NAIRS: A Neural Attentive Interpretable Recommendation System

In this paper, we develop a neural attentive interpretable recommendation system, named NAIRS. A self-attention network, as a key component of the system, is designed to assign attention weights to interacted items of a user. This attention mechanism can distinguish the importance of the various interacted items in contributing to a user profile. Based on the user profiles obtained by the self-attention network, NAIRS offers personalized high-quality recommendation. Moreover, it develops visual cues to interpret recommendations. This demo application with the implementation of NAIRS enables users to interact with a recommendation system, and it persistently collects training data to improve the system. The demonstration and experimental results show the effectiveness of NAIRS.Comment: This paper was published as a demonstration paper on WSDM'19. In this version, we added a detailed related work sectio

Demographic strategies of a dominant tree species in response to logging in a degraded subtropical forest in Southeast China

International audienceAbstractKey messageThe demography of pioneer tree species (Pinus massonianaLamb.) is significantly affected by logging in Southeast China. Logging negatively affects the population growth rate ofP. massoniana, which facilitates the growth of individual trees but has no effect on reproduction probability. The survival and growth of seedlings contribute the most to population growth.ContextSubtropical forest degradation caused by unreasonable disturbances is closely related to anthropogenic activities in Southeast China, and the frequent small-scale logging activity by local people was the dominated disturbance regime in forests in this region over the past several decades.AimsThe objective of this study is to evaluate the demographic consequences of logging on Pinus massoniana, a pioneer tree species, at individual level (survival, growth, and fecundity) and population level (the population growth rate and size distribution) over short-term period.MethodsThe size of tree individuals was combined with vital rates using various modeling approaches based on demographic data from three annual censuses. The integral projection model (IPM) was constructed and used to conduct comparative demographic analyses.ResultsLogging negatively affected the population growth rate: from a slight expansion before logging to a moderate decline after logging. This study found a significant reduction in seedling recruitment after logging, and plant growth and mortality were slightly enhanced. The survival of seedlings greatly contributes to population growth rate compared to other life stages for both periods (before and after logging) while its relative importance decreases after logging. Seedling growth is also important to population growth, and its relative importance increased after logging. Shrinkage and fecundity have a minimal contribution effect on the population growth rate.ConclusionGrowing plants in a nursery with a similar demography to P. massoniana could be beneficial for pioneer species regeneration in that this will improve the survival rate and growth of small individuals after logging

Enhancement of Vaccinia Virus Based Oncolysis with Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors

Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDI) dampen cellular innate immune response by decreasing interferon production and have been shown to increase the growth of vesicular stomatitis virus and HSV. As attenuated tumour-selective oncolytic vaccinia viruses (VV) are already undergoing clinical evaluation, the goal of this study is to determine whether HDI can also enhance the potency of these poxviruses in infection-resistant cancer cell lines. Multiple HDIs were tested and Trichostatin A (TSA) was found to potently enhance the spread and replication of a tumour selective vaccinia virus in several infection-resistant cancer cell lines. TSA significantly decreased the number of lung metastases in a syngeneic B16F10LacZ lung metastasis model yet did not increase the replication of vaccinia in normal tissues. The combination of TSA and VV increased survival of mice harbouring human HCT116 colon tumour xenografts as compared to mice treated with either agent alone. We conclude that TSA can selectively and effectively enhance the replication and spread of oncolytic vaccinia virus in cancer cells

Dexmedetomidine activates the PKA/CREB pathway and inhibits proinflammatory factor expression through β2 adrenergic receptors

Abstract Introduction Dexmedetomidine (DEX) is primarily utilized for sedation in the context of general anesthesia or intensive care. However, the exact regulatory mechanism by which DEX affects cytokines remains unclear. This study aims to investigate the underlying mechanism by which DEX inhibits proinflammatory factors through activation of the β2 adrenergic receptor (β2 AR). Methods The inflammatory cell model of human mononuclear macrophage (THP‐1) cells induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was established to study the effect of DEX on the expression of cell‐related inflammatory factors. ADRA2A gene knockout THP‐1 cells (THP‐1KO) were constructed by CRISPR technology, and the effect of DEX on the expression of inflammatory factors of THP‐1KO cells was detected. The target sites of DEX on β2 AR were screened by molecular docking. Reversion experiments were performed using ADRB2‐siRNA. Western blot was used to detect the activation of β2 AR/PKA/CREB pathway and NF‐κB, and ELISA was used to detect the release level of inflammatory factors. Results The results demonstrated a significant reduction in the expression levels of MCP‐1, interleukin‐06, and IL‐8 in both THP‐1 and THP‐1KO cells when induced by LPS following treatment with DEX. Additionally, DEX treatment led to an increase in IL‐10 expression. Immunofluorescence analysis revealed an upregulation of β2 AR expression after DEX treatment. Western blot results indicated that DEX notably enhanced the activation of the β2 AR and PKA/CREB pathways, while concurrently suppressing the activation of NF‐κB. Notably, the use of ADRB2 siRNA reversed the effects of DEX treatment and promoted the release of inflammatory cytokines. Conclusion DEX initiates the activation of the PKA/CREB pathway through the activation of β2 AR. Simultaneously, it exerts an inhibitory effect on the activation of NF‐κB, consequently reducing the transcription of proinflammatory factors while increasing the transcription of anti‐inflammatory factors

