Life and death of an "altruistic" bacterium

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL

 

IMAGE: FLUORESCENCE IMAGE OF A CAULOBACTER BIOFILM. LIVE CELLS ARE LABELLED IN GREEN, DEAD ONES IN PINK, AND EXTRACELLULAR DNA RELEASE DURING CELL DEATH IS SHOWN IN BLUE. view more 

CREDIT: CÉCILE BERNE, UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL

Biofilms, complex communities of bacteria, abound around us: on the surface of cheese where they give off flavors and aromas, in streams where they form the slimy substance on rocks, on our teeth where they form plaque.

Living in a biofilm provides numerous advantages to bacteria: things like resource sharing, shelter from predators, and increased resistance to toxic compounds such as antibiotics.

But having the option to leave the biofilm when environmental conditions deteriorate can be a plus for bacteria, too, allowing them to relocate to a more hospitable environment.

‘’For the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, the biofilm becomes a kind of prison in perpetuity: once cells are attached to a surface through a strong adhesive at one end of the cell, they cannot leave the biofilm,” said Yves Brun, a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Université de Montréal.

‘’However, when these attached cells divide, their unattached ‘daughter’ cells have a choice of joining the biofilm or swimming away.’’

Cells release their DNA

How do cells decide to stay or leave the biofilm? ‘’We showed in a study published in 2010  that when Caulobacter cells die in the biofilm, they release their DNA, which inhibits daughter cells from joining the biofilm, hence promoting relocation from environments where death rate increases,’’  Brun said.

He and his research team therefore wanted to determine if cell death occurred randomly as the environmental quality declined or if it was a regulated process responding to a specific signal.

‘’We showed that Caulobacter uses a programmed cell death mechanism that causes some cells to sacrifice themselves when the conditions inside the biofilm deteriorate,” said team member Cécile Berne, the lead author of the study.

‘’Known as a toxin-antitoxin system, this mechanism uses a toxin that targets a vital function and its associated antidote, the antitoxin,” she said. “The toxin is more stable than the antitoxin and when programmed cell death is initiated, the amount of antitoxin is reduced, resulting in cell death.’’

When oxygen becomes sparse

‘’Using a combination of genetics and microscopy, we showed that the toxin-antitoxin system is activated when oxygen becomes sparse as the biofilm becomes larger and cells compete for the available oxygen,’’ Berne added.

The resulting death of a subset of cells releases DNA, which promotes the dispersal of their live siblings to potentially more hospitable environments, thereby preventing overcrowding that would further reduce environmental quality in the biofilm.

Biofilms have both positive and negative impacts on our everyday life. Bacteria living in biofilms are commonly used in food production, wastewater treatment, and pollution remediation.

‘’The downside is that the biofilm lifestyle is also a strategy used by pathogenic bacteria to become more resistant to antibiotics,” said Brun.

“Understanding the mechanisms driving the balance between cells joining the biofilm and cells  swimming away will help us develop solutions to the challenge of antibiotic resistance, to promote the formation of biofilms when we want them, and eradicate them when we do not.’’

About this study

“eDNA-stimulated cell dispersion from Caulobacter crescentus biofilms upon oxygen limitation is dependent on a toxin-antitoxin system” by Cécile Berne, Sébastien Zappa and Yves Brun was published in eLife on December 7, 2022.

  

A mature bacterial film (biofilm) of Caulobacter cells attached to a glass surface.

Attached Caulobacter cells forming a biofilm around a dust particle.

CREDIT

Cécile Berne, Université de Montréal

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JOURNAL

eLife

DOI

10.7554/eLife.80808 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

eDNA-stimulated cell dispersion from Caulobacter crescentus biofilms upon oxygen limitation is dependent on a toxin-antitoxin system

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Dec-2022

School-age health at heart of University of Huddersfield and UNESCO Chair project

Business Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

 

IMAGE: PROFESSOR DIDIER JOURDAN AND DR NICOLA GRAY view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

Improving the health of children and young people through creative collaborations between health and education professionals will be the focus of the University of Huddersfield’s input into the UNESCO Chair ‘Global Health and Education’ for the period 2022-2026. The university is co-chair holder together with the University of Clermont Auvergne in France.

