Search

Abstract In this study, we investigated analytical challenges associated with the formulation of 2 anti-HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs), 3BNC117 and PGT121, both separately at 100 mg/mL and together at 50 mg/mL each. The bnAb formulations were characterized for relative solubility and conformational stability followed by accelerated and real-time stability studies. Although the bnAbs were stable during 4°C storage, incubation at 40°C differentiated their stability profiles. Specific concentration-dependent aggregation rates at 30°C and 40°C were measured by size exclusion chromatography for the individual bnAbs with the mixture showing intermediate behavior. Interestingly, although the relative ratio of the 2 bnAbs remained constant at 4°C, the ratio of 3BNC117 to PGT121 increased in the dimer that formed during storage at 40°C. A mass spectrometry-based multiattribute method, identified and quantified differences in modifications of the Fab regions for each bnAb within the mixture including clipping, oxidation, deamidation, and isomerization sites. Each bnAb showed slight differences in the levels and sites of lysine residue glycations. Together, these data demonstrate the ability to differentiate degradation products from individual antibodies within the bnAb mixture, and that degradation rates are influenced not only by the individual bnAb concentrations but also by the mixture concentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Here we describe new fluorescent probes based on fluorescein and rhodamine that provide reversible, real-time insight into cellular redox status. The new probes incorporate bio-imaging relevant fluorophores derived from fluorescein and rhodamine linked with stable nitroxide radicals such that they cannot be cleaved, either spontaneously or enzymatically by cellular processes. Overall fluorescence emission is determined by reversible reduction and oxidation, hence the steady state emission intensity reflects the balance between redox potentials of critical redox couples within the cell. The permanent positive charge on the rhodamine-based probes leads to their rapid localisation within mitochondria in cells. Reduction and oxidation also leads to marked changes in the fluorophore lifetime, enabling monitoring by fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy. Finally, we demonstrate that administration of a methyl ester version of the rhodamine-based probe can be used at concentrations as low as 5 nM to generate a readily detected response to redox stress within cells as analysed by flow cytometry. Graphical abstract fx1 Highlights • New fluorescent probes give reversible real-time insight into cellular redox status. • Probe structure enhances mitochondrial retention. • Reversible fluorescence switch-on predominantly occurs within mitochondria. • Probe reduction, balanced by re-oxidation, controls fluorophore lifetime and emission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • An integrated real-time method for the rendering of the infrared characteristics for large-scale terrains. • Infrared characteristics calculation based on the terrain classification of remote-sensing images. • Real-time rendering of multi-resolution infrared texture and terrain pyramids. Abstract As a low-cost, efficient, digital simulation tool, real-time rendering of the infrared characteristics for large-scale terrains is typically interdisciplinary involving the rapid computation of heat transfer and infrared physics models, as well as tools associated with pattern recognition and computer graphics. This paper proposes an integrated real-time method that renders the infrared characteristics of large-scale terrains based on the classification of remote-sensing images in the visible band which can be obtained more conveniently. An energy balance model for terrains composed of different surface materials is established. This model is used in calculating the infrared characteristics of different terrain features and in generating a multi-resolution texture pyramid with the classification information. The infrared calculation results were verified by comparing with results from real world data. Out-of-core rendering method is used to load the mesh data and textures of the large-scale terrains. The process meets real-time demands when rendering terrain composed of over 200 GB mesh data and 15 LOD (level of detail). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a direct stylization system to render 3D animated geometry as watercolor painted animation. Featuring low-level art-direction in real-time, our approach focuses on letting users paint custom stylization parameters in the 3D scene. These painted parameters drive watercolor effects in object-space, managing localized control and emulating the characteristic appearance of traditional watercolor. For this purpose, the parameters alter the object-space geometric representations and are rasterized, to coherently control and enhance further image-space effects. The watercolor effects are simulated through improved and novel algorithms to recreate hand tremors, pigment turbulence, color bleeding, edge darkening, paper distortion and granulation. All these represent essential characteristic effects of traditional watercolor. The proposed direct stylization system scales well with scene complexity, can be implemented in most rendering pipelines and can be adapted to simulate a wide range of watercolor looks. The simulation is compared to previous approaches and is evaluated through a user study, involving professional CG artists spending over 50 h stylizing their own assets and sharing their feedback about the watercolor stylization, the direct stylization system and their needs as artists using Non-photorealistic Rendering (NPR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In traditional 2D animation several intermediate frames are drawn between two consecutive key frames. This process can be very time-consuming and tedious for the animator. In this paper we present a semi-automatic inbetweening method that is tightly coupled with the animation production pipeline. We exploit the fact that artists typically start with an outline of the drawing to help preview the illustration, and use these guidelines to improve the curve correspondence inference. The method is based on a two-level matching algorithm, where the first one finds correspondences between the guidelines, and the second one between the final art. This separation further aids the artist by using transformed guidelines and drawings from preceding frames to guide the creation of new ones, acting as a digital light table. We show the robustness of our method with a variety of animation examples, including sequences from animation books and professional animators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microblog such as Twitter and Sina Weibo provides a convenient and instant platform which makes information easy to share and acquire. However, Microblog’s