Improving the Brain-Computer Interface Learning Process with Gamification in Motor Imagery: A Review

Brain-computer-interface-based motor imagery (MI-BCI), a control method for transferring the imagination of motor behavior to computer-based commands, could positively impact neural functions. With the safety guaranteed by non-invasive BCI devices, this method has the potential to enhance rehabilitation and physical outcomes. Therefore, this MI-BCI control strategy has been highly researched. However, applying a non-invasive MI-BCI to real life is still not ideal. One of the main reasons is the monotonous training procedure. Although researchers have reviewed optimized signal processing methods, no suggestion is found in training feedback design. The authors believe that enhancing the engagement interface via gamification presents a potential method that could increase the MI-BCI outcome. After analyzing 2524 articles (from 2001 to 2020), 28 pieces of research are finally used to evaluate the feasibility of using gamified MI-BCI system for training. This paper claims that gamification is feasible for MI-BCI training with an average accuracy of 74.35% among 111 individuals and positive reports from 26 out of 28 studies. Furthermore, this literature review suggests more emphasis should be on immersive and humanoid design for a gaming system, which could support relieving distraction, stimulate correct MI and improve learning outcomes. Interruptive training issues such as disturbing graphical interface design and potential solutions have also been presented for further research

In Situ Electrochemical Oxidation of Cu2S into CuO Nanowires as a Durable and Efficient Electrocatalyst for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Development of cost-effective oxygen evolution catalysts is of capital importance for the deployment of large-scale energy-storage systems based on metal-air batteries and reversible fuel cells. In this direction, a wide range of materials have been explored, especially under more favorable alkaline conditions, and several metal chalcogenides have particularly demonstrated excellent performances. However, chalcogenides are thermodynamically less stable than the corresponding oxides and hydroxides under oxidizing potentials in alkaline media. Although this instability in some cases has prevented the application of chalcogenides as oxygen evolution catalysts and it has been disregarded in some others, we propose to use it in our favor to produce high-performance oxygen evolution catalysts. We characterize here the in situ chemical, structural, and morphological transformation during the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline media of CuS into CuO nanowires, mediating the intermediate formation of Cu(OH). We also test their OER activity and stability under OER operation in alkaline media and compare them with the OER performance of Cu(OH) and CuO nanostructures directly grown on the surface of a copper mesh. We demonstrate here that CuO produced from in situ electrochemical oxidation of CuS displays an extraordinary electrocatalytic performance toward OER, well above that of CuO and Cu(OH) synthesized without this transformation

Seismic architecture of Yongle isolated carbonate platform in Xisha Archipelago, South China Sea

This study presented recently reprocessed multi-channel seismic data and multi-beam bathymetric map to reveal the geomorphology and stratigraphic architecture of the Yongle isolated carbonate platform in the Xisha Archipelago, northwestern South China Sea. Our results show that the upper slope angles of Yongle carbonate platform exceed 10° and even reach to ∼32.5° whereas the lower slope angles vary from .5° to 5.3°. The variations of slope angles show that margins of Yongle Atoll belong to escarpment (bypass) margins to erosional (escarpment) margins. The interior of carbonate platform is characterized by sub-parallel to parallel, semi-continuous to continuous reflectors with medium-to high-amplitude and low-to medium-frequency. The platform shows a sub-flat to flat-topped shape in its geometry with aggradation and backstepping occurring on the platform margins. According to our seismic-well correlation, the isolated carbonate platform started forming in Early Miocene, grew during Early to Middle Miocene, and subsequently underwent drowning in Late Miocene, Pliocene and Quaternary. Large-scale submarine mass transport deposits are observed in the southeastern and southern slopes of Yongle Atoll to reshape the slopes since Late Miocene. The magmatism and hydrothermal fluid flow pipes around the Yongle Atoll have been active during 10.5–2.6 Ma. Their activity might intensify dolomitization of the Xisha isolated carbonate platforms during Late Miocene to Pliocene. Our results further suggest that the Yongle carbonate platform is situated upon a pre-existing fault-bounded block with a flat pre-Cenozoic basement rather than a large scale volcano as previously known and the depth of the basement likely reached to 1400 m, which is deeper than the well CK-2 suggested

