95 research outputs found
Experiments on Longitudinal and Transverse Bedload Transport in Sine-Generated Meandering Channels
Bedload grains in consecutive meandering bends either move longitudinally or across the channel centerline. This study traces and quantifies the grainsâ movement in two laboratorial sine-generated channels, i.e., one with deflection angle θ0 = 30⌠and the other 110âŚ. The grains originally paved along the channels are uniform in size with D = 1 mm and are dyed in various colors, according to their initial location. The experiments recorded the changes in the flow patterns, bed deformation, and the gain-loss distribution of the colored grains in the pool-bar complexes. We observed the formation of two types of erosion zones during the process of the bed deformation, i.e., Zone 1 in the foreside of the point bars and Zone 2 near the concave bank downstream of the bend apexes. Most grains eroded from Zone 1 are observed moving longitudinally as opposed to crossing the channel centerline. Contrastingly, the dominant moving direction of the grains eroded from Zone 2 changes from the longitudinal direction to the transversal one as the bed topography evolves. Besides, most building material of the point bars comes from the upstream bends, although low-and highly curved channels behave differently
CoLight: Learning Network-level Cooperation for Traffic Signal Control
Cooperation among the traffic signals enables vehicles to move through
intersections more quickly. Conventional transportation approaches implement
cooperation by pre-calculating the offsets between two intersections. Such
pre-calculated offsets are not suitable for dynamic traffic environments. To
enable cooperation of traffic signals, in this paper, we propose a model,
CoLight, which uses graph attentional networks to facilitate communication.
Specifically, for a target intersection in a network, CoLight can not only
incorporate the temporal and spatial influences of neighboring intersections to
the target intersection, but also build up index-free modeling of neighboring
intersections. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use graph
attentional networks in the setting of reinforcement learning for traffic
signal control and to conduct experiments on the large-scale road network with
hundreds of traffic signals. In experiments, we demonstrate that by learning
the communication, the proposed model can achieve superior performance against
the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 10 pages. Proceedings of the 28th ACM International on Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, 201
CityFlow: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Large Scale City Traffic Scenario
Traffic signal control is an emerging application scenario for reinforcement
learning. Besides being as an important problem that affects people's daily
life in commuting, traffic signal control poses its unique challenges for
reinforcement learning in terms of adapting to dynamic traffic environment and
coordinating thousands of agents including vehicles and pedestrians. A key
factor in the success of modern reinforcement learning relies on a good
simulator to generate a large number of data samples for learning. The most
commonly used open-source traffic simulator SUMO is, however, not scalable to
large road network and large traffic flow, which hinders the study of
reinforcement learning on traffic scenarios. This motivates us to create a new
traffic simulator CityFlow with fundamentally optimized data structures and
efficient algorithms. CityFlow can support flexible definitions for road
network and traffic flow based on synthetic and real-world data. It also
provides user-friendly interface for reinforcement learning. Most importantly,
CityFlow is more than twenty times faster than SUMO and is capable of
supporting city-wide traffic simulation with an interactive render for
monitoring. Besides traffic signal control, CityFlow could serve as the base
for other transportation studies and can create new possibilities to test
machine learning methods in the intelligent transportation domain.Comment: WWW 2019 Demo Pape
Storyfier: Exploring Vocabulary Learning Support with Text Generation Models
Vocabulary learning support tools have widely exploited existing materials,
e.g., stories or video clips, as contexts to help users memorize each target
word. However, these tools could not provide a coherent context for any target
words of learners' interests, and they seldom help practice word usage. In this
paper, we work with teachers and students to iteratively develop Storyfier,
which leverages text generation models to enable learners to read a generated
story that covers any target words, conduct a story cloze test, and use these
words to write a new story with adaptive AI assistance. Our within-subjects
study (N=28) shows that learners generally favor the generated stories for
connecting target words and writing assistance for easing their learning
workload. However, in the read-cloze-write learning sessions, participants
using Storyfier perform worse in recalling and using target words than learning
with a baseline tool without our AI features. We discuss insights into
supporting learning tasks with generative models.Comment: To appear at the 2023 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology (UIST); 16 pages (7 figures, 23 tables
Sexâspecific activation of SK current by isoproterenol facilitates action potential triangulation and arrhythmogenesis in rabbit ventricles
Sex has a large influence on cardiac electrophysiological properties. Whether sex differences exist in apaminâsensitive small conductance Ca2+âactivated K+ (SK) current (IKAS) remains unknown. We performed optical mapping, transmembrane potential, patch clamp, western blot and immunostaining in 62 normal rabbit ventricles, including 32 females and 30 males. IKAS blockade by apamin only minimally prolonged action potential (AP) duration (APD) in the basal condition for both sexes, but significantly prolonged APD in the presence of isoproterenol in females. Apamin prolonged APD at the level of 25% repolarization (APD25) more prominently than APD at the level of 80% repolarization (APD80), consequently reversing isoproterenolâinduced AP triangulation in females. In comparison, apamin prolonged APD to a significantly lesser extent in males and failed to restore the AP plateau during isoproterenol infusion. IKAS in males did not respond to the Lâtype calcium current agonist BayK8644, but was amplified by the casein kinase 2 (CK2) inhibitor 4,5,6,7âtetrabromobenzotriazole. In addition, wholeâcell outward IKAS densities in ventricular cardiomyocytes were significantly larger in females than in males. SK channel subtype 2 (SK2) protein expression was higher and the CK2/SK2 ratio was lower in females than in males. IKAS activation in females induced negative intracellular Ca2+âvoltage coupling, promoted electromechanically discordant phase 2 repolarization alternans and facilitated ventricular fibrillation (VF). Apamin eliminated the negative Ca2+âvoltage coupling, attenuated alternans and reduced VF inducibility, phase singularities and dominant frequencies in females, but not in males. We conclude that βâadrenergic stimulation activates ventricular IKAS in females to a much greater extent than in males. IKAS activation plays an important role in ventricular arrhythmogenesis in females during sympathetic stimulation
