Multi-Sensory Emotion Recognition with Speech and Facial Expression

Emotion plays an important role in human beings’ daily lives. Understanding emotions and recognizing how to react to others’ feelings are fundamental to engaging in successful social interactions. Currently, emotion recognition is not only significant in human beings’ daily lives, but also a hot topic in academic research, as new techniques such as emotion recognition from speech context inspires us as to how emotions are related to the content we are uttering. The demand and importance of emotion recognition have highly increased in many applications in recent years, such as video games, human computer interaction, cognitive computing, and affective computing. Emotion recognition can be done from many sources including text, speech, hand, and body gesture as well as facial expression. Presently, most of the emotion recognition methods only use one of these sources. The emotion of human beings changes every second and using a single way to process the emotion recognition may not reflect the emotion correctly. This research is motivated by the desire to understand and evaluate human beings’ emotion from multiple ways such as speech and facial expressions. In this dissertation, multi-sensory emotion recognition has been exploited. The proposed framework can recognize emotion from speech, facial expression, and both of them. There are three important parts in the design of the system: the facial emotion recognizer, the speech emotion recognizer, and the information fusion. The information fusion part uses the results from the speech emotion recognition and facial emotion recognition. Then, a novel weighted method is used to integrate the results, and a final decision of the emotion is given after the fusion. The experiments show that with the weighted fusion methods, the accuracy can be improved to an average of 3.66% compared to fusion without adding weight. The improvement of the recognition rate can reach 18.27% and 5.66% compared to the speech emotion recognition and facial expression recognition, respectively. By improving the emotion recognition accuracy, the proposed multi-sensory emotion recognition system can help to improve the naturalness of human computer interaction

Multi-Sensory Emotion Recognition with Speech and Facial Expression

Emotion plays an important role in human beings’ daily lives. Understanding emotions and recognizing how to react to others’ feelings are fundamental to engaging in successful social interactions. Currently, emotion recognition is not only significant in human beings’ daily lives, but also a hot topic in academic research, as new techniques such as emotion recognition from speech context inspires us as to how emotions are related to the content we are uttering. The demand and importance of emotion recognition have highly increased in many applications in recent years, such as video games, human computer interaction, cognitive computing, and affective computing. Emotion recognition can be done from many sources including text, speech, hand, and body gesture as well as facial expression. Presently, most of the emotion recognition methods only use one of these sources. The emotion of human beings changes every second and using a single way to process the emotion recognition may not reflect the emotion correctly. This research is motivated by the desire to understand and evaluate human beings’ emotion from multiple ways such as speech and facial expressions. In this dissertation, multi-sensory emotion recognition has been exploited. The proposed framework can recognize emotion from speech, facial expression, and both of them. There are three important parts in the design of the system: the facial emotion recognizer, the speech emotion recognizer, and the information fusion. The information fusion part uses the results from the speech emotion recognition and facial emotion recognition. Then, a novel weighted method is used to integrate the results, and a final decision of the emotion is given after the fusion. The experiments show that with the weighted fusion methods, the accuracy can be improved to an average of 3.66% compared to fusion without adding weight. The improvement of the recognition rate can reach 18.27% and 5.66% compared to the speech emotion recognition and facial expression recognition, respectively. By improving the emotion recognition accuracy, the proposed multi-sensory emotion recognition system can help to improve the naturalness of human computer interaction

