Multiple Context Learning Networks for Visual Question Answering

In recently years, some visual question answering (VQA) methods that emphasize the simultaneous understanding of both the context of image and question have been proposed. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they fail to explore a more comprehensive and generalized context learning tactics. To address this issue, we propose a novel Multiple Context Learning Networks (MCLN) to model the multiple contexts for VQA. Three kinds of contexts are investigated, namely visual context, textual context and a special visual-textual context that ignored by previous methods. Moreover, three corresponding context learning modules are proposed. These modules endow image and text representations with context-aware information based on a uniform context learning strategy. And they work together to form a multiple context learning layer (MCL). Such MCL can be stacked in depth and which describe high-level context information by associating intra-modal contexts with inter-modal context. On the VQA v2.0 datasets, the proposed model achieves 71.05% and 71.48% on test-dev set and test-std set respectively, and gains better performance than the previous state-of-the-art methods. In addition, extensive ablation studies have been carried out to examine the effectiveness of the proposed method.

COVID-19 and Vaccination Campaigns as “Western Plots” in Pakistan: Government Policies, (Geo-)politics, Local Perceptions, and Beliefs

Vaccination encounters multiple context-specific challenges—socio-cultural, economic, and political—that substantially affect its uptake. Likewise, natural disasters and health emergencies considerably impact immunization endeavors, such as the coronaviurs 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has overwhelmed the entire world. It was already anticipated that the pandemic would severely affect Pakistan's vaccination programs due to interruptions in routine vaccination and the overstretching of healthcare systems. Consequently, there are anticipations of outbreaks of other vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs). Yet empirical evidence is missing. Drawing on qualitative research, this article focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on routine vaccination programs in Pakistan. Our data come from a small village located in Pakistan's Sindh province where local people refused the routine polio vaccine that was stopped for a while, then resumed in July 2020. They suspected both the vaccine and COVID-19 to be a “Western plot.” We argue that these perceptions and practices can be seen against the backdrop of economic, socio-cultural, and (geo)political forces, which are encoded in “societal memory.” Not only is there a need to reverse the significant impacts of COVID-19 on routine vaccination by arranging supplementary immunization activities (SIAs), but also the government must deal with other pressing issues that affect the vaccination programs in the country.

Parallel representation of context and multiple context-dependent values in ventro-medial prefrontal cortex

Value representations in ventromedial prefrontal-cortex (vmPFC) are known to guide decisions. But how preferable available options are depends on one's current task. Goal-directed behavior, which involves changing between different task-contexts, therefore requires to know how valuable the same options will be in different contexts. We tested whether multiple task-dependent values influence behavior and asked if they are integrated into a single value representation or are co-represented in parallel within vmPFC signals. Thirty five participants alternated between tasks in which stimulus color or motion predicted rewards. Our results provide behavioral and neural evidence for co-activation of both contextually-relevant and -irrelevant values, and suggest a link between multivariate neural representations and the influence of the irrelevant context and its associated value on behavior. Importantly, current task context could be decoded from the same region, and better context-decodability was associated with stronger (relevant-)value representations. Evidence for choice conflicts was found only in the motor cortex, where the competing values are likely resolved into action.

Context-driven Bengali Text Generation using Conditional Language Model

Text generation is a rapidly evolving field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with larger Language models proposed very often setting new state-of-the-art. These models are exorbitantly effective in learning the representation of words and their internal coherence in a particular language. However, an established context-driven, end to end text generation model is very rare, even more so for the Bengali language. In this paper, we have proposed a Bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) based architecture that simulates the conditional language model or the decoder portion of the sequence to sequence (seq2seq) model and is further conditioned upon the target context vectors. We have explored several ways of combining multiple context words into a fixed dimensional vector representation that is extracted from the same GloVe language model which is used to generate the embedding matrix. We have used beam search optimization to generate the sentence with the maximum cumulative log probability score. In addition, we have proposed a human scoring based evaluation metric and used it to compare the performance of the model with unidirectional LSTM and GRU networks. Empirical results prove that the proposed model performs exceedingly well in producing meaningful outcomes depicting the target context. The experiment leads to an architecture that can be applied to an extensive domain of context-driven text generation based applications and which is also a key contribution to the NLP based literature of the Bengali language.

Context-dependent roles of YAP/TAZ in stem cell fates and cancer

Hippo effectors YAP and TAZ control cell fate and survival through various mechanisms, including transcriptional regulation of key genes. However, much of this research has been marked by conflicting results, as well as controversy over whether YAP and TAZ are redundant. A substantial portion of the discordance stems from their contradictory roles in stem cell self-renewal vs. differentiation and cancer cell survival vs. apoptosis. In this review, we present an overview of the multiple context-dependent functions of YAP and TAZ in regulating cell fate decisions in stem cells and organoids, as well as their mechanisms of controlling programmed cell death pathways in cancer.

Designing an Amazing Youth Experience with Headstream (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Youth Program Coordinator at Headstream having 7+ years of experience working with youth in multiple context, including but not limited to, grassroots community building, classrooms, and virtual programming. OBJECTIVE Commenting on the necessary components to designing with, working with, and creating work with young people around mental wellness. METHODS Commentary. RESULTS Commentary. CONCLUSIONS Commentary.