Effects of visual stimuli on musically-induced chills response

Experiences of chills are one of the peak experiences reported in the context of response to art and are experienced by half to two thirds of the population. Previous research on aesthetic chills, a peak emotional response of art appreciation, has listed multiple sensory inputs; however, there exists few studies that investigated how visual information affected musically-induced chills response. The aim of the current master’s thesis was to investigate 1) whether related visual stimuli of a musical performance could enhance musically- induced chills responses and 2) whether different type of visual cues have different impact on listeners’ emotional reactions and 3) whether there is a difference between individuals towards this musical reward activity. In order to address these questions, this thesis reports two studies: a preliminary online experiment involving 82 participants and a second lab-based experiment in which 54 participants’ chill-responses to music were measured using galvanic skin conductance (GSR). Both studies used three types of music presentation modalities. In the preliminary online study, music pieces were presented in audio-only (AO), audio-visual (VO) and video-only (VO) modalities, and in GSR study, audio-only (AO), audio-visual of live orchestra performance, audio-visual with natural scenery were adopted. Results of the preliminary study suggested that for people with high musical reward sensitivity, audio-visual music listening modality resulted in more chills response outcomes, whereas low and average musical reward sensitivity listeners preferred audio-only music listening modality. In the physiological study, participants’ self-reported chills response is consistent with the findings in preliminary study; however, number of GSR peaks showed that low musical reward sensitivity listeners showed significantly more chills responses in audio-only listening modality than music with natural scenery, and high musical reward sensitivity listeners showed more chills responses in live performance than natural scenery visual input. It is therefore argued that whether visual components intensify the emotional responses evoked by musical performance is an individual reaction according to listeners’ musical reward sensitivity, which contributes to the emotional meanings of music

CCFL: Computationally Customized Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a method to train model with distributed data from numerous participants such as IoT devices. It inherently assumes a uniform capacity among participants. However, participants have diverse computational resources in practice due to different conditions such as different energy budgets or executing parallel unrelated tasks. It is necessary to reduce the computation overhead for participants with inefficient computational resources, otherwise they would be unable to finish the full training process. To address the computation heterogeneity, in this paper we propose a strategy for estimating local models without computationally intensive iterations. Based on it, we propose Computationally Customized Federated Learning (CCFL), which allows each participant to determine whether to perform conventional local training or model estimation in each round based on its current computational resources. Both theoretical analysis and exhaustive experiments indicate that CCFL has the same convergence rate as FedAvg without resource constraints. Furthermore, CCFL can be viewed of a computation-efficient extension of FedAvg that retains model performance while considerably reducing computation overhead

ChartReader: A Unified Framework for Chart Derendering and Comprehension without Heuristic Rules

Charts are a powerful tool for visually conveying complex data, but their comprehension poses a challenge due to the diverse chart types and intricate components. Existing chart comprehension methods suffer from either heuristic rules or an over-reliance on OCR systems, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we present ChartReader, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates chart derendering and comprehension tasks. Our approach includes a transformer-based chart component detection module and an extended pre-trained vision-language model for chart-to-X tasks. By learning the rules of charts automatically from annotated datasets, our approach eliminates the need for manual rule-making, reducing effort and enhancing accuracy.~We also introduce a data variable replacement technique and extend the input and position embeddings of the pre-trained model for cross-task training. We evaluate ChartReader on Chart-to-Table, ChartQA, and Chart-to-Text tasks, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. Our proposed framework can significantly reduce the manual effort involved in chart analysis, providing a step towards a universal chart understanding model. Moreover, our approach offers opportunities for plug-and-play integration with mainstream LLMs such as T5 and TaPas, extending their capability to chart comprehension tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/zhiqic/ChartReader

Povezanost polimorfizma pojedinačnog nukleotida gena ARID4A i kvalitete sperme kineskog vodenog bivola