Biosynthetic studies of fungal diterpene antibiotics

The isoprenoid pathway is one of the major biosynthetic pathways of secondary metabolites. Isoprenoids with a C₂₀ skeleton are known as diterpenoids and are derived from the common precursor, geranylgeranyl diphosphate (GGPP). This dissertation describes approaches to discover the diterpene synthase enzymes which provide the backbone structures for pleuromutilin and sordarin, two diterpene antibiotics produced by the fungi Pleurotus passeckerianus Pilat and Sordaria araneosa Cain, respectively. A greater understanding of these synthase enzymes may allow us to eventually manipulate the corresponding genes, creating new scaffolds for bioactive molecules. In this dissertation, attempts to identify the biosynthetic gene clusters, including the diterpene synthase genes, for the formation of pleuromutilin and sordarin are described. Three methods were used to locate the diterpene synthase genes. The first approach involved the use of PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) with degenerate primers designed from identified and putative fungal diterpene synthase genes. A variety of conditions and degenerate primers were utilized, but no desired PCR products were found. The reason that this method did not work might be the limited overall knowledge of fungal diterpene synthases; the degenerate primers might not be suitable for P. passeckerianus and S. araneosa. The second method attempted to locate the diterpene synthase genes through a related isoprenoid biosynthetic gene, the ggs genes (GGPP synthase genes). P. passeckerianus and S. araneosa ggs genes were used to try to locate the biosynthetic genes of pleuromutilin and sordarin by probing and screening a genomic DNA library and by genome walking methods. Three ggs gene fragments were identified from P. passeckerianus and two fragments were identified from S. araneosa. The BLAST searches strongly supported their ggs gene identities. About 10 kb of sequence extending from each fragment was obtained. However, no gene associated with the pleuromutilin or sordarin biosyntheses was found. This result and a recent review suggest that fungal diterpene gene clusters do not necessarily need a dedicated ggs. So although the ggs approach has worked for several fungal clusters, it does not appear to work for all fungal diterpenes. The biosynthesis genes for the formation of pleuromutilin and sordarin appear to belong to the category that is not clustered with a dedicated ggs gene. The third method utilized was Suppression Subtractive Hybridization (SSH), which is a technique used to find differentially expressed genes. This method was tried on the fungus P. passeckerianus. A subtracted library was formed from cDNA prepared from a 2nd day culture that did not produce pleuromutilin and from cDNA from a 7th day culture that produced pleuromutilin. The genes involved in the biosynthesis of pleuromutilin should be among the genes in the subtracted library. The PCR amplification results suggest that the SSH method has worked and identified a number of possible candidate genes. Several clones from the subtracted library have been sent for sequencing to find out whether or not genes associated with pleuromutilin biosynthesis are present. In conclusion, three methods have been attempted to identify the diterpene synthase genes for the formation of pleuromutilin and sordarin. Although no diterpene biosynthetic genes have been found to date, these studies will provide a solid foundation for further studies in this area

Frame Fountain: Coding and Decoding MAC Frames

Abstract To address the large latency and degraded network throughput due to the retransmission triggered by frame loss in high speed wireless networks, this paper proposes a solution called Frame Fountain that encodes and decodes data frames in the MAC layer. This solution intelligently encodes a number of redundant frames from original frames upon link loss rate so that a receiver can effectively recover lost original frames without significant retransmissions. Meanwhile, various probability distributions are investigated to find an optimal one as the degree distribution adopted by this coding solution. Extensive experiments show that, working with a degree distribution improved upon robust Soliton distribution, Frame Fountain can recover most of original frames with large probability

The Effect of the Antimicrobial Peptide Plectasin on the Growth Performance, Intestinal Health, and Immune Function of Yellow-Feathered Chickens

The goal of the study was to test the effects of an antibiotic substitute, plectasin, on the growth performance, immune function, intestinal morphology and structure, intestinal microflora, ileal mucosal layer construction and tight junctions, ileal immune-related cytokines, and blood biochemical indices of yellow-feathered chickens. A total of 1,500 one-day-old yellow-feathered chicks were randomly divided into four dietary treatment groups with five replicates in each group and 75 yellow-feathered chicks in each replication, as follows: basal diet (group A); basal diet supplemented with 10 mg enramycin/kg of diet (group B), basal diet supplemented with 100 mg plectasin/kg of diet (group C), and basal diet supplemented with 200 mg plectasin/kg of diet (group D). It was found that the dietary antimicrobial peptide plectasin could improve the ADG and had better F/G for the overall period of 1–63 days. Dietary plectasin can enhance H9N2 avian influenza virus (AIV) and Newcastle disease virus (NDV) antibody levels of yellow-feathered chickens at 21, and 35 days of age. Dietary plectasin can enhance the intestine structure, inhibit Escherichia coli and proinflammatory cytokines in the ileum, and ameliorate the blood biochemical indices of yellow-feathered chickens at 21 days of age. This study indicates that the antimicrobial peptide plectasin has beneficial effects on the growth performance, intestinal health and immune function of yellow-feathered chickens