The University’s co-chair holder of the second four-year mandate of the UNESCO Chair is Dr Nicola Gray, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice. A Trustee of the UK Association for Young People's Health  and a Fellow of the US Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, Dr Gray has worked closely with UNESCO and partner institution the University of Clermont Auvergne.

The UNESCO Chair ‘Global Health and Education’ was founded in 2018 by leading global experts in the field of school health promotion in Clermont Auvergne’s Professor Didier Jourdan, who is also Visiting Professor in Public Health at Huddersfield, and Goof Buijs, former manager of the SHE (Schools for Health in Europe) network, two leading global experts in the field of school health promotion. Dr Gray became involved through her role as the Vice President for Europe at the International Association for Adolescent Health (IAAH).

“We are giving technical advice to UNESCO and other UN agencies,” says Dr Gray. “It is a two-way channel - with various initiatives we will try to influence and give technical input into UNESCO’s plans, while they will share events and documents with us that we will disseminate to our networks. 

The start of the second four-year mandate of the UNESCO Chair coincides with the 30th anniversary of the global UNESCO Chair/UNITWIN Programme of UNESCO, the network that sees institutions like Huddersfield and Clermont Auvergne pooling resources and sharing their knowledge inside and outside academia. The Chair is building a global community connecting universities, public and private organisations and individuals. This community can get involved with knowledge production, capacity-building and knowledge-sharing activities.

Integrating health into the journey through school and beyond is one of the flagship programmes of the current term of the UNESCO Chair, according to Professor Jourdan.

“The traditional approach to health at schools has been visits by health professionals to give out vaccinations or speak to pupils. The changes we are looking at are more sustained, where health and awareness of health issues are threaded through the school calendar and curriculum, rather than on specific occasions. Health promotion can be seen as an extra that is ‘parachuted’ in and becomes a burden, but we’d like teachers to see it as an extra skill and a source of pride.

“This is coinciding with a number of UN initiatives, like the launch of global standards and indicators to make every school a health-promoting school. The importance of health in schools became a real focus during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been a member of the WHO Europe Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Safe Schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving input on how the education and the health sectors can better work together”.

Dr Gray adds: “We feel that health professionals partnering with schools can give children vital life skills. How to look after yourself, looking after your health and relationships, being able to express feelings, how to interact with others, knowing how the body works, how important it is to eat well – addressing all these issues at a young age could have a positive impact in the long term.

“The operational team for the UNESCO Chair at Huddersfield includes experts from the Schools of Applied Sciences, Education and Professional Development, Human and Health Sciences and Huddersfield Business School. This multidisciplinary approach reflects the links that we will make through our networks to individuals and organisations at local, national and international level.”

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

The connection between illnesses of the digestive and nervous systems

New DFG research unit to research the “gut-brain axis”

Grant and Award Announcement

FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER-UNIVERSITÄT ERLANGEN-NÜRNBERG

How do the gut and the brain interact, and can this even trigger disease? There is growing consensus within the research community that the nervous and digestive systems interact with each other. How exactly, however, is still largely unknown. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is now funding a new clinical research unit at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) that will investigate the interaction between the digestive and nervous systems with reference to inflammatory and degenerative diseases, the first collaborative research group in Germany to explore the “gut-brain axis”. The interdisciplinary team will receive a total of 6 million euros of funding over the coming four years.

For several years now, medical research has become increasingly fascinated by the buzzword “gut-brain axis”. This refers to the assumption that there is a connection between neurological diseases and immunological changes in the gastrointestinal tract, in other words that the gut and the brain interact, and that as a result of this interaction, diseases in either system may mutually affect each other or even act as a trigger for the disease in the first place. Studies show that patients with chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) have a greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease later in life. Or that there may be a connection between multiple sclerosis and IBD.

The interaction is controlled by a highly complex communication system involving neural, hormonal, metabolic, immunological and microbial signals. The newly established clinical DFG research unit 5024 “Immune checkpoints of gut-brain communication in inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases” led by Prof. Dr. Claudia Günther, FAU professor of gastrointestinal pathophysiology, and speaker Prof. Dr. Beate Winner, head of the Department of Stem Cell Biology at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, will investigate what exactly this communication involves. The new research field is characterized not only by the close interdisciplinary collaboration between immunology, gastroenterology and neurosciences, but also by the integration of bioinformatics and machine learning as well as medical engineering.

