Among major vertebrate groups, anurans (frogs and toads) are understudied with regard to their visual systems, and little is known about variation among species that differ in ecology. We sampled North American anurans representing diverse evolutionary and life histories that likely possess visual systems adapted to meet different ecological needs. Using standard molecular techniques, visual opsin genes, which encode the protein component of visual pigments, were obtained from anuran retinas. Additionally, we extracted the visual opsins from publicly available genome and transcriptome assemblies, further increasing the phylogenetic and ecological diversity of our dataset to 33 species in total. We found that anurans consistently express four visual opsin genes (
- PAR ID:
- 10191708
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- HotMobile '20: The 21st International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 74 to 79
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract RH1 ,LWS ,SWS1 , andSWS2 , but notRH2 ) even though reported photoreceptor complements vary widely among species. The proteins encoded by these genes showed considerable sequence variation among species, including at sites known to shift the spectral sensitivity of visual pigments in other vertebrates and had conserved substitutions that may be related to dim‐light adaptation. Using molecular evolutionary analyses of selection (dN/dS) we found significant evidence for positive selection at a subset of sites in the dim‐light rod opsin geneRH1 and the long wavelength sensitive cone opsinLWS . The function of sites inferred to be under positive selection are largely unknown, but a few are likely to affect spectral sensitivity and other visual pigment functions based on proximity to previously identified sites in other vertebrates. We also found the first evidence of visual opsin duplication in an amphibian with the duplication of theLWS gene in the African bullfrog, which had distinctLWS copies on the sex chromosomes suggesting the possibility of sex‐specific visual adaptation. Taken together, our results indicate that ecological factors, such as habitat and life history, as well as behavior, may be driving changes to anuran visual systems. -
more » « less
Abstract In-situ visual observations of marine organisms is crucial to developing behavioural understandings and their relations to their surrounding ecosystem. Typically, these observations are collected via divers, tags, and remotely-operated or human-piloted vehicles. Recently, however, autonomous underwater vehicles equipped with cameras and embedded computers with GPU capabilities are being developed for a variety of applications, and in particular, can be used to supplement these existing data collection mechanisms where human operation or tags are more difficult. Existing approaches have focused on using fully-supervised tracking methods, but labelled data for many underwater species are severely lacking. Semi-supervised trackers may offer alternative tracking solutions because they require less data than fully-supervised counterparts. However, because there are not existing realistic underwater tracking datasets, the performance of semi-supervised tracking algorithms in the marine domain is not well understood. To better evaluate their performance and utility, in this paper we provide (1) a novel dataset specific to marine animals located at
http://warp.whoi.edu/vmat/ , (2) an evaluation of state-of-the-art semi-supervised algorithms in the context of underwater animal tracking, and (3) an evaluation of real-world performance through demonstrations using a semi-supervised algorithm on-board an autonomous underwater vehicle to track marine animals in the wild. -
more » « less
Abstract Neuronal ensembles are groups of neurons with correlated activity associated with sensory, motor, and behavioral functions. To explore how ensembles encode information, we investigated responses of visual cortical neurons in awake mice using volumetric two-photon calcium imaging during visual stimulation. We identified neuronal ensembles employing an unsupervised model-free algorithm and, besides neurons activated by the visual stimulus (termed “onsemble”), we also find neurons that are specifically inactivated (termed “offsemble”). Offsemble neurons showed faster calcium decay during stimuli, suggesting selective inhibition. In response to visual stimuli, each ensemble (onsemble+offsemble) exhibited small trial-to-trial variability, high orientation selectivity, and superior predictive accuracy for visual stimulus orientation, surpassing the sum of individual neuron activity. Thus, the combined selective activation and inactivation of cortical neurons enhances visual encoding as an emergent and distributed neural code.
-
Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the development of visual analytics systems dedicated to addressing urban issues. These systems distill intricate urban analysis workflows into intuitive, interactive visual representations and interfaces, enabling users to explore, understand, and derive insights from large and complex data, including street-level imagery, street networks, and building geometries. Developing urban visual analytics systems, however, is a challenging endeavor that requires considerable programming expertise and interaction between various multidisciplinary stakeholders. This situation often leads to monolithic and isolated prototypes that are hard to reproduce, combine, or extend. Concurrently, there has been an increase in the availability of general and urban-specific toolkits, frameworks, and authoring tools that are open source and abstract away the need to implement low-level visual analytics functionalities. This paper provides a hierarchical taxonomy of urban visual analytics systems to contextualize how they are usually designed, implemented, and evaluated. We develop this taxonomy across three distinct levels (i.e., dimensions, categories, and tags), juxtaposing visualization with analytics, data, and system dimensions. We then assess the extent to which current open-source toolkits, frameworks, and authoring tools can effectively support the development of components tailored to urban visual analytics, identifying their strengths and limitations in addressing the unique challenges posed by urban data. In doing so, we offer a roadmap that can guide the effective employment of existing resources and chart a pathway for developing and refining future systemsmore » « less
-
RFID technologies are making their way into numerous applications, including inventory management, supply chain, product tracking, transportation, logistics, etc. One important application is to automatically detect anomalies in RFID systems, such as missing tags, unknown tags, or cloned tags due to theft, management error, or targeted attacks. Existing solutions are all designed to detect a certain type of RFID anomalies, but lack a general functionality for detecting different types of anomalies. This paper attempts to propose a general framework for anomaly detection in RFID systems, thereby reducing the complexity for readers and tags to implement different anomaly-detection protocols. We introduce a new concept of differential Bloom filter (DBF), which turns physical-layer signal data into a segmented Bloom filter that encodes the IDs of abnormal tags. As a case study, we propose a protocol that builds DBF for identifying all missing tags in an efficient way. We implement a prototype for missing-tag identification using USRP and WISP tags to verify the effectiveness our protocol, and use large-scale simulations for performance evaluation. The results show that our solution can significantly improve time efficiency, when comparing with the best existing work.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3376897.3377854
