Visual Semantic SLAM with Landmarks for Large-Scale Outdoor Environment

Semantic SLAM is an important field in autonomous driving and intelligent agents, which can enable robots to achieve high-level navigation tasks, obtain simple cognition or reasoning ability and achieve language-based human-robot-interaction. In this paper, we built a system to creat a semantic 3D map by combining 3D point cloud from ORB SLAM with semantic segmentation information from Convolutional Neural Network model PSPNet-101 for large-scale environments. Besides, a new dataset for KITTI sequences has been built, which contains the GPS information and labels of landmarks from Google Map in related streets of the sequences. Moreover, we find a way to associate the real-world landmark with point cloud map and built a topological map based on semantic map.Comment: Accepted by 2019 China Symposium on Cognitive Computing and Hybrid Intelligence(CCHI'19

RNA editing of nuclear transcripts in Arabidopsis thaliana

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>RNA editing is a transcript-based layer of gene regulation. To date, no systemic study on RNA editing of plant nuclear genes has been reported. Here, a transcriptome-wide search for editing sites in nuclear transcripts of Arabidopsis (<it>Arabidopsis thaliana</it>) was performed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>MPSS (massively parallel signature sequencing) and PARE (parallel analysis of RNA ends) data retrieved from public databases were utilized, focusing on one-base-conversion editing. Besides cytidine (C)-to-uridine (U) editing in mitochondrial transcripts, many nuclear transcripts were found to be diversely edited. Interestingly, a sizable portion of these nuclear genes are involved in chloroplast- or mitochondrion-related functions, and many editing events are tissue-specific. Some editing sites, such as adenosine (A)-to-U editing loci, were found to be surrounded by peculiar elements. The editing events of some nuclear transcripts are highly enriched surrounding the borders between coding sequences (CDSs) and 3′ untranslated regions (UTRs), suggesting site-specific editing. Furthermore, RNA editing is potentially implicated in new start or stop codon generation, and may affect alternative splicing of certain protein-coding transcripts. RNA editing in the precursor microRNAs (pre-miRNAs) of <it>ath-miR854</it> family, resulting in secondary structure transformation, implies its potential role in microRNA (miRNA) maturation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>To our knowledge, the results provide the first global view of RNA editing in plant nuclear transcripts.</p

Comparative study of surface integral methods in aeroacoustic prediction

Introduction: Surface integral methods based on the acoustic analogy and Kirchhoff formulation are widely employed in computational aeroacoustics. The computational accuracy is usually highly dependent on the selections of the acoustic prediction method and of the integral surfaces.Methods: This paper analyzes the pros and cons of each aeroacoustic prediction method and studies numerically sound generated from flow past a circular cylinder by employing different surface integral methods. The acoustic analogy based on the impermeable solid surfaces either ignores the quadrupole contribution or needs high computational cost to calculate the quadrupole contribution, and the acoustic analogy based on the permeable integral surfaces usually suffers from the spurious source issue.Results: Both the pressure-based or density-based Kirchhoff formulations can be used in aeroacoustic prediction, however, the numerical results indicate that the pressure-based Kirchhoff formulation also suffers from the issue of the spurious sound because the pressure fluctuations at the permeable integral surfaces are contaminated by hydrodynamic component.Discussion: It seems that only the density-based Kirchhoff formulation does not suffer from the issue of the spurious sound, but this formulation requires the acoustic sources should be extracted from compressible flow simulations

A new encrypted data switching Protocol: Bridging IBE and ABE without loss of data confidentiality

Encryption technologies have become one of the most prevalent solutions to safeguard data confidentiality in may real-world applications, e.g., cloud-based data storage systems. Encryption outputting a relatively “static” format of encrypted data, however, may hinder further data operations, for example, encrypted data may need to be “transformed” into other formats for either computation or other purposes. In order to enable an encryption to be used in another device equipped with a different encryption mechanism, the concept of encryption switching is first proposed in CRYPTO 2016 for conversion particularly between Paillier and ElGamal encryptions. This paper considers the conversion between conventional identity-based and attribute-based encryptions and further proposes a concrete construction via the technique of proxy reencryption. The construction is proved to be CPA secure in the standard model under q-decisional parallel bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption. The performance comparisons highlight that our bridging mechanism reduces computation and communication cost on client side, especially when the data of client is encrypted and outsourced to remote cloud. The computational costs w.r.t. re-encryption (on server side) and decryption (on client side) are acceptable in practice