Over the coming years, the researchers hope first of all to obtain more specific insights into the interaction between the gut and the brain in inflammatory and degenerative diseases and to decode immunological switches in communication between the gut and the brain. Building on these findings, they then hope to develop new approaches for treatment aimed at fighting or even preventing diseases of the digestive and nervous systems.

About DFG research units

Research units (RU) are groups of several researchers based at one or more locations. They often contribute to establishing new areas of research. The aim of a clinical research unit (CRU) is to promote research groups involved in disease or patient-oriented (translational) clinical research and set up permanent research groups in clinical facilities.

Overview of all DFG research units at FAU

Washington state quinoa can make a better cookie

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: ELIZABETH NALBANDIAN, STUDY FIRST AUTHOR AND WSU FOOD SCIENCE GRADUATE STUDENT, PREPARES SOME SUGAR COOKIES MADE WITH QUINOA FLOUR FOR BAKING. view more 

CREDIT: SHELLY HANKS, WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

PULLMAN, Wash. – The “super grain” quinoa has the potential to make a super cookie, according to research by Washington State University.

In a study published in the Journal of Food Science, WSU researchers show that two types of quinoa, bred specifically to grow in Washington state, had great functionality as a potential high-fiber, high-protein additive flour for commercial cookies. This means when baked, the cookies had good “spreadability” and texture.

Taste tests are still underway, but preliminary results show that people preferred sugar cookies with 10% of the quinoa flour over a traditional all-wheat flour cookie.

“It’s the Holy Grail for food scientists: we want to develop something that people love to eat and want to go buy and buy again – and now we’re adding some fiber in without them even knowing it,” said Girish Ganjyal, a WSU food scientist and the study’s corresponding author.

Originating in South America, quinoa has a host of nutritional benefits: it is high in fiber, protein, vitamins and minerals. It is also gluten-free. While the grain is popular with health enthusiasts, it has yet to take off with many mainstream consumers. WSU researchers are working to change that.

While no official counts are available, WSU plant breeder Kevin Murphy estimates that quinoa is grown on more than 5,000 acres in the Pacific Northwest currently, and more farmers are interested.

Murphy, a co-author on this study, has been breeding quinoa lines specifically to grow well in the Pacific Northwest climate while maintaining, and even enhancing, the crop’s nutritional benefits. He has been collaborating with Ganjyal since 2014 on improving ways to bring these crops to consumers’ tables.

The current study also identified one type of quinoa that works best for “pre-cooked grain salad” – a more familiar use for quinoa – as well as identifying the quinoa varieties that worked well in baking cookies.

Food science studies like this, combined with field trials that demonstrate the crops’ agronomic traits, will help WSU researchers decide which quinoa breeding lines to release for growers’ use in 2023.

In turn, the information will help farmers decide which type of quinoa they might plant, already knowing how they could sell the crop they harvest, Ganjyal said.

In this study, researchers looked at ten different quinoa breeding lines and tested them as a flour in cookies at 25% up to 100% quinoa. Many of the breeding lines held up well at the lower levels but the cookies tended to crumble as they approached 100% quinoa flour.

The preliminary results from the taste tests also show that using up to 25% quinoa flour tended to have better results. The researchers purposely chose sugar cookies for the taste test because they are plain as opposed to chocolate chip cookies which might mask any flavor from the quinoa. For the sugar cookie, a little quinoa might have an advantage, said Elizabeth Nalbandian, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. student in Ganjyal’s lab.

“I think at 10%, quinoa added a type of nutty flavor that people really liked,” she said, noting the testers liked it even more than the control whole flour cookie.

The quinoa appreciation tended to wane after about 30% substitution, Nalbandian said, probably because the texture started becoming grittier. Still, she sees potential for quinoa flour particularly in the gluten-free market as many of those baked products can be low in nutritional content.

The researchers will continue working to develop and test quinoa food products, and Ganjyal noted that Nalbandian is particularly well suited for this work because she has experience in the culinary arts and holds an undergraduate degree in hospitality and business management as well as in food science.

“This is a chef’s art as well as a science,” he said.

Preliminary taste tests show that people preferred sugar cookies baked with 10% of the quinoa flour over traditional all-wheat flour cookies.

 

WSU food science graduate student Elizabeth Nalbandian prepares cookie dough containing quinoa flour for baking.

