Mechanisms of Synaptic Development and Premature Aging in Drosophila: A Dissertation

Development and aging, two fundamental aspects of life, remain key biological processes that researchers try to understand. Drosophila melanogaster, thanks to its various merits, serves as an excellent model to study both of these processes. This thesis includes two parts. In the first part, I discuss our finding that the presynaptic neuron controls a retrograde signaling pathway by releasing essential components via exosomes. During synaptic development, postsynaptic cells send retrograde signals to adjust the activity and growth of presynaptic cells. It remains unclear what the mechanism is which triggers the release of retrograde signals; and how presynaptic cells are involved in this signaling event. The first part of this thesis demonstrates that a retrograde signal mediated by Synaptotagmin4 (Syt4) depends on the anterograde delivery of Syt4 protein from the presynaptic neuron to the muscle compartment likely through exosomes. This trans-synaptic transfer of Syt4 is required for the retrograde control of activity-dependent synaptic growth at the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction. In the second part of this thesis, I talk about our discovery that the disruption of nuclear envelope (NE) budding, a novel RNA export pathway, is linked to the loss of mitochondrial integrity and premature aging in Drosophila. We demonstrate that several transcripts, which are essential for mitochondrial integrity and function, use NE-budding for nuclear export. Transgenic Drosophila expressing a LamC mutation modeling progeroid syndrome (PS), a premature aging disorder in humans, displays accelerated aging-related phenotypes including progressive mitochondrial degeneration as well as decreased levels of a specific mitochondrial transcript which is normally enriched at NE-budding site. The PS-modeled LamC mutants exhibit abnormal lamina organization that likely disrupts the egress of these RNAs via NE-budding. These results connect defective RNA export through NE-budding to progressive loss of mitochondrial integrity and premature aging in Drosophila

Research on the CSR Reporting Disclosure Practice in China – Critical Evaluate the Different Gap between the BP and CNPC

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming more and more important in today’s business, because the CSR shows the corporate culture, reputation and accountability to the public; so the CSR Reporting is the best way to disclose the corporate non-financial issues to the public. Nowadays, the CSR Reporting is still a new subject and the report’s purpose is not familiar to the users in China, only large enterprise publishes CSR reports every year and the report disclosure practice is still in a very poor situation. In this dissertation, I am going to investigate the CSR Reporting leading-edge disclosure practice and the report guidelines, in order to gain the different gaps between the leading-edge organization and Chinese organization’s disclosure practice. The BP and CNPC will recognize as the research cases in this dissertation

Video-Helpful Multimodal Machine Translation

Existing multimodal machine translation (MMT) datasets consist of images and video captions or instructional video subtitles, which rarely contain linguistic ambiguity, making visual information ineffective in generating appropriate translations. Recent work has constructed an ambiguous subtitles dataset to alleviate this problem but is still limited to the problem that videos do not necessarily contribute to disambiguation. We introduce EVA (Extensive training set and Video-helpful evaluation set for Ambiguous subtitles translation), an MMT dataset containing 852k Japanese-English (Ja-En) parallel subtitle pairs, 520k Chinese-English (Zh-En) parallel subtitle pairs, and corresponding video clips collected from movies and TV episodes. In addition to the extensive training set, EVA contains a video-helpful evaluation set in which subtitles are ambiguous, and videos are guaranteed helpful for disambiguation. Furthermore, we propose SAFA, an MMT model based on the Selective Attention model with two novel methods: Frame attention loss and Ambiguity augmentation, aiming to use videos in EVA for disambiguation fully. Experiments on EVA show that visual information and the proposed methods can boost translation performance, and our model performs significantly better than existing MMT models. The EVA dataset and the SAFA model are available at: https://github.com/ku-nlp/video-helpful-MMT.git.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 Main Conference (long paper

6G Non-Terrestrial Networks Enabled Low-Altitude Economy: Opportunities and Challenges

The unprecedented development of non-terrestrial networks (NTN) utilizes the low-altitude airspace for commercial and social flying activities. The integration of NTN and terres- trial networks leads to the emergence of low-altitude economy (LAE). A series of LAE application scenarios are enabled by the sensing, communication, and transportation functionalities of the aircrafts. The prerequisite technologies supporting LAE are introduced in this paper, including the network coverage and aircrafts detection. The LAE functionalities assisted by aircrafts with respect to sensing and communication are then summarized, including the terrestrial and non-terrestrial targets sensing, ubiquitous coverage, relaying, and traffic offloading. Finally, several future directions are identified, including aircrafts collaboration, energy efficiency, and artificial intelligence enabled LAE.Comment: This paper has been submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio