It is well established that human ES cells (hESC), and iPS cells, can gain chromosomal abnormalities during prolonged culture. These changes include the gain of whole or partial chromosomes as well as structure rearrangements. Karyotypically abnormal hESC often show signs of neoplastic transformation and defects in differentiation, so that they may pose significant dangers for their potential use in regenerative medicine, while these changes may affect their use in other applications including toxicology, drug discovery and disease modelling. It seems likely that those chromosomal changes that involve rearrangements of the DNA result from defects during DNA synthesis in S phase of the cell cycle. However, many changes involve the gain of whole chromosomes, strongly suggesting that these changes arise from defects at mitosis resulting in chromosomal non-dysjunction and unequal distributions of chromosome to the daughter cells. It is likely that the mitotic machinery, particularly the spindle assembly checkpoint, which governs the equal separation of the sister chromatids, is different in ES cells from somatic cells, reflecting specific requirements in the early embryo and it is reported that checkpoint-apoptosis uncoupling occurs in human and mouse ESCs, but the underlying molecular mechanism remains unexplored. In this project we will focus on the expression and role of the Aurora kinases which are key regulators of cell division. They are often highly expressed by cancer cells and in our previous studies we also found that they are also enriched in early mammalian embryos and embryonic stem cells. This enrichment may be associated with the fast cell division rate of embryonic cells, but may also make these cells susceptible to the mis-regulation of the mitotic checkpoint resulting in the accumulation of chromosomal abnormality. In particular, Aurora kinase C, an Aurora kinase normally expressed in germ cells, has overlapping as well as distinct functions from Aurora B during mouse preimplantation development and the presence of Aurora C may contribute to the unique properties of mitotic checkpoint in hESCs. We will use small molecule inhibition, siRNA knocking-down and mRNA over expression to disrupt the function of Aurora B and C and study the short-term and long-term effects on hESC apoptosis, self-renewal and differentiation. The results will provide insights into the function of mitotic checkpoints in hESCs and help inform approaches to reduce or prevent the occurrence of karyotype abnormality in hESCs and improve their genome stability.

An age of globalization makes it more than ever urgent to ask: what processes of transmission mediate literary and cultural exchanges between China and the West? China's complex interactions with its others are key to understanding its relation to modernity. Humanities scholarship on the translations and transformations involved in such interactions have diverged. Some have posed, from a Western point of view, the alterity of China. Others have focused on the negotiations of difference and equivalence involved in any cultural encounter, and on forms of transmission enabled or transformed by these negotiations. \n\nThe Network will focus on the oppositions and relations through which Chinese modernity has been shaped and imagined. The historical origins of 'the modern' have been variously located in western formations: Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, or the emergence of an Avant-Garde. Defining the modern, however, is not only a question of periodization, but also of geography. As Lydia Liu observes, 'The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity... The fact that one can speak about a varied range of modernities suggests an extraordinary faith in the translatability of modernity and its universal ethos.' \n\nAt the heart of this problem are specific acts, sites, and theories of translation; relationships between universal and particular; and the limits or possibilities of cultural commensurability. Whether at the level of language and culture, or concepts, technologies and techniques, translation defines the field of Chinese modernism and modernity. The processes of transmission include literary and visual translation, as well as contextualization and reception, but also raise issues of translatability in the broadest sense. The study of modernity in relation to cultural transmission has proved increasingly attractive not only to scholars of literary and cultural studies in China and the West, but to translation theorists, critical theorists, and theorists of the visual. \n\nThe activities of the Network will be organized into three strands: \n\nTranslating Modernism: Scholars working on the relationship between Western and Chinese modernisms increasingly seek to go beyond the question of what in Chinese modernism corresponds to or derives from European modernism.\n\nTranslating Theory: The take-up of western post-modern cultural and critical theory in China since the 1990s has been dramatic, yet poses questions about its translation into new contexts.\n\nTranslating Culture: Contemporary Chinese artistic and cultural production has never been more accessible to global audiences, but issues of commensurability arise in both elite and popular culture.\n\nThe rationale of the Network is to increase UK research capacity into modern and contemporary Chinese culture. While work on cultural transmission to and from China has been vibrant in the US academy over the past fifteen years, the field remains comparatively weak in the UK. The aim of the three-way Network between CRASSH, the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, and Yale's Council on East Asian Studies is to create and sustain relationships with academics in both China and the US, where the field is further advanced. The Network will play a key role in developing research capacity through a programme of workshops, seminars, visiting fellowships, and two major international conferences in Cambridge and Beijing. \n\nIts participants have expertise in literary theory, cultural studies, translation theory, modernism, and contemporary Chinese culture, including visual culture. The activities of the Network will be of interest to academics and practitioners in the fields of comparative literature, cultural studies, critical and cultural theory, translation studies, and Chinese studies.

