Human Computer Interaction Using Eye-tracking Data

The eye-tracking device records users’ eye movements in order to better understand users’ information-seeking behavior. One of our research goals was to investigate the search behavior when participants interact with a health-related online database. Another research goal was to explore how participants browse for health information inquiries. The result shows that the health professional participants studied spent more time on our proposed or recommended browsers which are called help mechanism comparing to general participants

Single-cell RNA-seq data imputation using Feature Propagation

While single-cell RNA sequencing provides an understanding of the transcriptome of individual cells, its high sparsity, often termed dropout, hampers the capture of significant cell-cell relationships. Here, we propose scFP (single-cell Feature Propagation), which directly propagates features, i.e., gene expression, especially in raw feature space, via cell-cell graph. Specifically, it first obtains a warmed-up cell-gene matrix via Hard Feature Propagation which fully utilizes known gene transcripts. Then, we refine the k-Nearest Neighbor(kNN) of the cell-cell graph with a warmed-up cell-gene matrix, followed by Soft Feature Propagation which now allows known gene transcripts to be further denoised through their neighbors. Through extensive experiments on imputation with cell clustering tasks, we demonstrate our proposed model, scFP, outperforms various recent imputation and clustering methods. The source code of scFP can be found at https://github.com/Junseok0207/scFP.Comment: ICML 2023 Workshop on Computational Biology (Contributed Talk

How User\u27s Visualization Literacy Relates to Their Cognitive Traits

Researchers in the field of Information Visualization have suggested that users’ cognitive abilities would likely to affect their understanding of data visualizations and deeper exploration in the visualizations. However, the evidence is still scant to link between user’s visualization literacy and their cognitive traits. Thus, the research goal of this study is to explore how user’s visualization literacy and their cognitive traits are related. In particular, we focused on two cognitive traits: numeracy and need-for-cognition. In order to achieve the goal, first, we measured visualization literacy, numeracy, and need-for-cognition using existing instruments with 46 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, and the scores of the tree instruments were analyzed. The results showed that a moderate positive relationship between visualization literacy and numeracy (Spearman rho correlation coefficient = 0.571, P-Value=0.000); a moderate positive relationship between visualization literacy and need-for-cognition (Spearman rho correlation coefficient = 0.403, P-Value=0.006). In short, this study provides researchers of visualization literacy understanding of how users’ ability to interpret visualization relate their cognitive traits

Effects of Sound on Postural Stability during Quiet Standing

Loss of postural stability can increase the likelihood of slips and falls in workplaces. The present study intended to extend understanding of the effects of frequency and pressure level of sound on postural stability during standing. Eleven male subjects participated. Standing on a force platform, the subjects' center of pressures were measured under different combinations of pressure level and frequency of the sound. Variables such as the position variability of COP and the length of postural sway path in anterior-posterior (AP) and medio-lateral (ML) direction were evaluated. Subjective ratings of perceived disturbance at each experimental condition were also obtained using a 7-point rating scale. Results showed that the length of sway path and the position variability of COP increased as the frequency of sound increased in posterior-anterior axis. The effect of sound pressure level, however, was not significant on both the postural sway length and the position variability of COP. These results suggested substantial disturbance of standing balance system among subjects exposed to high frequency noise. The results implied that physical workers should be alerted that their abilities of postural balance could be degraded significantly as disturbance caused by a sound existed

The impact of environmental factors during maternal separation on the behaviors of adolescent C57BL/6 mice

Neonatal maternal separation is a widely used method to construct an early-life stress model in rodents. In this method, pups are separated from their mothers for several hours every day during the first 2 weeks of life, which results in adverse early-life events. It is a known fact that maternal separation can exert a significant impact on the behavior and psychological health, such as anxiety and depression, in adolescent offspring. However, environmental conditions during maternal separation can differ such as the presence of other animals or by placing pups in a different dam. To investigate the differential effects of various conditions of maternal separation on the behavior of adolescent mice, we created the following groups: (1) iMS group: pups were moved to an isolated room with no other adult mice in a nearby cage, (2) eDam group: the pups randomly exchanged their dams, (3) OF group: pups were shifted to another cage with the bedding material containing maternal odor (olfactory stimulation), and (4) MS group: pups were shifted to another vivarium. From postnatal day (PND) 2–20 (i.e., 19 consecutive days), pups were separated from the dam daily for 4 h and exposed to various environments (MS, iMS, eDam, and OF) or were left undisturbed [control (CON) group]. A series of behavioral assessments were conducted to evaluate locomotion, anxiety, recognition, learning, and memory in adolescent offspring. The results showed that neonatal maternal separation led to impaired recognition memory, motor coordination, and motor skill learning across all groups. However, the iMS group exhibited anxiety-like behavior in the elevated plus maze test and enhanced the extinction of fear memory in the auditory fear conditioning test. The OF and eDam groups displayed partially recovered short-term working memory in the Y-maze test but exhibited opposite exploratory behaviors. The OF group spent more time in the center, while the eDam group spent less time. These findings demonstrated that exposure to different environmental conditions during maternal separation causes behavioral alterations in adolescent offspring, providing a potential explanation for the variation in behavioral phenotypes observed in the early-life stress models