short, noisy, real-time features make Chinese Microblog entity linking task a new challenge. In this paper, we investigate many linking methods and introduce the implementation of our work on Chinese microblog entity linking task. By means of crawling Baidu encyclopaedia web page, we generate polysemous, synonymous and index collections in MongoDB to manage the entities. We use a Chinese NLP tools named HanLP 1 to perform noun words extracting, and then generate candidate set with these collections and word similarity. For disambiguation part, we take Word2vec 2 whose model is trained by THUC news 3 to determine the textual relevance. Our work performs pretty well on the Sina Weibo data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights and addresses the complexity and challenges involved in visualizing large and detailed Building Information Models (BIM) in real-time. The contribution of the paper is twofold: (a) an in-depth analysis of four commonly used BIM viewers in terms of real-time rendering performance and (b) the development and validation of a prototype BIM viewer specifically designed to allow real-time visualization of large and complex building models. Regarding existing BIM viewers our results show that they all share limitations in their ability to handle large BIMs taken from real-world projects interactively. However, for the same test models our prototype BIM viewer is able to provide smooth real-time performance without sacrificing visual accuracy. By taking advantage of an efficient visibility determination algorithm, our prototype viewer restricts rendering efforts to visible objects only, with a significant performance increase compared to existing BIM viewers as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a real-time animation system for fully embodied virtual humans that satisfies accurate foot placement constraints for different human walking and running styles. Our method offers a fine balance between motion fidelity and character control, and can efficiently animate over sixty agents in real time (25 FPS) and over a hundred characters at 13 FPS. Given a point cloud of reachable support foot configurations extracted from the set of available animation clips, we compute the Delaunay triangulation. At runtime, the triangulation is queried to obtain the simplex containing the next footstep, which is used to compute the barycentric blending weights of the animation clips. Our method synthesizes animations to accurately follow footsteps, and a simple IK solver adjusts small offsets, foot orientation, and handles uneven terrain. To incorporate root velocity fidelity, the method is further extended to include the parametric space of root movement and combine it with footstep based interpolation. The presented method is evaluated on a variety of test cases and error measurements are calculated to offer a quantitative analysis of the results achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with the development of new technologies, orchestrating computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has become a topic of discussion because new learning spaces challenge teacher to support collaborative learning in new ways. However, despite the optimistic notions of teachers’ orchestration in CSCL situations, there are still no systematic research findings on real-time orchestration. This study is one attempt to fill in the knowledge gap on understanding the differences in knowledge construction processes between settings with and without teachers’ real-time orchestration in 3D learning games from a socio-cultural perspective. The aims of the study are twofold. The first aim is to design a scripted 3D learning game to practice inter-professional knowledge construction in a vocational context. The second goal is to determine the main differences in knowledge construction processes in 3D game settings with and without real-time teacher orchestration. Findings provide new insights into what actually happens in collaboration processes within different learning settings. Specifically, students in settings with real-time teacher orchestration used more effort to provide knowledge (especially explaining one’s own situation) and less effort for other inputs (in particular, off task discussion). Thus, a scripted 3D game itself guided and helped groups to solve tasks. However, teachers’ professional competencies also helped to reduce off task discussions during the 3D game, develop a shared understanding of the tasks’ inter-professional nature, and explain activities in a meaningful way. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Multi-resolution techniques are required for rendering large volumetric datasets exceeding the size of the graphics card''s memory or even the main memory. The cut through the multi-resolution volume representation is defined by selection criteria based on error metrics. For GPU-based volume rendering, this cut has to fit into the graphics card''s memory and needs to be continuously updated due to the interaction with the volume such as changing the area of interest, the transfer function or the viewpoint. We introduce a greedy cut update algorithm based on split-and-collapse operations for updating the cut on a frame-to-frame basis. This approach is guided by a global data-based metric based on the distortion of classified voxel data, and it takes into account a limited download budget for transferring data from main memory into the graphics card to avoid large frame rate variations. Our out-of-core support for handling very large volumes also makes use of split-and-collapse operations to generate an extended cut in the main memory. Finally, we introduce an optimal polynomial-time cut update algorithm, which maximizes the error reduction between consecutive frames. This algorithm is used to verify how close to the optimum our greedy split-and-collapse algorithm performs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The main problem in the real-time rendering of vegetation is the massive amount of primitives to be rendered. These primitives are needed to fully describe the geometry of the plants. However, some of them are not visible depending on the location of the viewer. This work focuses on this fact to interactively reduce the amount of geometry needed to represent the foliage through a view-dependent multiresolution scheme. Following a camera-dependent criterion, the less visible parts of the foliage are detected in real time, and rendered with a decreased level of detail for improving efficiency. This fact considerably reduces the extraction and the visualization time of the geometry that represents the foliage. The novelty of the presented method is that its design is oriented to being efficient on massively parallel architectures, such as the graphics processing unit. Moreover, we introduce a new management system for efficiently handling level of detail objects in order to improve performance for forest scenes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]