302 research outputs found
In Vitro Functional Analysis Of Novel Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms In OATP1B1 And Potential Clinical Relevance
Statin-induced myopathy is a common adverse reaction of statin therapy. Patients with elevated plasma concentration of statins are thought to be at greater risk for myopathy. Statins are transported from the blood to hepatocytes via organic anion transporting polypeptide 1B1 (OATP1B1). Although single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in OATP1B1 have been associated with increased statin concentrations, we hypothesize that there may be other SNPs in OATP1B1 that can also contribute to reduced transport activity and increased plasma statin concentrations. OATP1B1 cDNA packaged in pEF6/V5-His TOPO was used as template, and 6 SNPs — c.298G\u3eA, c.419C\u3eT, c.463C\u3eA (*4), c.1007C\u3eG, c.1463G\u3eC (*9), and c.1738C\u3eT — were introduced separately and expressed in adenovirus. 3 SNPs abolished transport activity, 1 SNP decreased transport, 1 increased transport, and 1 did not affect transport activity. Our data support the hypothesis that there are additional loss of function SNPs in OATP1B1
Trade-gender alignment of international trade agreements: insufficiencies and improvements
There is a growing call for gender equality in international trade. Enhancing trade-gender alignment of international trade agreements (ITAs) is a major way to make ITAs gender-responsive. In recent years, an increasing number of gender provisions have been incorporated in ITAs, which can be roughly categorized in four major types from normative perspective: declaratory, aspirational, obligatory, and exceptive. While these provisions help draw attention to gender issues associated with international trade and investment, their normativity, enforceability and effectiveness remain at an insufficient level in general. Given the sensitivity and complexity of gender issues in many states, it seems unrealistic and undesirable to transform ITAs into a major discourse for states to address gender concerns, but it still makes sense to enhance trade-gender alignment of ITAs. This impliedly calls for incorporating larger number and more types of gender provisions in ITAs, enhancing their normativity and enforceability through suitable means, and harmonizing national gender laws and ITA gender provisions to create synergies for pursuing gender equality
GelFlow: Self-supervised Learning of Optical Flow for Vision-Based Tactile Sensor Displacement Measurement
High-resolution multi-modality information acquired by vision-based tactile
sensors can support more dexterous manipulations for robot fingers. Optical
flow is low-level information directly obtained by vision-based tactile
sensors, which can be transformed into other modalities like force, geometry
and depth. Current vision-tactile sensors employ optical flow methods from
OpenCV to estimate the deformation of markers in gels. However, these methods
need to be more precise for accurately measuring the displacement of markers
during large elastic deformation of the gel, as this can significantly impact
the accuracy of downstream tasks. This study proposes a self-supervised optical
flow method based on deep learning to achieve high accuracy in displacement
measurement for vision-based tactile sensors. The proposed method employs a
coarse-to-fine strategy to handle large deformations by constructing a
multi-scale feature pyramid from the input image. To better deal with the
elastic deformation caused by the gel, the Helmholtz velocity decomposition
constraint combined with the elastic deformation constraint are adopted to
address the distortion rate and area change rate, respectively. A local flow
fusion module is designed to smooth the optical flow, taking into account the
prior knowledge of the blurred effect of gel deformation. We trained the
proposed self-supervised network using an open-source dataset and compared it
with traditional and deep learning-based optical flow methods. The results show
that the proposed method achieved the highest displacement measurement
accuracy, thereby demonstrating its potential for enabling more precise
measurement of downstream tasks using vision-based tactile sensors
Anisotropically Shaped Magnetic/Plasmonic Nanocomposites for Information Encryption and Magnetic-Field-Direction Sensing.
Instantaneous control over the orientation of anisotropically shaped plasmonic nanostructures allows for selective excitation of plasmon modes and enables dynamic tuning of the plasmonic properties. Herein we report the synthesis of rod-shaped magnetic/plasmonic core-shell nanocomposite particles and demonstrate the active tuning of their optical property by manipulating their orientation using an external magnetic field. We further design and construct an IR-photoelectric coupling system, which generates an output voltage depending on the extinction property of the measured nanocomposite sample. We employ the device to demonstrate that the nanocomposite particles can serve as units for information encryption when immobilized in a polymer film and additionally when dispersed in solution can be employed as a new type of magnetic-field-direction sensor
Performance of Early Retransmission Scheme and Delay Based Protocol in Video Streaming
In this paper, we propose an early retransmission scheme to improve TCP's performance in delivering time-sensitive media. Our extensive ns2 simulations show significant improvement. When integrated into a traditional TCP variant, namely TCP-SACK, the early retransmission scheme can substantially reduce the latency caused by retransmission timeout. As a result, it can help TCP-SACK achieve a considerably higher success rate in delivering real time media. Early Retransmission also enhances the performance of a delay-based TCP variant, namely PERT. Furthermore, we also explore the improvement brought by employing a fine-grained retransmission timer, and compare it with ER. We find out that ER outperforms the fine grained timer in a variety of conditions and the combination of the two can further improve performance
Neural Document Expansion with User Feedback
This paper presents a neural document expansion approach (NeuDEF) that
enriches document representations for neural ranking models. NeuDEF harvests
expansion terms from queries which lead to clicks on the document and weights
these expansion terms with learned attention. It is plugged into a standard
neural ranker and learned end-to-end. Experiments on a commercial search log
demonstrate that NeuDEF significantly improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art
neural rankers and expansion methods on queries with different frequencies.
Further studies show the contribution of click queries and learned expansion
weights, as well as the influence of document popularity of NeuDEF's
effectiveness.Comment: The 2019 ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of
Information Retrieva
Multi-Clue Reasoning with Memory Augmentation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as one of the most challenging
tasks in artificial intelligence due to its multi-modal nature. However, most
existing VQA methods are incapable of handling Knowledge-based Visual Question
Answering (KB-VQA), which requires external knowledge beyond visible contents
to answer questions about a given image. To address this issue, we propose a
novel framework that endows the model with capabilities of answering more
general questions, and achieves a better exploitation of external knowledge
through generating Multiple Clues for Reasoning with Memory Neural Networks
(MCR-MemNN). Specifically, a well-defined detector is adopted to predict
image-question related relation phrases, each of which delivers two
complementary clues to retrieve the supporting facts from external knowledge
base (KB), which are further encoded into a continuous embedding space using a
content-addressable memory. Afterwards, mutual interactions between
visual-semantic representation and the supporting facts stored in memory are
captured to distill the most relevant information in three modalities (i.e.,
image, question, and KB). Finally, the optimal answer is predicted by choosing
the supporting fact with the highest score. We conduct extensive experiments on
two widely-used benchmarks. The experimental results well justify the
effectiveness of MCR-MemNN, as well as its superiority over other KB-VQA
methods
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