bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Norcantharidin combined with paclitaxel induces endoplasmic reticulum stress mediated apoptotic effect in prostate cancer cells by targeting SIRT7 expression
Authors: Wu Min‐Hua , Hui Su‐Chun , Chen Yong‐Syuan , Chiou Hui‐Ling , Lin Ching‐Yi , Lee Chien‐Hsing , Hsieh Yi‐Hsien 
Published: July 2021

AbstractProstate cancer (PCa), an extremely common malignancy in males, is the most prevalent disease in several countries. Norcantharidin (NCTD) has antiproliferation, antimetastasis, apoptosis, and autophagy effects in various tumor cells. Nevertheless, the antitumor effect of NCTD combined with paclitaxel (PTX), a chemotherapeutic drug, in PCa remains unknown. The cell growth, proliferative rate, cell cycle distribution, and cell death were determined by 3‐[4,5‐dimethylthiazol‐2‐yl]‐2,5 diphenyltetrazolium bromide, colony formation assay, PI staining, and Annexin V/PI staining by flow cytomertry, whereas the mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress was evaluated using the MitoPotential assay and ER‐ID red assay. We also evaluated the protein and mRNA expression of SIRTs by Western blotting and qRTPCR assay. Overexpression effectivity was measured by DNA transfection assay. Our study showed that cell viability and proliferative PC3 and DU145 rates were effectively inhibited after NCTD‐PTX combination. We also found that NCTD‐PTX combination treatment significantly enhance G2/M phase arrest, induction of cell death and ER stress, loss of MMP, and ER‐ or apoptotic‐related protein expression. Furthermore, NCTD‐PTX combination treatment was significantly decreasing the protein and mRNA expression of SIRT7 in PCa cells. Combination therapy effectively reduced cell viability, ER stress‐mediated apoptosis and p‐eIF2α/ATF4/CHOP/cleaved‐PARP expression inhibition in SIRT7 overexpression of PCa cells. These results indicate that NCTD combined with PTX induces ER stress‐mediated apoptosis of PCa cells by regulating the SIRT7 expression axis. Moreover, combination therapy may become a potential therapeutic strategy against human PCa.
Moving Beyond Decoding: Teaching Pronoun Resolution to Develop Reading Comprehension
Authors: Letchford Lois , Rasinski Timothy 
Published: July 2021

Abstract"Little" Words often carry complex meanings. Pronoun resolution is an essential component of comprehension. Skilled readers work to maintain text cohesion (i.e., they resolve the pronouns as needed.) Less proficient readers often are not as proficient in resolving pronouns. Limited pronoun resolution limits comprehension. This article defines pronoun resolution as a comprehension task and offers instructional approaches to teaching students this oft‐neglected comprehension strategy.
Physiological, oxidative and metabolic responses of lactating water buffaloes to tropical climate of South China
Authors: Li Mengwei , Hassan Faiz‐ul , Tang Zhenhua , Guo Yanxia , Liang Xin , Peng Lijuan , Xie Huade , Yang Chengjian 
Published: July 2021

AbstractBackgroundHeat stress in tropics is generally associated with significant economic losses resulting from reduced performance, morbidity, and mortality of livestock. To avoid serious consequences of heat stress, it is imperative to better understand the physiological responses and biochemical changes under the state of altered body homeostasis during different seasons of the year.ObjectivesThis study aimed to evaluate the seasonal dynamics of physiological, oxidative and metabolic responses of lactating Nili‐Ravi buffaloes to the tropical climate of South China.MethodsPhysiological responses including rectal temperature (RT), body surface temperature (BST) and respiratory rate (RR) along with serum biochemical and antioxidant parameters of 20 lactating Nili‐Ravi buffaloes were evaluated during different seasons of the year.ResultsHigher temperature‐humidity Index (THI) during the summer season (>80) resulted in a significant increases in RR and BST as compared to the winter season. Higher oxidative stress was observed in the summer season as revealed by significantly higher MDA while lower serum antioxidant enzyme (TAC, GSH‐Px, SOD and CAT) contents. Moreover, serum cortisol was also significantly higher in summer and autumn. The levels of growth hormone and ACTH were also significantly (P < 0.05) lower in summer and autumn as compared to other seasons. The negative association of THI with physiological and antioxidant parameters was observed while it was positively associated with serum MDA and cortisol levels.ConclusionsOur study revealed moderate heat stress in lactating buffaloes in the summer season which calls for attention to avoid economic losses and animal welfare issues.
Fabrication of bacterial cellulose with high efficient loading of Ag andTiO2nanoparticles for removing organic dyes
Authors: Hu Jinyan , Liu Suo , Wu Dingsheng , Pan Dengyu , Feng Quan 
Published: July 2021

