Stable concurrent learning and control of dynamical systems is the subject of adaptive control. Despite being an established field with many practical applications and a rich theory, much of the ...development in adaptive control for nonlinear systems revolves around a few key algorithms. By exploiting strong connections between classical adaptive nonlinear control techniques and recent progress in optimization and machine learning, we show that there exists considerable untapped potential in algorithm development for both adaptive nonlinear control and adaptive dynamics prediction. We begin by introducing first-order adaptation laws inspired by natural gradient descent and mirror descent. We prove that when there are multiple dynamics consistent with the data, these non-Euclidean adaptation laws implicitly regularize the learned model. Local geometry imposed during learning thus may be used to select parameter vectors—out of the many that will achieve perfect tracking or prediction—for desired properties such as sparsity. We apply this result to regularized dynamics predictor and observer design, and as concrete examples, we consider Hamiltonian systems, Lagrangian systems, and recurrent neural networks. We subsequently develop a variational formalism based on the Bregman Lagrangian. We show that its Euler Lagrange equations lead to natural gradient and mirror descent-like adaptation laws with momentum, and we recover their first-order analogues in the infinite friction limit. We illustrate our analyses with simulations demonstrating our theoretical results.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Ceramic fuel cells offer a clean and efficient means of producing electricity through a variety of fuels. However, miniaturization of cell dimensions for portable device application remains a ...challenge, as volumetric power densities generated by readily-available planar/tubular ceramic cells are limited. Here, we demonstrate a concept of 'micro-monolithic' ceramic cell design. The mechanical robustness and structural integrity of this design is thoroughly investigated with real-time, synchrotron X-ray diffraction computed tomography, suggesting excellent thermal cycling stability. The successful miniaturization results in an exceptional power density of 1.27 W cm
at 800 °C, which is among the highest reported. This holistic design incorporates both mechanical integrity and electrochemical performance, leading to mechanical property enhancement and representing an important step toward commercial development of portable ceramic devices with high volumetric power (>10 W cm
), fast thermal cycling and marked mechanical reliability.
New imaging techniques in AKI Selby, Nicholas M; Duranteau, Jacques
Current opinion in critical care,
12/2020, Letnik:
26, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common complication in critically ill patients. Understanding the pathophysiology of AKI is essential to guide patient management. Imaging techniques that inform the ...pathogenesis of AKI in critically ill patients are urgently needed, in both research and ultimately clinical settings. Renal contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) and multiparametric MRI appear to be the most promising imaging techniques for exploring the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in AKI.
CEUS and MRI can be used to noninvasively and safely evaluate renal macrocirculation and microcirculation and oxygenation in critical ill patients. These techniques show that a decrease in renal blood flow, particularly cortical blood flow, may be observed in septic AKI and may contribute to its development. MRI may be a valuable method to quantify long-term renal damage after AKI that cannot currently be detected using standard clinical approaches.
CEUS and multiparametric renal MRI are promising imaging techniques but more evidence is needed to show how they can first be more widely used in a research setting to test key hypotheses about the pathophysiology and recovery of AKI, and then ultimately be adopted in clinical practice to guide patient management.
Crustaceans are cultured extensively around the world in intensive farming systems. High‐performance formulated feeds have been developed for crustacean aquaculture, which are often supplemented with ...a number of natural and synthetic carotenoid sources. Studies over a number of years have consistently shown that dietary carotenoid supplementation is beneficial for crustacean aquaculture across a range of commercially relevant parameters. Most obvious is the effect on pigmentation, where carotenoid inclusion levels in feeds and duration of feeding diets with carotenoids have been optimised across many species to improve product colour, and subsequently quality and price. However, beneficial effects of carotenoid inclusion have increasingly been demonstrated on other parameters. This review updates the recent progress in our understanding of dietary carotenoid utilisation and storage, and the combined effects of diet, genetics and environment on crustacean pigmentation. In addition, the range of other physiological benefits this class of molecules brings to these animals is summarised. These include improvements in survival, growth, reproductive capacity, disease resistance and stress resistance.
