Nmda Receptors In Hibernating Arctic Ground Squirrels

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2005Hibernation is a unique physiological state characterized by suppressed metabolism and body temperature that is interrupted by multiple, brief periods of arousal throughout the hibernation season. Blood flow fluctuates during hibernation and arousal in a reperfusion-like manner without causing neurological damage. Previous studies show that hippocampal slices from hibernating animals tolerate experimental oxygen nutrient deprivation and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) toxicity better than slices from euthermic animals. However, the cellular mechanisms underlying these examples of tolerance remain unclear. Tolerance to NMDA toxicity suggests that modulation of NMDA receptors (NMDAR) contributes to intrinsic tissue tolerance in slices from hibernating Arctic ground squirrels (hAGS, Spermophilus parryii). NMDAR are one subtype of glutamate receptors. NMDAR play critical roles in excitatory synaptic transmission, synaptic plasticity, learning and memory, and excitotoxicity. NMDAR1 (NR1) is a fundamental subunit of NMDAR and required for receptor function. The main focus of the current project was to test the hypothesis that NMDAR are down-regulated in hAGS compared with interbout euthermic AGS (ibeAGS) and to explore the potential mechanisms of this down-regulation. NMDAR function can be modulated by protein phosphorylation, subunit composition, and internalization. Hence, the aim of chapter 2 was to determine the distribution of NRl in hAGS and ibeAGS using immunohistochemistry. The aim of chapter 3 was to examine NMDAR function in cultured hippocampal slices from hAGS, ibeAGS, and rats using calcium imaging, and to investigate potential modulation of NMDAR such as phosphorylation and internalization for altered function using western blot analysis. Given that synaptic remodeling and functional changes after arousal from hibernation, and NMDAR play an important role in learning and memory, the aim of chapter 4 was to address the effects of hibernation on learning and memory in AGS using an active avoidance task. Here, we report that NMDAR in hAGS are down-regulated via decreased phosphorylation of NR1. This down-regulation is not due to changes in NR1 distribution and internalization. In addition, the fraction of NR1 in the functional membrane pool in AGS is less than in rats. These findings provide evidence that modulation of NMDAR contributes to neuroprotection observed in hAGS

Emotion-driven interactive storytelling.

Interactive storytelling has attracted plenty of research interest in recent years. Most current interactive storytelling systems follow a goal-oriented approach to story representation, i.e. the user is engaged with the story through fulfilling a number of goals rather than empathising with the characters and experiencing anenriched emotional experience (Pizzi and Cavazza 2007). This fails to satisfy potential users who are oriented to traditional media, such as movies (Louchart et al. 2008) and demographic groups who are interested in attractive and challenging stories (Duh et al. 2010). Given this consideration, an emotion-driven interactive storytelling approach is proposed in this research. In contrast to the goal-oriented interactive storytelling approach, emotion-driven interactive storytelling attempts to create an engaging emotional experience, and involve the user’s emotion with the characters. More importantly, the user’s emotions, evoked by empathising with the characters, determine the character’s behaviours and therefore have an impact on the whole storyline. In this sense, emotions, as a driving force, directly and explicitly contribute to storytelling and the user experience. An interactive video was made by re-editing existing TV material to interpret the concept of emotion-driven interactive storytelling. The examination of user experience of playing this interactive video revealed that non-gamers were more likely to be emotionally involved with the interactive video and empathise with the character. Participants in this group also exhibited higher enjoyment and engagement than gamers. In addition, females were found more likely to empathise with the character and satisfy with the storyline. However because the TV material used to make the interactive video was female-oriented, males failed to enjoy and engage themselves as much as females. But it is important to note that in comparison to males’ previous experience of watching TV Ugly Betty, emotion-driven interactive storytelling increased their enjoyment and engagement. Therefore, emotion-driven interactive storytelling enriches the approach to developing interactive storytelling systems and has the potential to provide an engaging user experience to some types of users. Future research possibilities are discussed with respect to a wider population and research where materials suitable for both genders are presented

Space-Invariant Projection in Streaming Network Embedding

Newly arriving nodes in dynamics networks would gradually make the node embedding space drifted and the retraining of node embedding and downstream models indispensable. An exact threshold size of these new nodes, below which the node embedding space will be predicatively maintained, however, is rarely considered in either theory or experiment. From the view of matrix perturbation theory, a threshold of the maximum number of new nodes that keep the node embedding space approximately equivalent is analytically provided and empirically validated. It is therefore theoretically guaranteed that as the size of newly arriving nodes is below this threshold, embeddings of these new nodes can be quickly derived from embeddings of original nodes. A generation framework, Space-Invariant Projection (SIP), is accordingly proposed to enables arbitrary static MF-based embedding schemes to embed new nodes in dynamics networks fast. The time complexity of SIP is linear with the network size. By combining SIP with four state-of-the-art MF-based schemes, we show that SIP exhibits not only wide adaptability but also strong empirical performance in terms of efficiency and efficacy on the node classification task in three real datasets