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO

Real-time Monitoring for the Next Core-Collapse Supernova in JUNO

Core-collapse supernova (CCSN) is one of the most energetic astrophysical events in the Universe. The early and prompt detection of neutrinos before (pre-SN) and during the SN burst is a unique opportunity to realize the multi-messenger observation of the CCSN events. In this work, we describe the monitoring concept and present the sensitivity of the system to the pre-SN and SN neutrinos at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), which is a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector under construction in South China. The real-time monitoring system is designed with both the prompt monitors on the electronic board and online monitors at the data acquisition stage, in order to ensure both the alert speed and alert coverage of progenitor stars. By assuming a false alert rate of 1 per year, this monitoring system can be sensitive to the pre-SN neutrinos up to the distance of about 1.6 (0.9) kpc and SN neutrinos up to about 370 (360) kpc for a progenitor mass of 30$M_{\odot}$ for the case of normal (inverted) mass ordering. The pointing ability of the CCSN is evaluated by using the accumulated event anisotropy of the inverse beta decay interactions from pre-SN or SN neutrinos, which, along with the early alert, can play important roles for the followup multi-messenger observations of the next Galactic or nearby extragalactic CCSN.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

Keypoint-Aware Single-Stage 3D Object Detector for Autonomous Driving

Current single-stage 3D object detectors often use predefined single points of feature maps to generate confidence scores. However, the point feature not only lacks the boundaries and inner features but also does not establish an explicit association between regression box and confidence scores. In this paper, we present a novel single-stage object detector called keypoint-aware single-stage 3D object detector (KASSD). First, we design a lightweight location attention module (LLM), including feature reuse strategy (FRS) and location attention module (LAM). The FRS can facilitate the flow of spatial information. By considering the location, the LAM adopts weighted feature fusion to obtain efficient multi-level feature representation. To alleviate the inconsistencies mentioned above, we introduce a keypoint-aware module (KAM). The KAM can model spatial relationships and learn rich semantic information by representing the predicted object as a set of keypoints. We conduct experiments on the KITTI dataset. The experimental results show that our method has a competitive performance with 79.74% AP on a moderate difficulty level while maintaining 21.8 FPS inference speed

Comparative Transcriptome Analysis to Identify Candidate Genes Related to Chlorogenic Acid and Flavonoids Biosynthesis in Iridaceae

Iris (Iridaceae) is one of the most widely admired ornamental plants. It has been used mainly in medicine due to the high concentration of chlorogenic acid (CGA), flavonoids, isoflavones, lignans, and other compounds in its rhizomes. In iris, the gene functions related to CGA and flavonoids biosynthesis are still unclear. In this study, we compared the I. germanica rhizome with a high accumulation level of CGA but a low accumulation level of flavonoids, and the I. pallida rhizome with a low accumulation level of CGA but a high accumulation level of flavonoids at the transcriptome and metabolome levels. A total of 761 metabolites were detected, including 202 flavonoids and 106 phenolic acids based on metabolome profiling. In total, 135 flavonoids were highly accumulated in I. pallida, including three flavanols, 51 flavonoids, 12 flavonoid carbonosides, 31 flavonols, and 21 isoflavones. Based on single-molecule long-read sequencing technology, 94,461 transcripts were identified in iris. Expression analysis indicated that the high accumulation level of C4H and 4CL in I. germanica were essential for CGA accumulation, while CHS, DFR, ANS, ANR, LAR, and 3GT were essential for flavonoids biosynthesis in I. pallida. Many transcription factors such as transcript_83288 (MYB), transcript_57970 (WRKY), and transcript_77465 (WRKY) act as regulators, playing important roles in these biological processes. Our findings provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms associated with the biosynthesis and regulation of flavonoids and CGA in the iris rhizome, and highlight the usefulness of an integrated approach for understanding this process

Fully Conjugated Donor-Acceptor Block Copolymers for Organic Photovoltaics via Heck-Mizoroki Coupling

The development of facile routes to prepare fully conjugated block copolymers (BCPs) from diverse monomers is an important goal for advancing robust bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) organic photovoltaics (OPVs). Herein we introduce a synthetic strategy for step-growth BCPs employing 1,2-bis(trialkylstannyl)ethene as one monomer, which, in addition to offering improved backbone planarity, directly yields a vinylene-terminated macromonomer suitable for Heck-Mizoroki coupling. The benefits of our strategy, which facilitates the preparation of functionalized macromonomers suitable for BCP synthesis, are demonstrated with a representative BCP based on a diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) copolymer coded pBDTTDPP as the donor block and a perylenediimide (PDI) copolymer coded as pPDIV as the acceptor block. Feed ratio optimization affords control over the macromonomer chain-end functionalities and allows for the selective formation of a tri-BCP consisting of pPDIV-b-pBDTTDPP-b-pPDIV, which is employed in a single-component BHJ OPV. Devices achieved a power conversion efficiency of 1.51% after thermal stress at 150 degrees C compared to 0.02% for a control device consisting of a comparable blend of pBDTTDPP and pPDIV. The difference in performance is ascribed to the morphological stability of the BHJ when using the BCP