bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
TPPH/g-C3N4 Nanohybrids Constructed with Surfactant-Assisted Co-Assembly for Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation
Authors: Shang Ye , Lv Manfei , Li Songtian
Published: October 2021

A new type of pure organic 5,10,15,20-tetra (4-hydroxyphenyl) porphyrin (TPPH)/[Formula: see text]-C3N4 nanohybrid was prepared to expand the light absorption range of graphitic carbon nitride materials. The morphology and structure of the composites were systematically characterized by scanning electron microscope, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Results show that after the introduction of TPPH, the visible light area optical absorption of the composite sample increased significantly under the noncovalent interaction of TPPH and [Formula: see text]-C3N4, and the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and [Formula: see text]–[Formula: see text] measurements confirmed the improved charge separation efficiency of the sample and showed excellent photocatalytic hydrogen production capacity. Under full spectrum irradiation, the hydrogen production of 1.67% TPPH/[Formula: see text]-C3N4 without adding co-catalyst reached 10.87[Formula: see text]mmol[Formula: see text][Formula: see text], about 2.68 times that of pure [Formula: see text]-C3N4 (4.06[Formula: see text]mmol[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]), which showed effective promotion of the electron transfer between TPPH and [Formula: see text]-C3N4.
Development of Garlic Oral Beads using Garlic Nanoparticles and Studies on their Protective Effects Against Avian Coccidiosis
Authors: Kaliyaperumal Viswanathan , Palavesam Azhahianambi , Kandasamy Arul Kumar , Ramalingam Vijaya Shanthi , Karuppan Chitra , Nithiyanantham Madhan , Harikrishnan Indira , Gopal Dhinakarraj , Muthusamy Raman , Alagesan Senthil Kumar Tuticorin Maragatham
Published: October 2021

In this paper, new oral beads were developed for poultry applications using garlic nanoparticles (NPs). The NPs were synthesized using water in oil micro-emulsion method and it was confirmed using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy. The biocompatibility was evaluated by using the chicken blood, chicken intestinal cell line and the results indicated that the particles are highly safe. The oral beads were formulated using hydroxyl propyl methyl cellulose phthalate as polymer protective layer and specifically dissolved in pH 6.5 and released the NPs at the intestine. To study their impacts, the chickens were fed with beads starting day 3 after hatching, and their weight was recorded. To study the anti-parasitic effect, the chickens were challenged with Eimeria species. The active treatments with oral beads effectively cure the intestinal damages triggered by the Eimeria species and improved the chicken weight. The prophylactic treatment 100% protects chicken against Eimeria infection and increased the body weight.
Much ADO about failures: a fault-aware model for compositional verification of strongly consistent distributed systems
Authors: Honoré Wolf , Kim Jieung , Shin Ji-Yong , Shao Zhong
Published: October 2021

Despite recent advances, guaranteeing the correctness of large-scale distributed applications without compromising performance remains a challenging problem. Network and node failures are inevitable and, for some applications, careful control over how they are handled is essential. Unfortunately, existing approaches either completely hide these failures behind an atomic state machine replication (SMR) interface, or expose all of the network-level details, sacrificing atomicity. We propose a novel, compositional, atomic distributed object (ADO) model for strongly consistent distributed systems that combines the best of both options. The object-oriented API abstracts over protocol-specific details and decouples high-level correctness reasoning from implementation choices. At the same time, it intentionally exposes an abstract view of certain key distributed failure cases, thus allowing for more fine-grained control over them than SMR-like models. We demonstrate that proving properties even of composite distributed systems can be straightforward with our Coq verification framework, Advert, thanks to the ADO model. We also show that a variety of common protocols including multi-Paxos and Chain Replication refine the ADO semantics, which allows one to freely choose among them for an application's implementation without modifying ADO-level correctness proofs.
ECROs: building global scale systems from sequential code
Authors: De Porre Kevin , Ferreira Carla , Preguiça Nuno , Gonzalez Boix Elisa
Published: October 2021

To ease the development of geo-distributed applications, replicated data types (RDTs) offer a familiar programming interface while ensuring state convergence, low latency, and high availability. However, RDTs are still designed exclusively by experts using ad-hoc solutions that are error-prone and result in brittle systems. Recent works statically detect conflicting operations on existing data types and coordinate those at runtime to guarantee convergence and preserve application invariants. However, these approaches are too conservative, imposing coordination on a large number of operations. In this work, we propose a principled approach to design and implement efficient RDTs taking into account application invariants. Developers extend sequential data types with a distributed specification, which together form an RDT. We statically analyze the specification to detect conflicts and unravel their cause. This information is then used at runtime to serialize concurrent operations safely and efficiently. Our approach derives a correct RDT from any sequential data type without changes to the data type's implementation and with minimal coordination. We implement our approach in Scala and develop an extensive portfolio of RDTs. The evaluation shows that our approach provides performance similar to conflict-free replicated data types for commutative operations, and considerably improves the performance of non-commutative operations, compared to existing solutions.
Efficient automatic scheduling of imaging and vision pipelines for the GPU
Authors: Anderson Luke , Adams Andrew , Ma Karima , Li Tzu-Mao , Jin Tian , Ragan-Kelley Jonathan
Published: October 2021

We present a new algorithm to quickly generate high-performance GPU implementations of complex imaging and vision pipelines, directly from high-level Halide algorithm code. It is fully automatic, requiring no schedule templates or hand-optimized kernels. We address the scalability challenge of extending search-based automatic scheduling to map large real-world programs to the deep hierarchies of memory and parallelism on GPU architectures in reasonable compile time. We achieve this using (1) a two-phase search algorithm that first ‘freezes’ decisions for the lowest cost sections of a program, allowing relatively more time to be spent on the important stages, (2) a hierarchical sampling strategy that groups schedules based on their structural similarity, then samples representatives to be evaluated, allowing us to explore a large space with few samples, and (3) memoization of repeated partial schedules, amortizing their cost over all their occurrences. We guide the process with an efficient cost model combining machine learning, program analysis, and GPU architecture knowledge. We evaluate our method’s performance on a diverse suite of real-world imaging and vision pipelines. Our scalability optimizations lead to average compile time speedups of 49x (up to 530x). We find schedules that are on average 1.7x faster than existing automatic solutions (up to 5x), and competitive with what the best human experts were able to achieve in an active effort to beat our automatic results.
Data-driven abductive inference of library specifications
Authors: Zhou Zhe , Dickerson Robert , Delaware Benjamin , Jagannathan Suresh
Published: October 2021

Programmers often leverage data structure libraries that provide useful and reusable abstractions. Modular verification of programs that make use of these libraries naturally rely on specifications that capture important properties about how the library expects these data structures to be accessed and manipulated. However, these specifications are often missing or incomplete, making it hard for clients to be confident they are using the library safely. When library source code is also unavailable, as is often the case, the challenge to infer meaningful specifications is further exacerbated. In this paper, we present a novel data-driven abductive inference mechanism that infers specifications for library methods sufficient to enable verification of the library's clients. Our technique combines a data-driven learning-based framework to postulate candidate specifications, along with SMT-provided counterexamples to refine these candidates, taking special care to prevent generating specifications that overfit to sampled tests. The resulting specifications form a minimal set of requirements on the behavior of library implementations that ensures safety of a particular client program. Our solution thus provides a new multi-abduction procedure for precise specification inference of data structure libraries guided by client-side verification tasks. Experimental results on a wide range of realistic OCaml data structure programs demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
A multiparty session typing discipline for fault-tolerant event-driven distributed programming
Authors: Viering Malte , Hu Raymond , Eugster Patrick , Ziarek Lukasz
Published: October 2021

This paper presents a formulation of multiparty session types (MPSTs) for practical fault-tolerant distributed programming. We tackle the challenges faced by session types in the context of distributed systems involving asynchronous and concurrent partial failures – such as supporting dynamic replacement of failed parties and retrying failed protocol segments in an ongoing multiparty session – in the presence of unreliable failure detection. Key to our approach is that we develop a novel model of event-driven concurrency for multiparty sessions. Inspired by real-world practices, it enables us to unify the session-typed handling of regular I/O events with failure handling and the combination of features needed to express practical fault-tolerant protocols. Moreover, the characteristics of our model allow us to prove a global progress property for well-typed processes engaged in multiple concurrent sessions, which does not hold in traditional MPST systems.

To demonstrate its practicality, we implement our framework as a toolchain and runtime for Scala, and use it to specify and implement a session-typed version of the cluster management system of the industrial-strength Apache Spark data analytics framework. Our session-typed cluster manager composes with other vanilla Spark components to give a functioning Spark runtime; e.g., it can execute existing third-party Spark applications without code modification. A performance evaluation using the TPC-H benchmark shows our prototype implementation incurs an average overhead below 10%.
What we eval in the shadows: a large-scale study of eval in R programs
Authors: Goel Aviral , Donat-Bouillud Pierre , Křikava Filip , Kirsch Christoph M. , Vitek Jan
Published: October 2021

Most dynamic languages allow users to turn text into code using various functions, often named eval, with language-dependent semantics. The widespread use of these reflective functions hinders static analysis and prevents compilers from performing optimizations. This paper aims to provide a better sense of why programmers use eval. Understanding why eval is used in practice is key to finding ways to mitigate its negative impact. We have reasons to believe that reflective feature usage is language and application domain-specific; we focus on data science code written in R and compare our results to previous work that analyzed web programming in JavaScript. We analyze 49,296,059 calls to eval from 240,327 scripts extracted from 15,401 R packages. We find that eval is indeed in widespread use; R’s eval is more pervasive and arguably dangerous than what was previously reported for JavaScript.
Compilation of sparse array programming models
Authors: Henry Rawn , Hsu Olivia , Yadav Rohan , Chou Stephen , Olukotun Kunle , Amarasinghe Saman , Kjolstad Fredrik
Published: October 2021

This paper shows how to compile sparse array programming languages. A sparse array programming language is an array programming language that supports element-wise application, reduction, and broadcasting of arbitrary functions over dense and sparse arrays with any fill value. Such a language has great expressive power and can express sparse and dense linear and tensor algebra, functions over images, exclusion and inclusion filters, and even graph algorithms.