Emissions of SO
from flue gas and marine transport have detrimental impacts on the environment and human health, but SO
is also an important industrial feedstock if it can be recovered, stored and ...transported efficiently. Here we report the exceptional adsorption and separation of SO
in a porous material, Cu
(L) (H
L = 4',4‴-(pyridine-3,5-diyl)bis(1,1'-biphenyl-3,5-dicarboxylic acid)), MFM-170. MFM-170 exhibits fully reversible SO
uptake of 17.5 mmol g
at 298 K and 1.0 bar, and the SO
binding domains for trapped molecules within MFM-170 have been determined. We report the reversible coordination of SO
to open Cu(II) sites, which contributes to excellent adsorption thermodynamics and selectivities for SO
binding and facile regeneration of MFM-170 after desorption. MFM-170 is stable to water, acid and base and shows great promise for the dynamic separation of SO
from simulated flue gas mixtures, as confirmed by breakthrough experiments.
We analyze the effect of synchronization on distributed stochastic gradient algorithms. By exploiting an analogy with dynamical models of biological quorum sensing, where synchronization between ...agents is induced through communication with a common signal, we quantify how synchronization can significantly reduce the magnitude of the noise felt by the individual distributed agents and their spatial mean. This noise reduction is in turn associated with a reduction in the smoothing of the loss function imposed by the stochastic gradient approximation. Through simulations on model nonconvex objectives, we demonstrate that coupling can stabilize higher noise levels and improve convergence. We provide a convergence analysis for strongly convex functions by deriving a bound on the expected deviation of the spatial mean of the agents from the global minimizer for an algorithm based on quorum sensing, the same algorithm with momentum, and the elastic averaging SGD (EASGD) algorithm. We discuss extensions to new algorithms that allow each agent to broadcast its current measure of success and shape the collective computation accordingly. We supplement our theoretical analysis with numerical experiments on convolutional neural networks trained on the CIFAR-10 data set, where we note a surprising regularizing property of EASGD even when applied to the non-distributed case. This observation suggests alternative second-order in time algorithms for nondistributed optimization that are competitive with momentum methods.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Modulation of pore environment is an effective strategy to optimize guest binding in porous materials. We report the post-synthetic modification of the charge distribution in a charged metal-organic ...framework, MFM-305-CH
, Al(OH)(L)Cl, (H
L)Cl = 3,5-dicarboxy-1-methylpyridinium chloride and its effect on guest binding. MFM-305-CH
shows a distribution of cationic (methylpyridinium) and anionic (chloride) centers and can be modified to release free pyridyl N-centres by thermal demethylation of the 1-methylpyridinium moiety to give the neutral isostructural MFM-305. This leads simultaneously to enhanced adsorption capacities and selectivities (two parameters that often change in opposite directions) for CO
and SO
in MFM-305. The host-guest binding has been comprehensively investigated by
synchrotron X-ray and neutron powder diffraction, inelastic neutron scattering, synchrotron infrared and
H NMR spectroscopy and theoretical modelling to reveal the binding domains of CO
and SO
in these materials. CO
and SO
binding in MFM-305-CH
is shown to occur
hydrogen bonding to the methyl and aromatic-CH groups, with a long range interaction to chloride for CO
. In MFM-305 the hydroxyl, pyridyl and aromatic C-H groups bind CO
and SO
more effectively
hydrogen bonds and dipole interactions. Post-synthetic modification
dealkylation of the as-synthesised metal-organic framework is a powerful route to the synthesis of materials incorporating active polar groups that cannot be prepared directly.
The insulin-like 3 (INSL3) hormone produced by Leydig cells is essential for proper male sex differentiation, but the regulation of Insl3 expression remains poorly understood. This study describes a ...new physical and functional cooperation between the nuclear receptors SF1 and COUP-TFII in Insl3 expression.
