Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition Using Random Frequency Components

The ubiquitous use of face recognition has sparked increasing privacy concerns, as unauthorized access to sensitive face images could compromise the information of individuals. This paper presents an in-depth study of the privacy protection of face images' visual information and against recovery. Drawing on the perceptual disparity between humans and models, we propose to conceal visual information by pruning human-perceivable low-frequency components. For impeding recovery, we first elucidate the seeming paradox between reducing model-exploitable information and retaining high recognition accuracy. Based on recent theoretical insights and our observation on model attention, we propose a solution to the dilemma, by advocating for the training and inference of recognition models on randomly selected frequency components. We distill our findings into a novel privacy-preserving face recognition method, PartialFace. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PartialFace effectively balances privacy protection goals and recognition accuracy. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tencent/TFace.Comment: ICCV 202

(Re)constructing school readiness from Chinese young children's perspectives

This interim report presents the ongoing progress of a collaborative project between the Centre for Teacher and Early Years Education (CTEY), UCL Institute of Education and the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University (BNU), which aims to (re)construct school readiness from Chinese children's perspectives. In this report, we first set out the context and rationale for carrying out this project (see Section 1). Then, we introduce the overarching research questions of this project, followed by a detailed account of the research design and the instruments for conducting research with young children (see Section 2). Subsequently, we report the pilot study we have conducted and present the preliminary findings (see Section 3). Finally, we outline the first round of fieldwork that has been carried out in seven early years settings of different backgrounds in Beijing (see Section 4), together with a timetable illustrating the next steps and upcoming milestones of this research project (see Section 5)

Multi-tissue integrative analysis of personal epigenomes

Evaluating the impact of genetic variants on transcriptional regulation is a central goal in biological science that has been constrained by reliance on a single reference genome. To address this, we constructed phased, diploid genomes for four cadaveric donors (using long-read sequencing) and systematically charted noncoding regulatory elements and transcriptional activity across more than 25 tissues from these donors. Integrative analysis revealed over a million variants with allele-specific activity, coordinated, locus-scale allelic imbalances, and structural variants impacting proximal chromatin structure. We relate the personal genome analysis to the ENCODE encyclopedia, annotating allele- and tissue-specific elements that are strongly enriched for variants impacting expression and disease phenotypes. These experimental and statistical approaches, and the corresponding EN-TEx resource, provide a framework for personalized functional genomics

Practical Formation Control for Multiple Anonymous Robots System with Unknown Nonlinear Disturbances

This paper mainly investigates formation control problems for a group of anonymous mobile robots with unknown nonlinear disturbances on a plane, in which all robots can asymptotically converge to any formation patterns without collision, and maintain any required relative distance with neighboring robots. To solve this problem, all robots are modeled as kinematic points and can only acquire information from other robots and their targets. Furthermore, a flexible distributed control law is designed to solve the formation problem while no collisions between any robots can be guaranteed during the whole process. The outstanding feature of the proposed control method is that it can force all mobile robots to form not only uniform circle formations but also non-uniform and non-circular formations with moving target centers. At last, both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show the feasibility of the proposed control law

Recent Progress on Wave Energy Marine Buoys

This study aims to introduce and discuss the recent research, development and application of wave energy marine buoys. The topic becomes increasingly appealing after the observation that wave energy technologies have been evolving in the recent decades, yet have not reached convergence. The power supply is usually the bottleneck for marine distributed systems such as buoys. Wave energy technologies are especially useful in this sense, as they can capture and convert the promising “native” renewable energy in the ocean (i.e., wave energy) into electricity. The paper enumerates the recent developments in wave energy capture (e.g., oscillating bodies) and power take-off (e.g., nanogenerators). The study also introduces the typical marine buoys and discusses the applicability of wave energy technologies on them. It is concluded that the wave energy technologies could be implemented as a critical addition to the comprehensive power solution of marine distributed systems. Wave energy buoys are likely to differentiate into “wave energy converter buoys” and “wave-energy-powered buoys”, which is indicated by the ratio of the generated power to the load power

Pull-based distributed event-triggered circle formation control for multi-agent systems with directed topologies

This paper investigates a circle formation control problem for multi-agent systems with directed topologies via pull-based distributed event-triggered control principles. Firstly, for scenarios of continuous communication, a pull-based distributed event-triggered principle is proposed. It is proved that if the communication topology is irreducible and has a directed spanning tree, the event-triggered coupling continuous communication can lead multiple agents to form a desired circle formation. Then, the results are extended to discontinuous communication scenarios, where all the agents use a model of their neighborhoods to generate self-triggered instants without monitoring continuously, update the local controller here, and if necessary, local broadcast information based on the adopted control inputs to neighboring agents. In addition, Zeno behavior can be excluded during the whole process. Finally, numerical simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed circle formation control methods.Peer reviewe