We present several algorithms that aim to advance the state-of-the-art in reinforcement learning and planning algorithms. One key idea is to transfer knowledge across problems by representing it using local features. This idea is used to speed up a dynamic programming based generalized policy iteration. We then present a control approach that uses a library of trajectories to establish a contro...

Design becomes more and more the art of bringing together expertise and experts from different domains in creating future products. Synthetical knowledge and hands-on skills in design, especially in industrial design, is often implicit, hardly captured and modeled for remote education. The need of transferring implicit design knowledge using computer mediated learning tools, provides not only t...

We propose the idea of transferring common-sense knowledge from source categories to target categories for scalable object detection. In our setting, the training data for the source categories have bounding box annotations, while those for the target categories only have image-level annotations. Current state-of-the-art approaches focus on image-level visual or semantic similarity to adapt a d...

Category classifiers trained from a large corpus of annotated data are widely accepted as the sources for (hypothesis) transfer learning. Sources generated in this way are tied to a particular set of categories, limiting their transferability across a wide spectrum of target categories. In this paper, we address this largelyoverlooked yet fundamental source problem by both introducing a systema...

Background Sarcomas are cancers that arise from tissues of mesenchymal origin and there has been limited improvement in treatments over the last 30 years. The Warburg effect is a widespread metabolic phenotype of cancer, where glycolysis is favoured despite the presence of oxygen. Dichloroacetate (DCA) is a pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK) inhibitor in clinical use that can reverse the Warbu...

We previously showed that insulin has a profound effect to suppress pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK) 4 expression in rat skeletal muscle. In the present study, we examined whether insulin's effect on PDK4 expression is impaired in acute insulin-resistant states and, if so, whether this change is accompanied by decreased insulin's effects to stimulate Akt and forkhead box class O (FOXO) 1 pho...

Starvation and experimental diabetes induce a stable increase in pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK) activity in skeletal muscle, which is largely due to a selective upregulation of PDK-4 expression. Increased free fatty acid (FFA) level has been suggested to be responsible for the upregulation. Because these metabolic states are also characterized by insulin deficiency, the present study was d...

Dichloroacetate (DCA), an inhibitor of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK), has been recently demonstrated as a promising nontoxic antineoplastic agent that promotes apoptosis of cancer cells. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the antitumor effect of DCA combined with 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) on colorectal cancer (CRC) cells. Four human CRC cell lines were treated with DCA or 5-FU, or ...

The pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (PDC) is inactivated in many tissues during starvation and diabetes to conserve three-carbon compounds for gluconeogenesis. This is achieved by an increase in the extent of PDC phosphorylation caused in part by increased pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK) activity due to increased PDK expression. This study examined whether altered pyruvate dehydrogenase phos...

Interleukin (IL)-6 is released from skeletal muscle (SkM) during exercise and has been shown to affect hepatic metabolism. It is, however, unknown whether SkM IL-6 is involved in the regulation of exercise training-induced counteraction of changes in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in the liver in response to high-fat diet (HFD) feeding. Male SkM-specific IL-6 KO (MKO) and Floxed mice were su...