VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning

Autonomous driving systems require a good understanding of surrounding environments, including moving obstacles and static High-Definition (HD) semantic map elements. Existing methods approach the semantic map problem by offline manual annotation, which suffers from serious scalability issues. Recent learning-based methods produce dense rasterized segmentation predictions to construct maps. However, these predictions do not include instance information of individual map elements and require heuristic post-processing to obtain vectorized maps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end vectorized HD map learning pipeline, termed VectorMapNet. VectorMapNet takes onboard sensor observations and predicts a sparse set of polylines in the bird's-eye view. This pipeline can explicitly model the spatial relation between map elements and generate vectorized maps that are friendly to downstream autonomous driving tasks. Extensive experiments show that VectorMapNet achieve strong map learning performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 14.2 mAP and 14.6mAP. Qualitatively, we also show that VectorMapNet is capable of generating comprehensive maps and capturing more fine-grained details of road geometry. To the best of our knowledge, VectorMapNet is the first work designed towards end-to-end vectorized map learning from onboard observations. Our project website is available at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/vectormapnet/

Build your own hybrid thermal/EO camera for autonomous vehicle

to appear in the Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2019International audienceIn this work, we propose a novel paradigm to design a hybrid thermal/EO (Electro-Optical or visible-light) camera, whose thermal and RGB frames are pixel-wisely aligned and temporally synchronized. Compared with the existing schemes, we innovate in three ways in order to make it more compact in dimension, and thus more practical and extendable for real-world applications. The first is a redesign of the structure layout of the thermal and EO cameras. The second is on obtaining a pixel-wise spatial registration of the thermal and RGB frames by a coarse mechanical adjustment and a fine alignment through a constant homography warping. The third innovation is on extending one single hybrid camera to a hybrid camera array, through which we can obtain wide-view spatially aligned thermal, RGB and disparity images simultaneously. The experimental results show that the average error of spatial-alignment of two image modalities can be less than one pixel

Optimizing Trading Assignments in Water Right Markets

Over the past two decades, water markets have been successfully fielded in countries such as Australia, the United states, Chile, China, etc. Water users, mainly irrigators, have benefited immensely from water markets. However, the current water market design also faces certain serious barriers. It has been pointed out that transaction costs, which exists in most markets, induce great welfare loss. For example, for water markets in western China discussed in this paper, the influence of transaction costs is significant. Another important barrier is the locality of trades due to geographical constraints. Based on the water market at Xiying Irrigation, one of the most successful water market in western China, we model the water market as a graph with minimum transaction thresholds on edges. Our goal is to maximize the transaction volume or welfare. We prove that the existence of transaction costs results in no polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) to maximize social welfare (MAX SNP-hard). The complexities on special graphs are also presented. From a practical point of view, however, optimal social welfare can be obtained via a well-designed mixed integer linear program and can be approximated near optimally at a large scale via a heuristic algorithm. Both algorithms are tested on data sets generated from real historical trading data. Our study also suggests the importance of reducing transaction costs, for example, institutional costs in water market design. Our work opens a potentially important avenue of market design within the agenda of computational sustainability

Some degree conditions for

A spanning subgraph of a graph G is called a path-factor of G if its each component is a path. A path-factor is called a ≥k-factor of G if its each component admits at least k vertices, where k ≥ 2. (Zhang and Zhou, Discrete Math. 309 (2009) 2067–2076) defined the concept of ≥k-factor covered graphs, i.e., G is called a ≥k-factor covered graph if it has a ≥k-factor covering e for any e∈ E(G). In this paper, we firstly obtain a minimum degree condition for a planar graph being a ≥2-factor and ≥3-factor covered graph, respectively. Secondly, we investigate the relationship between the maximum degree of any pairs of non-adjacent vertices and ≥k-factor covered graphs, and obtain a sufficient condition for the existence of ≥2-factor and ≥3-factor covered graphs, respectively

