Identity based proxy re-encryption scheme (IBPRE+) for secure cloud data sharing

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.In proxy re-encryption (PRE), a proxy with re-encryption keys can transfer aciphertext computed under Alice's public key into a new one, which can be decrypted by Bob only with his secret key. Recently, Wang et al. introduced the concept of PRE plus (PRE+) scheme, which can be seen as the dual of PRE, and is almost the same as PRE scheme except that the re-encryption keys are generated by the encrypter. Compared to PRE, PRE+ scheme can easily achieve two important properties: first, the message-level based fine-grained delegation and, second, the non-transferable property. In this paper, we extend the concept of PRE+ to the identity based setting. We propose a concrete IBPRE+ scheme based on 3-linear map and roughly discuss its properties. We also demonstrate potential application of this new primitive to secure cloud data sharing.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

LiveRetro: Visual Analytics for Strategic Retrospect in Livestream E-Commerce

Livestream e-commerce integrates live streaming and online shopping, allowing viewers to make purchases while watching. However, effective marketing strategies remain a challenge due to limited empirical research and subjective biases from the absence of quantitative data. Current tools fail to capture the interdependence between live performances and feedback. This study identified computational features, formulated design requirements, and developed LiveRetro, an interactive visual analytics system. It enables comprehensive retrospective analysis of livestream e-commerce for streamers, viewers, and merchandise. LiveRetro employs enhanced visualization and time-series forecasting models to align performance features and feedback, identifying influences at channel, merchandise, feature, and segment levels. Through case studies and expert interviews, the system provides deep insights into the relationship between live performance and streaming statistics, enabling efficient strategic analysis from multiple perspectives.Comment: Accepted by IEEE VIS 202

Changes in Cortical Thickness in Patients With Early Parkinson’s Disease at Different Hoehn and Yahr Stages

Objectives: This study was designed to explore changes in cortical thickness in patients with early Parkinson’s disease (PD) at different Hoehn and Yahr (H-Y) stages and to demonstrate the association of abnormally altered brain regions with part III of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS-III).Materials and Methods: Sixty early PD patients and 29 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled in this study. All PD patients underwent comprehensive clinical and neuropsychological evaluations and 3.0 T magnetic resonance scanning. Patients with H-Y stage ≤1.5 were included in the mild group, and all other patients were included in the moderate group. FreeSurfer software was used to calculate cortical thickness. We assessed the relationship between UPDRS-III and regional changes in cortical thinning, including the bilateral fusiform and the temporal lobe.Results: The average cortical thickness of the temporal pole, fusiform gyrus, insula of the left hemisphere and fusiform gyrus, isthmus cingulate cortex, inferior temporal gyrus, middle temporal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex of the right hemisphere exhibited significant decreasing trends in HCs group and PD groups (i.e., the mild group and moderate group). After controlling for the effects of age, gender, and disease duration, the UPDRS-III scores in patients with early PD were correlated with the cortical thickness of the left and right fusiform gyrus and the left temporal pole (p < 0.05).Conclusion: The average cortical thickness of specific brain regions reduced with increasing disease severity in early PD patients at different H-Y stages, and the UPDRS-III scores of early PD patients were correlated with cortical thickness of the bilateral fusiform gyrus and the left temporal pole

Glycemic Variability Promotes Both Local Invasion and Metastatic Colonization by Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma

Background & Aims: Although nearly half of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients have diabetes mellitus with episodes of hyperglycemia, its tumor microenvironment is hypoglycemic. Thus, it is crucial for PDAC cells to develop adaptive mechanisms dealing with oscillating glucose levels. So far, the biological impact of such glycemic variability on PDAC biology remains unknown. Methods: Murine PDAC cells were cultured in low- and high-glucose medium to investigate the molecular, biochemical, and metabolic influence of glycemic variability on tumor behavior. A set of in vivo functional assays including orthotopic implantation and portal and tail vein injection were used. Results were further confirmed on tissues from PDAC patients. Results: Glycemic variability has no significant effect on PDAC cell proliferation. Hypoglycemia is associated with local invasion and angiogenesis, whereas hyperglycemia promotes metastatic colonization. Increased metastatic colonization under hyperglycemia is due to increased expression of runt related transcription factor 3 (Runx3), which further activates expression of collagen, type VI, alpha 1 (Col6a1), forming a glycemic pro-metastatic pathway. Through epigenetic machinery, retinoic acid receptor beta (Rarb) expression fluctuates according to glycemic variability, acting as a critical sensor relaying the glycemic signal to Runx3/Col6a1. Moreover, the signal axis of Rarb/Runx3/Col6a1 is pharmaceutically accessible to a widely used antidiabetic substance, metformin, and Rar modulator. Finally, PDAC tissues from patients with diabetes show an increased expression of COL6A1. Conclusions: Glycemic variability promotes both local invasion and metastatic colonization of PDAC. A pro-metastatic signal axis Rarb/Runx3/Col6a1 whose activity is controlled by glycemic variability is identified. The therapeutic relevance of this pathway needs to be explored in PDAC patients, especially in those with diabetes

The Effect of Processing Parameter on Zirconium Modified Al-Cu-Mg Alloys Fabricated by Selective Laser Melting

The newly designed alloy compositions for selective laser melting (SLM) have aroused great interest. In this study, zirconium modified Al-Cu-Mg alloys were fabricated by SLM. Results show that crack-free samples with relative density of nearly 100% were obtained by optimizing the processing parameters. With the increase of scanning speed, the relative density decreases due to insufficient energy input. In addition, the microstructure transforms from homogeneous to bio-modal, the reason is the unstable flows caused by the high scanning speed. The small hatching space will provide more energy input and preheat, leading to the coarse surface.Mechanical Engineerin

