Multi-modal gated recurrent units for image description

Using a natural language sentence to describe the content of an image is a challenging but very important task. It is challenging because a description must not only capture objects contained in the image and the relationships among them, but also be relevant and grammatically correct. In this paper a multi-modal embedding model based on gated recurrent units (GRU) which can generate variable-length description for a given image. In the training step, we apply the convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the image feature. Then the feature is imported into the multi-modal GRU as well as the corresponding sentence representations. The multi-modal GRU learns the inter-modal relations between image and sentence. And in the testing step, when an image is imported to our multi-modal GRU model, a sentence which describes the image content is generated. The experimental results demonstrate that our multi-modal GRU model obtains the state-of-the-art performance on Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MS COCO datasets.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, magazin

The use of clamping grips and friction pads by tree frogs for climbing curved surfaces

Most studies on the adhesive mechanisms of climbing animals have addressed attachment against flat surfaces, yet many animals can climb highly curved surfaces, like twigs and small branches. Here we investigated whether tree frogs use a clamping grip by recording the ground reaction forces on a cylindrical object with either a smooth or anti-adhesive, rough surface. Furthermore, we measured the contact area of fore and hindlimbs against differently sized transparent cylinders and the forces of individual pads and subarticular tubercles in restrained animals. Our study revealed that frogs use friction and normal forces of roughly a similar magnitude for holding on to cylindrical objects. When challenged with climbing a non-adhesive surface, the compressive forces between opposite legs nearly doubled, indicating a stronger clamping grip. In contrast to climbing flat surfaces, frogs increased the contact area on all limbs by engaging not just adhesive pads but also subarticular tubercles on curved surfaces. Our force measurements showed that tubercles can withstand larger shear stresses than pads. SEM images of tubercles revealed a similar structure to that of toe pads including the presence of nanopillars, though channels surrounding epithelial cells were less pronounced. The tubercles' smaller size, proximal location on the toes and shallow cells make them probably less prone to buckling and thus ideal for gripping curved surfaces

Cortical Reorganization in Patients Recovered from Bell's Palsy: An Orofacial and Finger Movements Task-State fMRI Study

Objective. To explore cortical reorganization of patients recovered from Bell's palsy (BP) by task-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during finger and orofacial movements and provide more evidence for acupuncture clinical treatment of BP. Methods. We collected 17 BP patients with complete clinical recovery (BP group) and 20 healthy volunteers (control group) accepted the task-state fMRI scans with lip pursing movements and finger movements, respectively. Results. It was found that there were significant differences of brain functional status between the two groups. Conclusions. The results showed that there was cortical reorganization in the brain of patients recovered from BP after acupuncture treatment, which also suggested the relationship between the hand motor areas and facial motor areas of BP patients

Influence of process conditions on the formation of 2-4 ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from the pyrolysis of polyvinyl chloride

Municipal solid waste (MSW) contains significant amounts of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The reactivity of PVC may form polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) during the pyrolysis of MSW, which can become a key challenge during the development of pyrolysis technologies. However, there is very limited work in relation to the influence of pyrolysis process conditions in terms of temperature and heating rate on PAHs formation during pyrolysis of PVC. In this work, the formation of 2-4-ring PAHs from the pyrolysis of PVC at temperatures of 500, 600, 700, 800, or 900°C and at fast and slow heating rates was investigated under a N2 atmosphere in a fixed bed reactor. With the increase of temperature from 500 to 900°C, HCl yield decreased from 54.7 to 30.2 wt.%, while the yields of gases and PAHs in the tar increased. Slow pyrolysis generated higher HCl yield, and lower gas and tar yield than fast pyrolysis; the PAH yield obtained from the slow pyrolysis was much lower compared to fast pyrolysis. The results suggest that for fast pyrolysis, the dehydrochlorination of the PVC might be incomplete, resulting in the formation of chlorinated aromatic compounds

Effects of Educational Attainment and Housing Condition on Self-Rated Health in Old Age: Heterogeneity and Tendency in China.