Molecular characterization and genetic diversity of parvoviruses prevalent in cats in Central and Eastern China from 2018 to 2022

Cats are a potential source of genetic diversity for parvoviruses. Herein, 134 samples were collected from cats with clinical gastroenteritis and analyzed for the presence of viral DNA via polymerase chain reaction, which revealed 48 positive samples. Identity analysis of VP2 nucleotide sequences indicated that these 48 strains, belonging to feline panleukopenia virus (FPV) and canine parvovirus type-2 (CPV-2; including new CPV-2a and CPV-2c genotypes), shared 94.59–99.94% nucleotide identity with the reference strains. The FPV strain F8 (isolated from Vietnam) appeared to be a recombinant of strains HB2003 and JS1901, whereas the Chinese CPV-2b strain BM-(11) isolated in 2011 was believed to be a recombinant of strains AH2008 and JS1901. In phylogenetic tree analysis based on VP2 nucleotide sequences, all obtained FPV strains and most reference FPV strains were clustered together, except strain BJ-22, which originated from monkeys. Further, two new CPV-2a strains (AH2005 and AH2008) were close to the newly reported Chinese CPV-2a strains but were distant from the other CPV-2a strains, namely CPV-339 (from the United States) and K022 (from South Korea). Additionally, the FPV and CPV-2 strains had high mutation rates in the antigenic regions of the VP2 protein. According to model prediction of the CPV–VP2 protein, these mutations may cause changes in the tertiary structure of VP2. The findings of this study can be used to improve the pre-evaluation of vaccination efficacy against diseases caused by FPV and CPV-2 in domestic cats and understand their genotypic transmission and mutation trends

Regulation of High-Temperature Stress Response by Small RNAs

Temperature extremes constitute one of the most common environmental stresses that adversely affect the growth and development of plants. Transcriptional regulation of temperature stress responses, particularly involving protein-coding gene networks, has been intensively studied in recent years. High-throughput sequencing technologies enabled the detection of a great number of small RNAs that have been found to change during and following temperature stress. The precise molecular action of some of these has been elucidated in detail. In the present chapter, we summarize the current understanding of small RNA-mediated modulation of high- temperature stress-regulatory pathways including basal stress responses, acclimation, and thermo-memory. We gather evidence that suggests that small RNA network changes, involving multiple upregulated and downregulated small RNAs, balance the trade-off between growth/development and stress responses, in order to ensure successful adaptation. We highlight specific characteristics of small RNA-based tem- perature stress regulation in crop plants. Finally, we explore the perspectives of the use of small RNAs in breeding to improve stress tolerance, which may be relevant for agriculture in the near future

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Cooperative Binary Relaying and Combining For Multi-Hop Wireless Communication

Cooperative communication can achieve diversity gain and increase the channel capacity. This paper proposes a novel cooperative scheme called Cooperative Binary Relaying and Combining (CBRC) for multi-hop wireless networking systems where the nodes cooperatively demodulate high-order modulated signal symbols with low-order robust modulations. Low-order demodulation schemes make partial decision at each relay node and avoid propagating the errors that can result from high-order demodulation schemes in conventional cooperative relaying. Therefore, CBRC supports high bit rate transmission at high-order modulations over low SNR links. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the bit error rate performance of CBRC and conventional cooperative strategies. The results show that CBRC can significantly improve the performance. © 2012 IEEE

Design and Research on Vehicles Motor Testing System Based on Improvement PID

Motor is the important parts in vehicles. It is the key parts for achieving automation. It is the critical technology to test vehicle motors. We take the PID (Proportion Integration Differentiation) as based fundamental controlling algorithm, and we test motor parameters through LabVIEW for single-chip AT89C52. According to practical working condition, we build circuit electric field boundary, and analyze electric field distribution of hard circuit. In addition, we also design filtering circuit for main interrupt frequency (below 1 kHz), and we improved PID for direct motor speed which is controlled by PWM (pulse-width modulation) to reach speed astatic regulation. At the same time, the system achieves soft start-up