Moving P2P Live Streaming to Mobile and Ubiquitous Environment

Media streams distribution over a wired network to static hosts can be realized by Client/Server mode or Peer-to-Peer overlay networks. However, if the end hosts are mobile over heterogeneous wireless access networks, one needs to consider many operational issues such as network detection, handoff, join and leave latency, and desired level of quality of service, as well as caching. In the latest researches, one popular P2P live streaming system, called AnySee, over the wired network, has been deployed and widely used. Based on the AnySee system, this paper proposed and implemented one hybrid live streaming system, AnySee-Mobile, under wired and wireless environment. In the system, one wireless peer will be selected to act as an agent. One agent has two main functions, to request media from P2P overlay network as a normal peer, and to multicast media to WLAN as a multicast source. In this paper we study, how to elect one multicast agent in WLAN. Several experimentations have been made and proved that the system has good user experiences and performances

Macroscopic modeling of social crowds

Social behavior in crowds, such as herding or increased interpersonal spacing, is driven by the psychological states of pedestrians. Current macroscopic crowd models assume that these are static, limiting the ability of models to capture the complex interplay be-tween evolving psychology and collective crowd dynamics that defines a “social crowd”. This paper introduces a novel approach by explicitly incorporating an “activity” vari-able into the modeling framework, which represents the evolving psychological states of pedestrians and is linked to crowd dynamics. To demonstrate the role of activity, we model pedestrian egress when this variable captures stress and awareness of contagion. In addition, to highlight the importance of dynamic changes in activity, we examine a scenario in which an unexpected incident necessitates alternative exits. These case studies demonstrate that activity plays a pivotal role in shaping crowd behavior. The proposed modeling approach thus opens avenues for more realistic macroscopic crowd descriptions with practical implications for crowd management

Meta-analysis of preclinical studies of mesenchymal stromal cells to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

BackgroundThis study aims to evaluate the quality of preclinical data, determine the effect sizes, and identify experimental measures that inform efficacy using mesenchymal stromal (or stem) cells (MSC) therapy in animal models of rheumatoid arthritis (RA).MethodsLiterature searches were performed on MSC preclinical studies to treat RA. MSC treatment effect sizes were determined by the most commonly used outcome measures, including paw thickness, clinical score, and histological score.FindingsA total of 48 studies and 94 treatment arms were included, among which 42 studies and 79 treatment arms reported that MSC improved outcomes. The effect sizes of RA treatments using MSC, when compared to the controls, were: paw thickness was ameliorated by 53.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 26.7% -80.4%), histological score was decreased by 44.9% (95% CI: 33.3% -56.6%), and clinical score was decreased by 29.9% (95% CI: 16.7% -43.0%). Specifically, our results indicated that human umbilical cord derived MSC led to large improvements of the clinical score (-42.1%) and histological score (-51.4%).InterpretationTo the best of our knowledge, this meta-analysis is to quantitatively answer whether MSC represent a robust RA treatment in animal models. It suggests that in preclinical studies, MSC have consistently exhibited therapeutic benefits. The findings demonstrate a need for considering variations in different animal models and treatment protocols in future studies using MSC to treat RA in humans to maximise the therapeutic gains in the era of precision medicine.FundsNIH [1DP2CA195763], Baylx Inc.: BI-206512, NINDS/NIH Training Grant [Award# NS082174]

Exposure to various abscission-promoting treatments suggests substantial ERF subfamily transcription factors involvement in the regulation of cassava leaf abscission

AP2/ERF genes that exhibited the same expression patterns during ethylene and water-deficit stress treatments. (XLS 19 kb

Calibration-based Dual Prototypical Contrastive Learning Approach for Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation

Prototypical contrastive learning (PCL) has been widely used to learn class-wise domain-invariant features recently. These methods are based on the assumption that the prototypes, which are represented as the central value of the same class in a certain domain, are domain-invariant. Since the prototypes of different domains have discrepancies as well, the class-wise domain-invariant features learned from the source domain by PCL need to be aligned with the prototypes of other domains simultaneously. However, the prototypes of the same class in different domains may be different while the prototypes of different classes may be similar, which may affect the learning of class-wise domain-invariant features. Based on these observations, a calibration-based dual prototypical contrastive learning (CDPCL) approach is proposed to reduce the domain discrepancy between the learned class-wise features and the prototypes of different domains for domain generalization semantic segmentation. It contains an uncertainty-guided PCL (UPCL) and a hard-weighted PCL (HPCL). Since the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of different classes may be different, we propose an uncertainty probability matrix to represent the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of all the classes. The UPCL estimates the uncertainty probability matrix to calibrate the weights of the prototypes during the PCL. Moreover, considering that the prototypes of different classes may be similar in some circumstances, which means these prototypes are hard-aligned, the HPCL is proposed to generate a hard-weighted matrix to calibrate the weights of the hard-aligned prototypes during the PCL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance over current approaches on domain generalization semantic segmentation tasks.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM'2