In China, the health of the elderly has long been discussed, but few have investigated the diversity of the aging pattern in later life of this population. Although a large body of literature has approved the positive association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health, it still remains controversial regarding whether the association becomes convergent or divergent in old ages. Using data from China's 2010 and 2015 Inter-census Survey (1‰ sample), this paper explored the role of two key SES indicators, educational attainment and housing condition in modifying the self-rated health of Chinese elders aged 60 and above. We observed the diversified patterns of how educational attainment and housing condition have made an impact on the health of these elders in their old age and the temporal changes of the two SES indicators. We found higher educational attainment and better housing condition can lead to higher self-rated health. This positive significance however diminished with age over time, as we observed from 2010 to 2015, indicating the convergent effects of SES on health in old age. We also found that although educational attainment and housing condition were both positively correlated with health, their effects were differentiated. The influence of educational attainment on health waxed, whereas on housing conditions waned over time. These findings suggested the heterogeneity of health and SES effects among Chinese elders

Mechanism Design of a Transformable Crawling Robot and Feasibility Analysis for the Unstructured Environment

The better application of crawl robots depends on their ability to adapt to unstructured environments with significant variations in their structural shape and size. This paper presents the design and analysis of a novel robot with different locomotion configurations to move through varying environments. The leg of the robot, inspired by insects, was designed as a multi-link structure, including the Hoekens linkage and multiple parallel four-link mechanisms. The end trajectory was a symmetrical closed curve composed of an approximate straight line and a shell curve with a downward opening. The special trajectory allowed the robot to share drives and components to achieve structural deformation and locomotion. The structural characteristics of the crawl robot on the inner and outer arcs were obtained based on the working space. The constraint relationship between the structure size, the radius of the arc, and the coefficient of static friction with which the robot could crawl on the arc were established. The feasible support posture and support position of the robot under different arc radii were obtained. The simulation tested the locomotion of the robot on the plane, arc, and restricted space. The robot can be used for detection, search, and rescue missions in unstructured environments

Hyperspectral Band Selection via Band Grouping and Adaptive Multi-Graph Constraint

Unsupervised band selection has gained increasing attention recently since massive unlabeled high-dimensional data often need to be processed in the domains of machine learning and data mining. This paper presents a novel unsupervised HSI band selection method via band grouping and adaptive multi-graph constraint. A band grouping strategy that assigns each group different weights to construct a global similarity matrix is applied to address the problem of overlooking strong correlations among adjacent bands. Different from previous studies that are limited to fixed graph constraints, we adjust the weight of the local similarity matrix dynamically to construct a global similarity matrix. By partitioning the HSI cube into several groups, the model is built with a combination of significance ranking and band selection. After establishing the model, we addressed the optimization problem by an iterative algorithm, which updates the global similarity matrix, its corresponding reconstruction weights matrix, the projection, and the pseudo-label matrix to ameliorate each of them synergistically. Extensive experimental results indicate our method outperforms the other five state-of-the-art band selection methods in the publicly available datasets

Facile Preparation of Phenyboronic-Acid-Functionalized Fe₃O₄ Magnetic Nanoparticles for the Selective Adsorption of Ortho-Dihydroxy-Containing Compounds

A new facile strategy was designed to prepare the phenyboronic acid-functionalized Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O4@PBA) via direct silanization and thiol-ene click chemistry for the selective adsorption of ortho-dihydroxy-containing compounds. The three kinds of Fe3O4@PBA nanoparticles obtained showed excellent adsorption capacity and selectivity for ortho-dihydroxy-containing compounds including adenosine and o-dihydroxybenzene. Among them, the Fe3O4@MPS@MPBA exhibited the highest adsorption capacity and selectivity for adenosine and o-dihydroxybenzene, followed by Fe3O4@MPTES@AAPBA and Fe3O4@MPTES@VPBA. A synthesis method of superparamagnetic and boronate affinity nanocomposites with mild reaction conditions and simple process has been developed, which also provides a novel way for the synthesis of other types of enrichment materials of ortho-dihydroxy-containing compounds