Information and Communication Technologies and Informal Scholarly Communication: A Review of the Social Oriented Research

This article reviews and analyzes findings from research on computer mediated informal scholarly communication. Ten empirical research papers, which show the effects and influences of information & communication technologies (ICTs), or the effects of social contexts on ICTs use in informal scholarly communication, were analyzed and compared. Types of ICTs covered in those studies include e-mails, collaboratories, and electronic forums. The review shows that most of the empirical studies examined the ICTs use effects or consequences. Only a few studies examined the social shaping of ICTs and ICT uses in informal scholarly communication. Based on comparisons of the empirical findings this article summarizes the ICT use effects/consequences as identified in the studies into seven categories and discusses their implications

Instance-Level Salient Object Segmentation

Image saliency detection has recently witnessed rapid progress due to deep convolutional neural networks. However, none of the existing methods is able to identify object instances in the detected salient regions. In this paper, we present a salient instance segmentation method that produces a saliency mask with distinct object instance labels for an input image. Our method consists of three steps, estimating saliency map, detecting salient object contours and identifying salient object instances. For the first two steps, we propose a multiscale saliency refinement network, which generates high-quality salient region masks and salient object contours. Once integrated with multiscale combinatorial grouping and a MAP-based subset optimization framework, our method can generate very promising salient object instance segmentation results. To promote further research and evaluation of salient instance segmentation, we also construct a new database of 1000 images and their pixelwise salient instance annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmarks for salient region detection as well as on our new dataset for salient instance segmentation.Comment: To appear in CVPR201

Top Quark Rare Decays via Loop-Induced FCNC Interactions in Extended Mirror Fermion Model

Flavor changing neutral current (FCNC) interactions for a top quark $t$ decays into $Xq$ with $X$ represents a neutral gauge or Higgs boson, and $q$ a up- or charm-quark are highly suppressed in the Standard Model (SM) due to the Glashow-Iliopoulos-Miami mechanism. Whilst current limits on the branching ratios of these processes have been established at the order of $10^{-4}$ from the Large Hadron Collider experiments, SM predictions are at least nine orders of magnitude below. In this work, we study some of these FCNC processes in the context of an extended mirror fermion model, originally proposed to implement the electroweak scale seesaw mechanism for non-sterile right-handed neutrinos. We show that one can probe the process $t \to Zc$ for a wide range of parameter space with branching ratios varying from $10^{-6}$ to $10^{-8}$, comparable with various new physics models including the general two Higgs doublet model with or without flavor violations at tree level, minimal supersymmetric standard model with or without $R$-parity, and extra dimension model.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables and 1 appendix. Version to appear in NP

A combined analysis of PandaX, LUX, and XENON1T experiments within the framework of dark matter effective theory

Weakly interacting massive particles are a widely well-probed dark matter candidate by the dark matter direct detection experiments. Theoretically, there are a large number of ultraviolet completed models that consist of a weakly interacting massive particle dark matter. The variety of models makes the comparison with the direct detection data complicated and often non-trivial. To overcome this, in the non-relativistic limit, the effective theory was developed in the literature which works very well to significantly reduce the complexity of dark matter-nucleon interactions and to better study the nuclear response functions. In the effective theory framework for a spin-1/2 dark matter, we combine three independent likelihood functions from the latest PandaX, LUX, and XENON1T data, and give a joint limit on each effective coupling. The astrophysical uncertainties of the dark matter distribution are also included in the likelihood. We further discuss the isospin violating cases of the interactions. Finally, for both dimension-five and dimension-six effective theories above the electroweak scale, we give updated limits of the new physics mass scales.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, PandaX run10 data included and version accepted in JHEP, "code is available at the LikeDM website, https://likedm.hepforge.org/