CREDIT

Shelly Hanks, Washington State University

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JOURNAL

Journal of Food Science

DOI

10.1111/1750-3841.16354 

ARTICLE TITLE

Different breeding lines of quinoa significantly influence the quality of baked cookies and cooked grains

Researchers propose methods for automatic detection of doxing

Penn State researchers have identified an approach that was able to automatically detect doxing on Twitter with over 96% accuracy.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new automated approach to detect doxing — a form of cyberbullying in which certain private or personally identifiable information is publicly shared without an individual's consent or knowledge — may help social media platforms better protect their users, according to researchers from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology. 

The research on doxing could lead to more immediate flagging and removal of sensitive personal information that has been shared without the owner’s authorization. To date, the research team has only studied Twitter, where their novel proposed approach uses machine learning to differentiate which tweet containing personally identifiable information is maliciously shared rather than self-disclosed. 

They have identified an approach that was able to automatically detect doxing on Twitter with over 96% accuracy, which could help the platform — and eventually other social media platforms — more quickly and easily identify true cases of doxing.  

“The focus is to identify cases where people collect sensitive personal information about others and publicly disclose it as a way of scaring, defaming, threatening or silencing them,” said Younes Karimi, doctoral candidate and lead author on the paper. “This is dangerous because once this information is posted, it can quickly be shared with many people and even go beyond Twitter. The person to whom the information belongs needs to be protected.” 

In their work, the researchers collected and curated a dataset of nearly 180,000 tweets that were likely to contain doxed information. Using machine learning techniques, they categorized the data as containing personal information tied to either an individual’s identity — their social security number — or an individual’s location — their IP address — and manually labeled more than 3,100 of the tweets that were found to contain either piece of information. They then further classified the data to differentiate malicious disclosures from self-disclosures. Next, the researchers examined the tweets for common potential motivations behind disclosures, determined whether the intent was likely defensive or malicious, and indicated whether it could be characterized as doxing. 

“Not all doxing instances are necessarily malicious,” explained Karimi. “For example, a parent of a missing child might benignly share their private information with the desperate hope of finding them.” 

Next, the researchers used nine different approaches based on existing natural language processing methods and models to automatically detect instances of doxing and malicious disclosures of two types of most sensitive private information, social security number and IP address, in their collected dataset. They compared the results and identified the approach with the highest accuracy rate, presenting their findings in November at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. 

According to Karimi, this work is especially critical in a time when leading social media platforms — including Twitter — are conducting mass layoffs, minimizing the number of workers responsible for reviewing content that may violate the platforms’ terms of service. One platform’s policy, for example, states that unless a case of doxing has clearly abusive intent, the owner of the publicly shared information or their authorized representative must contact the platform before enforcement action is taken. Under this policy, private information could remain publicly available for long periods of time if the owner of the information is not aware that it has been shared. 

“While there exist some prior studies on detection of private information in general and some automated approaches for detecting cyberbullying are applied by social media platforms, they do not differentiate self-disclosures from malicious disclosures of second- and third-parties in tweets,” he said. “Fewer people are now in charge of taking action for these manual user reports, so adding automation can help them to narrow down the most important and sensitive reports and prioritize them.” 

Karimi collaborated with Anna Squicciarini, Frymoyer Chair in Information Sciences and Technology, and Shomir Wilson, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, on the paper.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

DOI

10.1145/3555167 

ARTICLE TITLE

Automated Detection of Doxing on Twitter

TikTok lowers barriers to virality, keeps tight control through algorithm

TikTok’s mobile-only interface and algorithm make content creation and virality as easy as ever but drive creator burnout

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The short-form video platform TikTok has become one of the top social media platforms in the United States where users go to join online dance trends, get their news and even discuss politics. With a goal of understanding how TikTok encourages content creation, especially political content, a Penn State-led research team has found that the platform's unique mobile-only interface and algorithm make content creation and opportunities to go viral particularly easy yet can lead to high rates of creator burnout.

“TikTok has the most total time spent on platform of any social media company in the United States with an average of 96 minutes a day,” said Kevin Munger, Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science at Penn State and project lead. “The most important media includes the content that people spend the most time consuming. Figuring out what TikTok is and what it does is a necessary step in our academic and public conversations about social media politics.”

The researchers used hashtags related to the 2020 U.S. election, such as #politics, #MAGA and #democrats, to identify and label 865 TikTok accounts as political and leaning left, right or center. They identified additional potentially political accounts by looking at accounts that interacted with the nearly 273,000 videos produced by the initial sample.

After hand-coding nearly 2,000 accounts as political and leaning left, right or center, they trained a supervised machine learning classifier to identify additional accounts. In total, they analyzed 11,546 accounts and nearly 2 million political videos uploaded to TikTok. They compared the accounts to the top 33 political channels on YouTube, another video-forward platform, to study the aspects that drive video supply and demand on the platforms and how TikTok shapes political communication.

The research team found that approximately 78% of viewers who commented on political tiktoks uploaded videos to the platform compared to 18% of YouTube commenters. The team also found that TikTok’s “For You Page,” where users spend more than two-thirds of their time and is curated by the company’s recommendation algorithm, replaced “following” behavior. The page automatically starts playing tiktoks when users open the app and can choose from the trillions of videos on the company’s servers. The recommendation algorithm makes it easier for these political videos to go viral, or be viewed thousands or even millions of times, regardless of an account’s number of followers.

“TikTok is better at guaranteeing at least some audience for every post, even if you don’t have a big network of followers,” said Munger, who described the platform as being the first social post-network where the importance of the algorithm has replaced that of the user’s network. “It gives you more of a likelihood of going viral out of nowhere. You’re more likely to see one tiktok or a few tiktoks get huge viewership numbers and the rest very few views. I think this inequality for a given account’s viewership reflects the more central role of the algorithm in determining what people watch.”

TikTok has released little information about how its algorithm chooses which videos to show on the “For You Page,” and Munger said this may leave content creators to guess what will go viral next. Because viewership relies more on the algorithm instead of an account’s number of followers, creators have to continually produce new videos to maintain higher view counts, potentially leading to high burnout rates, according to the researchers. They reported their findings in the journal Computational Communication Research.

TikTok takes advantage of a smartphone’s vertical, user-facing camera and provides filters and audio files that make it easy to create videos and tap into existing trends. These affordances incentivize more users to become creators, Munger said.

The central role of the algorithm differentiates TikTok from its competitors, according to the researchers. On YouTube, the number of views that a video receives largely correlates with the number of people subscribed to the account. In general, large subscriber numbers result in more views. Creators on YouTube can also consider viewer comments when deciding what to post in future.

TikTok’s recommendation algorithm and “For You Page” play a more central role in determining whether a video goes viral or flops, replacing the need for a large account following. The researchers looked at the peak-median views ratio, or how many more views an account’s most popular video received compared to their average video. They found that a political TikTok account’s most popular video has 64 as many views as their average video, compared to 40 on YouTube. Without the viewership security that comes with a large follower count, creators on TikTok must continually post new content in the hope that it goes viral, and the importance of the algorithm means that viewer comments carry less weight in content creators’ decision-making. These aspects can lead to high creator burnout, and the algorithm’s central role means that the company is ultimately in charge of what users see, said the researchers.

Despite the potential for burnout, TikTok’s easy-to-use interface and short-video format can lead to more cross-partisan communication compared to other platforms, added Munger.

“The fact that it’s very short – many users stick with the default 15-second video – and you can debate people point-by-point is part of what’s unique about TikTok,” he said. “There is more cross-ideological communication here than on YouTube, where hours-long videos can change the political discussion toward more fringe worldviews. I think the need for new content and to get a more personalized back-and-forth debate going engages the audience.”

Although TikTok may help facilitate political discussion, the platform’s user base skews younger, and much of the political content is poorly argued or evidenced, said Munger. He sees the platform as an opportunity for more experienced individuals to engage younger audiences.

“On the one hand, I’m quite sympathetic,” he said. “Thinking back to when I was a teenager, I did not make the best political arguments. Still, the fact that these arguments now are being consumed not just by friends but by potentially hundreds of thousands of people means that it’s important for established individuals who have different, perhaps richer perspectives to engage these audiences where they are on these platforms.”

Additional contributors to the research include Benjamin Guinaudeau, University of Kostanz, Germany; and Fabio Votta, University of Amsterdam.

