Publications

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - An agricultural field in the San Joaquin Sacramento Delta. The field is a mix of organic peat and sediments and minerals from old river channels

Abstract As with most herpesviruses, CMVs encode viral genes that inhibit Ag presentation to CD8 T cells (VIPRs). VIPR function has been assumed to be essential for CMV to establish its characteristic lifetime infection of its host. We compared infection of C57BL/6 mice with wild-type murine CMV (MCMV) and a virus lacking each of MCMV’s three known VIPRs: m4, m6, and m152. During acute infection, there was very little difference between the two viruses with respect to the kinetics of viral replication and clearance, or in the size and kinetics of the virus-specific CD8 T cell response. During chronic infection, a large, effector memory, virus-specific CD8 T cell population (CD8lowCD62L−CD11c+NKG2A+) was maintained in both infections; the size and phenotype of the CD8 T cell response to both viruses was remarkably similar. The characteristic effector memory phenotype of the CD8 T cells suggested that both wild-type and Δm4+m6+m152 virus continued to present Ag to CD8 T cells during the chronic phase of infection. During the chronic phase of infection, MCMV cannot be isolated from immunocompetent mice. However, upon immunosuppression, both Δm4+m6+m152 and wild-type virus could be reactivated from mice infected for 6 wk. Thus, restoring the ability of CD8 T cells to detect MCMV had little apparent effect on the course of MCMV infection and on the CD8 T cell response to it. These results challenge the notion that VIPR function is necessary for CMV persistence in the host.

ABSTRACT The traditional preparation methods for nitrocellulose (NC) emulsions have several drawbacks, such as high emulsifier content, complicated preparation processes, and the requirement for high‐energy‐consuming emulsification equipment. To address these issues, in this paper, we successfully synthesized an emulsifier‐free NC film‐forming coating using a simple, low‐energy solvent‐displacement method for the first time. Two kinds of plasticizers, epoxidized soybean oil (ESO) and dibutyl phthalate (DBP), were incorporated into the preparation process of NC. It was found that an NC‐based aqueous coating system with superior film‐forming properties could be obtained when the DBP and ESO contents reached 70% and 100% of the NC mass fraction in the system, respectively. The micromorphology, chemical structure, thermal properties, and water vapor sorption behavior of the nanocomposites were systematically investigated by field scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier‐transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, differential scanning calorimetry, thermogravimetric analysis, and dynamic vapor sorption technology. The results demonstrated that the obtained films exhibited stable thermal decomposition, a dense and uniform structure, and low hygroscopicity (their EMC values at 90% RH were all below 1%). The accelerated aging test revealed that under the thermal shock of 50°C, the film prepared with ESO assistance showed excellent aging resistance, with its chemical structure and mass remaining essentially unchanged. In contrast, the film prepared with DBP assistance exhibited a mass decrease in the early aging stage. In addition, based on the emulsion film‐forming principle, the drying kinetics of the coating system were investigated in detail, and the influences of temperature on the drying process were investigated. We believe that this study offers valuable references for the development of eco‐friendly cellulose‐based aqueous coatings for food packaging and other applications.

Structural integration is increasing among medical groups, but whether these changes yield care that is more integrated remains unclear. We explored the relationships between structural integration characteristics of 144 medical groups and perceptions of integrated care among their patients. Patients' perceptions were measured by a validated national survey of 3,067 Medicare beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions across six domains that reflect knowledge and support of, and communication with, the patient. Medical groups' structural characteristics were taken from the National Study of Physician Organizations and included practice size, specialty mix, technological capabilities, and care management processes. Patients' survey responses were most favorable for the domain of test result communication and least favorable for the domain of provider support for medication and home health management. Medical groups' characteristics were not consistently associated with patients' perceptions of integrated care. However, compared to patients of primary care groups, patients of multispecialty groups had strong favorable perceptions of medical group staff knowledge of patients' medical histories. Opportunities exist to improve patient care, but structural integration of medical groups might not be sufficient for delivering care that patients perceive as integrated.

State-of-the-art approaches to ObjectGoal navigation rely on reinforcement learning and typically require significant computational resources and time for learning. We propose Potential functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free learning (PONI), a modular approach that disentangles the skills of `where to look?' for an object and `how to navigate to (x, y)?'. Our key insight is that `where to look?' can be treated purely as a perception problem, and learned without environment interactions. To address this, we propose a network that predicts two complementary potential functions conditioned on a semantic map and uses them to decide where to look for an unseen object. We train the potential function network using supervised learning on a passive dataset of top-down semantic maps, and integrate it into a modular framework to perform ObjectGoal navigation. Experiments on Gibson and Matterport3D demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art for ObjectGoal navigation while incurring up to 1,600x less computational cost for training. Code and pre-trained models are available: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/poni/

The traditional goal of computer vision, to reconstruct, or recover properties of, the scene has recently been challenged by advocates of a new purposive approach in which the vision problem is defined in terms of the goals of an active agent. In the starkest light the debate can be characterized as one about the role of explicit representations. The extreme traditionalists strive for a detailed representation of the 3D world while the other extreme adopts a strict behaviorist stance which eschews representations in favor of "direct sensing." This panel will explore the roles of action, representation, and purpose in computer vision and, in doing so, will hopefully discover areas of agreement. 1 Panel Summary What should be the goal of computer vision? The traditional view (as exemplified by the work of Marr [1982]) poses the problem as: The description of the three dimensional world in terms of the surfaces and objects present and their physical properties and spatial relationships....