Capturing high-level requirements of information dashboards' components through meta-modeling

[EN]Information dashboards are increasing their sophistication to match new necessities and adapt to the high quantities of generated data nowadays.These tools support visual analysis, knowledge generation, and thus, are crucial systems to assist decision-making processes.However, the design and development processes are complex, because several perspectives and components can be involved.Tailoringcapabilities are focused on providing individualized dashboards without affecting the time-to-market through the decrease of the development processes' time. Among the methods used to configure these tools, the software product lines paradigm and model-driven development can be found. These paradigms benefit from the study of the target domain and the abstraction of features, obtaining high-level models that can be instantiated into concrete models. This paper presents a dashboard meta-model that aims to be applicable to any dashboard. Through domain engineering, different features of these tools are identified and arranged into abstract structuresand relationships to gain a better understanding of the domain. The goal of the meta-model is to obtain a framework for instantiating any dashboard to adapt them to different contexts and user profiles.One of the contexts in which dashboards are gaining relevance is Learning Analytics, as learning dashboards are powerful tools for assisting teachers and students in their learning activities.To illustrate the instantiation process of the presented meta-model, a small example within this relevant context (Learning Analytics) is also provided

Posterior parietal cortex mediates fear renewal in a novel context

The return of fear following extinction therapy is an important issue associated with the treatment of many fear-related disorders. Fear renewal is a suitable model, with which context-dependent modulation of the fear response can be examined. In this model, any context outside of an extinction context (e.g., novel or familiar contexts) could evoke relapse of the fear response. However, brain regions associated with context-dependent modulation are not fully understood. The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is considered a center for integrating multisensory information and making decisions. To study its role in the contextual modulation of fear relapse, we reversibly inactivated the PPC in mice before they were exposed to various contexts after extinction training. When muscimol was infused into the PPC, fear renewal was impaired in a novel context, but not in a familiar context. Fear relapses were blocked during optogenetic inhibition of the PPC, only when animals were placed in a novel context. We propose that the neural activity of the PPC is necessary for the relapse of a precise response to an extinguished conditioned stimulus in a novel context. © 2020 The Author(s).1

Eco-friendly Technologies for Physical and Chemical Recycling of PVC-Related Wasteful Resources

The aim of this study is to enhance the recycled PVC related material property by formulation technology and develop the recycling product processing technology furthermore develop the chemical recycling technology for last stage of PVC wastes. The formulation technology is composed of pre-treatment (crushing, separation etc.) and post-treatment (material ratio, additives, stabilizer etc.) to enhance the recyclate property. The formulation for recycled PVC by application basis and processing technology is applied to produce the structural product for civil and construction application such as pipe fittings and water drainage cap for environmental waterway. Also chemical recycling technology for end life PVC scrap which causes environmental pollution by incineration or landfill is studied for producing hydrocarbon and hydrogen chloride for VCM

Reversible Plasticity of Fear Memory-Encoding Amygdala Synaptic Circuits Even after Fear Memory Consolidation

It is generally believed that after memory consolidation, memory-encoding synaptic circuits are persistently modified and become less plastic. This, however, may hinder the remaining capacity of information storage in a given neural circuit. Here we consider the hypothesis that memory-encoding synaptic circuits still retain reversible plasticity even after memory consolidation. To test this, we employed a protocol of auditory fear conditioning which recruited the vast majority of the thalamic input synaptic circuit to the lateral amygdala (T-LA synaptic circuit; a storage site for fear memory) with fear conditioning-induced synaptic plasticity. Subsequently the fear memory-encoding synaptic circuits were challenged with fear extinction and re-conditioning to determine whether these circuits exhibit reversible plasticity. We found that fear memory-encoding T-LA synaptic circuit exhibited dynamic efficacy changes in tight correlation with fear memory strength even after fear memory consolidation. Initial conditioning or re-conditioning brought T-LA synaptic circuit near the ceiling of their modification range (occluding LTP and enhancing depotentiation in brain slices prepared from conditioned or re-conditioned rats), while extinction reversed this change (reinstating LTP and occluding depotentiation in brain slices prepared from extinguished rats). Consistently, fear conditioning-induced synaptic potentiation at T-LA synapses was functionally reversed by extinction and reinstated by subsequent re-conditioning. These results suggest reversible plasticity of fear memory-encoding circuits even after fear memory consolidation. This reversible plasticity of memory-encoding synapses may be involved in updating the contents of original memory even after memory consolidation