Our compiler strategy generalizes prior work in the literature on sparse tensor algebra compilation to support any function applied to sparse arrays, instead of only addition and multiplication. To achieve this, we generalize the notion of sparse iteration spaces beyond intersections and unions. These iteration spaces are automatically derived by considering how algebraic properties annotated onto functions interact with the fill values of the arrays. We then show how to compile these iteration spaces to efficient code.

When compared with two widely-used Python sparse array packages, our evaluation shows that we generate built-in sparse array library features with a performance of 1.4× to 53.7× when measured against PyData/Sparse for user-defined functions and between 0.98× and 5.53× when measured against SciPy/Sparse for sparse array slicing. Our technique outperforms PyData/Sparse by 6.58× to 70.3×, and (where applicable) performs between 0.96× and 28.9× that of a dense NumPy implementation, on end-to-end sparse array applications. We also implement graph linear algebra kernels in our system with a performance of between 0.56× and 3.50× compared to that of the hand-optimized SuiteSparse:GraphBLAS library.
Static detection of silent misconfigurations with deep interaction analysis
Authors: Zhang Jialu , Piskac Ruzica , Zhai Ennan , Xu Tianyin
Published: October 2021

The behavior of large systems is guided by their configurations: users set parameters in the configuration file to dictate which corresponding part of the system code is executed. However, it is often the case that, although some parameters are set in the configuration file, they do not influence the system runtime behavior, thus failing to meet the user’s intent. Moreover, such misconfigurations rarely lead to an error message or raising an exception. We introduce the notion of silent misconfigurations which are prohibitively hard to identify due to (1) lack of feedback and (2) complex interactions between configurations and code.

This paper presents ConfigX, the first tool for the detection of silent misconfigurations. The main challenge is to understand the complex interactions between configurations and the code that they affected. Our goal is to derive a specification describing non-trivial interactions between the configuration parameters that lead to silent misconfigurations. To this end, ConfigX uses static analysis to determine which parts of the system code are associated with configuration parameters. ConfigX then infers the connections between configuration parameters by analyzing their associated code blocks. We design customized control- and data-flow analysis to derive a specification of configurations. Additionally, we conduct reachability analysis to eliminate spurious rules to reduce false positives. Upon evaluation on five real-world datasets across three widely-used systems, Apache, vsftpd, and PostgreSQL, ConfigX detected more than 2200 silent misconfigurations. We additionally conducted a user study where we ran ConfigX on misconfigurations reported on user forums by real-world users. ConfigX easily detected issues and suggested repairs for those misconfigurations. Our solutions were accepted and confirmed in the interaction with the users, who originally posted the problems.
Reconciling optimization with secure compilation
Authors: Vu Son Tuan , Cohen Albert , De Grandmaison Arnaud , Guillon Christophe , Heydemann Karine
Published: October 2021

Software protections against side-channel and physical attacks are essential to the development of secure applications. Such protections are meaningful at machine code or micro-architectural level, but they typically do not carry observable semantics at source level. This renders them susceptible to miscompilation, and security engineers embed input/output side-effects to prevent optimizing compilers from altering them. Yet these side-effects are error-prone and compiler-dependent. The current practice involves analyzing the generated machine code to make sure security or privacy properties are still enforced. These side-effects may also be too expensive in fine-grained protections such as control-flow integrity. We introduce observations of the program state that are intrinsic to the correct execution of security protections, along with means to specify and preserve observations across the compilation flow. Such observations complement the input/output semantics-preservation contract of compilers. We introduce an opacification mechanism to preserve and enforce a partial ordering of observations. This approach is compatible with a production compiler and does not incur any modification to its optimization passes. We validate the effectiveness and performance of our approach on a range of benchmarks, expressing the secure compilation of these applications in terms of observations to be made at specific program points.
VESPA: static profiling for binary optimization
Authors: Moreira Angélica Aparecida , Ottoni Guilherme , Quintão Pereira Fernando Magno
Published: October 2021