INSL3, a hormone abundantly produced by Leydig cells, is essential for testis descent during fetal life and bone metabolism in adults. The mechanisms regulating Insl3 expression in Leydig cells have been studied in several species but remain poorly understood. To date, only a handful of transcription factors are known to activate the Insl3 promoter and include the nuclear receptors AR, NUR77, COUP-TFII, and SF1, as well as the Krüppel-like factor KLF6. Some of these transcription factors are known to transcriptionally cooperate on the Insl3 promoter, but the mechanisms at play remain unknown. Here, we report that COUP-TFII and SF1 functionally cooperate on the Insl3 promoter from various species but not on the Inha, Akr1c14, Cyp17a1, Hsd3b1, Star, Gsta3, and Amhr2 promoters that are known to be regulated by COUP-TFII and/or SF1. The Insl3 promoter contains species-conserved binding sites for COUP-TFII (-91 bp) and SF1 (-134 bp). Mutation of either the COUP-TFII or the SF1 sequence had no impact on the COUP-TFII/SF1 cooperation, but the mutation of both binding sites abolished the cooperation. In agreement with this, we found that COUP-TFII and SF1 physically interact in Leydig cells. Finally, we report that the transcriptional cooperation is not limited to COUP-TFII and SF1 as it also occurred between all NR2F and NR5A family members. Our data provide new mechanistic insights into the cooperation between the orphan nuclear receptors COUP-TFII and SF1 in the regulation of Insl3 gene expression in Leydig cells.
Controlled assembly of two-dimensional (2D) supramolecular organic frameworks (SOFs) has been demonstrated through a binary strategy in which ...1,4-bis-(4-(3,5-dicyano-2,6-dipyridyl)pyridyl)naphthalene (2), generated in situ by oxidative dehydrogenation of 1,4-bis-(4-(3,5-dicyano-2,6-dipyridyl)dihydropyridyl)naphthalene (1), is coupled in a 1:1 ratio with terphenyl-3,3′,4,4′-tetracarboxylic acid (3; to form SOF-8), 5,5′-(anthracene-9,10-diyl)diisophthalic acid (4; to form SOF-9), or 5,5′-bis-(azanediyl)-oxalyl-diisophthalic acid (5; to form SOF-10). Complementary O–H···N hydrogen bonds assemble 2D 63-hcb (honeycomb) subunits that pack as layers in SOF-8 to give a three-dimensional (3D) supramolecular network with parallel channels hosting guest DMF (DMF = N,N′-dimethylformamide) molecules. SOF-9 and SOF-10 feature supramolecular networks of 2D → 3D inclined polycatenation of similar hcb layers as those in SOF-8. Although SOF-8 suffers framework collapse upon guest removal, the polycatenated frameworks of SOF-9 and SOF-10 exhibit excellent chemical and thermal stability, solvent/moisture durability, and permanent porosity. Moreover, their corresponding desolvated (activated) samples SOF-9a and SOF-10a display enhanced adsorption and selectivity for CO2 over N2 and CH4. The structures of these activated compounds are well described by quantum chemistry calculations, which have allowed us to determine their mechanical properties, as well as identify their soft deformation modes and a large number of low-energy vibration modes. These results not only demonstrate an effective synthetic platform for porous organic molecular materials stabilized solely by primary hydrogen bonds but also suggest a viable means to build robust SOF materials with enhanced gas uptake capacity and selectivity.
The three FOXA transcription factors are mainly known for their roles in the liver. However, Foxa3-deficient mice become progressively sub/infertile due to germ cell loss. Because no data were ...available regarding the localization of the FOXA3 protein in the testis, immunohistochemistry was performed on mouse testis sections. In the fetal testis, a weak but consistent staining for FOXA3 is detected in the nucleus of Sertoli cells. In prepubertal and adult life, FOXA3 remains present in Sertoli cells of some but not all seminiferous tubules. FOXA3 is also detected in the nucleus of some peritubular cells. From postnatal day 20 onward, FOXA3 is strongly expressed in the nucleus of Leydig cells. To identify FOXA3 target genes in Leydig cells, MLTC-1 Leydig cells were transfected with a series of Leydig cell gene reporters in the presence of a FOXA3 expression vector. The platelet-derived growth factor receptor α (Pdgfra) promoter was significantly activated by FOXA3. The Pdgfra promoter contains three potential FOX elements and progressive 5' deletions and site-directed mutagenesis revealed that the most proximal element at -78 bp was sufficient to confer FOXA3 responsiveness. FOXA3 from Leydig cells could bind to this element in vitro (electrophoretic mobility shift assay) and was recruited to the proximal Pdgfra promoter in vivo (chromatin immunoprecipitation). Finally, endogenous Pdgfra messenger RNA levels were reduced in FOXA3-deficient MLTC-1 Leydig cells. Taken together, our data identify FOXA3 as a marker of the Sertoli cell lineage and of the adult Leydig cell population, and as a regulator of Pdgfra transcription in Leydig cells.