Gel treatment field application survey for water shut off in production wells

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) screening criteria are considered as a guideline for candidate evaluation and determination. Not many screening criteria for gel treatment had been published. Some published gel treatment application surveys for water shut off only include limited number of oil fields and locations. The current work aims to summarize the worldwide gel treatment applications for water shut off in production wells by creating and analyzing a dataset from a variety of sources. This study started from collecting and cleaning the gel treatment application data. All the data were from SPE field publications from 1990 to 2012 and from Petroleum Technology Transfer Council database. Only production wells gel treatment application projects were included in this study. Failed projects were detected and deleted by the proposed method. The original dataset included 56 fields and 415 wells. Upon deleting the projects with insufficient information, 33 fields and 160 wells remained. After improving the dataset quality, both graphical and statistical methods were utilized to analyze the data. Histograms and box plots were used to show the distribution of each parameter and present the range of the data. Gel type selection, injection method, pre-flush method, and post flush method were analyzed by bar charts to show the gel treatment usage conditions. For analyzing the treatment results, cross plots were constructed to compare oil wells production before and after treatments. Oil wells candidate selection criteria were discussed. To improve the success rate for future gel applications, the reasons for past failure field cases were summarized, and the treatment limitations were listed. In addition, economic analysis based on cost and payback time was also discussed --Abstract, page iii

Roulette: A Semantic Privacy-Preserving Device-Edge Collaborative Inference Framework for Deep Learning Classification Tasks

Deep learning classifiers are crucial in the age of artificial intelligence. The device-edge-based collaborative inference has been widely adopted as an efficient framework for promoting its applications in IoT and 5G/6G networks. However, it suffers from accuracy degradation under non-i.i.d. data distribution and privacy disclosure. For accuracy degradation, direct use of transfer learning and split learning is high cost and privacy issues remain. For privacy disclosure, cryptography-based approaches lead to a huge overhead. Other lightweight methods assume that the ground truth is non-sensitive and can be exposed. But for many applications, the ground truth is the user's crucial privacy-sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a framework of Roulette, which is a task-oriented semantic privacy-preserving collaborative inference framework for deep learning classifiers. More than input data, we treat the ground truth of the data as private information. We develop a novel paradigm of split learning where the back-end DNN is frozen and the front-end DNN is retrained to be both a feature extractor and an encryptor. Moreover, we provide a differential privacy guarantee and analyze the hardness of ground truth inference attacks. To validate the proposed Roulette, we conduct extensive performance evaluations using realistic datasets, which demonstrate that Roulette can effectively defend against various attacks and meanwhile achieve good model accuracy. In a situation where the non-i.i.d. is very severe, Roulette improves the inference accuracy by 21\% averaged over benchmarks, while making the accuracy of discrimination attacks almost equivalent to random guessing

Techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment of pineapple leaves utilization in Costa Rica

Pineapple production around the world creates large amounts of wasted organic residue, mainly in the form of pineapple leaves. Current management practices consist of in situ decomposition or in situ burning, both of which cause proliferation of flies and air pollution, respectively. The research conducted aims to develop a utilization process for this residue. Considering that pineapple leaves are rich in carbohydrates and other nutrients, a simple biological process involving a two-step procedure for juice production and ethanol fermentation has been developed to convert the leaves into renewable fuel and spent yeasts for animal feed. The liquid fraction extracted from the leaves is used as the nutrients to culture a yeast, Kluyveromyces marxianus, for ethanol and yeast protein production. In Costa Rica, one of the major pineapple producing countries in the world, the studied process can produce 92708 and 64859 tons of bioethanol and spent yeast per year respectively, from its 44500 hectares of pineapple plantation. This techno-economic analysis indicates that a regional biorefinery with the capacity to produce 50000 metric tons per year of ethanol could have a short payback period of 4.72 years. The life cycle analysis further demonstrates the advantages of the studied biorefining concept over the current practice of open burning.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ingeniería::Facultad de Ingeniería::Escuela de Ingeniería de Biosistema

COVID-19 spreading patterns in family clusters reveal gender roles in China

Unfolding different gender roles is preceding the efforts to reduce gender inequality. This paper analyzes COVID-19 family clusters outside Hubei Province in mainland China during the 2020 outbreak, revealing significant differences in spreading patterns across gender and family roles. Results show that men are more likely to be the imported cases of a family cluster, and women are more likely to be infected within the family. This finding provides new supportive evidence of the men as breadwinner and women as homemaker (MBWH) gender roles in China. Further analyses reveal that the MBWH pattern is stronger in eastern than in western China, stronger for younger than for elder people. This paper offers not only valuable references for formulating gender-differentiated epidemic prevention policies but also an exemplification for studying group differences in similar scenarios.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Coded Backscattering Communication with LTE Pilots as Ambient Signal