Homozygous mutation in DNAAF4 causes primary ciliary dyskinesia in a Chinese family

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder that affects the structure and function of motile cilia, leading to classic clinical phenotypes, such as situs inversus, chronic sinusitis, bronchiectasis, repeated pneumonia and infertility. In this study, we diagnosed a female patient with PCD who was born in a consanguineous family through classic clinical manifestations, transmission electron microscopy and immunofluorescence staining. A novel DNAAF4 variant NM_130810: c.1118G&gt;A (p. G373E) was filtered through Whole-exome sequencing. Subsequently, we explored the effect of the mutation on DNAAF4 protein from three aspects: protein expression, stability and interaction with downstream DNAAF2 protein through a series of experiments, such as transfection of plasmids and Co-immunoprecipitation. Finally, we confirmed that the mutation of DNAAF4 lead to PCD by reducing the stability of DNAAF4 protein, but the expression and function of DNAAF4 protein were not affected

Transient obscuration event captured in NGC~3227 II. Warm absorbers and obscuration events in archival XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observations

© The European Southern Observatory (ESO). This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141599The relationship between warm absorber (WA) outflows of active galactic nuclei and nuclear obscuration activities caused by optically thick clouds (obscurers) crossing the line of sight is still unclear. NGC 3227 is a suitable target for studying the properties of both WAs and obscurers because it matches the following selection criteria: WAs in both ultraviolet (UV) and X-rays, suitably variable, bright in UV and X-rays, and adequate archival spectra for making comparisons with the obscured spectra. In the aim of investigating WAs and obscurers of NGC 3227 in detail, we used a broadband spectral-energy-distribution model that is built in findings of the first paper in our series together with the photoionization code of SPEX software to fit the archival observational data taken by XMM-Newton and NuSTAR in 2006 and 2016. Using unobscured observations, we find four WA components with different ionization states (loga ζ [erg cm s -1] ∼-1.0, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0). The highest-ionization WA component has a much higher hydrogen column density (∼10 22 cm -2) than the other three components (∼10 21 cm -2). The outflow velocities of these WAs range from 100 to 1300 km s -1, and show a positive correlation with the ionization parameter. These WA components are estimated to be distributed from the outer region of the broad line region (BLR) to the narrow line region. It is worth noting that we find an X-ray obscuration event in the beginning of the 2006 observation, which was missed by previous studies. We find that it can be explained by a single obscurer component. We also study the previously published obscuration event captured in one observation in 2016, which needs two obscurer components to fit the spectrum. A high-ionization obscurer component (loga ζa ∼a 2.80; covering factor C f a ∼a 30%) only appears in the 2016 observation, which has a high column density (∼10 23 cm -2). A low-ionization obscurer component (loga ζa ∼a 1.0a -a 1.9; C f a ∼a 20%-50%) exists in both 2006 and 2016 observations, which has a lower column density (∼10 22 cm -2). These obscurer components are estimated to reside within the BLR by their crossing time of transverse motions. The obscurers of NGC 3227 are closer to the center and have larger number densities than the WAs, which indicate that the WAs and obscurers might have different origins.Peer reviewe

An open science resource for establishing reliability and reproducibility in functional connectomics

Efforts to identify meaningful functional imaging-based biomarkers are limited by the ability to reliably characterize inter-individual differences in human brain function. Although a growing number of connectomics-based measures are reported to have moderate to high test-retest reliability, the variability in data acquisition, experimental designs, and analytic methods precludes the ability to generalize results. The Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) is working to address this challenge and establish test-retest reliability as a minimum standard for methods development in functional connectomics. Specifically, CoRR has aggregated 1,629 typical individuals’ resting state fMRI (rfMRI) data (5,093 rfMRI scans) from 18 international sites, and is openly sharing them via the International Data-sharing Neuroimaging Initiative (INDI). To allow researchers to generate various estimates of reliability and reproducibility, a variety of data acquisition procedures and experimental designs are included. Similarly, to enable users to assess the impact of commonly encountered artifacts (for example, motion) on characterizations of inter-individual variation, datasets of varying quality are included

Convective vector wave equation of aeroacoustics

This paper extends the vector wave equation of aeroacoustics to consider the effect of uniform flow. Analytical time-domain and frequency-domain acoustic velocity integral formulations for the monopole source are deduced. Test cases for sound radiated from stationary and rotating sources in uniform flow are carried out to validate the developed acoustic velocity formulations