical simulations which show a high statistical confidence. (Quasi-)Periodic fluctuations of the radio luminosity of NRAO 530 might be associated with the oscillations of the accretion disk triggered by hydrodynamic instabilities of the accreted flow. \keywords{methods: statistical -- galaxies: active -- galaxies: quasar: individual: NRAO 530}Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted by RA

Significance of the entire C-terminus in biological activities mediated by the RON receptor tyrosine kinase and its oncogenic variant RON160

The RON receptor tyrosine kinase regulates epithelial cell homeostasis and tumorigenesis by transducing multiple signals through its functional domains. The present study was to determine the significance of the entire C-terminus in RON or its variant RON160-mediated activities related to cell motility and tumorigenesis. Analysis of protein phosphorylation revealed that elimination of the entire C-terminus significantly impairs the ligand-dependent or independent RON or RON160 phosphorylation and dimerization. Phosphorylation of downstream signaling proteins such as Erk1/2, AKT, and p38 MAP kinase was also diminished in cells expressing the C-terminus-free RON or RON160. These dysfunctional activities were accompanied with the inability of truncated RON or RON160 to mediate cytoplasmic β-catenin accumulation. Functional analysis further demonstrated that truncation of the C-terminus significantly impairs RON or RON160-mediated cell proliferation, morphological changes, and cellular migration. Significantly, oncogenic RON160-mediated tumor growth in athymic nude mice was lost after the deletion of the C-terminus. Thus, the C-terminus is a critical component of the RON receptor. The entire C-terminus is required for RON or RON160-mediated intracellular signaling events leading to various cellular activities

The Mechanisms for the Oxidative Addition of Imidazolium Salts to a Group 9 Transition Metal Atom (Co0, Rh0, and Ir0) and a Group 10 Transition Metal Atom (Ni0, Pd0, and Pt0): A Theoretical Study

The potential energy surfaces of the oxidative addition reactions, L2M + imidazoliumcation → product and CpM′L + imidazolium cation → product (M = Ni, Pd, Pt; M′ = Co, Rh, Ir; Cp = η5-C5H5; L = 1,3-aryl-N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC), aryl = 2,4,6-trimethylphenyl), are studied at the M06-L/Def2-SVP level of theory. The theoretical findings show that the singlet-triplet splitting (∆Est = Etriplet − Esinglet) for the L2M and CpM′L species can be used to predict the reactivity for their oxidative additions. That is to say, current theoretical evidence suggests that both a 14-electron L2M complex and a 16-electron CpM′Lcomplex with a better electron-donating ligand L (such as NHC) result in a reduced ∆Est value and facilitate the oxidative addition to the saturated C─H bond. The theoretical results for this study are in good agreement with the obtainable experimental results and allow a number of predictions to be made