Quantitative Analysis of Apache Storm Applications: The NewsAsset Case Study

The development of Information Systems today faces the era of Big Data. Large volumes of information need to be processed in real-time, for example, for Facebook or Twitter analysis. This paper addresses the redesign of NewsAsset, a commercial product that helps journalists by providing services, which analyzes millions of media items from the social network in real-time. Technologies like Apache Storm can help enormously in this context. We have quantitatively analyzed the new design of NewsAsset to assess whether the introduction of Apache Storm can meet the demanding performance requirements of this media product. Our assessment approach, guided by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), takes advantage, for performance analysis, of the software designs already used for development. In addition, we converted UML into a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) for Apache Storm, thus creating a profile for Storm. Later, we transformed said DSML into an appropriate language for performance evaluation, specifically, stochastic Petri nets. The assessment ended with a successful software design that certainly met the scalability requirements of NewsAsset

Fully Synthetic Longitudinal Real-World Data From Hearing Aid Wearers for Public Health Policy Modeling

Here, we share the first outcome of EVOTION (www.h2020evotion.eu) in the form of a data-set to inspire, encourage, and motivate a data-driven analytical approach to evidence-based healthcare policy modeling using real-world longitudinal data. The data-set includes information relating to patterns of real-world hearing aid usage and sound environment exposure. Undoubtedly, many such data-sources will be available for researchers and policy-makers in the future, and the data-set presented here can act as a first step of building and testing potential statistical model

GSP with General Independent Click-Through-Rates

The popular generalized second price (GSP) auction for sponsored search is built upon a separable model of click-through-rates that decomposes the likelihood of a click into the product of a "slot effect" and an "advertiser effect" --- if the first slot is twice as good as the second for some bidder, then it is twice as good for everyone. Though appealing in its simplicity, this model is quite suspect in practice. A wide variety of factors including externalities and budgets have been studied that can and do cause it to be violated. In this paper we adopt a view of GSP as an iterated second price auction (see, e.g., Milgrom 2010) and study how the most basic violation of separability --- position dependent, arbitrary public click-through-rates that do not decompose --- affects results from the foundational analysis of GSP (Varian 2007, Edelman et al. 2007). For the two-slot setting we prove that for arbitrary click-through-rates, for arbitrary bidder values, an efficient pure-strategy equilibrium always exists; however, without separability there always exist values such that the VCG outcome and payments cannot be realized by any bids, in equilibrium or otherwise. The separability assumption is therefore necessary in the two-slot case to match the payments of VCG but not for efficiency. We moreover show that without separability, generic existence of efficient equilibria is sensitive to the choice of tie-breaking rule, and when there are more than two slots, no (bid-independent) tie-breaking rule yields the positive result. In light of this we suggest alternative mechanisms that trade the simplicity of GSP for better equilibrium properties when there are three or more slots

Species difference in ANP32A underlies influenza A virus polymerase host restriction.

Influenza pandemics occur unpredictably when zoonotic influenza viruses with novel antigenicity acquire the ability to transmit amongst humans. Host range breaches are limited by incompatibilities between avian virus components and the human host. Barriers include receptor preference, virion stability and poor activity of the avian virus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in human cells. Mutants of the heterotrimeric viral polymerase components, particularly PB2 protein, are selected during mammalian adaptation, but their mode of action is unknown. We show that a species-specific difference in host protein ANP32A accounts for the suboptimal function of avian virus polymerase in mammalian cells. Avian ANP32A possesses an additional 33 amino acids between the leucine-rich repeats and carboxy-terminal low-complexity acidic region domains. In mammalian cells, avian ANP32A rescued the suboptimal function of avian virus polymerase to levels similar to mammalian-adapted polymerase. Deletion of the avian-specific sequence from chicken ANP32A abrogated this activity, whereas its insertion into human ANP32A, or closely related ANP32B, supported avian virus polymerase function. Substitutions, such as PB2(E627K), were rapidly selected upon infection of humans with avian H5N1 or H7N9 influenza viruses, adapting the viral polymerase for the shorter mammalian ANP32A. Thus ANP32A represents an essential host partner co-opted to support influenza virus replication and is a candidate host target for novel antivirals

Hypoxic gene expression in chronic hepatitis B virus infected patients is not observed in state-of-the-art in vitro and mouse infection models

