SE-KGE: A Location-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding Model for Geographic Question Answering and Spatial Semantic Lifting

Learning knowledge graph (KG) embeddings is an emerging technique for a variety of downstream tasks such as summarization, link prediction, information retrieval, and question answering. However, most existing KG embedding models neglect space and, therefore, do not perform well when applied to (geo)spatial data and tasks. For those models that consider space, most of them primarily rely on some notions of distance. These models suffer from higher computational complexity during training while still losing information beyond the relative distance between entities. In this work, we propose a location-aware KG embedding model called SE-KGE. It directly encodes spatial information such as point coordinates or bounding boxes of geographic entities into the KG embedding space. The resulting model is capable of handling different types of spatial reasoning. We also construct a geographic knowledge graph as well as a set of geographic query-answer pairs called DBGeo to evaluate the performance of SE-KGE in comparison to multiple baselines. Evaluation results show that SE-KGE outperforms these baselines on the DBGeo dataset for geographic logic query answering task. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our spatially-explicit model and the importance of considering the scale of different geographic entities. Finally, we introduce a novel downstream task called spatial semantic lifting which links an arbitrary location in the study area to entities in the KG via some relations. Evaluation on DBGeo shows that our model outperforms the baseline by a substantial margin.Comment: Accepted to Transactions in GI

NegVSR: Augmenting Negatives for Generalized Noise Modeling in Real-World Video Super-Resolution

The capability of video super-resolution (VSR) to synthesize high-resolution (HR) video from ideal datasets has been demonstrated in many works. However, applying the VSR model to real-world video with unknown and complex degradation remains a challenging task. First, existing degradation metrics in most VSR methods are not able to effectively simulate real-world noise and blur. On the contrary, simple combinations of classical degradation are used for real-world noise modeling, which led to the VSR model often being violated by out-of-distribution noise. Second, many SR models focus on noise simulation and transfer. Nevertheless, the sampled noise is monotonous and limited. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a Negatives augmentation strategy for generalized noise modeling in Video Super-Resolution (NegVSR) task. Specifically, we first propose sequential noise generation toward real-world data to extract practical noise sequences. Then, the degeneration domain is widely expanded by negative augmentation to build up various yet challenging real-world noise sets. We further propose the augmented negative guidance loss to learn robust features among augmented negatives effectively. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets (e.g., VideoLQ and FLIR) show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with clear margins, especially in visual quality

Semantically-Enriched Search Engine for Geoportals: A Case Study with ArcGIS Online

Many geoportals such as ArcGIS Online are established with the goal of improving geospatial data reusability and achieving intelligent knowledge discovery. However, according to previous research, most of the existing geoportals adopt Lucene-based techniques to achieve their core search functionality, which has a limited ability to capture the user's search intentions. To better understand a user's search intention, query expansion can be used to enrich the user's query by adding semantically similar terms. In the context of geoportals and geographic information retrieval, we advocate the idea of semantically enriching a user's query from both geospatial and thematic perspectives. In the geospatial aspect, we propose to enrich a query by using both place partonomy and distance decay. In terms of the thematic aspect, concept expansion and embedding-based document similarity are used to infer the implicit information hidden in a user's query. This semantic query expansion 1 2 G. Mai et al. framework is implemented as a semantically-enriched search engine using ArcGIS Online as a case study. A benchmark dataset is constructed to evaluate the proposed framework. Our evaluation results show that the proposed semantic query expansion framework is very effective in capturing a user's search intention and significantly outperforms a well-established baseline-Lucene's practical scoring function-with more than 3.0 increments in DCG@K (K=3,5,10).Comment: 18 pages; Accepted to AGILE 2020 as a full paper GitHub Code Repository: https://github.com/gengchenmai/arcgis-online-search-engin

68Ga-labeled WVP peptide as a novel PET probe for molecular biological diagnosis of unstable thoracic aortic aneurysm and early dissection: an animal study.

