Balanced byzantine reliable broadcast with near-optimal communication and improved computation

CNS-1718135 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1801564 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1931714 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1915763 - National Science Foundation; HR00112020021 - Department of Defense/DARPA; 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000037211 - SRI Internationalhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2022/776.pdfFirst author draf

Brief announcement: asynchronous verifiable information dispersal with near-optimal communication

CNS-1718135 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1801564 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1931714 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1915763 - National Science Foundation; HR00112020021 - Department of Defense/DARPA; 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000037211 - SRI Internationalhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2022/775.pdfFirst author draf

Cystatin C and risk of new-onset depressive symptoms among individuals with a normal creatinine-based estimated glomerular filtration rate: A prospective cohort study

The association between cystatin C and depressive symptoms in the general population has not been thoroughly elucidated to date. We investigated the association of cystatin C with new-onset depressive symptoms among individuals with normal creatinine-based estimated glomerular filtration rates (eGFR). In the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, 5111 participants without depressive symptoms or renal dysfunction (eGFR \u3c 60 ml/min/1.73

Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition

Contrastive language-image pretraining has shown great success in learning visual-textual joint representation from web-scale data, demonstrating remarkable "zero-shot" generalization ability for various image tasks. However, how to effectively expand such new language-image pretraining methods to video domains is still an open problem. In this work, we present a simple yet effective approach that adapts the pretrained language-image models to video recognition directly, instead of pretraining a new model from scratch. More concretely, to capture the long-range dependencies of frames along the temporal dimension, we propose a cross-frame attention mechanism that explicitly exchanges information across frames. Such module is lightweight and can be plugged into pretrained language-image models seamlessly. Moreover, we propose a video-specific prompting scheme, which leverages video content information for generating discriminative textual prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is effective and can be generalized to different video recognition scenarios. In particular, under fully-supervised settings, our approach achieves a top-1 accuracy of 87.1% on Kinectics-400, while using 12 times fewer FLOPs compared with Swin-L and ViViT-H. In zero-shot experiments, our approach surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods by +7.6% and +14.9% in terms of top-1 accuracy under two popular protocols. In few-shot scenarios, our approach outperforms previous best methods by +32.1% and +23.1% when the labeled data is extremely limited. Code and models are available at https://aka.ms/X-CLIPComment: Accepted by ECCV2022, Ora

PHOTOMETRIC OBSERVATIONS OF 782 MONTEFIORE, 3842 HARLANSMITH, 5542 MOFFATT, 6720 GIFU, AND (19979) 1989 VJ

Five solar system minor planets were measured photometrically between 2012 October and December using the SARA (Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy) telescopes located in Kitt Peak National Observatory in USA and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The following synodic periods were found: 782 Montefiore P = 4.0728 ± 0.0006 h; 3842 Harlansmith, P = 2.7938 ± 0.0005 h; 5542 Moffatt P = 5.187 ± 0.001 h; 6720 Gifu, P = 4.231 ± 0.001 h; and (19979) 1989 VJ, P = 7.568 ± 0.005 h

