Beyond Numbers: Creating Analogies to Enhance Data Comprehension and Communication with Generative AI

Unfamiliar measurements usually hinder readers from grasping the scale of the numerical data, understanding the content, and feeling engaged with the context. To enhance data comprehension and communication, we leverage analogies to bridge the gap between abstract data and familiar measurements. In this work, we first conduct semi-structured interviews with design experts to identify design problems and summarize design considerations. Then, we collect an analogy dataset of 138 cases from various online sources. Based on the collected dataset, we characterize a design space for creating data analogies. Next, we build a prototype system, AnalogyMate, that automatically suggests data analogies, their corresponding design solutions, and generated visual representations powered by generative AI. The study results show the usefulness of AnalogyMate in aiding the creation process of data analogies and the effectiveness of data analogy in enhancing data comprehension and communication

Oligomeric Procyanidin Nanoliposomes Prevent Melanogenesis and UV Radiation-Induced Skin Epithelial Cell (HFF-1) Damage

The potential protective effect of nanoliposomes loaded with lotus seedpod oligomeric procyanidin (LSOPC) against melanogenesis and skin damaging was investigated. Fluorescence spectroscopy showed that, after encapsulation, the LSOPC-nanoliposomes still possessed strong inhibitory effects against melanogenesis, reducing the activity of both monophenolase and diphenolase. Molecular docking indicated that LSOPC could generate intense interactive configuration with tyrosinase through arene–H, arene–arene, and hydrophobic interaction. An ultraviolet radiated cell-culture model (human foreskin fibroblast cell (HFF-1)) was used to determine the protective effects of the LSOPC-nanoliposomes against skin aging and damage. Results showed that LSOPC-nanoliposomes exerted the highest protective effects against both ultraviolet B (UVB) and ultraviolet A (UVA) irradiation groups compared with non-encapsulated LSOPC and a control (vitamin C). Superoxide dismutase (SOD) and malonaldehyde (MDA) assays demonstrated the protection mechanism may be related to the anti-photooxidation activity of the procyanidin. Furthermore, a hydroxyproline assay suggested that the LSOPC-nanoliposomes had a strong protective effect against collagen degradation and/or synthesis after UVA irradiation

EL-VIT: Probing Vision Transformer with Interactive Visualization

Nowadays, Vision Transformer (ViT) is widely utilized in various computer vision tasks, owing to its unique self-attention mechanism. However, the model architecture of ViT is complex and often challenging to comprehend, leading to a steep learning curve. ViT developers and users frequently encounter difficulties in interpreting its inner workings. Therefore, a visualization system is needed to assist ViT users in understanding its functionality. This paper introduces EL-VIT, an interactive visual analytics system designed to probe the Vision Transformer and facilitate a better understanding of its operations. The system consists of four layers of visualization views. The first three layers include model overview, knowledge background graph, and model detail view. These three layers elucidate the operation process of ViT from three perspectives: the overall model architecture, detailed explanation, and mathematical operations, enabling users to understand the underlying principles and the transition process between layers. The fourth interpretation view helps ViT users and experts gain a deeper understanding by calculating the cosine similarity between patches. Our two usage scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of EL-VIT in helping ViT users understand the working mechanism of ViT.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, conferenc

Piezo-photoelectronic coupling effect of BaTiO₃@TiO₂ nanowires for highly concentrated dye degradation

The induced built-in electric field by piezoelectric materials has proven to be one of the most effective strategies for modulating the charge-transfer pathway and inhibiting carrier recombination. In this work, a series of core-shell structured BaTiO3@TiO2 nanowires (BT@TiO2 NWs) heterojunctions were synthesized and the significant coupling effects between BaTiO3 (BT) and TiO2 resulted in surperior piezo-photocatalytic performance, which was demonstrated by three typical types of dyes with high concentrations. The degradation efficiency of 30 mg/L Rhodamine B (RhB), Methylene blue (MB) and Indigo Carmine (IC) solutions by 0.5 g/L BT@TiO2 NWs reached 99.5% in 75 min, 99.8% in 105 min and 99.7% in 45 min, respectively, which are much higher than piezo-photocatalysis systems reported before. To reveal the coupling mechanisms, photoelectrochemical measurements and band diagram analysis were carried out. The carrier concentration was increased from 2.28 × 1017 cm−3 to 4.91 × 1018 cm−3 and the lifetime of charges was improved from 50.37 ms to 60.98 ms due to the construction of a heterojunction between TiO2 and BT. It was proposed that the tilting and bending of the energy band caused by the introduction of a piezoelectric polarization can facilitate carrier separation both in the bulk phase and at the surfaces of semiconductors, resulting in outstanding piezo-photocatalytic properties for highly concentrated dye degradation. This work provides a universal catalyzer for highly concentrated dye degradation.</p

Amplifying the Music Listening Experience through Song Comments on Music Streaming Platforms

Music streaming services are increasingly popular among younger generations who seek social experiences through personal expression and sharing of subjective feelings in comments. However, such emotional aspects are often ignored by current platforms, which affects the listeners' ability to find music that triggers specific personal feelings. To address this gap, this study proposes a novel approach that leverages deep learning methods to capture contextual keywords, sentiments, and induced mechanisms from song comments. The study augments a current music app with two features, including the presentation of tags that best represent song comments and a novel map metaphor that reorganizes song comments based on chronological order, content, and sentiment. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through a usage scenario and a user study that demonstrate its capability to improve the user experience of exploring songs and browsing comments of interest. This study contributes to the advancement of music streaming services by providing a more personalized and emotionally rich music experience for younger generations.Comment: In the Proceedings of ChinaVis 202

ERNIE-ViLG 2.0: Improving Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Knowledge-Enhanced Mixture-of-Denoising-Experts

Recent progress in diffusion models has revolutionized the popular technology of text-to-image generation. While existing approaches could produce photorealistic high-resolution images with text conditions, there are still several open problems to be solved, which limits the further improvement of image fidelity and text relevancy. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, a large-scale Chinese text-to-image diffusion model, which progressively upgrades the quality of generated images~by: (1) incorporating fine-grained textual and visual knowledge of key elements in the scene, and (2) utilizing different denoising experts at different denoising stages. With the proposed mechanisms, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0 not only achieves the state-of-the-art on MS-COCO with zero-shot FID score of 6.75, but also significantly outperforms recent models in terms of image fidelity and image-text alignment, with side-by-side human evaluation on the bilingual prompt set ViLG-300