Yue Zhao

The research on Tibetan speech synthesis technology has been mainly focusing on single dialect, and thus there is a lack of research on Tibetan multidialect speech synthesis technology. This paper presents an end-to-end Tibetan multidialect speech synthesis model to realize a speech synthesis system which can be used to synthesize different Tibetan dialects. Firstly, Wylie transliteration scheme is used to convert the Tibetan text into the corresponding Latin letters, which effectively reduces the size of training corpus and the workload of front-end text processing. Secondly, a shared feature prediction network with a cyclic sequence-to-sequence structure is built, which maps the Latin transliteration vector of Tibetan character to Mel spectrograms and learns the relevant features of multidialect speech data. Thirdly, two dialect-specific WaveNet vocoders are combined with the feature prediction network, which synthesizes the Mel spectrum of Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral dialect into time-domain waveform, respectively. The model avoids using a large number of Tibetan dialect expertise for processing some time-consuming tasks, such as phonetic analysis and phonological annotation. Additionally, it can directly synthesize Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral speech on the existing text annotation. The experimental results show that the synthesized speech of Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral dialect based on our proposed method has better clarity and naturalness than the Tibetan monolingual model.

In this paper, we propose to incorporate the local attention in WaveNet-CTC to improve the performance of Tibetan speech recognition in multitask learning. With an increase in task number, such as simultaneous Tibetan speech content recognition, dialect identification, and speaker recognition, the accuracy rate of a single WaveNet-CTC decreases on speech recognition. Inspired by the attention mechanism, we introduce the local attention to automatically tune the weights of feature frames in a window and pay different attention on context information for multitask learning. The experimental results show that our method improves the accuracies of speech recognition for all Tibetan dialects in three-task learning, compared with the baseline model. Furthermore, our method significantly improves the accuracy for low-resource dialect by 5.11% against the specific-dialect model.

The mechanical environment crucially influences many cell functions 1. However, it remains largely mysterious how mechanical stimuli are transmitted into biochemical signals. Src is known to regulate the integrin-cytoskeleton interaction2, which is essential for the transduction of mechanical stimuli3-5. Using fluorescent resonance energy transfer, here we develop a genetically encoded Src reporter that enables the imaging and quantification of spatio-temporal activation of Src in live cells. We introduced a local mechanical stimulation to human umbilical vein endothelial cells by applying laser-tweezer traction on fibronectin-coated beads adhering to the cells. Using the Src reporter, we observed a rapid distal Src activation and a slower directional wave propagation of Src activation along the plasma membrane. This wave propagated away from the stimulation site with a speed of 18.1 ± 1.7 nm s-1. This force-induced directional and long-range activation of Src was abolished by the disruption of actin filaments or microtubules. Our reporter has thus made it possible to monitor mechanotransduction in live cells with spatio-temporal characterization. We find that the transmission of mechanically induced Src activation is a dynamic process that directs signals via the cytoskeleton to spatial destinations.

The traction forces exerted by an adherent cell on a substrate have been studied only in the two-dimensions tangential to substrate surface. We developed a novel technique to measure the three-dimensional traction forces exerted by live bovine aortic endothelial cells on polyacrylamide deformable substrate. On 3D images acquired by confocal microscopy, displacements were determined with image-processing programs, and traction forces in tangential and normal directions were computed by finite element method. BAECs generated traction force in normal direction with an order of magnitude comparable to Txy. Tz is upward at the cell edge and downward under the nucleus, changing continuously with a sign reversal between cell edge and nucleus edge. The method was evaluated regarding accuracy and precision of displacement measurements, effects of FE mesh size, displacement noises, and simple bootstrapping. These results provide new insights into cell-matrix interactions in terms of spatial and temporal variations in traction forces in 3D. This technique can be applied to study live cells to assess their biomechanical dynamics in conjunction with biochemical and functional activities, for investigating cellular functions in health and disease.

