Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Edge Computing

To overcome devices’ limitations in performing computation-intense applications, mobile edge computing (MEC) enables users to offload tasks to proximal MEC servers for faster task computation. However, the current MEC system design is based on average-based metrics, which fails to account for the ultra-reliable low-latency requirements in mission-critical applications. To tackle this, this paper proposes a new system design, where probabilistic and statistical constraints are imposed on task queue lengths, by applying extreme value theory. The aim is to minimize users’ power consumption while trading off the allocated resources for local computation and task offloading. Due to wireless channel dynamics, users are reassociated to MEC servers in order to offload tasks using higher rates or accessing proximal servers. In this regard, a user–server association policy is proposed, taking into account the channel quality as well as the servers’ computation capabilities and workloads. By marrying tools from Lyapunov optimization and matching theory, a two-timescale mechanism is proposed, where a user–server association is solved in the long timescale, while a dynamic task offloading and resource allocation policy are executed in the short timescale. The simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by guaranteeing highly reliable task computation and lower delay performance, compared to several baselines.
A Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus for Statistical Analysis of Natural Language and Quantitative Linguistics

The use of Project Gutenberg (PG) as a text corpus has been extremely popular in statistical analysis of language for more than 25 years. However, in contrast to other major linguistic datasets of similar importance, no consensual full version of PG exists to date. In fact, most PG studies so far either consider only a small number of manually selected books, leading to potential biased subsets, or employ vastly different pre-processing strategies (often specified in insufficient details), raising concerns regarding the reproducibility of published results. In order to address these shortcomings, here we present the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC), an open science approach to a curated version of the complete PG data containing more than 50,000 books and more than 3×109 word-tokens. Using different sources of annotated metadata, we not only provide a broad characterization of the content of PG, but also show different examples highlighting the potential of SPGC for investigating language variability across time, subjects, and authors. We publish our methodology in detail, the code to download and process the data, as well as the obtained corpus itself on three different levels of granularity (raw text, timeseries of word tokens, and counts of words). In this way, we provide a reproducible, pre-processed, full-size version of Project Gutenberg as a new scientific resource for corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval.
"Woman-Metal-White vs Man-Dress-Shorts": Combining Social, Temporal and Image Signals to Understand Popularity of Pinterest Fashion Boards

Pinterest is a popular photo sharing website. Fashion is one the most popular and content generating category on this platform. Most of the popular fashion brands and designers use boards on Pinterest for showcasing their products. However, the characteristics of popular fashion boards are not well-known. These characteristics can be used for predicting popularity of a nascent board. Further, newly formed boards can organize their content in a way similar to the popular fashion boards to garner enhanced popularity. What properties on these fashion boards determine their popularity? Can these properties be systematically quantified? In this paper, we show how social, temporal and image signals can together help in characterizing the popular fashion boards. In particular, we study the sharing/borrowing behavior of pins and the image content characteristics of the fashion boards. We analyze the sharing behavior using social and temporal signals, and propose six novel yet simple metrics: originality score, retention coefficients, production coefficients, inter-copying time, duration of sharing and speed coefficients. We further study the image based content properties by extracting fashion, color and gender terms embedded in the pin images. We observe significant differences across the popular (highly followed or highly ranked by the experts) and the unpopular (less followed) boards. We then use these characteristic features to early predict the popularity of a board and achieve a high correlation of 0.874 with low RMSE value. Our key observation is that likes and repin retention coefficients are the most discriminatory factors of a board’s popularity apart from the usage of various color, gender and fashion terms.
On The Chain Rule Optimal Transport Distance

We define a novel class of distances between statistical multivariate distributions by solving an optimal transportation problem on their marginal densities with respect to a ground distance defined on their conditional densities. By using the chain rule factorization of probabilities, we show how to perform optimal transport on a ground space being an information-geometric manifold of conditional probabilities. We prove that this new distance is a metric whenever the chosen ground distance is a metric. Our distance generalizes both the Wasserstein distances between point sets and a recently introduced metric distance between statistical mixtures. As a first application of this Chain Rule Optimal Transport (CROT) distance, we show that the ground distance between statistical mixtures is upper bounded by this optimal transport distance and its fast relaxed Sinkhorn distance, whenever the ground distance is joint convex. We report on our experiments which quantify the tightness of the CROT distance for the total variation distance, the square root generalization of the Jensen-Shannon divergence, the Wasserstein $W_p$ metric and the Renyi divergence between mixtures.
Interference-aware User Grouping Strategy in NOMA Systems with QoS Constraints