Over the past few years, there has been a surge in the popularity of binary optimizers such as BOLT, Propeller, Janus and HALO. These tools use dynamic profiling information to make optimization decisions. Although effective, gathering runtime data presents developers with inconveniences such as unrepresentative inputs, the need to accommodate software modifications, and longer build times. In this paper, we revisit the static profiling technique proposed by Calder
et al.
in the late 90’s, and investigate its application to drive binary optimizations, in the context of the BOLT binary optimizer, as a replacement for dynamic profiling. A few core modifications to Calder et al.’s original proposal, consisting of new program features and a new regression model, are sufficient to enable some of the gains obtained through runtime profiling. An evaluation of BOLT powered by our static profiler on four large benchmarks (clang, GCC, MySQL and PostgreSQL) yields binaries that are 5.47 % faster than the executables produced by clang -O3.
Making pointer analysis more precise by unleashing the power of selective context sensitivity
Authors: Tan Tian , Li Yue , Ma Xiaoxing , Xu Chang , Smaragdakis Yannis
Published: October 2021

Traditional context-sensitive pointer analysis is hard to scale for large and complex Java programs. To address this issue, a series of selective context-sensitivity approaches have been proposed and exhibit promising results. In this work, we move one step further towards producing highly-precise pointer analyses for hard-to-analyze Java programs by presenting the Unity-Relay framework, which takes selective context sensitivity to the next level. Briefly, Unity-Relay is a one-two punch: given a set of different selective context-sensitivity approaches, say S = S1, . . . , Sn, Unity-Relay first provides a mechanism (called Unity)to combine and maximize the precision of all components of S. When Unity fails to scale, Unity-Relay offers a scheme (called Relay) to pass and accumulate the precision from one approach Si in S to the next, Si+1, leading to an analysis that is more precise than all approaches in S. As a proof-of-concept, we instantiate Unity-Relay into a tool called Baton and extensively evaluate it on a set of hard-to-analyze Java programs, using general precision metrics and popular clients. Compared with the state of the art, Baton achieves the best precision for all metrics and clients for all evaluated programs. The difference in precision is often dramatic — up to 71% of alias pairs reported by previously-best algorithms are found to be spurious and eliminated.
LooPy: interactive program synthesis with control structures
Authors: Ferdowsifard Kasra , Barke Shraddha , Peleg Hila , Lerner Sorin , Polikarpova Nadia
Published: October 2021

One vision for program synthesis, and specifically for programming by example (PBE), is an interactive programmer's assistant, integrated into the development environment. To make program synthesis practical for interactive use, prior work on Small-Step Live PBE has proposed to limit the scope of synthesis to small code snippets, and enable the users to provide local specifications for those snippets. This paradigm, however, does not work well in the presence of loops. We present LooPy, a synthesizer integrated into a live programming environment, which extends Small-Step Live PBE to work inside loops and scales it up to synthesize larger code snippets, while remaining fast enough for interactive use. To allow users to effectively provide examples at various loop iterations, even when the loop body is incomplete, LooPy makes use of
live execution
, a technique that leverages the programmer as an oracle to step over incomplete parts of the loop. To enable synthesis of loop bodies at interactive speeds, LooPy introduces
Intermediate State Graph
, a new data structure, which compactly represents a large space of code snippets composed of multiple assignment statements and conditionals. We evaluate LooPy empirically using benchmarks from competitive programming and previous synthesizers, and show that it can solve a wide variety of synthesis tasks at interactive speeds. We also perform a small qualitative user study which shows that LooPy's
block-level
specifications are easy for programmers to provide.
Faulty Point Unit: ABI Poisoning Attacks on Trusted Execution Environments
Authors: Alder Fritz , Van Bulck Jo , Spielman Jesse , Oswald David , Piessens Frank
Published: October 2021

This article analyzes a previously overlooked attack surface that allows unprivileged adversaries to impact floating-point computations in enclaves through the Application Binary Interface (ABI). In a comprehensive study across 7 industry-standard and research enclave shielding runtimes for Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), we show that control and state registers of the x87 Floating-Point Unit (FPU) and Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions are not always properly sanitized on enclave entry. We furthermore show that this attack goes beyond the x86 architecture and can also affect RISC-V enclaves. Focusing on SGX, we abuse the adversary’s control over precision and rounding modes as an ABI fault injection primitive to corrupt enclaved floating-point operations. Our analysis reveals that this is especially relevant for applications that use the older x87 FPU, which is still under certain conditions used by modern compilers. We exemplify the potential impact of ABI quality-degradation attacks for enclaved machine learning and for the SPEC benchmarks. We then explore the impact on confidentiality, showing that control over exception masks can be abused as a controlled channel to recover enclaved multiplication operands. Our findings, affecting 5 of 7 studied SGX runtimes and one RISC-V runtime, demonstrate the challenges of implementing high-assurance trusted execution across computing architectures.
User Perceptions of Security and Privacy for Group Chat
Authors: Oesch Sean , Abu-Salma Ruba , Diallo Oumar , Krämer Juliane , Simmons James , Wu Justin , Ruoti Scott
Published: October 2021

Secure messaging tools are an integral part of modern society. To understand users’ security and privacy perceptions and requirements for secure group chat, we surveyed 996 respondents in the US and UK. Our results show that group chat presents important security and privacy challenges, some of which are not present in one-to-one chat. For example, users need to be able to manage and monitor group membership, establish trust for new group members, and filter content that they share in different chat contexts. We also find that respondents lack mechanisms for determining which tools are secure and instead rely on non-technical strategies for protecting their privacy—for example, self-filtering and carefully tracking group membership.