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JOURNAL

Computational Communication Research

DOI

10.5117/CCR2022.2.004.GUIN 

ARTICLE TITLE

Fifteen Seconds of Fame: TikTok and the Supply Side of Social Video

Bolstering the safety of self-driving cars with a deep learning-based object detection system

An Internet-of-Things-enabled, real-time object detection system developed by researchers could make autonomous vehicles more reliable and safer

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INCHEON NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES SUCH AS DEEP LEARNING, NEURAL NETWORKS AND INTERNET-OF-THINGS TECHNOLOGY ARE IMPROVING AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES CONTINUOUSLY. IN THIS STUDY, RESEARCHERS FROM KOREA, UK, AND CANADA PROPOSE A NOVEL 3D OBJECT DETECTION SYSTEM FOR THESE VEHICLES TO REALIZE A SAFER AND MORE RELIABLE DRIVING EXPERIENCE. view more 

CREDIT: SCOTT SCHRANTZ FROM FLICKR (HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SCOTTSCHRANTZ/6125665813/)

Self-driving cars, or autonomous vehicles, have long been earmarked as the next generation mode of transport. To enable the autonomous navigation of such vehicles in different environments, many different technologies relating to signal processing, image processing, artificial intelligence deep learning, edge computing, and IoT, need to be implemented.

One of the largest concerns around the popularization of autonomous vehicles is that of safety and reliability. In order to ensure a safe driving experience for the user, it is essential that an autonomous vehicle accurately, effectively, and efficiently monitors and distinguishes its surroundings as well as potential threats to passenger safety.

To this end, autonomous vehicles employ high-tech sensors, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDaR), radar, and RGB cameras that produce large amounts of data as RGB images and 3D measurement points, known as a “point cloud.” The quick and accurate processing and interpretation of this collected information is critical for the identification of pedestrians and other vehicles. This can be realized through the integration of advanced computing methods and Internet-of-Things (IoT) into these vehicles, which allows for fast, on-site data processing and navigation of various environments and obstacles more efficiently.

In a recent study published in the IEEE Transactions of Intelligent Transport Systems journal on 17 October 2022, a group of international researchers, led by Professor Gwanggil Jeon from Incheon National University, Korea have now developed a smart IoT-enabled end-to-end system for 3D object detection in real time based on deep learning and specialized for autonomous driving situations.

“For autonomous vehicles, environment perception is critical to answer a core question, ‘What is around me?’ It is essential that an autonomous vehicle can effectively and accurately understand its surrounding conditions and environments in order to perform a responsive action,” explains Prof. Jeon. “We devised a detection model based on YOLOv3, a well-known identification algorithm. The model was first used for 2D object detection and then modified for 3D objects,” he elaborates.

The team fed the collected RGB images and point cloud data as input to YOLOv3, which, in turn, output classification labels and bounding boxes with confidence scores. They then tested its performance with the Lyft dataset. The early results revealed that YOLOv3 achieved an extremely high accuracy of detection (>96%) for both 2D and 3D objects, outperforming other state-of-the-art detection models.

The method can be applied to autonomous vehicles, autonomous parking, autonomous delivery, and future autonomous robots as well as in applications where object and obstacle detection, tracking, and visual localization is required. “At present, autonomous driving is being performed through LiDAR-based image processing, but it is predicted that a general camera will replace the role of LiDAR in the future. As such, the technology used in autonomous vehicles is changing every moment, and we are at the forefront,” highlights Prof. Jeon. “Based on the development of element technologies, autonomous vehicles with improved safety should be available in the next 5-10 years,” he concludes optimistically.

 

***

Reference

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2022.3210490

Authors: Imran Ahmed1, Gwanggil Jeon2,*, and Abdellah Chehri3

Affiliations:

1School of Computing and Information Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

2Department of Embedded Systems Engineering, Incheon National University

3Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Royal Military College of Canada

 

About Incheon National University

Incheon National University (INU) is a comprehensive, student-focused university. It was founded in 1979 and given university status in 1988. One of the largest universities in South Korea, it houses nearly 14,000 students and 500 faculty members. In 2010, INU merged with Incheon City College to expand capacity and open more curricula. With its commitment to academic excellence and an unrelenting devotion to innovative research, INU offers its students real-world internship experiences. INU not only focuses on studying and learning but also strives to provide a supportive environment for students to follow their passion, grow, and, as their slogan says, be INspired.