To meet the performance and complexity requirements from practical deployment of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, several users are grouped together for NOMA transmission while orthogonal resources are allocated among groups. User grouping strategies have significant impact on the power consumption and system performance. However, existing related studies divide users into groups based on channel conditions, where diverse quality of service (QoS) and interference have not been considered. In this paper, we focus on the interference-aware user grouping strategy in NOMA systems, aiming at minimizing power consumption with QoS constraints. We define a power consumption and externality (PCE) function for each user to represent the power consumption involved by this user to satisfy its QoS requirement as well as interference that this user brings to others in the same group. Then, we extend the definition of PCE to multi-user scenarios and convert the user grouping problem into the problem of searching for specific negative loops in the graph. Bellman-Ford algorithm is extended to find these negative loops. Furthermore, a greedy suboptimal algorithm is proposed to approach the solution within polynomial time. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can considerably reduce the total power consumption compared with existing strategies.
Computing a Score of Navigability in Large Graphs

The groundbreaking experiment of Travers and Milgram demonstrated the so-called "six degrees of separation" phenomenon, by which any individual in the world is able to contact an arbitrary, hitherto-unknown, individual by means of a short chain of social ties. Despite the large number of empirical and theoretical studies to explain the Travers-Milgram experiment, some fundamental questions are still open: why some individuals are more likely than others to discover short friend-of-a-friend communication chains? Can we rank individuals on the basis of their ability to discover short chains? To answer these questions, we extend the concept of potential gain, originally defined in the context of Web analysis, to social networks and we define a novel index, called "the navigability score," that ranks nodes in a network on the basis of how their position facilitates the discover of short chains that connect to arbitrary target nodes in the network. We define two variants of potential gain, called the geometric and the exponential potential gain, and present fast algorithms to compute them. Our theoretical and experimental analysis proves that the computation of the geometric and exponential gain are affordable even on large real-life graphs.
Preventing Attacks on Anonymous Data Collection

Anonymous data collection systems allow users to contribute the data necessary to build services and applications while preserving their privacy. Anonymity, however, can be abused by malicious agents aiming to subvert or to sabotage the data collection, for instance by injecting fabricated data. In this paper we propose an efficient mechanism to rate-limit an attacker without compromising the privacy and anonymity of the users contributing data. The proposed system builds on top of Direct Anonymous Attestation, a proven cryptographic primitive. We describe how a set of rate-limiting rules can be formalized to define a normative space in which messages sent by an attacker can be linked, and consequently, dropped. We present all components needed to build and deploy such protection on existing data collection systems with little overhead. Empirical evaluation yields performance up to 125 and 140 messages per second for senders and the collector respectively on nominal hardware. Latency of communication is bound to 4 seconds in the 95th percentile when using Tor as network layer.
The Sensitivity of Orthopaedic Surgeons to the Secondary Prevention of Fragility Fractures

Background: Orthopaedic surgeons must play an important role in the secondary prevention of fragility fractures; however, some surgeons are more aware than others of their responsibility regarding fracture prevention. The purpose of the present study was to identify which factors can lead to a higher sensitivity for fracture prevention. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was distributed to orthopaedic surgeons via online invitation or at academic conferences in China from July through October 2015. A total of 452 surgeons responded. As the primary outcome measure, we created a sensitivity scoring system for fracture prevention based on the respondents’ answers to 5 questions regarding behavior in the following areas: risk-factor evaluation, pharmacologic therapy, nonpharmacologic therapy, patient education, and follow-up. Multivariable linear regression and multivariable logistic regression analyses were used to identify factors related to surgeon sensitivity to fracture prevention. Results: Very few surgeons reported having received adequate training regarding fracture prevention or reading guidelines or other fracture prevention literature (22% and 30%, respectively). Most respondents initiated pharmacologic or nonpharmacologic therapy (82% and 75%, respectively) for the treatment of confirmed osteoporosis among patients with fragility fractures, but only half performed a risk-factor evaluation, patient education, or timely patient follow-up (51%, 52%, and 48%, respectively). In the multivariable linear regression model, the orthopaedic surgeon’s age (&bgr; = 0.09, p = 0.003), self-rated knowledge level regarding osteoporosis or related issues (&bgr; = 0.16, p < 0.001), self-perceived effectiveness in using preventive measures for patients with a fragility fracture (&bgr; = 0.62, p < 0.001), and use of clinical pathways for fragility fractures in his or her workplace (&bgr; = 1.24, p < 0.001) were independently associated with sensitivity scores for fracture prevention. Similar results were obtained from a multivariable logistic regression model. Conclusions: In China, the sensitivity of orthopaedic surgeons to the secondary prevention of fragility fractures is relatively low. Implementation of a comprehensive prevention approach and targeted continuing medical education are required to encourage surgeons to take greater responsibility for screening, treating, educating, and following their patients with fragility fractures.
Predictive Score for Identifying Survival and Recurrence Risk Profiles in Patients Undergoing Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation: The I-VT Score