Integrated Analysis of the 3D Geostress and 1D Geomechanics of an Exploration Well in a New Gas Field

The aim of this study was to propose the workflow for integrated analysis of the 3D geostress and 1D geomechanics of an exploration in a new gas field. This integrated analysis will allow for problems associated with the inaccuracy of 1D geomechanical analysis to be overcome in a region with obvious anticline/syncline structures. The 1D geomechanical analysis of the well in the exploration of a new gas field mainly included the prediction of pore pressure and calculation of the mud weight window for safe drilling. In general, this integrated workflow included both a method for pore pressure prediction and a method for the calculation of the mud weight window, with the numerical solution of 3D geostress plus the interval velocity of formations. The procedure for the calculation of the 3D geostress of a target block was also introduced. Numerical solution of the 3D geostress of the target gas field, as well as solutions of 1D geomechanical analysis, have demonstrated the efficiency and practical use of the proposed theory in the successful drilling of the LT-1 well in the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang, China. For this LT-1 well in the target TS block, there was no logging data to refer to when predicting the pore pressure of undrilled formations. Only 3D geostress could be used to calculate the mud weight window. Influences of anticline structures were considered in the calculation of 3D geostress. Since the accuracy of the numerical solution of 3D geostress is higher than the accuracy of the 1D geostress solution for a single well analysis, the results of pore pressure and the mud weight window are more accurate than those obtained with conventional 1D geostress analysis. Details of the finite element modeling of the 3D geostress field of the TS block is presented along with the solution of the 3D geostress field. With the data of the interval velocity of formations and 3D geostress solution of the TS block, pore pressure prediction was carried out for the 7000 m-deep pilot LT-1 well. Finally, calculations were performed for the values of the mud weight window of the LT-1 well

A Multi-Task Learning Approach for Answer Selection: A Study and a Chinese Law Dataset

In this paper, we propose a Multi-Task learning approach for Answer Selection (MTAS), motivated by the fact that humans have no difficulty performing such task because they possess capabilities of multiple domains (tasks). Specifically, MTAS consists of two key components: (i) A category classification model that learns rich category-aware document representation; (ii) An answer selection model that provides the matching scores of question-answer pairs. These two tasks work on a shared document encoding layer, and they cooperate to learn a high-quality answer selection system. In addition, a multi-head attention mechanism is proposed to learn important information from different representation subspaces at different positions. We manually annotate the first Chinese question answering dataset in law domain (denoted as LawQA) to evaluate the effectiveness of our model. The experimental results show that our model MTAS consistently outperforms the compared methods.

Performance and Stability Enhancement of Perovskite-Type Nanomaterials Applied for Carbon Capture Utilizing Oxyfuel Combustion

A new series of Ba-Co-Operovskite-type oxygen carriers has been successfully synthesized by the microwave-assisted sol-gel method and further applied for producing an O2/CO2 mixture gas. The oxygen adsorption/desorption performance of synthesized samples was studied in a fixed-bed reactor system. Effects of A/B-site substitution on the oxygen desorption performance of Ba-Co-O–based perovskites are also included. Furthermore, the effects of operating conditions including the adsorption time and temperature as well as the desorption temperature on oxygen production performance were investigated in detail. The results indicated that BaCoO3-δ exhibited an excellent oxygen desorption performance among the synthesized A/B-site–substituted ACoO3-δ and BaBO3-δ samples, and that the optimal adsorption time, adsorption temperature and desorption temperatureforBaCoO3-δ were determined to be 20min, 850◦Cand850◦C, respectively, in this study