AbstractAs a new advanced oxidation technology, photocatalytic technology has broad application prospects in the field of wastewater treatment. However, in the actual use process, there will be difficulties in catalyst recovery and reuse. This article successfully prepared bacterial cellulose (BC) loaded silver and titanium dioxide nanoparticles (Ag‐plated TiO2/BC composite pellicle) by in situ embedding method. BC not only works as the carrier to load TiO2and Ag NPs but also adsorbs dyes to promote the reaction. As a reusable photocatalytic film, it is convenient to use and recycle in terms of testing and characterization compared with powders. The results show that Ag and TiO2nanoparticles were closely embedded in BC. We evaluated the photocatalytic degradation performance of the catalyst on methylene blue (MB), active red X‐3B, and Rhodamine B. When the reaction time was 2 h, the dye removal rates were 71%, 68%, and 82.6%. At the same time, through the inhibition zone experiment, it was found that the material has a certain inhibitory effect on bothEscherichia coliandStaphylococcus aureus. Therefore, the supported catalyst prepared by this method has the advantages of high catalytic activity, relatively stable property, easy recovery, and tailorability, making it potentially applicable in sewage post‐treatment links.
The value of airborne wind energy to the electricity system
Authors: Malz Elena C. , Walter Viktor , Göransson Lisa , Gros Sebastien 
Published: July 2021

AbstractAirborne wind energy (AWE) is a new power generation technology that harvests wind energy at high altitudes using tethered wings. The potentially higher energy yield, combined with expected lower costs compared to traditional wind turbines (WTs), motivates interest in further developing this technology. However, commercial systems are currently unavailable to provide more detailed information on costs and power generation. This study estimates the economic value of AWE in the future electricity system, and by that indicates which cost levels are required for AWE to be competitive. A specific focus is put on the relation between AWE systems (AWESs) and WTs. For this work, ERA‐5 wind data are used to compute the power generation of the wind power technologies, which is implemented in a cost‐minimizing electricity system model. By forcing a certain share of the annual electricity demand to be supplied by AWESs, the marginal system value (MSV) of AWE is investigated. The MSV is found to be affected by the AWE share, the wind resource, and the temporal distribution of the AWES's electricity generation. The MSV of AWE is location‐ and system‐dependent and ranges between 1.4 and 2.2
at a low share of AWE supply (0%–30%). At higher shares, the MSV drops. The power generation of WTs and AWESs are related, implying that the wind technologies present a similar power source and can be used interchangeably. Thus, the introduction of AWESs will have a low impact on the cost‐optimal wind power share in the electricity system, unless an AWES cost far below the system‐specific MSV is attained.
Determination of peaking factors for sewerage system in Antalya, tourism capital of Turkey
Authors: Tan Remziye İlayda , Arslankaya Ertan , Kesgin Erdal , Agaccioglu Hayrullah 
Published: July 2021

AbstractThe design of wastewater system pipe size is traditionally based on the maximum wastewater flow that is a function of multiple factors. Understanding the appropriate peaking factors (PF) by using daily flow variations through wastewater collection systems (WWCS) is essential for cost‐effective design. This paper describes the maximum and minimum PFs by using wastewater flow data of four separate residential areas such as Lara, Belek‐1, Kemer, and Hurma in Antalya, which is the tourism capital of Turkey. The study involves the analysis of wastewater data recorded at daily interval for two different time periods (2006–2009 and 2016–2019) in Antalya. There is a comprehensive investigation regarding PFs that involves sustained peaking flow and percentiles. Therefore, a new empirical equation was proposed by using wastewater flowrate for the estimation of the maximum daily peaking factor. When the daily PFs are determined in the range of 1.31–1.52, 1.60–2.58, 2.26–3.29, and 1.93–2.29 for Lara, Belek‐1, Kemer, and Hurma wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) for 2016–2019 time period, they are in the range of 2.19–2.93 and 1.95–3.31 for Lara and Hurma WWTPs for the time period of 2006–2009, respectively. In brief, this study presents a comprehensive calculation of PFs with a determination of their sustained flow analysis with different durations and percentiles.Practitioner Points

