Subitizing with Variational Autoencoders

Numerosity, the number of objects in a set, is a basic property of a given visual scene. Many animals develop the perceptual ability to subitize: the near-instantaneous identification of the numerosity in small sets of visual items. In computer vision, it has been shown that numerosity emerges as a statistical property in neural networks during unsupervised learning from simple synthetic images. In this work, we focus on more complex natural images using unsupervised hierarchical neural networks. Specifically, we show that variational autoencoders are able to spontaneously perform subitizing after training without supervision on a large amount images from the Salient Object Subitizing dataset. While our method is unable to outperform supervised convolutional networks for subitizing, we observe that the networks learn to encode numerosity as basic visual property. Moreover, we find that the learned representations are likely invariant to object area; an observation in alignment with studies on biological neural networks in cognitive neuroscience

Interactions of human tenascin-X domains with dermal extracellular matrix molecules.

Contains fulltext : 51632.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access) Contains fulltext : 51632_pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Tenascin-X (TNX) is a large 450 kDa extracellular matrix protein expressed in a variety of tissues including skin, joints and blood vessels. Deficiency of TNX causes a recessive form of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome characterized by joint hypermobility, skin fragility and hyperextensible skin. Skin of TNX deficient patients shows abnormal elastic fibers and reduced collagen deposition. The mechanism by which TNX deficiency leads to connective tissue alterations is unknown. Here we report that C-terminal domains of human TNX bind to major dermal fibrillar collagens and tropoelastin. We have mapped these interactions to the fibronectin type III repeat 29 (FNIII29) and the C-terminal fibrinogen domain (FbgX) of TNX. In addition we found that FNIII29 of TNX accelerates collagen fibrillogenesis in vitro. We hypothesize that TNX contributes to matrix stability and is possibly involved in collagen fibril formation

Elimination of rabies—a missed opportunity

Rabies is one of the oldest known zoonoses. Recognized etiological agents consist of at least 15 proposed species of lyssaviruses with primary reservoirs residing in the Orders Carnivora and Chiroptera. A plethora of viral variants, maintained by a diverse set of abundant hosts, presents a formidable challenge to a strict concept of true disease eradication. Despite the availability of affordable and efficacious animal and human vaccines, today however dog rabies continues to escalate unabated across much of Asia and Africa, causing millions of suspect human exposures and tens of thousands of human rabies deaths annually. By identifying what hampers global human rabies elimination this chapter emphasizes that, given the global epidemiology of rabies, the “One Health” concept is key to solving the problem. Next to state of the art human rabies prevention, immunization and experimental therapy, it is obvious that human rabies can only be eliminated through rabies control at the animal source. This ‘paradigm shift’, however, needs new grassroot initiatives as well as political will and the closing of ranks of all stakeholders in the near future