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The Jam Station is a collaborative musical experience (CME), with embedded sensors to detect, evaluate, and reinforce collaboration among players of all skill levels. The system is also gamified, consisting of four instruments that face a centrally located, vertically oriented, display that visualizes various game states. Playing any of the instruments affect the game as musical collaboration is assessed and visualized on the display. The display also includes a “progress bar’’ which fills up the more players collaborate musically, and to “win’’ the game, the progress bar must be full, initiating a multi-color light show for the players. By creating an environment focused primarily on collaboration, we aim to support collaborative music-making for musicians of all skill levels.

Music improvisation, which is defined as creatively and playfully exchanging musical concepts, is often associated with expert musicianship and musical skill. While there are numerous methods for live scoring improvisation, there are not many resources aimed at assisting novice performance during improvisational activities. Jam Tabs is a notation system that helps coordinate idiomatic musical expression for novice musicians using color-coded instruments and a colored visual display. Jam Tabs utilizes a seven-color notation system, LED cubes and a colored piano keyboard to assist novices in coordinating chord progressions—a common musical element used among improvising musicians in popular western music contexts. We have observed that novice piano players could follow chord progressions in tonal music note for note using color coordination while improvising. We found that seven colors in any key provide enough information for players to experience a satisfactorily expressive and creative jam session.

Sequence-to-sequence models have proven to be highly successful in learning morphological inflection from examples as the series of SIGMORPHON/CoNLL shared tasks have shown. It is usually assumed, however, that a linguist working with inflectional examples could in principle develop a gold standard-level morphological analyzer and generator that would surpass a trained neural network model in accuracy of predictions, but that it may require significant amounts of human labor. In this paper, we discuss an experiment where a group of people with some linguistic training develop 25+ grammars as part of the shared task and weigh the cost/benefit ratio of developing grammars by hand. We also present tools that can help linguists triage difficult complex morphophonological phenomena within a language and hypothesize inflectional class membership. We conclude that a significant development effort by trained linguists to analyze and model morphophonological patterns are required in order to surpass the accuracy of neural models.

The pituitary gland regulates numerous physiological functions including growth, reproduction, temperature and metabolic homeostasis, lactation, and response to stress. Pituitary organogenesis is dependent on signaling factors that are produced in and around the developing pituitary. The studies described in this report reveal that the forkhead transcription factor, Foxd1, is not expressed in the developing mouse pituitary gland, but rather in the mesenchyme surrounding the pituitary gland, which is an essential source of signaling factors that regulate pituitary organogenesis. Loss of Foxd1 causes a morphological defect in which the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland protrudes through the cartilage plate that is developing ventral to the pituitary at embryonic days (e)14.5, e16.5, and e18.5. The number of proliferating pituitary cells is increased at e14.5 and e16.5. Loss of Foxd1 also results in significantly decreased levels of Lhb expression at e18.5. This decrease in Lhb expression does not appear to be due to a change in the number of gonadotrope cells in the pituitary gland. Previous studies have shown that loss of the LIM homeodomain factor, Lhx3, which is activated by the FGF signaling pathway, results in loss of LH production. Although there is a difference in Lhb expression in Foxd1 null mice, the expression pattern of LHX3 is not altered in Foxd1 null mice. These studies suggest that Foxd1 is indirectly required for normal Lhb expression and cartilage formation.

Fertility is dependent on the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. Each component of this axis is essential for normal reproductive function. Mice with a mutation in the forkhead transcription factor gene, Foxp3, exhibit autoimmunity and infertility. We have previously shown that Foxp3 mutant mice have significantly reduced expression of pituitary gonadotropins. To address the role of Foxp3 in gonadal function, we examined the gonadal phenotype of these mice. Foxp3 mutant mice have significantly reduced seminal vesicle and testis weights compared with Foxp3 +/Y littermates. Spermatogenesis in Foxp3 mutant males is arrested prior to spermatid elongation. Activation of luteinizing hormone signaling in Foxp3 mutant mice by treatment with human chorionic gonadotropin significantly increases seminal vesicle and testis weights as well as testicular testosterone content and seminiferous tubule diameter. Interestingly, human chorionic gonadotropin treatments rescue spermatogenesis in Foxp3 mutant males, suggesting that their gonadal phenotype is due primarily to a loss of pituitary gonadotropin stimulation rather than an intrinsic gonadal defect. fertility, forkhead, FOXP3, gonadotropin, pituitary, spermatogenesis, transcription factor