Engaging females with a model for affective storytelling

Female gamers have been underrepresented in some game genres. One of the reasons for this is the gender difference in players’ emotional experience. According to psychological studies, females are more likely to be concerned with other’s emotions and tend to involve their emotions in the storytelling by empathising with the characters and experiencing other-directed emotions [12]. Given these considerations, this paper proposes a model for affective storytelling which aims to create an engaging emotional experience and involve the player’s emotion with the characters. More importantly, the player’s emotions, evoked by appraising the story and empathizing with the characters, determine the character’s behaviors and therefore have an impact on the whole storyline. Since the model for affective storytelling aims to create an engaging emotional experience for the player without following a goal-oriented narrative approach, it appears that males and females might have a different user experience in this model for affective storytelling. Future work therefore will be carried out to develop an affective storytelling system and test if females are more engaged and satisfied with the affective storytelling system

Study on Resource Configuration on Cloud Manufacturing

The purpose of manufacturing is to realize the requirement of customer. In manufacturing process of cloud system, there exist a lot of resource services which have similar functional characteristics to realize the requirement. It makes the manufacturing process more diverse. To develop the quality and reduce cost, a resource configuration model on cloud-manufacturing platform is put forward in this paper. According to the generalized six-point location principle, a growth design from the requirement of customers to entities with geometric constraints is proposed. By the requirement growing up to product, a configuration process is used to match the entities with the instances which the resources in the database could supply. Different from most existing studies, this paper studies the tolerance design with multiple candidate resource suppliers on cloud manufacturing to make the market play a two-level game considering the benefit of customers and the profit of resources to give an optimal result. A numerical case study is used to illustrate the proposed model and configuration process. The performance and advantage of the proposed method are discussed at the end

Experimental Selection for Drosophila Survival in Extremely High O2 Environments

Although oxidative stress is deleterious to mammals, the mechanisms underlying oxidant susceptibility or tolerance remain to be elucidated. In this study, through a long-term laboratory selection over many generations, we generated a Drosophila melanogaster strain that can live and reproduce in very high O2 environments (90% O2), a lethal condition to naïve flies. We demonstrated that tolerance to hyperoxia was heritable in these flies and that these hyperoxia-selected flies exhibited phenotypic differences from naïve flies, such as a larger body size and increased weight by 20%. Gene expression profiling revealed that 227 genes were significantly altered in expression and two third of these genes were down-regulated. Using a mutant screen strategy, we studied the role of some altered genes (up- or down-regulated in the microarrays) by testing the survival of available corresponding P-element or UAS construct lines under hyperoxic conditions. We report that down-regulation of several candidate genes including Tropomyosin 1, Glycerol 3 phosphate dehydrogenase, CG33129, and UGP as well as up-regulation of Diptericin and Attacin conferred tolerance to severe hyperoxia. In conclusion, we identified several genes that were not only altered in hyperoxia-selected flies but we also prove that these play an important role in hyperoxia survival. Thus our study provides a molecular basis for understanding the mechanisms of hyperoxia tolerance

ArtGPT-4: Artistic Vision-Language Understanding with Adapter-enhanced MiniGPT-4

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing (NLP), with models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 achieving impressive capabilities in various linguistic tasks. However, training models on such a large scale is challenging, and finding datasets that match the model's scale is often difficult. Fine-tuning and training models with fewer parameters using novel methods have emerged as promising approaches to overcome these challenges. One such model is MiniGPT-4, which achieves comparable vision-language understanding to GPT-4 by leveraging novel pre-training models and innovative training strategies. However, the model still faces some challenges in image understanding, particularly in artistic pictures. A novel multimodal model called ArtGPT-4 has been proposed to address these limitations. ArtGPT-4 was trained on image-text pairs using a Tesla A100 device in just 2 hours, using only about 200 GB of data. The model can depict images with an artistic flair and generate visual code, including aesthetically pleasing HTML/CSS web pages. Furthermore, the article proposes novel benchmarks for evaluating the performance of vision-language models. In the subsequent evaluation methods, ArtGPT-4 scored more than 1 point higher than the current \textbf{state-of-the-art} model and was only 0.25 points lower than artists on a 6-point scale. Our code and pre-trained model are available at \url{https://huggingface.co/Tyrannosaurus/ArtGPT-4}.Comment: 16 page