Image Representations and New Domains in Neural Image Captioning

We examine the possibility that recent promising results in automatic caption generation are due primarily to language models. By varying image representation quality produced by a convolutional neural network, we find that a state-of-the-art neural captioning algorithm is able to produce quality captions even when provided with surprisingly poor image representations. We replicate this result in a new, fine-grained, transfer learned captioning domain, consisting of 66K recipe image/title pairs. We also provide some experiments regarding the appropriateness of datasets for automatic captioning, and find that having multiple captions per image is beneficial, but not an absolute requirement.Comment: 11 Pages, 5 Images, To appear at EMNLP 2015's Vision + Learning worksho

Cost-Effective HITs for Relative Similarity Comparisons

Similarity comparisons of the form "Is object a more similar to b than to c?" are useful for computer vision and machine learning applications. Unfortunately, an embedding of $n$ points is specified by $n^3$ triplets, making collecting every triplet an expensive task. In noticing this difficulty, other researchers have investigated more intelligent triplet sampling techniques, but they do not study their effectiveness or their potential drawbacks. Although it is important to reduce the number of collected triplets, it is also important to understand how best to display a triplet collection task to a user. In this work we explore an alternative display for collecting triplets and analyze the monetary cost and speed of the display. We propose best practices for creating cost effective human intelligence tasks for collecting triplets. We show that rather than changing the sampling algorithm, simple changes to the crowdsourcing UI can lead to much higher quality embeddings. We also provide a dataset as well as the labels collected from crowd workers.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Evolutionary and geographical history of the Leishmania donovani complex with a revision of current taxonomy.

Leishmaniasis is a geographically widespread severe disease, with an increasing incidence of two million cases per year and 350 million people from 88 countries at risk. The causative agents are species of Leishmania, a protozoan flagellate. Visceral leishmaniasis, the most severe form of the disease, lethal if untreated, is caused by species of the Leishmania donovani complex. These species are morphologically indistinguishable but have been identified by molecular methods, predominantly multilocus enzyme electrophoresis. We have conducted a multifactorial genetic analysis that includes DNA sequences of protein-coding genes as well as noncoding segments, microsatellites, restriction-fragment length polymorphisms, and randomly amplified polymorphic DNAs, for a total of approximately 18,000 characters for each of 25 geographically representative strains. Genotype is strongly correlated with geographical (continental) origin, but not with current taxonomy or clinical outcome. We propose a new taxonomy, in which Leishmania infantum and L. donovani are the only recognized species of the L. donovani complex, and we present an evolutionary hypothesis for the origin and dispersal of the species. The genus Leishmania may have originated in South America, but diversified after migration into Asia. L. donovani and L. infantum diverged approximately 1 Mya, with further divergence of infraspecific genetic groups between 0.4 and 0.8 Mya. The prevailing mode of reproduction is clonal, but there is evidence of genetic exchange between strains, particularly in Africa

Exemplar codes for facial attributes and tattoo recognition

Abstract When implementing real-world computer vision systems, researchers can use mid-level representations as a tool to adjust the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Unfortunately, existing mid-level representations that improve accuracy tend to decrease efficiency, or are specifically tailored to work well within one pipeline or vision problem at the exclusion of others. We introduce a novel, efficient mid-level representation that improves classification efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Our Exemplar Codes are based on linear classifiers and probability normalization from extreme value theory. We apply Exemplar Codes to two problems: facial attribute extraction and tattoo classification. In these settings, our Exemplar Codes are competitive with the state of the art and offer efficiency benefits, making it possible to achieve high accuracy even on commodity hardware with a low computational budget

Effect of seven anti-tuberculosis treatment regimens on sputum microbiome : a retrospective analysis of the HIGHRIF study 2 and PanACEA MAMS-TB clinical trials

Funding: European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership and German Ministry of Education and Research.Background Respiratory tract microbiota has been described as the gatekeeper for respiratory health. We aimed to assess the impact of standard-of-care and experimental anti-tuberculosis treatment regimens on the respiratory microbiome and implications for treatment outcomes. Methods In this retrospective study, we analysed the sputum microbiome of participants with tuberculosis treated with six experimental regimens versus standard-of-care who were part of the HIGHRIF study 2 (NCT00760149 ) and PanACEA MAMS-TB (NCT01785186 ) clinical trials across a 3-month treatment follow-up period. Samples were from participants in Mbeya, Kilimanjaro, Bagamoyo, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Experimental regimens were composed of different combinations of rifampicin (R), isoniazid (H), pyrazinamide (Z), ethambutol (E), moxifloxacin (M), and a new drug, SQ109 (Q). Reverse transcription was used to create complementary DNA for each participant's total sputum RNA and the V3-V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene was sequenced using the Illumina metagenomic technique. Qiime was used to analyse the amplicon sequence variants and estimate alpha diversity. Descriptive statistics were applied to assess differences in alpha diversity pre-treatment and post-treatment initiation and the effect of each treatment regimen. Findings Sequence data were obtained from 397 pre-treatment and post-treatment samples taken between Sept 26, 2008, and June 30, 2015, across seven treatment regimens. Pre-treatment microbiome (206 genera) was dominated by Firmicutes (2860 [44%] of 6500 amplicon sequence variants [ASVs]) at the phylum level and Streptococcus (2340 [36%] ASVs) at the genus level. Two regimens had a significant depressing effect on the microbiome after 2 weeks of treatment, HR20mg/kgZM (Shannon diversity index p=0·0041) and HR35mg/kgZE (p=0·027). Gram-negative bacteria were the most sensitive to bactericidal activity of treatment with the highest number of species suppressed being under the moxifloxacin regimen. By week 12 after treatment initiation, microbiomes had recovered to pre-treatment level except for the HR35mg/kgZE regimen and for genus Mycobacterium, which did not show recovery across all regimens. Tuberculosis culture conversion to negative by week 8 of treatment was associated with clearance of genus Neisseria, with a 98% reduction of the pre-treatment level. Interpretation HR20mg/kgZM was effective against tuberculosis without limiting microbiome recovery, which implies a shorter efficacious anti-tuberculosis regimen with improved treatment outcomes might be achieved without harming the commensal microbiota.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins

https://via.library.depaul.edu/museum-publications/1010/thumbnail.jp

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes