Human Motion Analysis and Synthesis in Computer Graphics

This thesis focuses on solving a challenging problem in the field of computer graphics, namely to model and understand 3D human motion efficiently and meaningfully. This is vital to achieve the analysis (health & sports science), synthesis (character animation) and control (video game) of human movements. Though numerous studies have focused on improving the results of motion analysis, motion synthesis and motion control, only a few of these studies solved the problems from the fundamental part owing to the lack of information encoded in motion data. In my works, the motion of human was divided into the three types, namely single human motion, multi-people interactions and crowd movement. Subsequently, I solved the problems from motion analysis to motion control in different types of motion. In the single human motion, two types of motion graphs on the motion sequence were proposed using Markov Process. The human motion is represented as the directed graphs, which suggests the number of action patterns and transitions among them. By analyzing the graphs topologies, the richness, transitions flexibility and unpredictability among different action patterns inside the human motion sequence can be easily verified. The framework here is capable of visualizing and analyzing the human motion on the high level of action preference, intention and diversity. For the two people interaction motion, the use of 3D volumetric meshes on the interacting people was proposed to model their movement and spatial relationship among them. The semantic meanings of the motions were defined by such relationship. A customized Earth Movers Distance was proposed to assess the topological and geometric difference between two groups of meshes. The above assessment captured the semantic similarities among different two-people interactions, which is consistent with what humans perceive. With this interaction motion representation, the multi-people interactions in semantic level can be retrieved and analyzed, and such complex movements can be easily adapted and synthesized with low computational costs. In the crowd movement, a data-driven gesture-based crowd control system was proposed, in which the control scheme was learned from example gestures provided by different users. The users gestures and corresponding crowd motions, representable to the crowd motions properties and irrelevant to style variations of gestures and crowd motions, were modelled into a compact low dimensional space. With this representation, the proposed framework can take an arbitrary users input gesture and generate appropriate crowd motion in real time. This thesis shows the advantages of higher-level human motion modelling in different scenarios and solves different challenging tasks of computer graphics. The unified framework summarizes the knowledge to analyze, synthesize and control the movement of human

Risk Management in UK Small and Medium Enterprises

This study focuses on the rationales for risk management and business insurance in UK’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the purpose of which is to examine the factors that influence the conduct of a risk assessment and the attitude towards the importance of business insurance. We have prepared a questionnaire and select 1024 respondents from 582 SMEs in UK, asking them a series of questions that includes their attitude towards insurance and risk assessment, attitude towards perceived business threats and main objectives, and firm size, etc. Through using logistic regression, ordered probit regression and OLS regression analyses, our result suggest that risk assessment and insurance are complements, not substitutes. Meanwhile, those SMEs which consider health and safety issue to be important are more likely to have a risk assessment and believe insurance is essential as well. While those firms which face more potential threats would prefer purchasing insurance rather than conducting a risk assessment. However, the result also indicates that the demand of insurance and risk assessment is different for firms with different size (different number of employees)

A new model to estimate significant wave heights with ERS-1/2 scatterometer data

A new model is proposed to estimate the significant wave heights with ERS-1/2 scatterometer data. The results show that the relationship between wave parameters and radar backscattering cross section is similar to that between wind and the radar backscattering cross section. Therefore, the relationship between significant wave height and the radar backscattering cross section is established with a neural network algorithm, which is, if the average wave period is &lt;= 7s, the root mean square of significant wave height retrieved from ERS-1/2 data is 0.51 m, or 0.72 m if it is &gt;7s otherwise.</p

The effect of polarization ratio on RADARSAT wind vector retrievals

In this presentation, the polarization ratios were calculated from AIRSAR polarimetric SAR data and ENVISAT ASAR dual-polarization data; and their empirical alpha parameters which depend on incidence angle were obtained. Five C band HH polarization RADARSAT-1 SAR images are used to validate these polarization ratios and we found that the empirical parameter alpha = 0.5 is superior to other possible parameter alpha values.</span

RNA-seq-based digital gene expression analysis reveals modification of host defense responses by rice stripe virus during disease symptom development in Arabidopsis

