Encapsulated Conjugated Oligomer Nanoparticles for Real‐Time Photoacoustic Sentinel Lymph Node Imaging and Targeted Photothermal Therapy

Noninvasive and nonionizing imaging of sentinel lymph nodes (SLN) is highly desirable for the detection of breast cancer metastasis through sentinel lymph node biopsy. Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is an emerging imaging technique that can serve as a suitable approach for SLN imaging. Herein, novel conjugated oligomer based nanoparticles (NPs) with strong NIR absorption, good biocompatibility, excellent PA contrast, and good photothermal conversion efficiency are reported. Real‐time PA imaging of SLN reveals high resolution of the NPs via injection from the left forepaw pad. In addition, the surface functionalized NPs can target breast cancer cells and kill them efficiently and specifically through photothermal therapy upon 808 nm laser irradiation. This work shows great potential of the nanoparticle PA contrast agent to serve as a multifunctional probe for photothermal therapy at SLNs to achieve the inhibition of cancer cell metastasis in the near future.     

Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering

International Journal of Computer Vision - The problem of visual question answering (VQA) is of significant importance both as a challenging research question and for the rich set of applications...     

Grinding analysis of Indian coal using response surface methodology

International Journal of Coal Science & Technology - The present work discusses a systematic approach to model grinding parameters of coal in a ball mill. A three level Box–Behnken design...     

Comprehensive asynchronous symmetric rendezvous algorithm in cognitive radio networks

Spectrum has become a scant quantity with recent upsurge in the field of wireless communication. Cognitive radio network (CRN) alleviates the overgrowing spectrum scarcity and underutilization problem by adequately sharing the frequency bands between licensed and unlicensed users. CRN allows unlicensed users or secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically utilize the free portion of the spectrum allocated to the licensed users or primary users. The fundamental process in the formation of CRN is the rendezvous process where SUs meet on commonly available channels and establish reliable links for effective communication. Existing rendezvous solutions based on the assumption of a common control channel (CCC) among the SUs are infeasible and less efficient in the dynamic environment of CRNs. Therefore, channel hopping (CH) technique without CCC support, often referred to as blind rendezvous, is usually employed for accomplishing the rendezvous between SUs. This paper presents a comprehensive asynchronous symmetric rendezvous (CASR) algorithm that does not require time synchronization and guarantees rendezvous of SUs in finite time. CASR algorithm exploits the MAC address of SU as the unique identifier (ID) and generates CH sequence based on the dynamic manipulation of ID according to the number of available communication channels. Leveraging the unique ID of each SU, CASR algorithm succeeded in rendezvous guarantee while perpetuating a good time to rendezvous. The efficiency of CASR algorithm is estimated theoretically and verified through various simulation experiments. Simulation results affirm that CASR algorithm performs better in terms of average time-to-rendezvous as compared with existing rendezvous algorithms.     

Disturbance Observer Based Speed Control of PMSM Using Fractional Order PI Controller

In this paper, fractional order PI (FOPI) control is developed for speed control of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM). Designing the parameters for FOPI controller is a challenging task, especially for nonlinear systems like PMSM. All three PI controllers in the conventional vector controlled speed drive are replaced by FOPI controllers. Design of these FOPI controllers is based on the locally linearized model of PMSM around an operating point. This operating point changes with the load torque. The novelty of the work reported here is in use of Non Linear Disturbance Observer (NLDO) to estimate load torque to obtain this new operating point. All three FOPI controllers are then designed adaptively using this new operating point. The scheme is tested on simulation using MATLAB/SIMULINK and results are presented.      

VQA: Visual Question Answering

We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing \(\sim \)0.25 M images, \(\sim \)0.76 M questions, and \(\sim \)10 M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (http://cloudcv.org/vqa).     

Inducing Personalities and Values from Language Use in Social Network Communities

A community in social networks is generally assumed to be composed of a group of individuals with similar characteristics. Although there has been a plethora of work on understanding network topologies (edge density, clustering coefficient, etc.) within an online community, the psycho-sociological compositions of social network communities have hardly been studied. The present paper aims to analyse the communities as composition of induced psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic variables (Personalities, Values and Ethics) across individuals in social media networks. The motivation behind this analysis is to understand the behavioural characteristics at individual as well as societal level in social networks. To this end, three studies were carried out on six different datasets: three Twitter corpora, two Facebook corpora, and an Essay corpus, annotated with Values and Ethics of the users. First, experiments on creating automatic models to determine the Personality and Values of individuals by analysing their language usage and social media behaviour. Second, experiments on understanding the characteristics or blend of characteristics of individuals within an online community. Finally, generation of a map of values and ethics for India, a multi-lingual and multi-cultural country. Striking similarities to general intuitive perception could be observed, i.e., the results obtained in the study resemble our general perception about the cities/towns of India.     

Mechanical,morphological, and thermal properties of chemically treated pine needles reinforced thermosetting composites

In the recently published article cited above, the author's name Aishwarya Jyoti was incorrectly printed. The correct author's name is published above.     

Reducing disk power consumption in servers with DRPM

Although effective techniques exist for tackling disk power for laptops and workstations, applying them in a server environment presents a considerable challenge, especially under stringent performance requirements. Using a dynamic rotations per minute approach to speed control in server disk arrays can provide significant savings in I/O system power consumption without lessening performance.     

Molecular Engineering of Photoacoustic Performance by Chalcogenide Variation in Conjugated Polymer Nanoparticles for Brain Vascular Imaging

As conjugated polymer nanoparticles (CPNs) have attracted growing interest as photoacoustic (PA) imaging contrast agents, revelation of the relationship between the molecular structure of conjugated polymers and PA property is highly in demand. Here, three donor–acceptor‐structured conjugated polymer analogs are designed, where only a single heteroatom of acceptor units changes from oxygen to sulfur to selenium, allowing for systematic investigation of the molecular structure–PA property relationship. The absorption and PA spectra of these CPNs can be facilely tuned by changing the heteroatoms of the acceptor units. Moreover, the absorption coefficient, and in turn the PA signal intensity, decreases when the heteroatom changes from oxygen to sulfur to selenium. As these CPNs exhibit weak fluorescence and similar photothermal conversion efficiency (≈70%), their PA intensities are approximately proportional to their absorption coefficients. The in vivo brain vasculature imaging in this study also demonstrates this trend. This study provides a simple but efficient strategy to manipulate the PA properties of CPNs through changing the heteroatom at key positions.