University at Buffalo

About: University at Buffalo is a education organization based out in Buffalo, New York, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 33773 authors who have published 63840 publications receiving 2278954 citations. The organization is also known as: UB & State University of New York at Buffalo.

A Thousand Frames in Just a Few Words: Lingual Description of Videos through Latent Topics and Sparse Object Stitching

Abstract: The problem of describing images through natural language has gained importance in the computer vision community. Solutions to image description have either focused on a top-down approach of generating language through combinations of object detections and language models or bottom-up propagation of keyword tags from training images to test images through probabilistic or nearest neighbor techniques. In contrast, describing videos with natural language is a less studied problem. In this paper, we combine ideas from the bottom-up and top-down approaches to image description and propose a method for video description that captures the most relevant contents of a video in a natural language description. We propose a hybrid system consisting of a low level multimodal latent topic model for initial keyword annotation, a middle level of concept detectors and a high level module to produce final lingual descriptions. We compare the results of our system to human descriptions in both short and long forms on two datasets, and demonstrate that final system output has greater agreement with the human descriptions than any single level.

Extracellular dopamine in the medial preoptic area: implications for sexual motivation and hormonal control of copulation

Abstract: Dopamine (DA) activity in the medial preoptic area (MPOA) contributes to the control of male rat sexual behavior. We tested (1) whether extracellular DA increases during precopulatory exposure to an estrous female and during copulation, (2) whether exposure to another male increases extracellular DA, (3) whether motor activity during copulation accounts for increased DA levels, and (4) whether concurrent or recent testosterone influences DA levels or copulation in castrates. Extracellular DA and its metabolites in male rats9 MPOA were measured using microdialysis. DA level increased during precopulatory exposure to the female in all animals that subsequently copulated; this included all intact animals, all testosterone-treated castrates, and 9 of 14 1- week castrates treated with oil vehicle. DA levels did not increase in any animal that subsequently failed to copulate, including the remaining 1-week, and all 2-week, vehicle-treated castrates. When the barrier was removed and the animals were allowed to copulate, levels of DA and its metabolites continued to rise in intact males and in castrates that copulated. The DA response to the estrous female could not be attributed to nonsexual social stimuli, since exposure to another male was ineffective. The DA response to copulation could not be attributed primarily to motor activity, since animals running voluntarily in a running wheel did not show significantly increased DA. These and previous data suggest that DA released in the MPOA in response to an estrous female may contribute to sexual motivation and copulatory proficiency. Testosterone may promote copulation in part through permissive actions on dopamine release.

The protein structure prediction problem could be solved using the current PDB library.

Abstract: For single-domain proteins, we examine the completeness of the structures in the current Protein Data Bank (PDB) library for use in full-length model construction of unknown sequences. To address this issue, we employ a comprehensive benchmark set of 1,489 medium-size proteins that cover the PDB at the level of 35% sequence identity and identify templates by structure alignment. With homologous proteins excluded, we can always find similar folds to native with an average rms deviation (RMSD) from native of 2.5 A with approximately 82% alignment coverage. These template structures often contain a significant number of insertions/deletions. The tasser algorithm was applied to build full-length models, where continuous fragments are excised from the top-scoring templates and reassembled under the guide of an optimized force field, which includes consensus restraints taken from the templates and knowledge-based statistical potentials. For almost all targets (except for 2/1,489), the resultant full-length models have an RMSD to native below 6 A (97% of them below 4 A). On average, the RMSD of full-length models is 2.25 A, with aligned regions improved from 2.5 A to 1.88 A, comparable with the accuracy of low-resolution experimental structures. Furthermore, starting from state-of-the-art structural alignments, we demonstrate a methodology that can consistently bring template-based alignments closer to native. These results are highly suggestive that the protein-folding problem can in principle be solved based on the current PDB library by developing efficient fold recognition algorithms that can recover such initial alignments.

Introducing incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations.

Abstract: We evaluate the introduction of monetary incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations. We show that monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets, and the suffering and deaths of many of those waiting, without increasing the total cost of transplant surgery by more than about 12 percent. We build on the value-of-life literature and other parts of economic analysis to estimate the equilibrium cost of live transplants for kidneys and livers. We also show that market price for kidneys will be determined by the cost of live donations, even though most organs will come from cadavers.