Background: Several distinct risk factors for arrhythmia recurrence and mortality following ventricular tachycardia (VT) ablation have been described. The effect of concurrent risk factors has not been assessed so far; thus, it is not yet possible to estimate these risks for a patient with several comorbidities. The aim of the study was to identify specific risk groups for mortality and VT recurrence using the Survival Tree (ST) analysis method. Methods: In 1251 patients 16 demographic, clinical and procedure-related variables were evaluated as potential prognostic factors using ST analysis using a recursive partitioning algorithm that searches for relationships among variables. Survival time and time to VT recurrence in groups derived from ST analysis were compared by a log-rank test. A random forest analysis was then run to extract a variable importance index and internally validate the ST models. Results: Left ventricular ejection fraction, implantable cardioverter defibrillator/cardiac resynchronization device, previous ablation were, in hierarchical order, identified by ST analysis as best predictors of VT recurrence, while left ventricular ejection fraction, previous ablation, Electrical storm were identified as best predictors of mortality. Three groups with significantly different survival rates were identified. Among the high-risk group, 65.0% patients were survived and 52.1% patients were free from VT recurrence; within the medium- and low-risk groups, 84.0% and 97.2% patients survived, 72.4% and 88.4% were free from VT recurrence, respectively. Conclusions: Our study is the first to derive and validate a decisional model that provides estimates of VT recurrence and mortality with an effective classification tree. Preprocedure risk stratification could help optimize periprocedural and postprocedural care.
Enhancing the Accumulation of Polymer Micelles by Selectively Dilating Tumor Blood Vessels with NO for Highly Effective Cancer Treatment

The accumulation of nanoparticles in tumors by the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect is effective and well known. However, how to maximize accumulation is still a bottleneck in the development of nanomedicine. Herein, a tumor vascular‐targeted hybrid polymeric micelle, which has a great capacity to selectively augment the EPR effect of nanoparticles by dilating tumor blood vessels via the activity of nitric oxide (NO), is presented. Under neutral conditions, the micelle is stable, with a long blood circulation half‐life due to the carboxylated poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) layer; in mildly acidic tumor tissues, the micelle can selectively target the tumor blood vessels by the exposed cyclic Arg‐Gly‐Asp peptide (cRGD) peptides, which is realized with a pH‐dependent hydrolysis of the monomethoxy PEG layer. Simultaneously, exposed copper ions catalyze the decomposition of endogenous NO donors, which generates NO in situ, leading to vasodilation and increased tumor vascular permeability. As a result, the accumulation of nanoparticles is significantly enhanced, and a high accumulation of doxorubicin in tumors is achieved at 48 h after injection. This high dose of therapeutic agent produces a large inhibition of tumor growth (94%) in cancer treatment, and shows no general toxicity, with 100% of the mice surviving the treatment regimen.
A System Based-Approach to Examine Cytokine Response in Poxvirus-Infected Macrophages

The poxviruses are large, linear, double-stranded DNA viruses about 130 to 230 kbp, that have an animal origin and evolved to infect a wide host range. Variola virus (VARV), the causative agent of smallpox, is a poxvirus that infects only humans, but other poxviruses such as monkey poxvirus and cowpox virus (CPXV) have crossed over from animals to infect humans. Therefore understanding the biology of poxviruses can devise antiviral strategies to prevent these human infections. In this study we used a system-based approach to examine the host responses to three orthopoxviruses, CPXV, vaccinia virus (VACV), and ectromelia virus (ECTV) in the murine macrophage RAW 264.7 cell line. Overall, we observed a significant down-regulation of gene expressions for pro-inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and related receptors. There were also common and virus-specific changes in the immune-regulated gene expressions for each poxvirus-infected RAW cells. Collectively our results showed that the murine macrophage RAW 264.7 cell line is a suitable cell-based model system to study poxvirus host response.
Human papillomavirus and the landscape of secondary genetic alterations in oral cancers