ARID4A (AT-rich interaction domain 4A) is closely related to animal sperm quality traits. In the present study, the association between ARID4A gene polymorphisms of Chinese water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) with sperm quality traits was examined, including ejaculate volume, sperm concentration, post-thaw sperm motility, and sperm abnormality of buffalo semen. Seven single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of ARID4A gene were detected in 156 Chinese water buffaloes by Sanger sequencing and identifying overlap peaks. Among the SNPs, six were associated with at least one sperm quality trait. In brief, g.21192G>C, g.21285C>G, and g.21364A>G could be used as potential markers for selecting semen with low sperm abnormality, high ejaculate volume, sperm concentration, and sperm motility. Furthermore, 10 haplotypes (H1: -CTCGG, H2: GTGGCA, H3: GCGGCA, H4: GCTGCA, H5: GCTCGA, H6: GTGGGG, H7: GCTCCG, H8: -CGGGA, H9: GCGGCG, and H10: GTTGCA) were formed by the six SNPs through linkage disequilibrium analysis, and then 14 different combined haplotypes were collected. Correlation analysis showed that the combined H1H2 haplotype had the highest genotype frequency. Notably, the combined H1H2 haplotype had low sperm concentration, low sperm motility, and high sperm abnormality. The combined H2H3 haplotype could be used as a potential molecular marker for selecting semen with high sperm motility. In general, we illustrated a significant correlation between SNPs in ARID4A and sperm quality traits of Chinese water buffalo, which may be useful in the marker-assisted selection of buffalo breeding. This study was the first to analyze the genetic polymorphisms of ARID4A and association with sperm qualities of Chinese buffalo.Gen ARID4A (engl AT-rich interaction domain 4A) usko je povezan s kvalitetom sperme. U ovom je radu istraživana povezanost polimorfizma gena ARID4A u kineskih vodenih bivola (Bubalus bubalis) s kvalitetom sperme, uključujući volumen ejakulata, koncentraciju sperme, pokretljivost spermija nakon odmrzavanja i abnormalnost spermija u sjemenu bivola. U 156 kineskih vodenih bivola otkriveno je sedam polimorfizama pojedinačnog nukleotida (SNPs) gena ARID4A Sangerovim sekvenciranjem i identifikacijom preklopljenih vrhova. Među SNP-ovima njih je šest bilo povezano s barem jednim svojstvom kvalitete spermija. Ukratko, g. 21192G>C, g. 21285C>G i g. 21364A>G mogu se upotrijebiti kao potencijalni markeri za selekciju sjemena s niskom abnormalnošću spermija, većim volumenom ejakulata, većom koncentracijom i pokretljivošću spermija. Nadalje, šest SNP-ova formiralo je 10 haplotipova (H1: -CTCGG, H2: GTGGCA, H3: GCGGCA, H4: GCTGCA, H5: GCTCGA, H6: GTGGGG, H7: GCTCCG, H8: -CGGGA, H9: GCGGCG i H10: GTTGCA) analizom povezanosti nepodudarnosti te je ustanovljeno 14 različitih kombiniranih haplotipova. Analiza korelacije pokazala je da kombinirani haplotip H1H2 ima najveću učestalost. Kombinirani haplotip H1H2 imao je najmanju koncentraciju sperme, slabu pokretljivost seprmija i znatnu abnormalnost spermija. Kombinirani haplotip H2H3 može se upotrijebiti kao potencijalni molekularni marker za odabir sjemena s većom pokretljivošću. Općenito je pokazana znakovita korelacija između SNP-ova u ARID4A i kvalitete sperme kineskog vodenog bivola, što može biti korisno u selekciji bivola potpomognutoj markerima. Ovo je prvo istraživanje koje je analiziralo genske polimorfizme ARID4A i njihovu povezanost s kvalitetom sjemena kineskih vodenih bivola

Identification of Cancer Dysfunctional Subpathways by Integrating DNA Methylation, Copy Number Variation, and Gene-Expression Data

A subpathway is defined as the local region of a biological pathway with specific biological functions. With the generation of large-scale sequencing data, there are more opportunities to study the molecular mechanisms of cancer development. It is necessary to investigate the potential impact of DNA methylation, copy number variation (CNV), and gene-expression changes in the molecular states of oncogenic dysfunctional subpathways. We propose a novel method, Identification of Cancer Dysfunctional Subpathways (ICDS), by integrating multi-omics data and pathway topological information to identify dysfunctional subpathways. We first calculated gene-risk scores by integrating the three following types of data: DNA methylation, CNV, and gene expression. Second, we performed a greedy search algorithm to identify the key dysfunctional subpathways within pathways for which the discriminative scores were locally maximal. Finally, a permutation test was used to calculate the statistical significance level for these key dysfunctional subpathways. We validated the effectiveness of ICDS in identifying dysregulated subpathways using datasets from liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC), head-neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSC), cervical squamous cell carcinoma, and endocervical adenocarcinoma. We further compared ICDS with methods that performed the same subpathway identification algorithm but only considered DNA methylation, CNV, or gene expression (defined as ICDS_M, ICDS_CNV, or ICDS_G, respectively). With these analyses, we confirmed that ICDS better identified cancer-associated subpathways than the three other methods, which only considered one type of data. Our ICDS method has been implemented as a freely available R-based tool (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ICDS)

Study of pathophysiology of Pompe disease and identification of novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers

Le basi molecolari e biochimiche della malattia di Pompe sono ormai ben note ma la fisiopatologia della malattia, ad oggi, resta ancora sconosciuta e la stessa terapia ha un’efficacia limitata nei pazienti. Il lavoro è focalizzato sullo studio delle interazioni proteiche dell’alfa glucosidasi acida (GAA), sulla presenza dello stress ossidativo nella malattia e nell’identificazione di nuovi biomarcatori per l’individuazione della diagnosi e per seguire la progressione della malattia. I risultati ottenuti offrono nuovi spunti per la comprensione dei meccanismi alla base della malattia e per l'individuazione di nuovi possibili target terapeutici

Approximate Sensory Data Collection: A Survey

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoTs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and related techniques, the amount of sensory data manifests an explosive growth. In some applications of IoTs and WSNs, the size of sensory data has already exceeded several petabytes annually, which brings too many troubles and challenges for the data collection, which is a primary operation in IoTs and WSNs. Since the exact data collection is not affordable for many WSN and IoT systems due to the limitations on bandwidth and energy, many approximate data collection algorithms have been proposed in the last decade. This survey reviews the state of the art of approximatedatacollectionalgorithms. Weclassifythemintothreecategories: themodel-basedones, the compressive sensing based ones, and the query-driven ones. For each category of algorithms, the advantages and disadvantages are elaborated, some challenges and unsolved problems are pointed out, and the research prospects are forecasted