Common Space Research Articles

BIFROST: A method for registering diverse imaging datasets of the Drosophila brain

Imaging methods that span both functional measures in living tissue and anatomical measures in fixed tissue have played critical roles in advancing our understanding of the brain. However, making direct comparisons between different imaging modalities, particularly spanning living and fixed tissue, has remained challenging. For example, comparing brain-wide neural dynamics across experiments and aligning such data to anatomical resources, such as gene expression patterns or connectomes, requires precise alignment to a common set of anatomical coordinates. However, reaching this goal is difficult because registering in vivo functional imaging data to ex vivo reference atlases requires accommodating differences in imaging modality, microscope specification, and sample preparation. We overcome these challenges in Drosophila by building an in vivo reference atlas from multiphoton-imaged brains, called the Functional Drosophila Atlas. We then develop a registration pipeline, BrIdge For Registering Over Statistical Templates (BIFROST), for transforming neural imaging data into this common space and for importing ex vivo resources such as connectomes. Using genetically labeled cell types as ground truth, we demonstrate registration with a precision of less than 10 microns. Overall, BIFROST provides a pipeline for registering functional imaging datasets in the fly, both within and across experiments.

The sacred and the wild: Unpacking human-wildlife interaction in Indian part of Kailash Sacred Landscape

The negative interaction between humans and wildlife in the Indian Himalayas has increased in recent decades. Studies on human-wildlife negative interactions have primarily focused on protected areas. However, research on such interactions is limited in regions like the Indian part of Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL), where wildlife and humans share a common space. This study examined the patterns of crop damage, livestock depredation, human fatalities, seasonal and temporal variations, location-specific factors, and critical variables contributing to negative humanwildlife interactions in KSL India. We examined 574 incidences of livestock depredation, 123 incidences of human injury/death between 1984-2016, and 560 crop damage incidences between 2002-2017. Most incidences of human injury/ death and livestock depredation were by common leopards, followed by Asiatic black bears. Maize was the highest raided crop (n=202), followed by wheat (n=190) and paddy (n=168). Maximum incidences of crop loss were reported in 2017 (n=76), and the lowest was in 2002 (n=5). The hotspot maps of crop damage and livestock depredation revealed that the negative interaction between humans and wildlife was highest in the southern part of the landscape. The result predicted 195 villages as hotspots in the Indian part of KSL. Villages were identified at the forest range level. We found that 11 villages in Askot, 12 in Munshiyari, 17 in Berinag, 15 in Dharchula, 36 in Didihat, 61 in Gangolihat, and 43 in Pithoragarh forest ranges are severely affected by negative interaction with wildlife.

The Obligation to Cooperate to Protect Against Serious Breaches of the European and American Conventions on Human Rights

Abstract This paper discusses the obligation of States to co-operate as a duty that stems from two different areas of international law. First, States are obliged to co-operate under the law of State responsibility, the aim of co-operation within this framework being to bring to an end serious breaches of peremptory norms. The second area is international human rights law and, in particular, the European (ECHR) and the American Conventions on Human Rights (ACHR), as these instruments have been interpreted by the respective regional human rights courts to encompass a procedural obligation for States to co-operate with a view to protect human rights. The paper asks whether the obligation to cooperate, as constructed by the two regional human rights courts, has any overlap with the obligation to cooperate under the law of State responsibility, and, if yes, whether it can and does cross-fertilise the interpretation of the latter. The analysis of the relevant case law provides two affirmative answers. First, there is common space between the obligations to cooperate under the law of State responsibility, the ECHR, and the ACHR. Second, analysis also identifies certain features in the relevant human rights case law that enrich the obligation to co-operate under the law of State responsibility. These features are the effectiveness in the protection of the most fundamental norms and interpretation of the duty to cooperate through systemic integration. Systemic integration is necessary to concretise the conduct States are expected to develop as the obligation to cooperate refers to a rather open list of relevant rules of international law applicable to that State.

Spatially integrated cortico-subcortical tracing data for analyses of rodent brain topographical organization.