Website: http://www.inu.ac.kr/mbshome/mbs/inuengl/index.html

 

About the author

Gwanggil Jeon received a Ph.D. degree from Hanyang University, Korea in 2008, following which he went on to become a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and an Assistant Professor at Niigata University, Japan, thereafter. He has served as a visiting or adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay in France and Università degli Studi di Milano Statale in Italy. He is currently a Full Professor at Incheon National University in Korea. Additionally, Dr. Jeon is an IEEE Senior Member and has received numerous awards, including the IEEE Chester Sall Award in 2007, the ETRI Journal Paper Award in 2008, and the Industry-Academic Merit Award by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups of Korea in 2020.

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JOURNAL

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

DOI

10.1109/TITS.2022.3210490 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A Smart IoT Enabled End-to-End 3D Object Detection System for Autonomous Vehicles

Does throwing my voice make you want to shop here?

By breaking the laws of physics in a virtual reality environment, researchers from the University of Tsukuba find that changing the location of a virtual assistant's voice in specific ways can be used as a tool to build rapport with customers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TSUKUBA

 

IMAGE: IMAGE GRAPHICS view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF TSUKUBA

Tsukuba, Japan—Virtual environments, including those for commerce, are increasingly common so as to provide an experience for the user that is as realistic as possible. However, virtual environments also provide a new opportunity for researchers to conduct experiments that would not be possible in the real world. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have done just that by exploring how changing the position of the virtual shop assistant's voice from its visual position would impact the shopping experience of humans in a virtual reality store.

Humans locate sound by combining visual and auditory cues. Because the visual cues are generally less variable, they can override audio cues, leading to the well-known ventriloquism effect, which occurs when a human perceives the location of a sound to be different from its actual source. It is also well known that humans have personal space, which varies according to social, personal, and environmental factors. Although both phenomena have long been studied individually, until the development of virtual reality, it has not been possible to study how the ventriloquism effect alters personal space.

"In particular, we wanted to know how it affects the rapport between the user and shop assistant," says Professor Zempo Keiichi, lead author of the study. Rapport, or the quality of interpersonal service, strongly affects loyalty and satisfaction, and skilled salespeople use several techniques to build rapport with customers.

In their experiments, the researchers asked 16 people in the virtual shop environment to define their personal space and record their impression when approached by shop assistants. Some assistants had both a voice and an image at the same position, and others had a voice that was located at different distances between the user and assistant.

"We found that rapport was not affected when the deviation between the sound and visual positions could not be tolerated; however, when it could be tolerated, we found two distinct phenomena," explains Professor Zempo Keiichi. The first was similar to the "uncanny valley," which occurs when an imperfect human representation invokes feelings of uneasiness in a real human. This decreased rapport with the virtual assistant. But when the sound moved even closer to the human, the rapport increased.

The authors call this phenomenon the "mouth-in-the-door" phenomenon because it is similar to the "foot-in-the-door" phenomenon, in which a small, unconscious consent, such as not moving away when someone starts to speak, causes a person to improve their evaluation of the other person. Without these virtual experiments, this phenomenon would have likely remained undiscovered. But now that it is known, the authors believe it can be used to improve the user experience, especially in virtual shop scenarios.

 

Original Paper

The article, "Mouth-in-the-door: The effect of a sound image of an avatar intruding on personal space that deviates in position from the visual image," was published in IEEE Access at DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3222804

Correspondence

Assistant Professor ZEMPO Keiichi 
Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba

Related Link

Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems (in Japanese)

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JOURNAL

IEEE Access

DOI

10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3222804 

ARTICLE TITLE

Mouth-in-the-Door: The Effect of a Sound Image of an Avatar Intruding on Personal Space That Deviates in Position From the Visual Image

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

Shaping the sport of kings: Key genes linked to successful racehorses identified by international team

A critical set of genes linked to successful racehorses has been identified by an international research team.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

A critical set of genes linked to successful racehorses has been identified by an international research team.

Scientists from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Irish equine science company Plusvital compared the genomes of Thoroughbred, Arabian and Mongolian racehorses to horses bred for other sports and leisure, and were able to pinpoint a set of genes that play a significant role in muscle, metabolism, and neurobiology. 

These genes were found to be clearly different in racing horses, and were common to all racing breeds compared to those animals from non-racing breeds. 

“Since the discovery of the ‘Speed Gene’ in 2009, we have generated genetic data for thousands of Thoroughbreds and horses from other breeds,” said University College Dublin Professor Emmeline Hill, lead scientist on the project and Chief Science Officer at Plusvital.