Sufficient conditions for graphs with{P2,P5}-factors

For a graph G , a spanning subgraph F of G is called an { P 2 ,P 5 }-factor if every component of F is isomorphic to P 2 or P 5 , where P k denotes the path of order k . It was proved by Egawa and Furuya that if G satisfies 3 c 1 ( G − S )+2 c 3 ( G − S ) ≤ 4| S |+1 for all S ⊆ V ( G ), then G has a { P 2 ,P 5 }-factor, where c k ( G − S ) denotes the number of components of G − S with order k . By this result, we give some other sufficient conditions for a graph to have a { P 2 ,P 5 }-factor by various graphic parameters such as toughness, binding number, degree sums, etc. Moreover, we obtain some regular graphs and some K 1 ,r -free graphs having { P 2 ,P 5 }-factors

The effects of intravenous remifentanil on umbilical artery serum-derived exosomes in parturients undergoing epidural anesthesia: a randomized trail

Abstract Background Umbilical artery serum-derived exosomes (UEs) serve as messengers for maternal–fetal information exchange and cellular regulation. Intravenous remifentanil could be considered as an effective adjunct to epidural anesthesia in providing a favorable analgesia effect for cesarean section (C-section), but its effects on UEs are currently unknown. Methods From 01/12/2021 to 30/06/2022, eligible parturients scheduled for repeated C-section at the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University were randomized to receive either an intravenous bolus (0.15 μg/kg) followed by a continuous infusion (0.075 μg/kg/min) of remifentanil or normal saline throughout the procedure. The primary outcome was the number of UEs. Secondary outcomes included the size and protein amount of UEs, the vital signs, visceral pain score, sedation score, maternal satisfaction score, Apgar score, the incidence of neonatal asphyxia, umbilical arterial pH, and the presence of complications. Results Nanoparticle tracking analysis indicated similar size of UEs between the two groups, but the number and protein amount of UEs were increased in the remifentanil group  compared to the control group (P  0.05). Conclusion The intravenous administration of remifentanil increased the number of UEs in parturients undergoing repeated C-section under epidural anesthesia, with improved birth experience and minimal neonatal complications

Protocol in evaluating capacity of Zn–Mn aqueous batteries: a clue of pH

In the literature, Zn–Mn aqueous batteries (ZMABs) confront abnormal capacity behavior, such as capacity fluctuation and diverse “unprecedented performances.” Because of the electrolyte additive-induced complexes, various charge/discharge behaviors associated with different mechanisms are being reported. However, the current performance assessment remains unregulated, and only the electrode or the electrolyte is considered. The lack of a comprehensive and impartial performance evaluation protocol for ZMABs hinders forward research and commercialization. Here, a pH clue (proton-coupled reaction) to understand different mechanisms is proposed and the capacity contribution is normalized. Then, a series of performance metrics, including rated capacity (Cr) and electrolyte contribution ratio from Mn2+ (CfM), are systematically discussed based on diverse energy storage mechanisms. The relationship between Mn (II) ↔ Mn (III) ↔ Mn (IV) conversion chemistry and protons consumption/production is well-established. Finally, the concrete design concepts of a tunable H+/Zn2+/Mn2+ storage system for customized application scenarios, opening the door for the next-generation high-safety and reliable energy storage system, are proposed.Ministry of Education (MOE)The authors sincerely acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC grant nos. 21571080, 22109029, and 22279023), Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (22ZR1403600), International Center of Future Science, Jilin University, Changchun, P. R. China (ICFS Seed Funding for Young Researchers), and the Singapore Ministry of Education by Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE-T2EP50121-0006)

Additional file 1 of Single-cell RNA sequencing in donor and end-stage heart failure patients identifies NLRP3 as a therapeutic target for arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy

Additional file 1: Table S1. Clinical information of ARVC patients based on Task Force Criteria in 2010. Table S2. Clinical characteristics of enrolled ARVC patients and normal controls. Table S3. Counts of different biotypes. Table S4. Cell types assignment by using SingleR and manual annotation. Table S5. Current list of GWAS cardiac arrhythmia genes. Table S6. The summary of major non-cardiomyocytes subpopulations in ARVC and normal human hearts