The cerebral cortex extends axonal projections to several subcortical brain regions, including the striatum, thalamus, superior colliculus, and pontine nuclei. Experimental tract-tracing studies have shown that these subcortical projections are topographically organized, reflecting the spatial organization of sensory surfaces and body parts. Several public collections of mouse- and rat- brain tract-tracing data are available, with the Allen mouse brain connectivity atlas being most prominent. There, a large body of image data can be inspected, but it is difficult to combine data from different experiments and compare spatial distribution patterns. To enable co-visualization and comparison of topographical organization in mouse brain cortico-subcortical projections across experiments, we represent axonal labelling data as point data in a common 3D brain atlas space. We here present a collection of point-cloud data representing spatial distribution of corticostriatal, corticothalamic, corticotectal, and corticopontine projections in mice and exemplify how these spatially integrated point data can be used as references for experimental investigations of topographic organization in transgenic mice, and for cross-species comparison with corticopontine projections in rats.

Joint anatomical, histological and imaging investigation of the midbrain target region for superolateral medial forebrain bundle (slMFB) DBS.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) of the superolateral branch of the medial forebrain bundle (slMFB) is currently being researched in clinical trials and open case series as a therapeutic option for treatment resistant major depressive disorder (TR-MDD) and treatment resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (TR-OCD). There are numerous publications describing stimulation in such proximity to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and open questions remain concerning the stimulation target and its functional environment. As of right now, we are not aware of any publications that compare the typical electrode placements with the histologically supported tractographic depiction of the target structure. We used three cadaver midbrain samples with presumed unaltered anatomy. After fixation, staining and slicing, the histological samples were warped to the MNI (Montreal Neurological Institute) big brain environment. Utilizing a tractographic atlas, a qualitative analysis of the typical slMFB stimulation site in the lateral VTA utilizing a subset of clinically implanted DBS electrodes in n=12 patients, successfully implanted for TR-OCD was performed. A joint qualitative overlay analysis of predominantly tyrosine-hydroxylase stained histology at different resolutions in an anatomical common space was achieved. Localization of the DBS-lead bodies was found in the typical positions in front of the red nuclei in the lateral VTA. DBS lead tip region positions explained the oculomotor side effects of stimulation related to para-nigral or parabrachial pigmented sub-nuclei of the VTA, respectively. The location of active electrode contacts suggest downstream and antidromic effects on the greater VTA related medial forebrain bundle system. This is the first dedicated joint histopathological overlay analysis of DBS electrodes targeting the slMFB and lateral VTA in a common anatomical space. This analysis might serve to better understand the DBS target region for this procedure.

Supervised Contrastive Learning for 3D Cross-Modal Retrieval

Interoperability between different virtual platforms requires the ability to search and transfer digital assets across platforms. Digital assets in virtual platforms are represented in different forms or modalities, such as images, meshes, and point clouds. The cross-modal retrieval of three-dimensional (3D) object representations is challenging due to data representation diversity, making common feature space discovery difficult. Recent studies have been focused on obtaining feature consistency within the same classes and modalities using cross-modal center loss. However, center features are sensitive to hyperparameter variations, making cross-modal center loss susceptible to performance degradation. This paper proposes a new 3D cross-modal retrieval method that uses cross-modal supervised contrastive learning (CSupCon) and the fixed projection head (FPH) strategy. Contrastive learning mitigates the influence of hyperparameters by maximizing feature distinctiveness. The FPH strategy prevents gradient updates in the projection network, enabling the focused training of the backbone networks. The proposed method shows a mean average precision (mAP) increase of 1.17 and 0.14 in 3D cross-modal object retrieval experiments using ModelNet10 and ModelNet40 datasets compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Mathematical Analysis for Honeybee Dynamics Under the Influence of Seasonality

In this paper, we studied a mathematical model for honeybee population diseases under the influence of seasonal environments on the long-term dynamics of the disease. The model describes the dynamics of two different beehives sharing a common space. We computed the basic reproduction number of the system as the spectral radius of either the next generation matrix for the autonomous system or as the spectral radius of a linear integral operator for the non-autonomous system, and we deduced that if the reproduction number is less than unity, then the disease dies out in the honeybee population. However, if the basic reproduction number is greater than unity, then the disease persists. Finally, we provide several numerical tests that confirm the theoretical findings.