The 3GPP has recently conducted a study on the Ambient Internet of Things (AIoT), with a particular emphasis on examining backscatter communications as one of the primary techniques under consideration. Previous investigations into Ambient Backscatter Communications (AmBC) within the long term evolution (LTE) downlink have shown that it is feasible to utilize the user equipment channel estimator as a receiver for demodulating frequency shift keyed (FSK) messages transmitted by the backscatter devices. In practical deployment scenarios, the backscattered link often experiences a low signal-to-noise ratio, leading to subpar bit error rate (BER) performance in the case of uncoded transmissions. In this paper, we propose the adoption of the same convolutional coding methodology for backscatter links that is already employed for LTE downlink control signals. This approach facilitates the reuse of identical demodulation functions at the modem for both control signals and backscattered AIoT messages. To assess the performance of the proposed scheme, we conducted experiments utilizing real LTE downlink signals generated by a mobile operator within an office environment. When compared to uncoded FSK, convolutional channel coding delivers a notable gain of approximately 6 dB at a BER of $10^{-3}$. Consequently, the AmBC system demonstrates a high level of reliability, achieving a BER of $10^{-3}$ at a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 5 dB

Peptide 17, an inhibitor of YAP/TEAD4 pathway, mitigates lung cancer malignancy

Purpose: To investigate whether and how peptide 17 affects lung cancer cells.Methods: Human lung carcinoma cells, LLC and PC-9, were employed to study the therapeutic effect of peptide 17 on lung cancer. After exogenous expression of peptide 17, a co-immunoprecipitation experiment was used to examine the inhibitory effect of peptide 17. CCK8 assay was employed to assess the lung cancer cells’ viability while clone formation assays were used to assess lung cancer cell proliferation. Colony number was also determined. The stimulatory effect of peptide 17 on lung cancer cell apoptosis was assessed by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS).Results: Peptide 17 efficiently disrupted the interaction between YAP and TEAD4 (p < 0.001), and decreased the expression of CTGF and Cyr61. In addition, lung cancer cell viability and proliferation significantly decreased (p < 0.001) in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. On the other hand, the proportion of apoptotic cells was significantly elevated with rising concentration of peptide 17.Conclusion: Exogenous expression of peptide 17 activates Bcl2/Bax/caspase-9 signal and isresponsible for its inhibitory effects on lung cancer cells. Thus, peptide 17 is a promising target drug in lung cancer treatment.Keywords: Lung cancer, Yes-associate protein, Transcriptional enhancer activation domain 4 (TEAD4), Peptide 17, Apoptosi

Maternal and fetal/neonatal outcomes of pregnancies complicated by pulmonary hypertension: a retrospective study of 154 patients

Objectives: To determine the main clinical and demographic outcomes related to Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) and adverse obstetric and fetal/neonatal outcomes. Methods: This study retrospectively analyzed the medical record data of 154 patients with PH who were admitted to the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University between January 2011 and December 2020. Results: According to the severity of elevated Pulmonary Artery Systolic Pressure (PASP), 82 women (53.2%) were included in the mild PH group, 34 (22.1%) were included in the moderate PH group, and 38 (24.7%) were included in the severe PH group. There were significant differences in the incidence of heart failure, premature delivery, Very-Low-Birth-Weight (VLBW) infants, and Small-for-Gestational-Age (SGA) infants among the three PH groups (p < 0.05). Five (3.2%) women died within 7-days after delivery, 7 (4.5%) fetuses died in utero, and 3 (1.9%) neonates died. The authors found that PASP was an independent risk factor for maternal mortality. After adjustment for age, gestational weeks, systolic blood pressure, Body Mass Index (BMI), mode of delivery, and anesthesia, the risk of maternal mortality in the severe PH group was 20.21 times higher than that in the mild-moderate PH group (OR = 21.21 [95% CI 1.7∼264.17]), p < 0.05. All 131 (85.1%) patients were followed up for 12 months postpartum. Conclusions: The authors found that the risk of maternal mortality in the severe PH group was significantly higher than that in the mild-moderate group, highlighting the importance of pulmonary artery pressure screening before pregnancy, early advice on contraception, and multidisciplinary care