To better understand how these results relate to existing tools, we conduct cognitive walkthroughs (a form of expert usability review) for five popular group chat tools. Our results demonstrate that while existing tools address some items identified in our surveys, this support is partial and is insufficient in many cases. As such, there is a need for improved group chat tools that better align with user perceptions and requirements. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations on improving the security and usability of secure group chat.
Legal Responsibility Among the Young and the Elderly
Authors: Brank Eve M. , Wylie Lindsey E.
Published: October 2021

The decision of whether to hold someone legally responsible raises both philosophical and psychological questions. Philosophically, legal responsibility derives from either what someone did or who someone is—deed or role responsibility. For both the young and the very old, responsibility for bad actions is intertwined with psychological definitions of competency and capacity. For the young, the law assumes incompetence until a certain chronological age or court determination. For the old, no automatic chronological age is determinative; rather, the law assumes competence until a court determines otherwise. These automatic or court determinations impact legal responsibility in both the civil and criminal law contexts for both the young and the old. Additionally, special circumstances create responsibilities for others in relation to the young and old.
Contract Schemas
Authors: Sommers Roseanna
Published: October 2021

This review draws on the notion of “contract schemas” to characterize what ordinary people think is happening when they enter into contractual arrangements. It proposes that contracts are schematically represented as written documents filled with impenetrable text containing hidden strings, which are routinely signed without comprehension. This cognitive template, activated whenever people encounter objects with these characteristic features, confers certain default assumptions, associations, and expectancies. A review of the literature suggests that contract schemas supply ( a) the assumption that terms will be enforced as written, ( b) the feeling that one is obligated to perform, and ( c) the sense that one has forfeited rights. Contract schemas should be of interest to legal scholars, because their psychological and behavioral effects often sit at odds with contract doctrine. Laypeople expect the law to find consent in situations where they would prefer it did not, and where it in fact does not. Contract schemas should also be of interest to ordinary consumers, who may find themselves relinquishing legally valid claims, erroneously assuming away rights, and/or blaming themselves. Future research should explore the consequences that flow from the lay perception that the law is rigidly formalistic to the detriment of fairness. Do such attitudes undermine the perceived moral authority of the law?
Synergistic Effect of F−and Persulfate in Efficient Titanium Alloy Chemical Mechanical Polishing
Authors: Deng Changbang , Jiang Liang , Qian Linmao
Published: October 2021

Titanium alloys require excellent surface quality to achieve superior performance in biomedicine. In this paper, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) was employed to prepare a satisfactory TC4 alloy surface. F−and persulfate were used as critical additives to improve the CMP efficiency. In comparison with the basic slurry without F−and persulfate, the slurry containing only F−, and the slurry containing only persulfate, the slurries containing both F−and persulfate lead to a noticeable increase in the material removal rate (MRR), which is attributed to the synergistic effect of F−and persulfate. After adding 80 mM NaF and 100 mM (NH4)2S2O8to the basic slurry, the MRR increases significantly from 11 nm min−1to 203 nm min−1, and the surface roughnessRareaches 3.4 nm. Moreover, there is no processing damage in the substrate. For the synergistic effect, Ti in TC4 alloy is first oxidized to Ti3+and Ti4+oxides by persulfate, and then HF, F−and HF2−attack the oxides to produce soluble complex compounds, promoting the corrosion and the resultant MRR. This study provides a feasible way to achieve the high-efficiency CMP of titanium alloys via the synergistic effect of complexing agent and oxidizer to enhance the corrosive wear.
TNF-α-activated eNOS signaling increases leukocyte adhesion through the S-nitrosylation pathway
Authors: Aguilar Gaynor , Córdova Francisco , Koning Tania , Sarmiento José , Boric Mauricio P. , Birukov Konstantin , Cancino Jorge , Varas-Godoy Manuel , Soza Andrea , Alves Natascha G. , Mujica Patricio E. , Durán Walter N. , Ehrenfeld Pamela , Sánchez Fabiola A.
Published: October 2021

Contrary to the well-established inhibitory role of NO in leukocyte adhesion, we demonstrate a positive role of nitric oxide in this process. We demonstrate that NO induced by eNOS after TNF-α treatment induces early leukocyte adhesion activating the S-nitrosylation pathway. Our data suggest that PKCζ S-nitrosylation may be a key step in this process.
Immunological Changes in Peripheral Blood of Ankylosing Spondylitis Patients during Anti-TNF-α Therapy and Their Correlations with Treatment Outcomes
Authors: Chen Rongjuan , Qian Hongyan , Yuan Xiaoqing , Chen Shiju , Liu Yuan , Wang Bin , Shi Guixiu
Published: October 2021

Tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) inhibitors are the main types of biological conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and have efficacy in treating ankylosing spondylitis (AS) which is not sensitive for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. However, the impact of TNF-α inhibitors on immune cells in patients with AS is still clearly undefined, and the impact of immune cells on treatment response is also largely elusive. This study is aimed at evaluating the longitudinal changes of circulating immune cells after anti-TNF-α therapy and their associations with treatment response in AS patients. Thirty-five AS patients receiving the treatment of anti-TNF-α therapy were included into this prospective observational study. The frequencies of immune cells including Th1, Th2, Th17, regulatory T cell (Treg), T follicular helper cell (Tfh), and regulatory B cell (Breg) in the peripheral blood were measured by flow cytometry at baseline and 4 time points after therapy. The difference in the circulating immune cells between responders and nonresponders was compared. This study suggested that anti-TNF-α therapy could significantly reduce circulating proinflammatory immune cells such as Th17 and Tfh, but significantly increased the percentages of circulating Treg and Breg. Moreover, circulating Breg may be a promising predictor of response to anti-TNF-α therapy in AS patients.
Hydrogen‐Rich Water Ameliorates Murine Chronic Graft‐versus‐Host Disease through Antioxidation
Authors: Qian Liren , Liu Jiaxin , Ma Weina , Liu Yu , Wang Xiaona , Liu Daihong
Published: October 2021

Background. Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo‐HSCT) is an important treatment option for various hematopoietic diseases and certain hereditary diseases. Chronic graft‐versus‐host disease (cGVHD) has become the main life‐threatening complication and cause of death in later stage postallo‐HSCT. Current treatment options for cGVHD are limited. Hydrogen gas (H2) has been demonstrated that has antioxidative, anti‐inflammatory, and antifibrosis effects. The aim of this study was to confirm whether oral administration hydrogen‐rich water exerted therapeutic effects on a scleroderma cGVHD mouse model and tried to explain the mechanism underly it. Methods. A mouse cGVHD model was established by haploidentical bone marrow transplantation. To evaluate therapeutic effects of H2 on cGVHD, survival rate, changes in clinical scores, and skin pathologic characteristics of cGVHD mice were observed. To evaluate its therapeutic mechanism, we detected the expression levels of antioxidative enzymes heme oxygenase‐1(HO‐1) and NAD (P)H: quinone acceptor oxidoreductase 1(NQO1) in skin homogenates. We also detected the expression level of the apoptotic protein caspase‐3 in skin homogenates. Results. 1‐month survival rate of cGVHD mice in the hydrogen group reached 93.3%, significantly higher than 66.7% in the nonhydrogen group (p < 0.05). Clinical score of cGVHD mice was improved by hydrogen‐rich water at 96 days posttransplantation (2.2 versus 4.5, p < 0.05). The skin pathological condition of cGVHD mice was significantly improved by hydrogen‐rich water. At 96 days posttransplantation, average skin pathological hematoxylin and eosin (HE) staining score in the hydrogen group was 1.05, which was significantly lower than 3.2 in the nonhydrogen group (p < 0.01). Average Masson staining score was 0.6 point in the hydrogen group, lower than 0.9 point in the nonhydrogen group (p < 0.05). Both the relative expression levels of HO‐1 and NQO1 proteins in skin specimens of cGVHD mice in the hydrogen group were lower than that in the nonhydrogen group (2.47 versus 6.21 and 1.83 versus 3.59, p < 0.05). The relative expression level of caspase‐3 protein in skin specimens of cGVHD mice increased to 7.17 on the 96th day after transplantation, significantly higher than 4.36 in the hydrogen group. Conclusion. In this study, we found that oral hydrogen‐rich water improved the survival rate and clinical symptoms of cGVHD mice by antioxidant and antiapoptosis. This study would pave the way for further clinical study, which may provide a new treatment option for cGVHD.
Artificial Neural Network Model in Spatial Analysis of Geographic Information System
Authors: He Shaofu , Li Fei
Published: October 2021