Efficient Stochastic Template Bank Using Inner Product Inequalities

Gravitational wave searches are crucial for studying compact sources such as neutron stars and black holes. Many sensitive modeled searches use matched filtering to compare gravitational strain data to a set of waveform models known as template banks. We introduce a new stochastic placement method for constructing template banks, offering efficiency and flexibility to handle arbitrary parameter spaces, including orbital eccentricity, tidal deformability, and other extrinsic parameters. This method can be computationally limited by the ability to compare proposal templates with the accepted templates in the bank. To alleviate this computational load, we introduce the use of inner product inequalities to reduce the number of required comparisons. We also introduce a novel application of Gaussian Kernel Density Estimation to enhance waveform coverage in sparser regions. Our approach has been employed to search for eccentric binary neutron stars, low-mass neutron stars, primordial black holes, and supermassive black hole binaries. We demonstrate that our method produces self-consistent banks that recover the required minimum fraction of signals. For common parameter spaces, our method shows comparable computational performance and similar template bank sizes to geometric placement methods and stochastic methods, while easily extending to higher-dimensional problems. The time to run a search exceeds the time to generate the bank by a factor of O(105) for dedicated template banks, such as geometric, mass-only stochastic, and aligned spin cases, O(104) for eccentric and O(103) for the tidal deformable bank. With the advent of efficient template bank generation, the primary area for improvement is developing more efficient search methodologies.

Enhancing cross-domain recommendations: Leveraging personality-based transfer learning with probabilistic matrix factorization

The conventional method of computing personality scores through extensive questionnaire-based surveys poses practical challenges in real-world scenarios. An alternate route is to predict personality scores from user reviews by analyzing various linguistic features such as writing style, word choices, and specific phrases. However, the reviews are domain-dependent and classification models trained on one domain cannot be readily applied to other domains. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a cross-domain recommendation framework called PEMF-CD which leverages a novel mixing strategy to integrate user reviews from multiple domains with common joint embedding space and predict user personality scores using a transformer model. By capturing the underlying semantics and latent representations within the textual data, the transformer architecture can effectively model the linguistic cues to infer users’ personality traits, and the learning is transferred across domains. To further enhance the recommendation process, our model integrates personality-wise and rating pattern-based similarities of users into a probabilistic matrix factorization method that fosters user neighborhoods based on similarity scores among users. Comprehensive experiments were conducted using five real-world datasets from TripAdvisor and Amazon with varied numbers of users, items, and reviews of up to 44187, 26386, and 426791, respectively. The performance has been benchmarked against thirteen baseline algorithms and the experimental results demonstrate a significant improvements of up to 24.72%, 64.28%, 48.79%, and 61% in RMSE, and 55.9%, 76.7%, 67.6%, and 71.5% in MAE for a 90:10 train-test split with Digital Music, Fashion, Magazine Subscriptions and Video Games datasets from Amazon, respectively. Similar results have been observed for the 80:20 train-test split.

Who are the people of Cyprus? The national identity building process in Cyprus from the late 19th to the early 20th century

Abstract This article offers a nuanced examination of the complex identity dynamics among the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of British administration replacing Ottoman rule in 1878. The article draws attention to the profound impact of this historical transition on the identity formation processes of both communities. Despite the shared wartime experience of the First World War, the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus failed to construct a cohesive identity rooted in their common geographical space. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ambivalence, the article explores the complex process by which Cypriot communities sought to align their identity with larger nations, namely Greece and Turkey, rather than grounding it in their local context. The article contends that the genesis of their ambivalence can be traced back to 1878 when British administration replaced Ottoman rule on the island.

Review: Winged Worlds: Common Spaces of Avian-Human Lives, edited by Olga Petri and Michael Guida

Review: <i>Winged Worlds: Common Spaces of Avian-Human Lives</i>, edited by Olga Petri and Michael Guida

Unlocking public infrastructures? State aid and the common European data space

EU state aid rules are part of the EU’s competition policy, a form of soft law developed to nudge states away from public investments in many areas. Rules were used to impose that market competition holds a privileged position, and that enacting social, political, or economic benefits that might stifle competition requires a complicated legal and political negotiation process between the European Commission, Member States, and private companies. Nonetheless, many strategic projects or situations in recent years led to significant state aid. The Commission utilised a variety of means to encourage both private and public investments in EU based digital infrastructure that is critical for public media services and for unified European data space. Despite EU’s balancing act between the private and public interests, business interests are dangerously capturing the development in the media data space. To grasp the social and economic contribution of publicly financed productive activities, we approach public broadcasting systems as producers of public wealth of a peculiar kind whose activities and goals are defined by their public purpose, rather than the imperatives of capital and profitmaking. Unifying data spaces with too many design decisions conceded to capitalist production runs the risk of further neglecting social foundations of member states. We argue that the desired digital transformation would be more successful if it moved towards affirmative approaches to public services and public infrastructures, recognising the historical and contemporary contribution of the production of public wealth and public media in member states.

