Saliency-guided Adaptive Seeding for Supervoxel Segmentation

We propose a new saliency-guided method for generating supervoxels in 3D space. Rather than using an evenly distributed spatial seeding procedure, our method uses visual saliency to guide the process of supervoxel generation. This results in densely distributed, small, and precise supervoxels in salient regions which often contain objects, and larger supervoxels in less salient regions that often correspond to background. Our approach largely improves the quality of the resulting supervoxel segmentation in terms of boundary recall and under-segmentation error on publicly available benchmarks.Comment: 6 pages, accepted to IROS201

An essential role in germline development for a P-granule associated novel protein in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and RNAi in the ubiquitous parasitic nematode Ascaris suum

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on January 25, 2011).Vita.Thesis advisor: Karen Bennett."December 2009"Ph. D. University of Missouri-Columbia 2009.The germline RNA helicases (GLHs) are constitutive components of P granules and important for fertility in C. elegans. Discovered as a GLH-1 partner, the P-granule associated novel protein (PAN-1) is important both in larval development and for germline development. We focused our studies on characterizing the germline function of PAN-1 and found it co-localized with the P-granule components PGL-1 and GLH-1 in the adult germline, but not during embryogenesis. In addition, when PAN-1 was knocked down only in germline by a somatic RNAi defect strain rrf-1, it resulted in reducing or eliminating GLH-1 protein levels, depending on the dsRNA concentration used for the RNAi effect. Because PAN-1 contains 13 leucine rich repeats that are often found in the F-box protein in C. elegans and the homologue to C. elegans F-box protein Fog-2, as well as the F-box conserved motif at the N-terminal domain, it is possibile that PAN-1 works as an F-box protein involved in regulating GLH-1 protein level, directly or non-directly. Since the CSN-5 was also found as a GLH-1 binding partner that protects GLH-1 from degradation, whether they work in the same pathway is yet to be studied. Ascaris infections are the most prevalent human parasite nematode infections. There are concerns as to the current treatment of using anthelmintic drugs due to the drug resistance and the efficiency in killing the exuberant Ascaris eggs. As RNAi was discovered as an exciting technology, it has the great therapeutic potential due to its specificity, potency and diversity. To investigate if RNAi could be used to cause sterility in Ascaris worms, we divided our task to two steps: first of all, in searching the potential dsRNAs that could be used in the RNAi study in Ascaris, we used C. elegans as a model to test different Ascaris dsRNAs that can cause either embryonic lethal or sterile phenotype in C. elegans. Then, these dsRNAs that have been successfully tested in the cross-species RNAi led us to test RNAi using Ascaris worms. However, although we tried various different means of dsRNAs delivery to Ascaris adults or the embryos, we have yet to succeed to observe any developmental defect.Includes bibliographical reference

Thermal performance and energy savings of white and sedum-tray garden roof: A case study in a Chongqing office building

This study presents the experimental measurement of the energy consumption of three top-floor air-conditioned rooms in a typical office building in Chongqing, which is a mountainous city in the hot-summer and cold-winter zone of China, to examine the energy performance of white and sedum-tray garden roofs. The energy consumption of the three rooms was measured from September 2014 to September 2015 by monitoring the energy performance (temperature distributions of the roofs, evaporation, heat fluxes, and energy consumption) and indoor air temperature. The rooms had the same construction and appliances, except that one roof top was black, one was white, and one had a sedum-tray garden roof. This study references the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP) to calculate and compare the energy savings of the three kinds of roofs. The results indicate that the energy savings ratios of the rooms with the sedum-tray garden roof and with the white roof were 25.0% and 20.5%, respectively, as compared with the black-roofed room, in the summer; by contrast, the energy savings ratios were −9.9% and −2.7%, respectively, in the winter. Furthermore, Annual conditioning energy savings of white roof (3.9 kWh/m2) were 1.6 times the energy savings for the sedum-tray garden roof. It is evident that white roof is a preferable choice for office buildings in Chongqing. Additionally, The white roof had a reflectance of 0.58 after natural aging owing to the serious air pollution worsened its thermal performance, and the energy savings reduced by 0.033 kWh/m2·d. Evaporation was also identified to have a significant effect on the energy savings of the sedum-tray garden roof