Pose Modulated Avatars from Video

It is now possible to reconstruct dynamic human motion and shape from a sparse set of cameras using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) driven by an underlying skeleton. However, a challenge remains to model the deformation of cloth and skin in relation to skeleton pose. Unlike existing avatar models that are learned implicitly or rely on a proxy surface, our approach is motivated by the observation that different poses necessitate unique frequency assignments. Neglecting this distinction yields noisy artifacts in smooth areas or blurs fine-grained texture and shape details in sharp regions. We develop a two-branch neural network that is adaptive and explicit in the frequency domain. The first branch is a graph neural network that models correlations among body parts locally, taking skeleton pose as input. The second branch combines these correlation features to a set of global frequencies and then modulates the feature encoding. Our experiments demonstrate that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of preserving details and generalization capabilities

AudioViewer: Learning to Visualize Sounds

A long-standing goal in the field of sensory substitution is to enable sound perception for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people by visualizing audio content. Different from existing models that translate to hand sign language, between speech and text, or text and images, we target immediate and low-level audio to video translation that applies to generic environment sounds as well as human speech. Since such a substitution is artificial, without labels for supervised learning, our core contribution is to build a mapping from audio to video that learns from unpaired examples via high-level constraints. For speech, we additionally disentangle content from style, such as gender and dialect. Qualitative and quantitative results, including a human study, demonstrate that our unpaired translation approach maintains important audio features in the generated video and that videos of faces and numbers are well suited for visualizing high-dimensional audio features that can be parsed by humans to match and distinguish between sounds and words. Code and models are available at https://chunjinsong.github.io/audioviewe

Origination, Expansion, Evolutionary Trajectory, and Expression Bias of AP2/ERF Superfamily in Brassica napus

The AP2/ERF superfamily, one of the most important transcription factor families, plays crucial roles in response to biotic and abiotic stresses. So far, a comprehensive evolutionary inference of its origination and expansion has not been available. Here, we identified 515 AP2/ERF genes in B. napus, a neo-tetraploid forming ~7500 years ago, and found that 82.14% of them were duplicated in the tetraploidization. A prominent subgenome bias was revealed in gene expression, tissue-specific, and gene conversion. Moreover, a large-scale analysis across plants and alga suggested that this superfamily could have been originated from AP2 family, expanding to form other families (ERF, and RAV). This process was accompanied by duplicating and/or alternative deleting AP2 domain, intragenic domain sequence conversion, and/or by acquiring other domains, resulting in copy number variations, alternatively contributing to functional innovation. We found that significant positive selection occurred at certain critical nodes during the evolution of land plants, possibly responding to changing environment. In conclusion, the present research revealed origination, functional innovation, and evolutionary trajectory of the AP2/ERF superfamily, contributing to understanding their roles in plant stress tolerance

A Study on the Aesthetic Preference of Bamboo Weaving Patterns Based on Eye Movement Experiments

Bamboo weaving is an intangible cultural heritage in China. Exploring people’s aesthetic preferences for bamboo weaving patterns to better serve the design of bamboo architectural decoration can help promote the upgrading of traditional crafts. This study explored the differences between genders in the oculomotor indicators in different bamboo weaving patterns through an eye-movement experimental study combined with a subjective questionnaire to explore whether different genders have aesthetic preferences for people’s pictures of bamboo weaving patterns. The results showed that both males and females preferred less visually striking and softer corrugated patterns, with males paying more attention to the more ‘angular’ hexagonal and triangular patterns, while females were more interested in the more regular and uniform brickwork and diagonal patterns

Porous hexagonal boron nitride sheets: effect of hydroxyl and secondary amino groups on photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

Hexagonal boron nitride (<i>h</i>-BN), an emerging two-dimensional material, has attracted great attention in various fields. However, due to its large band gap (ca. 6 eV), <i>h</i>-BN has not yet been exploited as a photocatalyst. Here, we demonstrate a porous <i>h</i>-BN sheets with rich hydroxyl (-OH) and secondary amino (-NH) groups, which can effectively decrease the band gap of <i>h</i>-BN. Porous <i>h</i>-BN sheets were synthesized via combustion of boron acid and urea at high temperature under nitrogen atmosphere. The as-obtained porous <i>h</i>-BN has a narrower band gap and a higher photocatalytic activity on hydrogen evolution than commercial <i>h</i>-BN. To further understand this photocatalytic performance, we investigated the groups, structure, and related optical and electrochemical properties for both porous and commercial <i>h</i>-BN. This work holds promise for <i>h</i>-BN to be used in the photocatalysis field

Synthesis and Alkyne Insertion Reactions of NHC-Based Cyclometalated Ruthenium(II) Complexes

The series of NHC-based cyclometalated ruthenium­(II) complexes <b>2a</b>–<b>k</b> were synthesized by the reactions of aryl-substituted imidazolium salts with [(<i>p</i>-cymene)­RuCl₂]₂ under mild conditions. These complexes could react with alkynes in MeOH at 80 °C, through alkyne insertion and subsequent reductive elimination, to give the new kinds of imidazolium salts <b>3a</b>–<b>q</b> in high yields. All new compounds were fully characterized, and the molecular structures of <b>2a</b>–<b>d</b>,<b>f</b>,<b>g</b>,<b>i</b>–<b>k</b> were determined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis

Comprehensive analyses of the BES1 gene family in Brassica napus and examination of their evolutionary pattern in representative species

Abstract Background The BES1 gene family, an important class of plant-specific transcription factors, play key roles in the BR signal pathway in plants, regulating various development processes. Until now, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the BES1 gene family in Brassica napus, and a cross-genome exploration of their origin, copy number changes, and functional innovation in plants was also not available. Results We identified 28 BES1 genes in B. napus from its two subgenomes (AA and CC). We found that 71.43% of them were duplicated in the tetraploidization, and their gene expression showed a prominent subgenome bias in the roots. Additionally, we identified 104 BES1 genes in another 18 representative angiosperms and performed a comparative analysis with B. napus, including evolutionary trajectory, gene duplication, positive selection, and expression pattern. Exploiting the available genome datasets, we performed a large-scale analysis across plants and algae suggested that the BES1 gene family could have originated from group F, expanding to form other groups (A to E) by duplicating or alternatively deleting some domains. We detected an additional domain containing M4 to M8 in exclusively groups F1 and F2. We found evidence that whole-genome duplication (WGD) contributed the most to the expansion of this gene family among examined dicots, while dispersed duplication contributed the most to expansion in certain monocots. Moreover, we inferred that positive selection might have occurred on major phylogenetic nodes during the evolution of plants. Conclusions Grossly, a cross-genome comparative analysis of the BES1 genes in B. napus and other species sheds light on understanding its copy number expansion, natural selection, and functional innovation