This study presents the findings regarding peaking factors and its statistical analysis for different time periods.
Statistical analysis included sustained flow, and the percentile of peaking factors was applied to waste water flow data for touristic city of Antalya.
The new formula of
was determined by using more touristic areas of Antalya within the scope of estimation of the daily peaking factor for dry weather flow by using average daily wastewater flowrate data with the determination coefficient of 0.95.
NNrepair: Constraint-Based Repair of Neural Network Classifiers
Authors: Usman Muhammad , Gopinath Divya , Sun Youcheng , Noller Yannic , Păsăreanu Corina S. 
Published: July 2021

AbstractWe present NNrepair, a constraint-based technique for repairing neural network classifiers. The technique aims to fix the logic of the network at an intermediate layer or at the last layer. NNrepair first uses fault localization to find potentially faulty network parameters (such as the weights) and then performs repair using constraint solving to apply small modifications to the parameters to remedy the defects. We present novel strategies to enable precise yet efficient repair such as inferring correctness specifications to act as oracles for intermediate layer repair, and generation of experts for each class. We demonstrate the technique in the context of three different scenarios: (1) Improving the overall accuracy of a model, (2) Fixing security vulnerabilities caused by poisoning of training data and (3) Improving the robustness of the network against adversarial attacks. Our evaluation on MNIST and CIFAR-10 models shows that NNrepair can improve the accuracy by 45.56% points on poisoned data and 10.40% points on adversarial data. NNrepair also provides small improvement in the overall accuracy of models, without requiring new data or re-training.
PEREGRiNN: Penalized-Relaxation Greedy Neural Network Verifier
Authors: Khedr Haitham , Ferlez James , Shoukry Yasser 
Published: July 2021

AbstractNeural Networks (NNs) have increasingly apparent safety implications commensurate with their proliferation in real-world applications: both unanticipated as well as adversarial misclassifications can result in fatal outcomes. As a consequence, techniques of formal verification have been recognized as crucial to the design and deployment of safe NNs. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to formally verify the most commonly considered safety specifications for ReLU NNs – i.e. polytopic specifications on the input and output of the network. Like some other approaches, ours uses a relaxed convex program to mitigate the combinatorial complexity of the problem. However, unique in our approach is the way we use a convex solver not only as a linear feasibility checker, but also as a means of penalizing the amount of relaxation allowed in solutions. In particular, we encode each ReLU by means of the usual linear constraints, and combine this with a convex objective function that penalizes the discrepancy between the output of each neuron and its relaxation. This convex function is further structured to force the largest relaxations to appear closest to the input layer; this provides the further benefit that the most “problematic” neurons are conditioned as early as possible, when conditioning layer by layer. This paradigm can be leveraged to create a verification algorithm that is not only faster in general than competing approaches, but is also able to verify considerably more safety properties; we evaluated PEREGRiNN on a standard MNIST robustness verification suite to substantiate these claims.
Isla: Integrating Full-Scale ISA Semantics and Axiomatic Concurrency Models
Authors: Armstrong Alasdair , Campbell Brian , Simner Ben , Pulte Christopher , Sewell Peter 
Published: July 2021