Concomitant SK current activation and sodium current inhibition cause J wave syndrome
The mechanisms of J wave syndrome (JWS) are incompletely understood. Here, we showed that the concomitant activation of small-conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) current (IKAS) and inhibition of sodium current by cyclohexyl-[2-(3,5-dimethyl-pyrazol-1-yl)-6-methyl-pyrimidin-4-yl]-amine (CyPPA) recapitulate the phenotypes of JWS in Langendorff-perfused rabbit hearts. CyPPA induced significant J wave elevation and frequent spontaneous ventricular fibrillation (SVF), as well as sinus bradycardia, atrioventricular block, and intraventricular conduction delay. IKAS activation by CyPPA resulted in heterogeneous shortening of action potential (AP) duration (APD) and repolarization alternans. CyPPA inhibited cardiac sodium current (INa) and decelerated AP upstroke and intracellular calcium transient. SVFs were typically triggered by short-coupled premature ventricular contractions, initiated with phase 2 reentry and originated more frequently from the right than the left ventricles. Subsequent IKAS blockade by apamin reduced J wave elevation and eliminated SVF. β-Adrenergic stimulation was antiarrhythmic in CyPPA-induced electrical storm. Like CyPPA, hypothermia (32.0°C) also induced J wave elevation and SVF. It facilitated negative calcium-voltage coupling and phase 2 repolarization alternans with spatial and electromechanical discordance, which were ameliorated by apamin. These findings suggest that IKAS activation contributes to the development of JWS in rabbit ventricles
Recommended from our members
Unveiling the phonon scattering mechanisms in half-Heusler thermoelectric compounds
Half-Heusler (HH) compounds are among the most promising thermoelectric (TE) materials for large-scale applications due to their superior properties such as high power factor, excellent mechanical and thermal reliability, and non-toxicity. Their only drawback is the remaining-high lattice thermal conductivity. Various mechanisms were reported with claimed effectiveness to enhance the phonon scattering of HH compounds including grain-boundary scattering, phase separation, and electronâphonon interaction. In this work, however, we show that point-defect scattering has been the dominant mechanism for phonon scattering other than the intrinsic phononâphonon interaction for ZrCoSb and possibly many other HH compounds. Induced by the charge-compensation effect, the formation of Co/4d Frenkel point defects is responsible for the drastic reduction of lattice thermal conductivity in ZrCoSb1âxSnx. Our work systematically depicts the phonon scattering profile of HH compounds and illuminates subsequent material optimizations
A 3ⲠUTR SNP in COL18A1 Is Associated with Susceptibility to HBV Related Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Chinese: Three Independent Case-Control Studies
BACKGROUND: Accumulated evidences indicate that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in angiogenesis and tumorigenesis related genes are associated with risk of Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). COL18A1 encodes the precursor of endostatin, which is a broad-spectrum angiogenesis inhibitor, and we speculate that SNPs in COL18A1 may be associated with susceptibility to HCC. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We carried out a 2-stage association study in 3 independent case-control groups in a total of 1067 chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients and 808 hepatitis B virus (HBV) related HCC patients in Han Chinese. Four SNPs which can represent all potential functional SNPs with MAF>0.1 recorded in HapMap database were genotyped using TaqMan methods. Levels of total COL18A1 mRNA were also examined using quantitative real-time RT-PCR. We found that rs7499 located in 3'-UTR to be strongly associated with HBV related HCC (P(combined)â=â0.0000005, ORâ=â0.72, 95%CIâ=â0.63-0.82). COL18A1 mRNA expression was significantly decreased as the disease progressed (Pâ=â0.000026). CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that COL18A1 rs7499 may contribute to the risk of HCC in Han Chinese
Gas-phase chemistry of molecular containers
The remarkable technical advances in mass spectrometry during the last decades, including soft ionisation techniques, the coupling of electrospray ionisation to flow reactors, and the broad scope of tandem mass spectrometric experiments applicable to mass-selected ions allow investigating the chemistry of molecular capsules in solution as well as in the absence of any environment. With these methods, mass spectrometry is capable of answering many questions starting from providing analytical characterisation data (elemental composition, stoichiometry, etc.) to structural aspects (connectivities, positions of building blocks in supramolecular complexes) and to the examination of solution and gas-phase reactivity including reactions inside molecular containers. The present article reviews this work with a focus rather on the chemical questions that can be answered than on the technical specialities of (tandem) mass spectrometry
Performance Analysis of Alamouti Transmit Deiversity with QAM in Imperfect Channel Estimation
In this paper, the performance of multi-level quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) systems is studied analytically when Alamouti space-time transmit diversity (STTD) coding is used for transmission over Rayleigh fading channels. The effect of self-interference (interference from another simultaneously transmitted symbol in the STTD scheme for the same user) due to imperfect channel estimation is investigated. Based on the characteristic function method, a closed-form expression of the bit error rate (BER) is derived. Numerical results for 16/64-QAM show that, with the Alamouti STTD technique, the BER performance of the QAM system can be improved significantly. The effect of receive antenna diversity is also investigated. It is shown that high-order QAM constellations can be employed even in low signal to noise ratio (SNR) with the transmit diversity technique in conjunction with receive antenna diversity
- âŚ