Phase Separation in Kidney Diseases: Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease and Beyond

Background: The formation of biomolecular condensates via phase separation has emerged as a fundamental principle underlying the spatiotemporal coordination of biological activities in cells. Aberrant biomolecular condensates often directly regulate key cellular process involved in the pathogenesis of human diseases, including kidney diseases. Summary: In this review, we summarize the physiological roles of phase separation and methodologies for phase separation studies. Taking autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease as an example, we discuss recent advances toward elucidating the multiple mechanisms involved in kidney pathology arising from aberrant phase separation. We suggest that dysregulation of phase separation contributes to the pathogenesis of other important kidney diseases, including kidney injury and fibrosis. Key Messages: Phase separation provides a useful new concept to understand the mechanisms underlying kidney disease development. Targeting aberrant phase-separated condensates offers new therapeutic avenues for combating kidney diseases

Identity based proxy re-encryption scheme (IBPRE+) for secure cloud data sharing

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.In proxy re-encryption (PRE), a proxy with re-encryption keys can transfer aciphertext computed under Alice's public key into a new one, which can be decrypted by Bob only with his secret key. Recently, Wang et al. introduced the concept of PRE plus (PRE+) scheme, which can be seen as the dual of PRE, and is almost the same as PRE scheme except that the re-encryption keys are generated by the encrypter. Compared to PRE, PRE+ scheme can easily achieve two important properties: first, the message-level based fine-grained delegation and, second, the non-transferable property. In this paper, we extend the concept of PRE+ to the identity based setting. We propose a concrete IBPRE+ scheme based on 3-linear map and roughly discuss its properties. We also demonstrate potential application of this new primitive to secure cloud data sharing.Peer Reviewe

Thermal Properties of SK One Component Polyurethane using Experiments and Multiphysics Simulations

This study proposes to determine the thermal conductivity of SK One Component Polyurethane (SKOCP) developed by China Institute of Water Resources & Hydropower Research Beijing IWHR-KHL Co. Ltd. SKOCP provides excellent proof of aging and chemical resistance of this material. It is non-toxic, acts as a good anti-seepage, offers anti-abrasion and good anti-freezing performance. In addition, it has high strength, high elongation and good bonding with base materials (i.e. concrete, metal surfaces, etc.).With all these robust properties, the one component polyurethane seems the most favourable material for construction in cold regions as it acts as anti-freezing and protects against freeze-thaw fractures. The research aims to study SKOCP in depth and to determine its thermal conductivity using experimentations and multiphysics based numerical simulations. The standard experimental setup, as suggested by Kvadsheim, Folkow et al. (1994), will be used to determine the thermal conductivity. In addition, infrared imaging technique will also be employed to study the thermal profiles, which will be used to estimate the thermal conductivity (Rashid, Khawaja et al. 2016). The thermal data will be compared against the multiphysics numerical simulation results. The study will help in building the confidence between the experimentation and multiphysics based numerical studies and provide scientific background for application of SKOCP in the Cold Climate

Enhancing Grid-Based 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving With Improved Dimensionality Reduction

Point cloud object detection is a pivotal technology in autonomous driving and robotics. Currently, the majority of cutting-edge point cloud detectors utilize Bird’s Eye View (BEV) for detection, as it allows them to take advantage of well-explored 2D detection techniques. Nevertheless, dimensionality reduction of features from 3D space to BEV space unavoidably leads to information loss, and there is a lack of research on this issue. Existing methods typically obtain BEV features by collapsing voxel or point features along the height dimension via a pooling operation or convolution, resulting in a significant decrease in geometric information. To tackle this problem, we present a new point cloud backbone network for grid-based object detection, MDRNet, which is based on adaptive dimensionality reduction and multi-level spatial residual strategies. In MDRNet, the Spatial-aware Dimensionality Reduction (SDR) is designed to dynamically concentrate on the essential components of the object during 3D-to-BEV transformation. Moreover, the Multi-level Spatial Residuals (MSR) strategy is proposed to effectively fuse multi-level spatial information in BEV feature maps. Our MDRNet can be employed on any existing grid-based object detector, resulting in a remarkable improvement in performance. Numerous experiments conducted on nuScenes, KITTI and DAIR-V have shown that MDRNet surpasses existing SOTA approaches. In particular, on the nuScenes dataset, we attained an impressive 7.2% mAP and 5.0% NDS enhancement compared with CenterPoint

Adaptive Point-Line Fusion: A Targetless LiDAR–Camera Calibration Method with Scheme Selection for Autonomous Driving

Accurate calibration between LiDAR and camera sensors is crucial for autonomous driving systems to perceive and understand the environment effectively. Typically, LiDAR–camera extrinsic calibration requires feature alignment and overlapping fields of view. Aligning features from different modalities can be challenging due to noise influence. Therefore, this paper proposes a targetless extrinsic calibration method for monocular cameras and LiDAR sensors that have a non-overlapping field of view. The proposed solution uses pose transformation to establish data association across different modalities. This conversion turns the calibration problem into an optimization problem within a visual SLAM system without requiring overlapping views. To improve performance, line features serve as constraints in visual SLAM. Accurate positions of line segments are obtained by utilizing an extended photometric error optimization method. Moreover, a strategy is proposed for selecting appropriate calibration methods from among several alternative optimization schemes. This adaptive calibration method selection strategy ensures robust calibration performance in urban autonomous driving scenarios with varying lighting and environmental textures while avoiding failures and excessive bias that may result from relying on a single approach