3,406 research outputs found
Angiotensin II induces soluble fms-Like tyrosine kinase-1 release via calcineurin signaling pathway in pregnancy
No full textMaternal endothelial dysfunction in preeclampsia is associated with increased soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFlt-1), a circulating antagonist of vascular endothelial growth factor and placental growth factor. Angiotensin II (Ang II) is a potent vasoconstrictor that increases concomitant with sFlt-1 during pregnancy. Therefore, we speculated that Ang II may promote the expression of sFlt-1 in pregnancy. Here we report that infusion of Ang II significantly increases circulating levels of sFlt-1 in pregnant mice, thereby demonstrating that Ang II is a regulator of sFlt-1 secretion in vivo. Furthermore, Ang II stimulated sFlt-1 production in a dose- and time-dependent manner from human villous explants and cultured trophoblasts but not from endothelial cells, suggesting that trophoblasts are the primary source of sFlt-1 during pregnancy. As expected, Ang II-induced sFlt-1 secretion resulted in the inhibition of endothelial cell migration and in vitro tube formation. In vitro and in vivo studies with losartan, small interfering RNA specific for calcineurin and FK506 demonstrated that Ang II-mediated sFlt-1 release was via Ang II type 1 receptor activation and calcineurin signaling, respectively. These findings reveal a previously unrecognized regulatory role for Ang II on sFlt-1 expression in murine and human pregnancy and suggest that elevated sFlt-1 levels in preeclampsia may be caused by a dysregulation of the local renin/angiotensin system
Colección: Perfil #3
No full textThis board-book version of LM turns out to be quite creative. Ratoncete comes from school every afternoon and goes through the forest looking for adventures. He apparently blasts a horn into the ear of the sleeping lion. Don Leon wants to spank him as a result, but Ratoncete offers an apology, not an offer of help. Later, he happens upon the lion in his trap of ropes. 8 pages, counting both covers. 6½" x 9".Language note: SpanishNo Autho
Computer vision and machine learning for viticulture technology
No full textThis paper gives two contributions to the state-of-the-art for viticulture technology research. First, we present a comprehensive review of computer vision, image processing, and machine learning techniques in viticulture. We summarize the latest developments in vision systems and techniques with examples from various representative studies, including, harvest yield estimation, vineyard management and monitoring, grape disease detection, quality evaluation, and grape phenology. We focus on how computer vision and machine learning techniques can be integrated into current vineyard management and vinification processes to achieve industry relevant outcomes. The second component of the paper presents the new GrapeCS-ML database which consists of images of grape varieties at different stages of development together with the corresponding ground truth data (e.g., pH and Brix) obtained from chemical analysis. One of the objectives of this database is to motivate computer vision and machine learning researchers to develop practical solutions for deployment in smart vineyards. We illustrate the usefulness of the database for a color-based berry detection application for white and red cultivars and give baseline comparisons using various machine learning approaches and color spaces. This paper concludes by highlighting future challenges that need to be addressed prior to successful implementation of this technology in the viticulture industry.Full Tex
A Big Data Layered Architecture and Functional Units for the Multimedia Internet of Things
No full textThe escalating growth of multimedia content in Internet of Things (IoT) applications leads to a huge volume of unstructured data being generated. Unstructured Big data has no particular format or structure and can be in any form such as text, audio, images, and video. Furthermore, current IoT systems cannot successfully realize the notion of having ubiquitous connectivity of everything if they are not capable to include 'multimedia things'. In this paper, we address two issues by proposing a new architecture for the Multimedia Internet of Things (MIoT) with Big multimodal computation layer. We first introduce MIoT as a novel paradigm in which smart heterogeneous multimedia things can interact and cooperate with one another and with other things connected to the Internet to facilitate multimedia-based services and applications that are globally available to the users. The MIoT architecture consists of six layers. The computation layer is specially designed for Big multimodal analytics. This layer has four important functional units: Data Centralized Unit, Multimodal Data Aggregation Unit, Multimodal Data Divide & Conquer Computation Unit, and Fusion & Decision Making Unit. A novel and highly scalable technique called the Divide & Conquer Principal Component Analysis (DC-PCA) for feature extraction in the divide and conquer mechanism is proposed to be used together with the Divide & Conquer Linear Discriminant Analysis (DC-LDA) for multimodal Big data analytics. Experiments are conducted to confirm the good performance of these techniques in the functional units of the Divide & Conquer computational mechanisms. The final section of the paper gives application on a camera sensing IoT platform and real-world data analytics on multicore architecture implementations.No Full Tex
Video Analytics for Customer Emotion and Satisfaction at Contact Centers
No full textDue to the high levels of competition in a global market, companies have put more emphasis on building strong customer relationships and increasing customer satisfaction levels. With technological improvements in information and communication technologies, a highly anticipated key contributor to improve the customer experience and satisfaction in service episodes is through the application of video analytics, such as to evaluate the customer's emotions over the full service cycle. Currently, emotion recognition from video is a challenging research area. One of the most effective solutions to address this challenge is to utilize both the audio and visual components as two sources contained in the video data to make an overall assessment of the emotion. The combined use of audio and visual data sources presents additional challenges, such as determining the optimal data fusion technique prior to classification. In this paper, we propose an audio-visual emotion recognition system to detect the universal six emotions (happy, angry, sad, disgust, surprise, and fear) from video data. The detected customer emotions are then mapped and translated to give customer satisfaction scores. The proposed customer satisfaction video analytics system can operate over video conferencing or video chat. The effectiveness of our proposal is verified through numerical results.No Full Tex