Molecular analysis of the diversity of vaginal microbiota associated with bacterial vaginosis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is an ecological disorder of the vaginal microbiota that affects millions of women annually, and is associated with numerous adverse health outcomes including pre-term birth and the acquisition of sexually transmitted infections. However, little is known about the overall structure and composition of vaginal microbial communities; most of the earlier studies focused on predominant vaginal bacteria in the process of BV. In the present study, the diversity and richness of vaginal microbiota in 50 BV positive and 50 healthy women from China were investigated using culture-independent PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and barcoded 454 pyrosequencing methods, and validated by quantitative PCR.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our data demonstrated that there was a profound shift in the absolute and relative abundances of bacterial species present in the vagina when comparing populations associated with healthy and diseased conditions. In spite of significant interpersonal variations, the diversity of vaginal microbiota in the two groups could be clearly divided into two clusters. A total of 246,359 high quality pyrosequencing reads was obtained for evaluating bacterial diversity and 24,298 unique sequences represented all phylotypes. The most predominant phyla of bacteria identified in the vagina belonged to <it>Firmicutes</it>, <it>Bacteroidetes</it>, <it>Actinobacteria </it>and <it>Fusobacteria</it>. The higher number of phylotypes in BV positive women over healthy is consistent with the results of previous studies and a large number of low-abundance taxa which were missed in previous studies were revealed. Although no single bacterium could be identified as a specific marker for healthy over diseased conditions, three phyla - <it>Bacteroidetes</it>, <it>Actinobacteria </it>and <it>Fusobacteria</it>, and eight genera including <it>Gardnerella</it>, <it>Atopobium</it>, <it>Megasphaera</it>, <it>Eggerthella</it>, <it>Aerococcus</it>, <it>Leptotrichia</it>/<it>Sneathia</it>, <it>Prevotella </it>and <it>Papillibacter </it>were strongly associated with BV (<it>p </it>< 0.05). These genera are potentially excellent markers and could be used as targets for clinical BV diagnosis by molecular approaches.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The data presented here have clearly profiled the overall structure of vaginal communities and clearly demonstrated that BV is associated with a dramatic increase in the taxonomic richness and diversity of vaginal microbiota. The study also provides the most comprehensive picture of the vaginal community structure and the bacterial ecosystem, and significantly contributes to the current understanding of the etiology of BV.</p

OX40 signaling favors the induction of TH9 cells and airway inflammation

The mechanisms regulating T helper 9 (TH9) cells and TH9-mediated diseases remain poorly defined. Here, we demonstrate that the receptor OX40 (Tnfrsf4) is a powerful inducer of TH9 cells in vitro and TH9-dependent airway inflammation in vivo. Under TGF-β based polarizing conditions, OX40 ligation eliminated production of induced regulatory T cells and TH17 cells, and divertedCD4+Foxp3− T cells to a TH9 phenotype. Mechanistically, OX40 activated the ubiquitin ligase TRAF6, which triggered the induction of NF-kB-inducing kinase (NIK) in CD4+ T cells and the non-canonical NF-kB pathway which subsequently lead toTH9 generation. Thus, our study identifies a previously unknown mechanism of TH9 induction and may have important clinical implications in allergic inflammation

Balanced Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with Near-Optimal Communication and Improved Computation

This paper studies Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) under asynchronous networks, and improves the state-of-the-art protocols from the following aspects. Near-optimal communication cost: We propose two new BRB protocols for $n$ nodes and input message $M$ that has communication cost $O(n|M|+n^2\log n)$, which is near-optimal due to the lower bound of $\Omega(n|M|+n^2)$. The first RBC protocol assumes threshold signature but is easy to understand, while the second RBC protocol is error-free but less intuitive. Improved computation: We propose a new construction that improves the computation cost of the state-of-the-art BRB by avoiding the expensive online error correction on the input message, while achieving the same communication cost. Balanced communication: We propose a technique named balanced multicast that can balance the communication cost for BRB protocols where the broadcaster needs to multicast the message $M$ while other nodes only needs to multicast coded fragments of size $O(|M|/n + \log n)$. The balanced multicast technique can be applied to many existing BRB protocols as well as all our new constructions in this paper, and can make every node incur about the same communication cost. Finally, we present a lower bound to show the near optimality of our protocol in terms of communication cost at each node

Asynchronous Verifiable Information Dispersal with Near-Optimal Communication

We present a near-optimal asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID) protocol. The total dispersal cost of our AVID protocol is $O(|M|+\kappa n^2)$, and the retrieval cost per client is $O(|M|+\kappa n)$. Unlike prior works, our AVID protocol only assumes the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. Also, in our AVID protocol, the dispersing client incurs a communication cost of $O(|M|+\kappa n)$ in comparison to $O(|M|+\kappa n\log n)$ of prior best. Moreover, each node in our AVID protocol incurs a storage cost of $O(|M|/n+\kappa)$ bits, in comparison to $O(|M|/n+\kappa \log n)$ bits of prior best. Finally, we present lower bound results on communication cost and show that our AVID protocol has near-optimal communication costs -- only a factor of $O(\kappa)$ gap from the lower bounds