Metformin promotes the survival of transplanted cardiosphere-derived cells thereby enhancing their therapeutic effect against myocardial infarction

The CDC differentiation at 4 weeks after transplantation analyzed by immunostaining. A–C: Sections of hearts were immunostained with antibodies to (A) the cardiomyocyte marker tropomyosin, (B) the endothelial cell marker von-Willebrand Factor (vWF), and (C) the smooth muscle cell marker α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA). Antibody to GFP was used for identifying surviving CDC-derived cells and DAPI was used for identifying nuclei. Scale bars = 20 μm. DAPI 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole. (PDF 178 kb

Feasibility analysis of hybrid energy generation systems for desert highway service areas: a case study in northern Xinjiang, China

Highways consume a significant amount of electrical energy annually, especially in remote desert regions where the cost of electricity is high. This research explores the utilization of natural resources along desert highways to establish hybrid energy generation systems for service areas. Three service areas along the desert highway in northern Xinjiang, China, serve as case studies. To assess the feasibility of hybrid energy generation systems in these service areas, meteorological data for the three locations were obtained from the NASA platform. The HOMER Pro software was employed for technical, economic, and environmental analyses of the systems. The results indicate the feasibility of Photovoltaic (PV)/Wind/Battery hybrid energy systems in the Huanghuagou, Kelameili, and Wujiaqu service areas. The application of these hybrid energy generation systems across the three service areas could provide 3,349,557 kWh of electrical energy annually for the desert highway. Sensitivity analysis reveals that the Net Present Cost (NPC) and Cost of Energy (COE) values decrease with increasing radiation levels, while NPC shows an increasing trend with growing load demand, and COE exhibits a decreasing trend. Among the three regions, Wujiaqu demonstrates the highest economic viability, with a COE of $0.34/kWh and an NPC of$3,141,641/kWh. Furthermore, Wujiaqu exhibits the lowest environmental impact, with CO2 emissions of 198,387 kg/yr, SO2 emissions of 493 kg/yr, and NOx emissions of 1,711 kg/yr

Correlation Between Circulating Tumor Cell DNA Genomic Alterations and Mesenchymal CTCs or CTC-Associated White Blood Cell Clusters in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

PurposeLiquid biopsy is attracting attention as a method of real-time monitoring of patients with tumors. It can be used to understand the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of tumors and has good clinical application prospects. We explored a new type of circulating tumor cell (CTC) enrichment technology combined with next-generation sequencing (NGS) to analyze the correlation between genomic alterations in circulating tumor cells of hepatocellular carcinoma and the counts of mesenchymal CTCs and CTC-associated white blood cell (CTC-WBC) clusters.MethodsWe collected peripheral blood samples from 29 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma from January 2016 to December 2019. We then used the CanPatrol™ system to capture and analyze mesenchymal CTCs and CTC-WBC clusters for all the patients. A customized Illumina panel was used for DNA sequencing and the Mann–Whitney U test was used to test the correlation between mesenchymal CTCs, CTC-WBC cluster counts, and specific genomic changes.ResultsAt least one somatic hotspot mutation was detected in each of the 29 sequenced patients. A total of 42 somatic hot spot mutations were detected in tumor tissue DNA, and 39 mutations were detected in CTC-DNA, all of which included common changes in PTEN, MET, EGFR, RET, and FGFR3. The number of mesenchymal CTCs was positively correlated with the somatic genomic alterations in the PTEN and MET genes (PTEN, P = 0.021; MET, P  = 0.008, Mann–Whitney U test) and negatively correlated with the somatic genomic alterations in the EGFR gene (P = 0.006, Mann–Whitney U test). The number of CTC-WBC clusters was positively correlated with the somatic genomic alterations in RET genes (P  = 0.01, Mann–Whitney U test) and negatively correlated with the somatic genomic alterations in FGFR3 (P = 0.039, Mann–Whitney U test).ConclusionsWe report a novel method of a CTC enrichment platform combined with NGS technology to analyze genetic variation, which further demonstrates the potential clinical application of this method for spatiotemporal heterogeneity monitoring of hepatocellular carcinoma. We found that the number of peripheral blood mesenchymal CTCs and CTC-WBC clusters in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma was related to a specific genome profile