Multidimensional analysis of textiles coated with electroactive polymers for actuators

This paper presents a multidimensional analysis of textiles coated with conductive polymers for actuators. The purpose of using multidimensional scaling analysis is to compare similarities and dissimilarities between conductive textiles obtained through conductive polymeric film deposition to observe the optimal value for electrical resistance and to select an adequate method to achieve conductive fabric using different polymers (polyethylene glycol, polyvinyl alcohol or polyvinylidene fluoride) and metal microparticles (copper or nickel). The multidimensional analysis is based on mapping a series of material properties from a proximity matrix (similarities or dissimilarities) between these properties. Multidimensional scaling allows rebuilding the exact map of the values (within approximately a symmetry or rotation). To fit dissimilarity or similarity matrices for multiple variables into one common space estimating the weight parameters for each variable, the INDSCAL model (individual differences multidimensional scaling) was used.

Organization and Implementation of a Common Space for the Promotion of Local Products in Côte d’Ivoire: The Case of the Boutique Paysanne

Organization and Implementation of a Common Space for the Promotion of Local Products in Côte d’Ivoire: The Case of the Boutique Paysanne

Adaptation of Post-fortress Buildings as an Enrichment of the Functional Programme of a Housing Estate on the Example of Fort VIII Służew in Warsaw

The article refers to the problem of adaptation of post-fortress objects from the 19th century located in the strict urban tissue in Poland. The authors of the text analyse the example of adaptation of Fort VIII Służew in Warsaw as a way of making common spaces in housing estates more attractive. The rapid demilitarisation of fortresses from this period caused by the development of the art of war and the subsequent dynamic development of urban planning after the Second World War resulted in the degradation and disappearance of these valuable monuments. The Russian ring fortress of Warsaw is now entirely within the urban fabric. Introducing additions and new utility functions is becoming a way of protecting the existing stock of often degraded spaces left behind by former forts. On the example of Fort VIII Służew, a number of activities related to adaptation, revitalisation and revalorisation of the existing urbanised residential space in Ursynów district are presented. The analysed object together with its surroundings is an example of a way to use post-fortress spaces for both utilitarian and cognitive purposes while respecting historic values. Age-old fortifications, so well preserved in Poland, significantly define and shape urban layouts. The research carried out by the authors of this text shows that appropriate use of the potential of post-fortress buildings from the 19th century can significantly improve the quality and character of colonial buildings and highlight the values associated with this type of specific monument.

Text-and-Image Learning Transformer for Cross-modal Person Re-identification

Text-based person re-identification aims to find the target person from a large pedestrian gallery with the given natural language description. Previous works mainly focus on embedding salient textual and visual representations in a common latent space by utilizing the dual-path structure or parameter-shared network. However, they still lack the ability to effectively extract fine-grained unimodal features as well as fuse the cross-modal data, leading to the increase of misaligned cases. To settle these issues, we propose a text-and-image implicit learning Transformer (TILT) to eliminate textual anisotropy and enhance the cross-modal alignment from both domains based on the bi-direction multimodal encoders. Specifically, we apply the pre-trained multimodal embedding module to overcome the unimodal anisotropy problem with contrastive learning, and map fine-grained features with dual encoder in bidirectional masking. Then, we design the cross-modal interaction encoder to comprehensively mine implicit cross-modal relations by reconstructing masked tokens, and fuse rich multi-modal knowledge in a common space. In addition, the cross-modal similarity matching module is proposed to optimize the intra-domain classification and decrease the inter-domain divergence. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public benchmarks CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid to verify the effectiveness of our proposed framework. And results prove that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all metrics.