This project represents joint work between 12 leading Chinese Universities, and several other invited key partners in the UK and US. The Internet, and other large-scale databases, form a significant resource of what may be termed "visual media": images, videos, 3D shape models, and so on. Internet text searches usually produce useful results. However, it can be much more difficult to find visual media, e.g. videos with specific content, or images similar to a picture in one's mind's eye. This is partly due to the fact that most image search is based on text inputs, and partly due to the difficulty of classifying pictures. It is easy for humans to "know" what an image contains, but image understanding by computer requires many tricky tasks - splitting an image into separate objects, and analysing their colour, their shape, and many other attributes. Better solutions to search of visual media would enable many applications in addition to search itself, and we will also look at one of them - the re-use of existing visual media when creating new visual media. This project has four main goals. The first is to investigate new approaches to structural analysis of visual media. This will include devising methods to find salient information (for example, what is the main object? what is irrelevant background? how is this object composed of parts?), and methods which process the information on different scales (small details may be just as important as overall shape, for example). The aim is to come up with hierarchical descriptions of the important information in visual media. The second is to find efficient new approaches to comparing, classifying and searching visual media, based on the above hierarchical descriptions. We will also look at how sketches can be used as a much more powerful means than text of allowing users to describe what they want to find when searching. The third area to be considered is editing and resynthesis of visual media. Structural analysis will provide more meaningful ways to select parts of an image than just, for example, all parts of the scene with a certain colour. In turn, this will simplify the process of editing visual media. Users will be able to apply consistent editing to scene elements with similar meaning (e.g. the user controls bending of one finger, and the computer applies a similar bend to the rest of the fingers of a hand, despite minor shape differences). More powerful search will also allow elements to be rapidly retrieved from visual media databases or the Internet to be combined into new scenes, or to be included within existing images, with suitable adjustment for different lighting, etc. When video is processed, further considerations will be needed to ensure results are consistent over time, and smoothly vary as time progresses; the vast amounts of data involved in video processing make this a challenging problem. The final area of work concerns the use of machine learning techniques to assist with all of the previous goals. The aim here is to automatically learn to recognize complex patterns, permitting software to make intelligent decisions based on visual data. Ultimately, a careful balance must be struck in which the user is firmly in control of the creative process, but the computer makes it easy for the user to produce the desired results.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The proposed research covers a very wide range of topics in processing of digital geometry, images and video sequences, being funded to a total of 24,000,000 Chinese Yuan (about 1,600,000) by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.The topics to be investigated will includeShape, image and video understanding, using neural networks and other ideas based on the structure of the human visual system, with an emphasis on high-performance systemsThe development of mathematical tools which are necessary for processing geometry and image and video understanding, allowing computers to learn about things they see, and to then classify new examples shown to them later. The key issue here is the huge amount of information present in the large numbers of pixels present in images, and even more so in video.How analogies to the human visual system can be used to help develop systems which can understand images and video. This includes such ideas as how to separate the big picture from the small details, using understanding at different geometric scales, and how to make methods which can automatically cluster related information. Further key issues are how geometric and visual information should be acquired and represented so that it can be processed effectively and efficiently to answer queries about content.How key features of geometric shapes, images and video can be represented, stored, compressed and encrypted. Particularly important are issues of digital rights management, including embedding invisible watermarks into visual data to enable proof of ownership, and the ability to provide content-aware security for geometric models, images and video.Other goals include new approaches to capturing and editing geometric models, images and video, including for example video blending.