Virtual reality (VR) users often encounter interruptions, posing challenges to maintaining real-world awareness during immersive experiences. The Passthrough feature in VR headsets allows users to view their physical surroundings without removing the headset. However, when interruptions come from the rear, users need to turn their heads to see the real world, which can lead to negative experiences in VR. Study 1, conducted through semi-structured interviews involving 13 participants, found that users are less likely to use Passthrough for rear interruptions due to large head-turning movements, which cause inconvenience, increase the risk of motion sickness, and reduce the experience. Building on these findings, we introduced three Passthrough techniques in Study 2 for displaying the rear view in front of the user: Full Rear Passthrough + Pause (FRPP), Rear Passthrough Window (RPW), and Rear Passthrough AR (RPAR). Compared to the Baseline method that requires head-turning, all three systems reduced physical and temporal demands, alleviated disorientation caused by motion sickness, and provided a better user experience for managing rear interruptions. Among these, FRPP and RPAR were the most preferred. These findings provide valuable insights for future VR design, emphasizing the need for solutions that effectively manage rear interruptions while maintaining user comfort and experience.

MOTIVATION: Single-cell Hi-C (scHi-C) technologies have significantly advanced our understanding of the 3D genome organization. However, scHi-C data are often sparse and noisy, leading to substantial computational challenges in downstream analyses. RESULTS: In this study, we introduce SHICEDO, a novel deep-learning model specifically designed to enhance scHi-C contact matrices by imputing missing or sparsely captured chromatin contacts through a generative adversarial framework. SHICEDO leverages the unique structural characteristics of scHi-C matrices to derive customized features that enable effective data enhancement. Additionally, the model incorporates a channel-wise attention mechanism to mitigate the over-smoothing issue commonly associated with scHi-C enhancement methods. Through simulations and real-data applications, we demonstrate that SHICEDO outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior quantitative and qualitative results. Moreover, SHICEDO enhances key structural features in scHi-C data, thus enabling more precise delineation of chromatin structures such as A/B compartments, TAD-like domains, and chromatin loops. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: SHICEDO is publicly available at https://github.com/wmalab/SHICEDO.

Matrix-variable optimization is a generalization of vector-variable optimization and has been found to have many important applications. To reduce computation time and storage requirement, this article presents two matrix-form recurrent neural networks (RNNs), one continuous-time model and another discrete-time model, for solving matrix-variable optimization problems with linear constraints. The two proposed matrix-form RNNs have low complexity and are suitable for parallel implementation in terms of matrix state space. The proposed continuous-time matrix-form RNN can significantly generalize existing continuous-time vector-form RNN. The proposed discrete-time matrix-form RNN can be effectively used in blind image restoration, where the storage requirement and computational cost are largely reduced. Theoretically, the two proposed matrix-form RNNs are guaranteed to be globally convergent to the optimal solution under mild conditions. Computed results show that the proposed matrix-form RNN-based algorithm is superior to related vector-form RNN and matrix-form RNN-based algorithms, in terms of computation time.

SUMMARY: HiCube is a lightweight web application for interactive visualization and exploration of diverse types of genomics data at multiscale resolutions. Especially, HiCube displays synchronized views of Hi-C contact maps and 3D genome structures with user-friendly annotation and configuration tools, thereby facilitating the study of 3D genome organization and function. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: HiCube is implemented in Javascript and can be installed via NPM. The source code is freely available at GitHub (https://github.com/wmalab/HiCube).

Blind image deblurring has been a challenging issue due to the unknown blur and computation problem. Recently, the matrix-variable optimization method successfully demonstrates its potential advantages in computation. This paper proposes an effective matrix-variable optimization method for blind image deblurring. Blur kernel matrix is exactly decomposed by a direct SVD technique. The blur kernel and original image are well estimated by minimizing a matrix-variable optimization problem with blur kernel constraints. A matrix-type alternative iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the matrix-variable optimization problem. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed blind image deblurring method is much superior to the state-of-the-art blind image deblurring algorithms in terms of image quality and computation time.

Reliability is an important metric for measuring the quality of software. Many methods have been proposed for online predicting and improving software reliability, but most of them have the following weakness: they are not able to predict software reliability on different time intervals and to locate the faulty components that cause the declining of the reliability either. This paper proposes a new method for online improvement of reliability of service composition. We use monitored failure data at ports of services to predict the reliabilities of service composition on different time intervals. If the predicted reliability is lower than the expected value, then we locate the faulty components that cause the declining of the reliability by using an improved spectrum-fault-localization (SFL) technique. The system can be automatically reconfigured to improve the system reliability by adding a component replica or replacing the faulty component. An Online Shop example is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.