DEGs involved in protein phosphorylation at 14 dpi. (XLSX 52 kb

Efficacy of sorafenib on metastatic renal cell carcinoma in Asian patients: Results from a multicenter study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The effects of sorafenib in the treatment of advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) have been confirmed in an international collaborative phase III trial. This study aims to confirm similar efficacy and treatment-induced toxicities of sorafenib in the treatment of metastatic RCC in ethnic Chinese patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Ninety-eight consecutive and non-selected patients with pathologically confirmed metastatic RCC were treated according to an institutional treatment protocol. All patients were treated with 400 mg of sorafenib orally twice daily on a continuous basis until disease progression or intolerance to treatment occurred. Dose reduction to 400 mg once daily was required if grade 3 or 4 toxicities occurred. All patients except for 7 received nephrectomy in the course of their disease. All patients were assessed for tumor response, progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and treatment-induced toxicities.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The median follow-up time was 76 weeks (range 2–296 weeks) for the entire group of patients. Radiologically confirmed complete response (CR), partial response (PR), stable disease (SD) of more than 4 months, and disease progression as best objective responses were observed in 1 (1%), 23 (23.5%), 62 (63.3%), and 12 (12.2%) patients, respectively. The tumor control rate (CR+PR+SD of >4 months) was 87.8%. The 1-year estimated PFS and OS were 58.4% and 64.6%, respectively. The median progression-free survival (PFS) time was 60 weeks (95% CI 41–79); and the median overall survival (OS) time was not reached with a follow-up of 76 weeks. Reduction of sorafenib dose was required in 26 patients who developed grade 3 or 4 treatment-cause adverse-effects. An additional 9 patients discontinued sorafenib treatment due to severe adverse-effects. No grade 5 toxicity occurred.</p> <p>Multivariate analysis revealed that independent predictive factors for tumor response to sorafenib treatment included ECOG status, presence of lymph node metastasis, and nephrectomy prior to the development of metastasis.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Sorafenib produced an 87.8% disease control rate for metastatic renal cell carcinoma in Chinese patients, with acceptable rates of toxicity. The medication dosed at 400 mg twice daily is both efficacious and safe in the treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma in Chinese patients.</p

Style Separation and Synthesis via Generative Adversarial Networks

Style synthesis attracts great interests recently, while few works focus on its dual problem "style separation". In this paper, we propose the Style Separation and Synthesis Generative Adversarial Network (S3-GAN) to simultaneously implement style separation and style synthesis on object photographs of specific categories. Based on the assumption that the object photographs lie on a manifold, and the contents and styles are independent, we employ S3-GAN to build mappings between the manifold and a latent vector space for separating and synthesizing the contents and styles. The S3-GAN consists of an encoder network, a generator network, and an adversarial network. The encoder network performs style separation by mapping an object photograph to a latent vector. Two halves of the latent vector represent the content and style, respectively. The generator network performs style synthesis by taking a concatenated vector as input. The concatenated vector contains the style half vector of the style target image and the content half vector of the content target image. Once obtaining the images from the generator network, an adversarial network is imposed to generate more photo-realistic images. Experiments on CelebA and UT Zappos 50K datasets demonstrate that the S3-GAN has the capacity of style separation and synthesis simultaneously, and could capture various styles in a single model

In situ Chromatin Interaction Analysis Using Paired-End Tag Sequencing.

Chromatin Interaction Analysis Using Paired-End Tag Sequencing (ChIA-PET) is an established method to map protein-mediated chromatin interactions. A limitation, however, is that it requires a hundred million cells per experiment, which hampers its broad application in biomedical research, particularly in studies in which it is impractical to obtain a large number of cells from rare samples. To reduce the required input cell number while retaining high data quality, we developed an in situ ChIA-PET protocol, which requires as few as 1 million cells. Here, we describe detailed step-by-step procedures for performing in situ ChIA-PET from cultured cells, including both an experimental protocol for sample preparation and data generation and a computational protocol for data processing and visualization using the ChIA-PIPE pipeline. As the protocol significantly simplifies the experimental procedure, reduces ligation noise, and decreases the required input of cells compared to previous versions of ChIA-PET protocols, it can be applied to generate high-resolution chromatin contact maps mediated by various protein factors for a wide range of human and mouse primary cells. © 2021 The Authors. Current Protocols published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Sample preparation and data generation Support Protocol: Bridge linker preparation Basic Protocol 2: Data processing and visualization