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a necessary but insufficient cause of a subset of oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCCs) that is increasing markedly in frequency. To identify contributory, secondary genetic alterations in these cancers, we used comprehensive genomics methods to compare 149 HPV-positive and 335 HPV-negative OSCC tumor/normal pairs. Different behavioral risk factors underlying the two OSCC types were reflected in distinctive genomic mutational signatures. In HPV-positive OSCCs, the signatures of APOBEC cytosine deaminase editing, associated with anti-viral immunity, were strongly linked to overall mutational burden. In contrast, in HPV-negative OSCCs, T>C substitutions in the sequence context 5′-ATN-3′ correlated with tobacco exposure. Universal expression of HPV E6*1 and E7 oncogenes was a sine qua non of HPV-positive OSCCs. Significant enrichment of somatic mutations was confirmed or newly identified in PIK3CA, KMT2D, FGFR3, FBXW7, DDX3X, PTEN, TRAF3, RB1, CYLD, RIPK4, ZNF750, EP300, CASZ1, TAF5, RBL1, IFNGR1, and NFKBIA. Of these, many affect host pathways already targeted by HPV oncoproteins, including the p53 and pRB pathways, or disrupt host defenses against viral infections, including interferon (IFN) and nuclear factor kappa B signaling. Frequent copy number changes were associated with concordant changes in gene expression. Chr 11q (including CCND1) and 14q (including DICER1 and AKT1) were recurrently lost in HPV-positive OSCCs, in contrast to their gains in HPV-negative OSCCs. High-ranking variant allele fractions implicated ZNF750, PIK3CA, and EP300 mutations as candidate driver events in HPV-positive cancers. We conclude that virus-host interactions cooperatively shape the unique genetic features of these cancers, distinguishing them from their HPV-negative counterparts.
Differential Gene Expression in Red Imported Fire Ant (Solenopsis invicta) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) Larval and Pupal Stages

Solenopsis invicta Buren is an invasive ant species that has been introduced to multiple continents. One such area, the southern United States, has a history of multiple control projects using chemical pesticides over varying ranges, often resulting in non-target effects across trophic levels. With the advent of next generation sequencing and RNAi technology, novel investigations and new control methods are possible. A robust genome-guided transcriptome assembly was used to investigate gene expression differences between S. invicta larvae and pupae. These life stages differ in many physiological processes; of special importance is the vital role of S. invicta larvae as the colonies’ “communal gut”. Differentially expressed transcripts were identified related to many important physiological processes, including digestion, development, cell regulation and hormone signaling. This dataset provides essential developmental knowledge that reveals the dramatic changes in gene expression associated with social insect life stage roles, and can be leveraged using RNAi to develop effective control methods.
Response letter to ‘does high LDL-cholesterol cause cardiovascular disease?’

Independent Investigator, Lund, Sweden; Laboratoire Coeur et Nutrition, TIMC-IMAG, School of Medicine, University of Grenoble-Alpes, Grenoble, France; Department of Psychology, Center for Preclinical and Clinical Research on PTSD, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA; Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology, Center for Preclinical and Clinical Research on PTSD, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA; NPO Japan Institute of Pharmacovigilance, Osaka, Japan; Department of Internal Medicine, Toyama Jonan Onsen Daini Hospital, University of Toyama, Toyama, Japan; Strömstad Academy, Strömstad, Sweden; Western Vascular Institute, University Hospital Galway & Galway Clinic, National University of Ireland & Royal college of Surgeons of Ireland affiliated Hospital, Galway, Ireland; East Cheshire Trust, Macclesfield District General Hospital, Macclesfield, England; Private Practice in Cardiology, Tyler, TX, USA; Medical Officer Service, Comando Brigata Alpina “Julia”/ Multinational Land Force, Udine, Italy; Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Service, VA Boston Healthcare System, West Roxbury; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Nagoya City University, Mizuhoku, Nagoya, Japan; New York Medical College, The American Institute of Stress, New York, NY, USA; Wallenberg Laboratory for Cardiovascluar and Metabolic Research, Sahlgren’s Academy, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, and Columbia University, NY, USA; Odenvägen 44B, Lidingö, Sweden
Is It Actionable? An Evaluation of the Rapid PCR-Based Blood Culture Identification Panel on the Management of Gram-Positive and Gram-Negative Blood Stream Infections

Background There is growing interest in the use of rapid blood culture identification (BCID) panels in antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASP). While many studies have looked at its clinical and economic utility, its comparative utility in gram-positive and gram-negative blood stream infections (BSI) have not been as well characterized. Methods The study was a quasi-experimental retrospective study at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona. All adult patients with positive blood cultures before BCID implementation (June 2015 to December 2015) and after BCID implementation (June 2016 to December 2016) were included. The outcomes of interest included: time to first appropriate antibiotic escalation, time to first appropriate antibiotic de-escalation, time to organism identification, LOS, infectious disease consultation, discharge disposition, and in-hospital mortality. Results In total, 203 patients were included in this study. There was a significant difference in the time to organism identification between pre- and post-BCID cohorts (27.1h vs. 3.3h, p<0.0001). BCID did not significantly reduce the time to first appropriate antimicrobial escalation or de-escalation for either GP-BSIs or GN-BSIs. Providers were more likely to escalate antimicrobial therapy in GP-BSIs after gram stain and more likely to de-escalate therapy in GN-BSIs after susceptibilities. While there were no significant differences in changes in antimicrobial therapy after organism identification by BCID, over a quarter of providers (28.1%) made changes after organism identification. Conclusions While BCID significantly reduced the time to identification for both GP-BSIs and GN-BSIs, BCID did not reduce the time to first appropriate antimicrobial escalation and de-escalation.