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the leading cause of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) worldwide. The prolyl hydroxylase domain (PHD)-hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) pathway is a key mammalian oxygen sensing pathway and is frequently perturbed by pathological states including infection and inflammation. We discovered a significant upregulation of hypoxia regulated gene transcripts in patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) in the absence of liver cirrhosis. We used state-of-the-art in vitro and in vivo HBV infection models to evaluate a role for HBV infection and the viral regulatory protein HBx to drive HIF-signalling. HBx had no significant impact on HIF expression or associated transcriptional activity under normoxic or hypoxic conditions. Furthermore, we found no evidence of hypoxia gene expression in HBV de novo infection, HBV infected human liver chimeric mice or transgenic mice with integrated HBV genome. Collectively, our data show clear evidence of hypoxia gene induction in CHB that is not recapitulated in existing models for acute HBV infection, suggesting a role for inflammatory mediators in promoting hypoxia gene expression

Transcriptomic Profiling of Virus-Host Cell Interactions following Chicken Anaemia Virus (CAV) Infection in an In Vivo Model.

Chicken Anaemia Virus (CAV) is an economically important virus that targets lymphoid and erythroblastoid progenitor cells leading to immunosuppression. This study aimed to investigate the interplay between viral infection and the host's immune response to better understand the pathways that lead to CAV-induced immunosuppression. To mimic vertical transmission of CAV in the absence of maternally-derived antibody, day-old chicks were infected and their responses measured at various time-points post-infection by qRT-PCR and gene expression microarrays. The kinetics of mRNA expression levels of signature cytokines of innate and adaptive immune responses were determined by qRT-PCR. The global gene expression profiles of mock-infected (control) and CAV-infected chickens at 14 dpi were also compared using a chicken immune-related 5K microarray. Although in the thymus there was evidence of induction of an innate immune response following CAV infection, this was limited in magnitude. There was little evidence of a Th1 adaptive immune response in any lymphoid tissue, as would normally be expected in response to viral infection. Most cytokines associated with Th1, Th2 or Treg subsets were down-regulated, except IL-2, IL-13, IL-10 and IFNγ, which were all up-regulated in thymus and bone marrow. From the microarray studies, genes that exhibited significant (greater than 1.5-fold, false discovery rate <0.05) changes in expression in thymus and bone marrow on CAV infection were mainly associated with T-cell receptor signalling, immune response, transcriptional regulation, intracellular signalling and regulation of apoptosis. Expression levels of a number of adaptor proteins, such as src-like adaptor protein (SLA), a negative regulator of T-cell receptor signalling and the transcription factor Special AT-rich Binding Protein 1 (SATB1), were significantly down-regulated by CAV infection, suggesting potential roles for these genes as regulators of viral infection or cell defence. These results extend our understanding of CAV-induced immunosuppression and suggest a global immune dysregulation following CAV infection

Evidence for the 125 GeV Higgs boson decaying to a pair of tau leptons

Peer reviewe

Observation of Charge-Dependent Azimuthal Correlations in p-Pb Collisions and Its Implication for the Search for the Chiral Magnetic Effect

Peer reviewe

Search for resonances in the mass spectrum of muon pairs produced in association with b quark jets in proton-proton collisions at root 8 and 13 TeV

A search for resonances in the mass range 12-70 GeV produced in association with a b quark jet and a second jet, and decaying to a muon pair, is reported. The analysis is based on data from proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 8 and 13 TeV, collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponding to integrated luminosities of 19.7 and 35.9 fb(-1), respectively. The search is carried out in two mutually exclusive event categories. Events in the first category are required to have a b quark jet in the central region (|| 2.4) and at least one jet in the forward region (|| > 2.4). Events in the second category are required to have two jets in the central region, at least one of which is identified as a b quark jet, no jets in the forward region, and low missing transverse momentum. An excess of events above the background near a dimuon mass of 28 GeV is observed in the 8 TeV data, corresponding to local significances of 4.2 and 2.9 standard deviations for the first and second event categories, respectively. A similar analysis conducted with the 13 TeV data results in a mild excess over the background in the first event category corresponding to a local significance of 2.0 standard deviations, while the second category results in a 1.4 standard deviation deficit. The fiducial cross section measurements and 95% confidence level upper limits on those for a resonance consistent with the 8 TeV excess are provided at both collision energies

Measurement of the triple-differential cross section for photon plus jets production in proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

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