In the past two decades, the computer technology industry has developed rapidly, and the geological prospecting industry is also undergoing a computerized and electronic revolution. The application technology of new geological information systems is gradually adding us to the spatial information system of geological prospecting projects. In order to deeply study the current situation of the artificial neural network model in the spatial analysis of our country’s geographic information system, this paper uses the traditional classification analysis method; database analysis and neural network analysis method of compensating samples were collected, an artificial model of the network is established, and the algorithm is simplified. And a neural network model is created. In the research of A and B counties’ geographic information system, using a new network model, 61 geological disasters were found in County A, of which 47 were landslides, 4 collapses, and 10 unstable slopes. There were 19 geographical disasters in County B, including 9 unstable slopes, 6 landslides and 4 collapses. In terms of geographic prediction combined with the network model, the comparison with the actual situation shows that the geographical distribution is 99.7% in the geographical and geological disaster-prone areas, and the geographical distribution is less in the nonprone areas, with a proportion of 0.3%. Geological disaster-prone areas of low points accounted for 76.9%, and the number of disaster-affected points in the low-prone areas accounted for 22.8%. The geographical and geological grades divided by the evaluation model are basically consistent with the actual grades, which can meet the needs of geographic evaluation. It is basically realized that starting from the model’s geographic information system, a more comprehensive and practical artificial neural network model is designed.
[Retracted] International Trade Path with Multi‐Polarization based on Multidirectional Mutation Genetic Algorithm Enabled Neural Network
Authors: Zhang Qing , Chong Choo Wei , Abdullah Abdul Rashid , Ali Mass Hareeza
Published: October 2021

At present, the development speed of international trade cannot catch up with the economic development speed, and the insufficient development speed of international trade will directly affect the rapid development of national economy. In order to solve the problem of international trade, the overall optimal scheduling of trade vehicles and the optimal planning of trade transportation path are very important to improve enterprise services, reduce enterprise costs, increase enterprise benefits, and enhance enterprise competitiveness. The second development of the program is based on the programming interface provided by Baidu map. This paper proposes a neural network algorithm for genetic optimization of multiple mutations, which overcomes the shortcoming of traditional genetic algorithm population “ten” character distribution by mixing multiple coding methods, and enhances the local search ability of genetic algorithm by introducing a new large‐mutation small‐range search population. The example application shows that the optimization method can realize the optimization of international trade path under real road conditions and greatly improve the work efficiency of actual trade.
Auricular Acupressure Therapy for Patients with Cancer with Sleep Disturbance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Authors: Wang Yunxia , Zhang Jiayuan , Jin Yuxia , Zhang Qi
Published: October 2021

Aim. We aim to provide available synthesized evidence of the efficacy and safety of auricular acupressure for cancer patients with sleep disturbance. Methods. Randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) were identified from PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library, PsycINFO, Chinese Biomedical Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chongqing VIP, and Wanfang Data, and the search date ranged from the inception of the databases to May 2021. Literature screening and data extraction were independently performed by three researchers. The Cochrane collaboration’s tool for assessing the risk of bias was applied to evaluate the risk of bias of the RCTs included. The extracted data were analyzed using Rev-Man 5.4.1 software. Results. Nine trials involving 688 participants met the inclusion criteria and were included in the qualitative analysis; 6 trials involving 485 participants were included in the meta-analysis. Synthesized results showed that auricular acupressure had a significant effect on reducing the total Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) score (MD = −3.88, 95% CI (−5.24, −2.53),

P
<
0.00001

), and the scores of five PSQI components, sleep latency (MD = −0.53, 95% CI (−0.73, −0.32),

P
<
0.00001

), subjective sleep quality (MD = −0.79, 95% CI (−1.05, −0.53),

P
<
0.00001

), sleep duration (MD = −0.50, 95% CI (−0.69, −0.31),

P
<
0.0001

), daytime dysfunction (MD = −0.53, 95% CI (−0.77, −0.29),

P
<
0.0001

), and sleep disturbances (MD = −0.54, 95% CI (−0.60, −0.49),

P
<
0.00001

), were also obviously decreased after the intervention of auricular acupressure. Shenmen and heart were the most commonly selected auricular acupoints, the main intervention durations ranged from 10 to 42 days, and the pressing times of auricular acupoints were 1–6 times a day, 1–5 min each time. One trial reported slight and transient pain caused by auricular acupressure, while the remaining 8 trials did not report obvious side effects. Conclusion. Auricular acupressure can significantly improve the sleep quality of cancer patients with sleep disturbance, with no obvious side effects. Rigorously designed clinical trials are necessary for the further support of the clinical application.
Short- and Long-Term Prognosis of Intravascular Ultrasound-Versus Angiography-Guided Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: A Meta-Analysis Involving 24,783 Patients
Authors: Zhang Qun , Wang Bailu , Han Yu , Sun Shukun , Lv Ruijuan , Wei Shujian
Published: October 2021

