Helping Visually Impaired People Take Better Quality Pictures.

Perception-based image analysis technologies can be used to help visually impaired people take better quality pictures by providing automated guidance, thereby empowering them to interact more confidently on social media. The photographs taken by visually impaired users often suffer from one or both of two kinds of quality issues: technical quality (distortions), and semantic quality, such as framing and aesthetic composition. Here we develop tools to help them minimize occurrences of common technical distortions, such as blur, poor exposure, and noise.

A Perspective on Building Ethical Datasets for Children's Conversational Agents.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technologies are becoming an integral part of youth's environments, impacting how they socialize and learn. Children (12 years of age and younger) often interact with AI through conversational agents (e.g.

Hierarchical partial matching and segmentation of interacting cells.

We propose a method that automatically tracks and segments living cells in phase-contrast image sequences, especially for cells that deform and interact with each other or clutter. We formulate the problem as a many-to-one elastic partial matching problem between closed curves. We introduce Double Cyclic Dynamic Time Warping for the scenario where a collision event yields a single boundary that encloses multiple touching cells and that needs to be cut into separate cell boundaries.

Involvement of receptor-bound protein methyltransferase PRMT1 in antiviral and antiproliferative effects of type I interferons.

Protein arginine N-methyltransferase (PRMT1) is one of the proteins that bind to the intracytoplasmatic domain of the IFNAR-1 chain of the type I interferon (IFN) receptor system. The attachment is specific and is not seen with PRMT2, another member of this protein family. Antisense PRMT1 cDNA constructs expressed under the early cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter were transfected into HeLa cells, and stable transformants were selected.