Disentangling Racial Phenotypes: Fine-Grained Control of Race-related Facial Phenotype Characteristics

Achieving an effective fine-grained appearance variation over 2D facial images, whilst preserving facial identity, is a challenging task due to the high complexity and entanglement of common 2D facial feature encoding spaces. Despite these challenges, such fine-grained control, by way of disentanglement is a crucial enabler for data-driven racial bias mitigation strategies across multiple automated facial analysis tasks, as it allows to analyse, characterise and synthesise human facial diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel GAN framework to enable fine-grained control over individual race-related phenotype attributes of the facial images. Our framework factors the latent (feature) space into elements that correspond to race-related facial phenotype representations, thereby separating phenotype aspects (e.g. skin, hair colour, nose, eye, mouth shapes), which are notoriously difficult to annotate robustly in real-world facial data. Concurrently, we also introduce a high quality augmented, diverse 2D face image dataset drawn from CelebA-HQ for GAN training. Unlike prior work, our framework only relies upon 2D imagery and related parameters to achieve state-of-the-art individual control over race-related phenotype attributes with improved photo-realistic output

Seeing Through the Data: A Statistical Evaluation of Prohibited Item Detection Benchmark Datasets for X-ray Security Screening

The rapid progress in automatic prohibited object detection within the context of X-ray security screening, driven forward by advances in deep learning, has resulted in the first internationally-recognized, application-focused object detection performance standard (ECAC Common Testing Methodology for Automated Prohibited Item Detection Systems). However, the ever-increasing volume of detection work in this application area is highly reliant on a limited set of large-scale benchmark detection datasets that are specific to this domain. This study provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the underlying distribution of the prohibited item instances in three of the most prevalent X-ray security imagery benchmark and how these correlate against the detection performance of six state-of-the-art object detectors spanning multiple contemporary object detection paradigms. We focus on object size, location and aspect ratio within the image in addition to looking at global properties such as image colour distribution. Our results show a clear correlation between false negative (missed) detections and object size with the distribution of undetected items being statistically smaller in size than those typically found in the corresponding dataset as a whole. For false positive detections, the size distribution of such false alarm instances is shown to differ from the corresponding dataset test distribution in all cases. Furthermore, we observe that onestage, anchor-free object detectors may be more vulnerable to the detection of heavily occluded or cluttered objects than other approaches whilst the detection of smaller prohibited item instances such as bullets remains more challenging than other object types

hiPSC-Based Tissue Organoid Regeneration

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are generated from terminally differentiated cells and have the potential to differentiate to any organs originated from the embryonic germ layers. Extensive effort has been made to establish protocols for direct in vitro conversion of human iPSCs (hiPSCs) to different cell types/organs. Importantly, hiPSCs can be generated from patients with known genetic mutations that predispose to high-risks of specific disease development. Thus, the hiPSCs technology provides unlimited resources for creating patient-specific disease models. hiPSC-derived three-dimensional “organoid” models have recently emerged as a powerful tool to recapitulate the physiologically-relevant process of disease progression in vitro. In this chapter, we will discuss the current advancement of organoid regeneration from hiPSCs and the applications of hiPSCs-derived organoids. The limitations and challenges of this approach will also be discussed here

Internal and International Vertical Specialization– Estimations For Brazil and new Approach to Gravity Models

WTO, OECD with many others, suggest the trade in value-added would be a “better” measure to understand the impact of trade on employment, growth, production etc. when import content in exports is important. We use in this work an Input-Output table for 2008, to calculate the value-added exported by Brazilian states. We distinguish the value-added exported directly by the state itself or indirectly via other states. First, by using value-added we define the extent of vertical specialization among Brazilian states. Exported value-added are then used in a gravity model to determine the structure of trade in value-added terms. We also define a trilateral gravity structure which permits to control for the vertical specialization between states and to estimate the trade determinants at three steps: origin state, re-exporter state and importer country

Investigation (In-Vitro) of Antiproliferative Properties of Pseudopediastrum boryanum (Turpin) E. Hegewald Extracts in Various Cancer Cell Lines

In this study, the antiproliferative effects of Pseudopediastrum boryanum isolated and cultured from Tokat Ye & scedil;il & imath;rmak River benthic habitats were investigated with in-vitro experiments. The Anticancer activity of algae extracts was tested in cancer cell lines using the BrdU cell proliferation ELISA method. Vero (African Green Monkey Kidney Tumour Cells) and HeLa (Human Uterine Carcinoma Cells) were examined in concentrations of 100, 250 and 500 mu g mL-1.-1 . As a result of antiproliferative tests, P. boryanum was found to have effective anticancer properties. P. boryanum extract concentrations of 250 and 500 mu g mL-1-1 had a significant cytotoxic effect on Vero and HeLa cell lines after 24 hours. According to the results, P. boryanum is estimated to be a good option for quantitative pharmaceutical analyses and could be evaluated in the pharmaceutical industry.ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author thanks Prof.Dr. Koksal Pabuccu for his help in the diagnosis of algae species