“This is the first time this set of genes has been linked to the success of racing breeds. Two of the genes were previously identified for performance in Thoroughbreds and Arabians, but the approach we took was to ask what genes were common to all racing breeds and different from non-racing breeds. 

“The very large number of horse breeds developed over the last hundreds of years all over the world have been carefully shaped by selective breeding for different traits desired by breeders. This has led to tall horses, small horses, powerful draft horses, useful riding horses, and fast racing horses. 

 “We have discovered a set of genes common to racing horses, but not all horses within a racing breed have the advantageous gene version, so these findings will be useful to identify the most suitable individuals within a breed for racing or for breeding.”

Co-author UCD Professor David MacHugh commented “Although racing is a multifactorial trait, with management and training having a considerable influence on the success of a racehorse, this study provides good evidence for major-effect genes shaping the racing trait in horse populations.” 

The research, published in Communications Biology, an open access journal from Nature, included the collection of hair samples from 100 horses owned by the champion Ajnai Sharga Horse Racing Team at their breeding farm in Khentii province, Mongolia, the birthplace of Chinggis Khan.

Using the DNA from these Mongolian racing horses, along with Thoroughbred and racing Arabian horses, the scientists compared the genomes of these breeds with 21 other non-racing breeds, such as Clydesdale, Connemara pony, Hanoverian, Morgan, Norwegian Fjord, Paint, Shetland, Shire, and identified seven essential genes for racing.

Among the top genes was NTM, which functions in brain development and influences learning and memory. This gene was selected during the horse domestication process, and in Thoroughbred racehorses influences whether a horse ever races. 

“This finding suggests that equine neurological systems perturbed by natural and artificial selection associated with domestication may overlap with adaptive traits that are required for racing,” said Professor MacHugh.

Dr Haige Han, another project collaborator and first author of the paper added: “Testing these variants in new sets of hundreds of horses from racing and non-racing breeds identified seven essential genes for racing. These genes have roles in muscle, metabolism, and neurobiological functions, and are central to racing ability among horse breeds.”

The researchers used gene expression data from skeletal muscle from Thoroughbred horses to investigate if the genes they had identified were involved in the muscle response to exercise and training. 

“By integrating these two different data sets we fine-tuned the list of racing genes to those that were most biologically relevant to racing. One of these genes was MYLK2 which is required for muscle contraction. In humans, MYLK2 is associated with exercise-induced muscle damage,” said Professor Hill.

This research was supported by National Key R&D Program of China; National Natural Science Foundation of China; Science Foundation Ireland; US National Institutes of Health; Royal Agricultural University Cirencester Fund; and Plusvital Ltd.

It was performed in collaboration with the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and UCD Conway Institute, Ireland; the Royal Agricultural University, UK; Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, China; Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ajnai Sharga Horse Racing Team, Mongolian University of Science and Technology, and Mongolian National University of Medical Sciences, Mongolia; Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Switzerland; California Institute of Technology and the Saban Research Institute, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, USA; and Plusvital Ltd.

Plusvital has been a leader in equine science since its formation in 1975, growing out of Ireland’s world-famous racing and sport horse tradition. 

In 2015, Plusvital acquired Equinome, a UCD spin-out company co-founded by Professor Hill, which now provides tests that analyse the DNA of horses to predict racing performance potential. Plusvital’s clients include leading trainers, owners, and breeders in all of the major thoroughbred regions around the world.

Authors: Haige Han, Beatrice A. McGivney, Lucy Allen, Dongyi Bai, Leanne R. Corduff, Gantulga Davaakhuu, Jargalsaikhan Davaasambuu, Dulguun Dorjgotov, Thomas J. Hall, Andrew J. Hemmings, Amy R. Holtby, Tuyatsetseg Jambal, Badarch Jargalsaikhan, Uyasakh Jargalsaikhan, Naveen K. Kadri, David E. MacHugh, Hubert Pausch, Carol Readhead, David Warburton, Manglai Dugarjaviin, and Emmeline W. Hill.

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JOURNAL

Communications Biology

DOI

10.1038/s42003-022-04206-x 

ARTICLE TITLE

Common protein-coding variants influence the racing phenotype in galloping racehorse breeds

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Dec-2022