AbstractArchitecture specifications such as Armv8-A and RISC-V are the ultimate foundation for software verification and the correctness criteria for hardware verification. They should define the allowed sequential and relaxed-memory concurrency behaviour of programs, but hitherto there has been no integration of full-scale instruction-set architecture (ISA) semantics with axiomatic concurrency models, either in mathematics or in tools. These ISA semantics can be surprisingly large and intricate, e.g. 100k+ lines for Armv8-A. In this paper we present a tool, Isla, for computing the allowed behaviours of concurrent litmus tests with respect to full-scale ISA definitions, in Sail, and arbitrary axiomatic relaxed-memory concurrency models, in the Cat language. It is based on a generic symbolic engine for Sail ISA specifications, which should be valuable also for other verification tasks. We equip the tool with a web interface to make it widely accessible, and illustrate and evaluate it for Armv8-A and RISC-V. By using full-scale and authoritative ISA semantics, this lets one evaluate litmus tests using arbitrary user instructions with high confidence. Moreover, because these ISA specifications give detailed and validated definitions of the sequential aspects of systems functionality, as used by hypervisors and operating systems, e.g. instruction fetch, exceptions, and address translation, our tool provides a basis for developing concurrency semantics for these. We demonstrate this for the Armv8-A instruction-fetch model and self-modifying code examples of Simner et al.
Summing up Smart Transitions
Authors: Elad Neta , Rain Sophie , Immerman Neil , Kovács Laura , Sagiv Mooly 
Published: July 2021

AbstractSome of the most significant high-level properties of currencies are the sums of certain account balances. Properties of such sums can ensure the integrity of currencies and transactions. For example, the sum of balances should not be changed by a transfer operation. Currencies manipulated by code present a verification challenge to mathematically prove their integrity by reasoning about computer programs that operate over them, e.g., in Solidity. The ability to reason about sums is essential: even the simplest ERC-20 token standard of the Ethereum community provides a way to access the total supply of balances.Unfortunately, reasoning about code written against this interface is non-trivial: the number of addresses is unbounded, and establishing global invariants like the preservation of the sum of the balances by operations like transfer requires higher-order reasoning. In particular, automated reasoners do not provide ways to specify summations of arbitrary length.In this paper, we present a generalization of first-order logic which can express the unbounded sum of balances. We prove the decidablity of one of our extensions and the undecidability of a slightly richer one. We introduce first-order encodings to automate reasoning over software transitions with summations. We demonstrate the applicability of our results by using SMT solvers and first-order provers for validating the correctness of common transitions in smart contracts.
Stateless Model Checking Under a Reads-Value-From Equivalence
Authors: Agarwal Pratyush , Chatterjee Krishnendu , Pathak Shreya , Pavlogiannis Andreas , Toman Viktor 
Published: July 2021

AbstractStateless model checking (SMC) is one of the standard approaches to the verification of concurrent programs. As scheduling non-determinism creates exponentially large spaces of thread interleavings, SMC attempts to partition this space into equivalence classes and explore only a few representatives from each class. The efficiency of this approach depends on two factors: (a) the coarseness of the partitioning, and (b) the time to generate representatives in each class. For this reason, the search for coarse partitionings that are efficiently explorable is an active research challenge.In this work we present$${\text {RVF-SMC}}$$RVF-SMC, a new SMC algorithm that uses a novelreads-value-from (RVF)partitioning. Intuitively, two interleavings are deemed equivalent if they agree on the value obtained in each read event, and read events induce consistent causal orderings between them. The RVF partitioning is provably coarser than recent approaches based on Mazurkiewicz and “reads-from” partitionings. Our experimental evaluation reveals that RVF is quite often a very effective equivalence, as the underlying partitioning is exponentially coarser than other approaches. Moreover,$${\text {RVF-SMC}}$$RVF-SMCgenerates representatives very efficiently, as the reduction in the partitioning is often met with significant speed-ups in the model checking task.
Gobra: Modular Specification and Verification of Go Programs
Authors: Wolf Felix A. , Arquint Linard , Clochard Martin , Oortwijn Wytse , Pereira João C. , Müller Peter 
Published: July 2021

AbstractGo is an increasingly-popular systems programming language targeting, especially, concurrent and distributed systems. Go differentiates itself from other imperative languages by offering structural subtyping and lightweight concurrency through goroutines with message-passing communication. This combination of features poses interesting challenges for static verification, most prominently the combination of a mutable heap and advanced concurrency primitives.We present Gobra, a modular, deductive program verifier for Go that proves memory safety, crash safety, data-race freedom, and user-provided specifications. Gobra is based on separation logic and supports a large subset of Go. Its implementation translates an annotated Go program into the Viper intermediate verification language and uses an existing SMT-based verification backend to compute and discharge proof obligations.
Delay-Bounded Scheduling Without Delay!
Authors: Johnson Andrew , Wahl Thomas 
Published: July 2021