Background. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) guided percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has potential benefits. This meta-analysis aimed to explore whether IVUS-guided PCI had better short- and long-term prognoses than angiography-guided PCI. Methods. We retrieved studies from PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library. Clinical trials including retrospective and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared IVUS-guided PCI with angiography-guided PCI were included. The patients were followed up after operation at 30 days, 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years. The clinical outcomes were target lesion revascularization (TLR), target vessel revascularization (TVR), and MACEs, including stent thrombosis (ST), myocardial infarction (MI), cardiac death, and all-cause death. The study population included patients with MI, coronary bifurcation lesions, short or long lesions, and unprotected left main coronary artery stenosis (ULMCA). The quality of retrospective trials was evaluated using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale, and the quality of randomized controlled trials was evaluated using the Jadad score. A total of 20 clinical trials met the criteria. Three trials were randomized controlled trials, while 17 were retrospective trials. Results. A total of 24,783 patients were included. In observational trials, the OR of MACEs was 0.49 (95% CI: 0.38–0.62) in 30 days, 0.65 (95% CI: 0.58–0.73) in one year, 0.51 (95% CI: 0.36–0.71) in two years, and 0.45 (95% CI: 0.31–0.65) in three years. In patients with long coronary lesions, the OR of MACEs in 1 year was 0.64 (95% CI: 0.28–1.50). In patients with left main artery disease, the OR of MACEs in 3 years was 0.42 (95% CI: 0.26–0.67). Compared with angiography-guided PCI, IVUS-guided PCI was associated with a lower incidence of MACEs during the same following period. Conclusion. Compared with angiography-guided PCI, IVUS-guided PCI has better performance in reducing the occurrence of MACEs.
Research on Volleyball Video Intelligent Description Technology Combining the Long‐Term and Short‐Term Memory Network and Attention Mechanism
Authors: Gao Yuhua , Mo Yong , Zhang Heng , Huang Ruiyin , Chen Zilong
Published: October 2021

With the development of computer technology, video description, which combines the key technologies in the field of natural language processing and computer vision, has attracted more and more researchers’ attention. Among them, how to objectively and efficiently describe high‐speed and detailed sports videos is the key to the development of the video description field. In view of the problems of sentence errors and loss of visual information in the generation of the video description text due to the lack of language learning information in the existing video description methods, a multihead model combining the long‐term and short‐term memory network and attention mechanism is proposed for the intelligent description of the volleyball video. Through the introduction of the attention mechanism, the model pays much attention to the significant areas in the video when generating sentences. Through the comparative experiment with different models, the results show that the model with the attention mechanism can effectively solve the loss of visual information. Compared with the LSTM and base model, the multihead model proposed in this paper, which combines the long‐term and short‐term memory network and attention mechanism, has higher scores in all evaluation indexes and significantly improved the quality of the intelligent text description of the volleyball video.
Deep Venous Thrombosis after Ad26.COV2.S Vaccination in Adult Male
Authors: Hussain Habiba , Sehring Matthew , Soriano Sheryll
Published: October 2021

With extensive loss of life and well-being seen since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the initiation of vaccinations has come with enormous hope towards the end of this pandemic. Detailed discussions regarding the safety and efficacy of these vaccines led to their approval. With such success, there have also been reports of vaccine-associated adverse events—allergic reactions, anaphylaxis, immune thrombocytopenia, and thrombosis. We discuss and report the first case of a healthy young adult male developing extensive thrombosis, after receiving the Ad26.COV2.S (Johnson & Johnson/Janssen) vaccine.
Impacts of Chemokine (C-X-C Motif) Receptor 2 C1208T Polymorphism on Cancer Susceptibility
Authors: Zhou Jing , Wu Hao , Su Quan-Xin , Shi Xiao-Kai , Tang Bo-Wen , Zhao Cui-Ping , Wang Hai , Chen Xiao-Ping
Published: October 2021

Background. The CXC chemokines belong to a unique family of cytokines that participates in the progression and development of many malignant tumors. Evidence for the relationship between chemokine (C-X-C motif) receptor 2 (CXCR2) C1208T polymorphism and susceptibility to cancer remains inconsistent. Methods. Odds ratios (ORs), 95% confidence intervals (CIs), and combined analysis were used to investigate the effect of CXCR2 variation on cancer risk. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were also used to evaluate the expression of CXCR2 in prostate cancer (PCA). Results. Across 11 case-control studies, 4,909 cases and 5,884 controls were involved in the current analysis. Individuals with a TT genotype were associated with increased risk of digestive cancer, compared to those with a TC+CC genotype (OR=1.16,95%CI=1.02-1.31,P=0.025). Individuals carrying the TT genotype had a 39% higher risk of urinary cancer than those carrying CC genotype (OR=1.39,95%CI=1.04-1.87,P=0.025). Individuals with a TT genotype showed a 56% augmented breast cancer risk, compared to those with a CC genotype (OR=1.56,95%CI=1.03-2.35,P=0.034). It was found that CXCR2 expression was downregulated in PCA. Compared with PCA subjects carrying the CC genotype, the expression of CXCR2 was decreased in patients with the TT genotype. Conclusions. The CXCR2 C1208T variation was associated with elevated risk of urinary, breast, and digestive cancer. However, the C1208T polymorphism was correlated with attenuated risk of lung cancer.