Background: Optical Doppler tomography combines laser Doppler flowmetry with optical coherence tomography to obtain high-resolution images of blood flow in human skin in situ and in real time. Observations: We present a case in which ODT was used on a patient with a port-wine stain birth-mark to document the change of blood flow in response to laser therapy. It might be possible to use ODT blood flow measurements in situ to assist in assessing the efficacy of laser PWS therapy. If partial restoration of flow occurs immediately or shortly after laser exposure, indicative of reperfusion due to inadequate blood vessel injury, the PWS can be retreated using higher light dosages. Retreatment is continued until the measured Doppler shift is zero due to a permanent reduction in blood flow, indicative of irreversible microthrombus formation in the PWS vessels. Conclusions: We have demonstrated that ODT may be used for noninvasive imaging of blood vessels in PWS skin. Moreover, ODT will potentially allow laser therapy to be optimized on an individual patient basis by providing a fast, semiquantitative evaluation of the efficacy of PWS laser therapy in situ and in real time.

In China, neither reproduction and parenthood by lesbian couples nor their marital status are regulated or protected by law. In 2020, the first legal dispute in China involving a lesbian couple over custody of their joint baby was heard in court. This study examines the legal and ethical issues that lesbian couples confront when they decide to give birth to a child of their own. These challenges begin with regulatory restrictions on their lawful access to assisted reproductive technology and extend to gaps in the legal establishment of parenthood. We found that the lack of access to legitimate reproductive assistance for lesbian couples in China has caused them to make efforts to circumvent laws and regulations to have a child. However, the legislative gaps later led to ethical dilemmas when resolving disputes over parenthood. This study discusses different accounts of establishing and determining natural parenthood in China and concludes by pointing out the urgent need for change in legislative and sociocultural attitudes toward both assisted reproductive technology and same‐sex relationships, mapping the way forward for lesbian couples to obtain better protection of procreation and parenthood before their marriage is culturally accepted and finally legalized.

This research explored the feasibility of using multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis in novel combination with other techniques to study comprehension of epistemic adverbs expressing doubt and certainty (e.g., evidently, obviously, probably ) as they relate to health communication in clinical settings. In Study 1, Australian English speakers performed a dissimilarity-rating task with sentence pairs containing the target stimuli, presented as “doctors' opinions.” Ratings were analyzed using a combination of cultural consensus analysis (factor analysis across participants), weighted-data classical-MDS, and cluster analysis. Analyses revealed strong within-community consistency for a 3-dimensional semantic space solution that took into account individual differences, strong statistical acceptability of the MDS results in terms of stress and explained variance, and semantic configurations that were interpretable in terms of linguistic analyses of the target adverbs. The results confirmed the feasibility of using MDS in this context. Study 2 replicated the results with Canadian English speakers on the same task. Semantic analyses and stress decomposition analysis were performed on the Australian and Canadian data sets, revealing similarities and differences between the two groups. Overall, the results support using MDS to study comprehension of words critical for health communication, including in future studies, for example, second language speaking patients and/or practitioners. More broadly, the results indicate that the techniques described should be promising for comprehension studies in many communicative domains, in both clinical settings and beyond, and including those targeting other aspects of language and focusing on comparisons across different speech communities.

DNA–protein interactions are fundamental to many biological processes, including the regulation of gene expression. Determining the binding affinities of transcription factors (TFs) to different DNA sequences allows the quantitative modeling of transcriptional regulatory networks and has been a significant technical challenge in molecular biology for many years. A recent paper by Maerkl and Quake1 demonstrated the use of microfluidic technology for the analysis of DNA–protein interactions. An array of short DNA sequences was spotted onto a glass slide, which was then covered with a microfluidic device allowing each spot to be within a chamber into which the flow of materials was controlled by valves. By trapping the DNA–protein complexes on the surface and measuring their concentrations microscopically, they could determine the binding affinity to a large number of DNA sequences that were varied systematically. They studied four TFs from the basic helix–loop–helix family of proteins, all of which bind to E‐box sites with the consensus CAnnTG (where “n” can be any base), and showed that variations in affinity for different sites allows each TF to regulate different genes. BioEssays 29:717–721, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.