Characteristics’ relation model of asphalt pavement performance based on factor analysis

Pavement performance of asphalt is an important criterion for road engineering quality evaluation. Proposed research paper designed an orthogonal experiment using three asphalt mixtures, including SMA-13, AC-20 and ATB-25 to get their relation models and evaluate pavement performances. Totally twenty-seven samples from private companies have been selected and seven crucial parameters are analyzed via factor analysis. Further analysis concluded three main factors corresponding to the three main pavement performance parameters (i) high-temperature stability (ii) durability and (iii) shear resistance. Based on scores of each asphalt mixture’s 3D scatter-map is plotted. Analysis found the relationship between three above-mentioned parameters. Relationship between the three main performance parameters has been established using graphical analysis. A separation plane can define the different types of asphalt mixtures’ scatter distribution area, and get the regression equation for the plane. Based on the equation for the plane a more intuitionistic model has been made which describes the relationship of asphalt pavement performance. Keywords: Road engineering, Asphalt, Index correlation, Surface fitting, 3D-mode

Stability of lineage-specific attributes in senescent human peripheral glia

Senescent and non-senescent human Schwann cells (hSCs) established in culture are virtually undistinguishable without the aid of specific tests such as detection of senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SA-βGal) activity. In most cultures, the rate of cell division is maintained high up until the second passage but cells cease to proliferate rapidly thereafter and the populations become senescent. By passage-5 no further expansion is possible and the cells manifest abnormalities such as vacuolization of the cytoplasm, aberrant nuclei (including multinucleation), and clustering. Arrival to senescence in hSC populations cannot be prevented by overexpression of hTERT and indefectibly occur under standard culture conditions regardless of the age of the donor. Even though senescent hSCs remain viable for prolonged periods of time, it is unclear whether they maintain attributes specific to cells of the SC lineage. To address this question, we performed a careful analysis of the progression of hSCs towards senescence to evaluate changes in proliferation rates, viability, purity and expression of SC-specific markers. We also obtained the transcriptomes of hSCs collected at different rounds of subculture and performed a stringent bioinformatics analysis to identify SC-specific and regulatory genes. We found that the hSC transcriptome was very stable and that hSCs maintained their expected identity (or transcriptional signature) regardless of subculture and the continued influence of mitogenic factors. Strikingly, the transcriptomes of low passage (proliferative) and late passage (senescent) hSCs were essentially undistinguishable with the exception of <100 differentially expressed genes known to play a role in replicative senescence, cell cycle arrest, chromatin organization and telomere maintenance. Senescent hSCs expressed invariable levels of SC-specific markers such as S100β and aligned to each other forming typical bundles at confluency. Most importantly, they maintained their ability to engulf and digest myelin granules, which is a function proper of SCs during nerve repair. To conclude, our studies show the value of combining transcriptomics (RNAseq) profiling and cell-based assays to understand hSC senescence. The stability of the hSC transcriptome in the face of expansion and mitogenic stimulation adds a level of safety for the use of these glial cells in autotransplantation therapy.Fil: Monje, Paula. Indiana University. School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Andersen, Natalia Denise. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Bahía Blanca. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Bahía Blanca; Argentina. University of Miami; Estados UnidosFil: Sant, David. University of Miami; Estados UnidosFil: Peng, Kevin. Indiana University. School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Wang, Gaofeng. University of Miami; Estados UnidosFil: Xu, Xiao-Ming. Indiana University. School of Medicine; Estados UnidosXV European Meetingon Glial Cells in Health and DiseaseMarseillesFranciaEuropean Glial Meetin

A Novel Macroblock Level Rate Control Method for Stereo Video Coding

To compress stereo video effectively, this paper proposes a novel macroblock (MB) level rate control method based on binocular perception. A binocular just-notification difference (BJND) model based on the parallax matching is first used to describe binocular perception. Then, the proposed rate control method is performed in stereo video coding with four levels, namely, view level, group-of-pictures (GOP) level, frame level, and MB level. In the view level, different proportions of bitrates are allocated for the left and right views of stereo video according to the prestatistical rate allocation proportion. In the GOP level, the total number of bitrates allocated to each GOP is computed and the initial quantization parameter of each GOP is set. In the frame level, the target bits allocated to each frame are computed. In the MB level, visual perception factor, which is measured by the BJND value of MB, is used to adjust the MB level bit allocation, so that the rate control results in line with the human visual characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed method can control the bitrate more accurately and get better subjective quality of stereo video, compared with other methods

Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition

Contrastive language-image pretraining has shown great success in learning visual-textual joint representation from web-scale data, demonstrating remarkable "zero-shot" generalization ability for various image tasks. However, how to effectively expand such new language-image pretraining methods to video domains is still an open problem. In this work, we present a simple yet effective approach that adapts the pretrained language-image models to video recognition directly, instead of pretraining a new model from scratch. More concretely, to capture the long-range dependencies of frames along the temporal dimension, we propose a cross-frame attention mechanism that explicitly exchanges information across frames. Such module is lightweight and can be plugged into pretrained language-image models seamlessly. Moreover, we propose a video-specific prompting scheme, which leverages video content information for generating discriminative textual prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is effective and can be generalized to different video recognition scenarios. In particular, under fully-supervised settings, our approach achieves a top-1 accuracy of 87.1% on Kinectics-400, while using 12 times fewer FLOPs compared with Swin-L and ViViT-H. In zero-shot experiments, our approach surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods by +7.6% and +14.9% in terms of top-1 accuracy under two popular protocols. In few-shot scenarios, our approach outperforms previous best methods by +32.1% and +23.1% when the labeled data is extremely limited. Code and models are available at https://aka.ms/X-CLIPComment: Accepted by ECCV2022, Ora

Elucidating the dynamic immune responses within the ocular mucosa of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) after infection with Flavobacterium columnare

The eye of vertebrates is constantly faced with numerous challenges from aquatic or airborne pathogens. As a crucial first line of defense, the ocular mucosa (OM) protects the visual organ from external threats in vertebrates such as birds and mammals. However, the understanding of ocular mucosal immunity in early vertebrates, such as teleost fish, remains limited, particularly concerning their resistance to bacterial infections. To gain insights into the pivotal role of the OM in antibacterial immunity among teleost fish, we developed a bacterial infection model using Flavobacterium columnare in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). Here the qPCR and immunofluorescence results showed that F. columnare could invade trout OM, suggesting that the OM could be a primary target and barrier for the bacteria. Moreover, immune-related genes (il-6, il-8, il-11, cxcl10, nod1, il1-b, igm, igt, etc.) were upregulated in the OM of trout following F. columnare infection, as confirmed by qPCR, which was further proved through RNA-seq. The results of transcriptome analyses showed that bacterial infection critically triggers a robust immune response, including innate, and adaptive immune-related signaling pathways such as Toll-like, NOD-like, and C-type lectin receptor signaling pathway and immune network for IgA production, which underscores the immune role of the OM in bacterial infection. Interestingly, a substantial reduction in the expression of genes associated with visual function was observed after infection, indicating that bacterial infection could impact ocular function. Overall, our findings have unveiled a robust mucosal immune response to bacterial infection in the teleost OM for the first time, providing valuable insights for future research into the mechanisms and functions of ocular mucosal immunity in early vertebrate species

On secure NOMA systems with transmit antenna selection schemes

This paper investigates the secrecy performance of a two-user downlink non-orthogonal multiple access systems. Both single-input and single-output and multiple-input and single-output systems with different transmit antenna selection (TAS) strategies are considered. Depending on whether the base station has the global channel state information of both the main and wiretap channels, the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) with suboptimal antenna selection and optimal antenna selection schemes are obtained and compared with the traditional space-time transmission scheme. To obtain further insights, the asymptotic analysis of the SOP in high average channel power gains regime is presented and it is found that the secrecy diversity order for all the TAS schemes with fixed power allocation is zero. Furthermore, an effective power allocation scheme is proposed to obtain the non-zero diversity order with all the TAS schemes. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the proposed analytical results