OBJECTIVE Type IV collagen (Col-IV) is a prospective biomarker for diagnosing and treating of unstable thoracic aortic aneurysm and dissection (TAAD). This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of 68Ga-labeled WVP peptide (68Ga-DOTA-WVP) as a novel Col-IV-targeted probe for TAAD biological diagnosis using PET/CT. METHODS WVP peptide was modified with bifunctional chelator DOTA for 68Ga radiolabeling. Immunohistochemical staining was used to evaluate the expression and location of Col-IV and elastin in aortas treated with 3-aminopropionitrile fumarate (BAPN) at different time points (0, 2, and 4 weeks). The imaging performance of 68Ga-DOTA-WVP was investigated using Micro-PET/CT in a BAPN-induced TAAD mouse model. The relationship between 68Ga-DOTA-WVP uptake in aortic lesions and the serum levels of TAAD-related biomarkers including D-dimer, C-reactive protein (CRP), and serum soluble suppression of tumorigenicity-2 (sST2) was also analyzed. RESULTS 68Ga-DOTA-WVP was readily prepared with high radiochemical purity and stability in vitro. 68Ga-DOTA-WVP Micro-PET/CT could detect Col-IV exposure of unstable aneurysms and early dissection in BAPN-induced TAAD mice, but little 68Ga-DOTA-WVP uptake was shown in the control group at each imaging time point. The differences of Col-IV expression and distribution of 68Ga-DOTA-WVP both in TAAD and control groups further verified the imaging efficiency of 68Ga-DOTA-WVP PET/CT. Additionally, a higher sST2 level was found in the imaging positive (n = 14) than the negative (n = 8) group (9.60 ± 1.14 vs. 8.44 ± 0.52, P = 0.014). CONCLUSION 68Ga-DOTA-WVP could trace the exposure and abnormal deposition of Col-IV in enlarged and early injured aortas, showing a potential for biological diagnosis, whole-body screening, and progression monitoring of TAAD

Heat wave characteristics, mortality and effect modification by temperature zones: a time-series study in 130 counties of China

Background: The substantial disease burden attributed to heat waves, and their increasing frequency and intensity due to climate change, highlight the importance of understanding the health consequences of heat waves. We explore the mortality risk due to heat wave characteristics, including the timing in the seasons, the day of the heat wave, the intensity and the duration, and the modifying effect of temperature zones. Methods: Heat waves were defined as ≥ 2 days with a temperature ≥99th percentile for the county from 1 May through 30 September. Heat waves were characterized by their intensity, duration, timing in the season, and day of the heat wave. Within each county, we estimated the total non-accidental death and cardiovascular disease mortality during each heat wave compared with non-heat wave days by controlling for potential confounders in summer. We combined individual heat wave effect estimates using a random-effects model to calculate overall effects at the temperature zone and national levels. Results: The average daily total number of non-accidental deaths was nine in the warm season (across all the counties). Approximately half of the daily total number of non-accidental deaths were cardiovascular-related deaths (approximately four persons per day). The average and maximum temperatures across the study area were 23.1 °C (range: -1.2–35.9 °C) and 28.3 °C (range: 5.4–42.8 °C), respectively. The average relative humidity during the study was 68.9% (range: 8.0–100.0%). Heat waves increase the risk of total non-accidental death by 15.7% [95% confidence interval (CI): 12.5, 18.9] compared with non-heat wave periods, and the risk of cardiovascular-related death increases by 22.0% (95% CI: 16.9, 27.4). The risk of non-accidental death during the first heat wave of the season increases by 16.3% (95% CI: 12.6, 20.2), the risk during the second heat wave increases by 6.3% (95% CI: 2.8, 9.9) and during subsequent heat waves increases by -2.1% (95% CI: -4.6, 0.4). The first day and the second to third days of heat waves increase the risk of total non-accidental death by 11.7% (95% CI: 7.6, 15.9) and 17.0% (95% CI: 13.1, 21.0), respectively. Effects of heat waves on mortality lasted more than 4 days (6.3%, 95% CI: 2.4, 10.5) and are non-significantly different from the first day of heat waves. We found non-significant differences of the heat wave-associated mortality risks across mid-, warm and subtropical temperature zones. Conclusions: In China, the effect of heat waves on mortality is acute, and varies by certain characteristics of heat waves. Given these results, national heat wave early warning systems should be developed, as well as precautions and protection warranted according to characteristics of heat waves