Age-specific ASPECTS atlas of Chinese subjects across different age groups for assessing acute ischemic stroke

The Alberta Stroke Program Early Computed Tomography Score (ASPECTS) is a valuable and easy-to-use method for assessing acute ischemic stroke. It aids in identifying suitable candidates for thrombolytic therapies and evaluating treatment effectiveness. However, ASPECTS evaluation primarily relies on visual observation in current clinical practice, lacking a common standardized space. Additionally, different doctors may have varying clinical experiences, leading to a poor inter-reader agreement and potential errors in the final ASPECTS scoring. To address these issues and fill in the absence of a publicly available ASPECTS atlas, this work constructs age-specific Chinese ASPECTS atlases based on non-contrast computed tomography images of 281 healthy subjects across different age groups. Images of different age groups are warped into respective common averaged spaces, where the average intensity atlases are computed. More importantly, 10 ASPECTS regions can be obtained during this process. We develop an automated ASPECTS region mapping pipeline and collect an independent dataset to validate our atlas. The results prove that the age-specific ASPECTS atlas is of great promise in clinical availability.

The common solution space of general relativity

We review the solution space for the field equations of Einstein's General Relativity for various static, spherically symmetric spacetimes. We consider the vacuum case, represented by the Schwarzschild black hole; the de Sitter-Schwarzschild geometry, which includes a cosmological constant; the Reissner-Nordström geometry, which accounts for the presence of charge. Additionally we consider the homogenenous and anisotropic locally rotational Bianchi II spacetime in the vacuum. Our analysis reveals that the field equations for these scenarios share a common three-dimensional group of point transformations, with the generators being the elements of the D⊗sT2 Lie algebra, known as the semidirect product of dilations and translations in the plane. Due to this algebraic property the field equations for the aforementioned gravitational models can be expressed in the equivalent form of the null geodesic equations for conformally flat geometries. Consequently, the solution space for the field equations is common, and it is the solution space for the free particle in a flat space. This approach open new directions on the construction of analytic solutions in gravitational physics and cosmology.

Adolescents' offline and online social support: A study on latent groups and their relationship with mental health.

The internet has become a common space for adolescents to connect with others and find information. However, it remains unclear whether online encounters can serve as new sources of social support for Chinese adolescents. The present study aimed to identify distinct patterns in Chinese adolescents' social support from both offline and online sources and to examine how these patterns relate to individual and family factors and adolescents' mental health conditions. Data were obtained from a cross-sectional survey of 1031 Chinese adolescents (47.1% female, mean age = 13.67) in Foshan, Guangdong province. Latent profile analysis was performed with Mplus. Associations between the identified classes and auxiliary variables were examined with the "R3STEP" procedure and the DCON command in Mplus. We identified four groups. Three groups showed consistent patterns in terms of receiving social support from offline and online sources, namely, the high support group (24.8%), moderate support group (43.8%), and low support group (15.3%), respectively. The fourth group received a moderate level of offline but low level of online support (16%), named the moderate offline-low online support group. The groups differed in individual and family characteristics. Higher support was associated with higher life satisfaction, lower depression, and social anxiety, but also higher problematic internet use. Overall, the moderate offline-low online support group showed better mental health than the other groups. Our study extends social support research by revealing heterogeneity in adolescents' social support patterns. The findings encourage a balanced use of offline and online support.

Common origin of dark matter and leptogenesis in U(1)B−L

In this paper, we investigate the common parameter space of dark matter and leptogenesis in the U(1)B−L symmetry. This model involves a complex scalar ϕ, sterile neutrinos N, and Majorana dark matter χ, where only dark matter χ is charged under the Z2 symmetry. Masses of N and χ are generated via the Yukawa interactions to ϕ after breaking of the U(1)B−L symmetry. TeV scale sterile neutrinos N are responsible for the generation of baryon asymmetry through the resonance leptogenesis mechanism. The new particles in the U(1)B−L have a significant impact on the dilution of N, thus on leptogenesis. Meanwhile, the annihilation processes of dark matter χ are almost identical to that of N, which indicates that both leptogenesis and dark matter are closely related to satisfying the observed results simultaneously. Under various theoretical and experimental constraints, the viable common parameter space of dark matter and leptogenesis is obtained for both global and local U(1)B−L symmetry.