Advancing Systems Biology in the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM) 2015

The 2015 International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2015) was held on November 13-15, 2015 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. ICIBM 2015 included eight scientific sessions, three tutorial sessions, one poster session, and four keynote presentations that covered the frontier research in broad areas related to bioinformatics, systems biology, big data science, biomedical informatics, pharmacogenomics, and intelligent computing. Here, we present a summary of the 10 research articles that were selected from ICIBM 2015 and included in the supplement to BMC Systems Biology

Approach to E-Business: A Case Study of Shanghai Tobacco Group Corporation

With the fast development of Internet, e-Business is prospering in the recently five years. Many traditional companies have been convinced of this revolutionary change, and they are exploring a feasible way to adapt to the transition. Chinese companies have weaker bases than the developed countries, but they are also cognizant of the big trend, and are making great efforts to grasp the opportunities. This paper introduces a practical Chinese case that illustrates the increasingly strategic role of e-business applications in traditional manufacturing industries. The company we studied is a large Chinese tobacco corporation, which locates in Shanghai, one of the most developed areas of China. After the WTO entry of China, the regulation system of Chinese tobacco industry will be transformed from STMA (State Tobacco Monopoly Administration) to a more open one. This will bring about more competitive pressures to Chinese tobacco enterprises. How can traditional large corporations adapt to the real new economy in the new environment, it is a big problem that most of the Chinese tobacco corporation faced on. Sensing the challenges and opportunities, Shanghai Tobacco Group Corporation started to search after a new development way, and they intend to develop an e-business application model to improve its distribution processes to integrate their purchasing, manufacturing, delivering, logistics, and sales. Studying such a typical large company , it may be helpful for other large company in other industry. This paper first reports the background of Chinese tobacco industry and a brief history of the IT applications in Shanghai Tobacco Group Corporation (in the next part we use SHTG for short), then we discusses the environment and business factors that led to the e-business application. Based on the above introductions and discussions, we illustrate an e-business solution to handle the situation SHTG faced

Analysis of partial-body and whole-body static sitting comfort

The whole-body comfort sensation was moderately to highly correlated with local body part comfort sensation in both sitting and driving, in order to understand what exact relationship exists between them, the seating comfort evaluations under the stimulus of four body parts (i.e. backs, waist, hips and thighs) were carried out for 15 subjects separately, subjective ratings on both partial-body and whole-body comfort are derived under different conditions. Impact factor (IF) of the partial-body comfort to whole-body comfort is calculated by the linear regression method, and the main variables are obtained by the stepwise regression algorithm. The most significant local body part in influencing whole body comfort is found at the region of hips, followed by backs, waist and hips. With impact factor analysis on partial body comfort, the results show that the local comfort feeling of waist is most potential to be influenced by other body parts, while the comfort sensitivity of thighs is the lowest

Intelligent biology and medicine in 2015: advancing interdisciplinary education, collaboration, and data science

We summarize the 2015 International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2015) and the editorial report of the supplement to BMC Genomics. The supplement includes 20 research articles selected from the manuscripts submitted to ICIBM 2015. The conference was held on November 13-15, 2015 at Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. It included eight scientific sessions, three tutorials, four keynote presentations, three highlight talks, and a poster session that covered current research in bioinformatics, systems biology, computational biology, biotechnologies, and computational medicine

PCPL: Predicate-Correlation Perception Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Today, scene graph generation(SGG) task is largely limited in realistic scenarios, mainly due to the extremely long-tailed bias of predicate annotation distribution. Thus, tackling the class imbalance trouble of SGG is critical and challenging. In this paper, we first discover that when predicate labels have strong correlation with each other, prevalent re-balancing strategies(e.g., re-sampling and re-weighting) will give rise to either over-fitting the tail data(e.g., bench sitting on sidewalk rather than on), or still suffering the adverse effect from the original uneven distribution(e.g., aggregating varied parked on/standing on/sitting on into on). We argue the principal reason is that re-balancing strategies are sensitive to the frequencies of predicates yet blind to their relatedness, which may play a more important role to promote the learning of predicate features. Therefore, we propose a novel Predicate-Correlation Perception Learning(PCPL for short) scheme to adaptively seek out appropriate loss weights by directly perceiving and utilizing the correlation among predicate classes. Moreover, our PCPL framework is further equipped with a graph encoder module to better extract context features. Extensive experiments on the benchmark VG150 dataset show that the proposed PCPL performs markedly better on tail classes while well-preserving the performance on head ones, which significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.Comment: To be appeared on ACMMM 202

Oral administration of interferon-α2b-transformed Bifidobacterium longum protects BALB/c mice against coxsackievirus B3-induced myocarditis

Multiple reports have claimed that low-dose orally administered interferon (IFN)-α is beneficial in the treatment of many infectious diseases and provides a viable alternative to high-dose intramuscular treatment. However, research is needed on how to express IFN stably in the gut. Bifidobacterium may be a suitable carrier for human gene expression and secretion in the intestinal tract for the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases. We reported previously that Bifidobacterium longum can be used as a novel oral delivery of IFN-α. IFN-transformed B. longum can exert an immunostimulatory role in mice; however the answer to whether this recombinant B. longum can be used to treat virus infection still remains elusive. Here, we investigated the efficacy of IFN-transformed B. longum administered orally on coxsackie virus B3 (CVB3)-induced myocarditis in BALB/c mice. Our data indicated that oral administration of IFN-transformed B. longum for 2 weeks after virus infection reduced significantly the severity of virus-induced myocarditis, markedly down regulated virus titers in the heart, and induced a T helper 1 cell pattern in the spleen and heart compared with controls. Oral administration of the IFN-transformed B. longum, therefore, may play a potential role in the treatment of CVB3-induced myocarditis

Formalize the informal: market segmentation and integration in the formal and informal credit markets in Wenzhou.

In 2012, the Chinese government designated Wenzhou city as a testbed for policy experimentation aimed at institutionalizing informal lending practices. This study investigates how interest rates in the formal and informal credit markets interacted before and after this policy experimentation. Hence, we use the vector autoregression models and ordinary multiple regression method, which is based on the financial repression theory. We document large yield spreads between the formal and informal credit markets in Wenzhou before (2003–2011) and after (2013–2018) the reforms. We find an increase in the responsiveness of the informal sector to the formal sector, after the reforms. We argue that the informal financial system serves as a one-way substitute for the formal financial sector in Wenzhou. An analysis of the transaction-level data suggests thatmaturity, availability of collateralization, loan purpose, and the amount of loans determine informal lending rates. Thus, this study provides important policy implications for reforming China’s financial syste