AbstractWe consider the broad problem of analyzing safety properties of asynchronous concurrent programs under arbitrary thread interleavings.Delay-bounded deterministic scheduling, introduced in prior work, is an efficient bug-finding technique to curb the large cost associated with full scheduling nondeterminism. In this paper we first present a technique tolift the delay boundfor the case of finite-domain variable programs, thus adding to the efficiency of bug detection the ability to prove safety of programs under arbitrary thread interleavings. Second, we demonstrate how, combined with predicate abstraction, our technique can both refute and verify safety properties of programs with unbounded variable domains, even for unbounded thread counts. Previous work has established that, for non-trivial concurrency routines, predicate abstraction induces a highly complex abstract program semantics. Our technique, however, never statically constructs an abstract parametric program; it only requires some abstract-states set to be closed under certain actions, thus eliminating the dependence on the existence of verification algorithms for abstract programs. We demonstrate the efficiency of our technique on many examples used in prior work, and showcase its simplicity compared to earlier approaches on the unbounded-thread Ticket Lock protocol.
Checking Data-Race Freedom of GPU Kernels, Compositionally
Authors: Cogumbreiro Tiago , Lange Julien , Rong Dennis Liew Zhen , Zicarelli Hannah 
Published: July 2021

AbstractGPUs offer parallelism as a commodity, but they are difficult to program correctly. Static analyzers that guarantee data-race freedom (DRF) are essential to help programmers establish the correctness of their programs (kernels). However, existing approaches produce too many false alarms and struggle to handle larger programs. To address these limitations we formalize a novel compositional analysis for DRF, based on access memory protocols. These protocols are behavioral types that codify the way threads interact over shared memory.Our work includes fully mechanized proofs of our theoretical results, the first mechanized proofs in the field of DRF analysis for GPU kernels. Our theory is implemented in , a tool that outperforms the state-of-the-art. Notably, it can correctly verify at least $$1.42{\times }$$

1.42
×

more real-world kernels, and it exhibits a linear growth in 4 out of 5 experiments, while others grow exponentially in all 5 experiments.
GenMC: A Model Checker for Weak Memory Models
Authors: Kokologiannakis Michalis , Vafeiadis Viktor 
Published: July 2021

AbstractGenMC is an LLVM-based state-of-the-art stateless model checker for concurrent C/C++ programs. Its modular infrastructure allows it to support complex memory models, such as RC11 and IMM, and makes it easy to extend to support further axiomatic memory models.In this paper, we discuss the overall architecture of the tool and how it can be extended to support additional memory models, programming languages, and/or synchronization primitives. To demonstrate the point, we have extended the tool with support for the Linux kernel memory model (LKMM), synchronization barriers, POSIX I/O system calls, and better error detection capabilities.
Synthesizing Invariant Barrier Certificates via Difference-of-Convex Programming
Authors: Wang Qiuye , Chen Mingshuai , Xue Bai , Zhan Naijun , Katoen Joost-Pieter 
Published: July 2021

AbstractA barrier certificate often serves as an inductive invariant that isolates an unsafe region from the reachable set of states, and hence is widely used in proving safety of hybrid systems possibly over the infinite time horizon. We present a novel condition on barrier certificates, termed theinvariant barrier-certificate condition, that witnesses unbounded-time safety of differential dynamical systems. The proposed condition is by far the least conservative one on barrier certificates, and can be shown as the weakest possible one to attain inductive invariance. We show that discharging the invariant barrier-certificate condition—thereby synthesizing invariant barrier certificates—can be encoded as solving anoptimization problem subject to bilinear matrix inequalities(BMIs). We further propose a synthesis algorithm based on difference-of-convex programming, which approaches a local optimum of the BMI problem via solvinga series of convex optimization problems. This algorithm is incorporated in a branch-and-bound framework that searches for the global optimum in a divide-and-conquer fashion. We present a weak completeness result of our method, in the sense that a barrier certificate is guaranteed to be found (under some mild assumptions) whenever there exists an inductive invariant (in the form of a given template) that suffices to certify safety of the system. Experimental results on benchmark examples demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.