A Combined Rule-Based & Machine Learning Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition Approach
No full textThis paper proposes an audio-visual emotion recognition system that uses a mixture of rule-based and machine learning techniques to improve the recognition efficacy in the audio and video paths. The visual path is designed using the Bi-directional Principal Component Analysis (BDPCA) and Least-Square Linear Discriminant Analysis (LSLDA) for dimensionality reduction and discrimination. The extracted visual features are passed into a newly designed Optimized Kernel-Laplacian Radial Basis Function (OKL-RBF) neural classifier. The audio path is designed using a combination of input prosodic features (pitch, log-energy, zero crossing rates and Teager energy operator) and spectral features (Mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients). The extracted audio features are passed into an audio feature level fusion module that uses a set of rules to determine the most likely emotion contained in the audio signal. An audio visual fusion module fuses outputs from both paths. The performances of the proposed audio path, visual path, and the final system are evaluated on standard databases. Experiment results and comparisons reveal the good performance of the proposed system.No Full Tex
Information communication assistive technologies for visually impaired people
No full textThe information explosion era provides the foundation for a technological solution to enable the visually impaired to more independent living in the community. This paper first provides a review of assistive technologies for visually impaired people. Current technology allows applications to be efficiently distributed and operated on mobile and handheld devices. Thus, this paper also summarizes recent developments of assistive technologies in mobile interaction. It then presents the Wireless Intelligent Assistive Navigation Management System Using SmartGuide Devices for visually impaired people. The "SmartGuide" of the system is built as a standalone portable handheld device. The system is to assist blind and low vision people to walk around independently especially in dynamic changing environments. It also includes a camera sensor network to enhance monitoring capabilities for an extra level of security and reliability. Finally, the paper presents an improved system with some new designs involving mobile interaction.No Full Tex
Markets Equilibrium: The Is-Lm Model
No full text. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the concept of markets equilibrium: the IS-LM Model. This research uses library research method by using reference sources from books and journals according to the theme. The author uses a qualitative method which is explained graphically, namely the market balance of the IS-LM model where the focus is on money and goods markets associated with macroeconomics where researchers take the side of investors. The results of this study are that the balance in the economy is the point where the IS and LM curves intersect. This point provides an interest rate (r) and income level (Y) that satisfies the equilibrium conditions that occur in the goods market and money market. In other words, planned spending equals actual spending, and the demand for real money balances equals the supply. So that the IS-LM balance, it is stated that IS=LM
Deployment of IoV for Smart Cities: Applications, Architecture, and Challenges
No full textThe Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a convergence of the mobile Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT), where vehicles function as smart moving intelligent nodes or objects within the sensing network. This paper gives two contributions to the state-of-the-art for IoV technology research. First, we present a comprehensive review of the current and emerging IoV paradigms and communication models with an emphasis on deployment in smart cities. Currently, surveys from many authors have focused concentration on the IoV as only serving applications for intelligent transportation like driver safety, traffic efficiency, and infotainment. This paper presents a more inclusive review of the IoV for also serving the needs of smart cities for large-scale data sensing, collection, information processing, and storage. The second component of the paper presents a new universal architecture for the IoV which can be used for different communication models in smart cities to address the above challenges. It consists of seven layers: vehicle identification layer, object layer, inter-intra devices layer, communication layer, servers and cloud services layer, big data and multimedia computation layer, and application layer. The final part of this paper discusses various challenges and gives some experimental results and insights for future research direction such as the effects of a large and growing number of vehicles and the packet delivery success rate in the dynamic network structure in a smart city scenario.Full Tex
A Graphene Oxide-Angiogenin Theranostic Nanoplatform for the Therapeutic Targeting of Angiogenic Processes: The Effect of Copper-Supplemented Medium
No full textGraphene oxide (GO) nanosheets with different content in the defective carbon species bound to oxygen sp3 were functionalized with the angiogenin (ANG) protein, to create a novel nanomedicine for modulating angiogenic processes in cancer therapies. The GO@ANG nanocomposite was scrutinized utilizing UV-visible and fluorescence spectroscopies. GO exhibits pro- or antiangiogenic effects, mostly attributed to the disturbance of ROS concentration, depending both on the total concentration (i.e., >100 ng/mL) as well as on the number of carbon species oxidized, that is, the C/O ratio. ANG is considered one of the most effective angiogenic factors that plays a vital role in the angiogenic process, often in a synergic role with copper ions. Based on these starting hypotheses, the GO@ANG nanotoxicity was assessed with the MTT colorimetric assay, both in the absence and in the presence of copper ions, by in vitro cellular experiments on human prostatic cancer cells (PC-3 line). Laser confocal microscopy (LSM) cell imaging evidenced an enhanced internationalization of GO@ANG than bare GO nanosheets, as well as significant changes in cell cytoskeleton organization and mitochondrial staining compared to the cell treatments with free ANG
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