Distributed and Deep Vertical Federated Learning with Big Data

In recent years, data are typically distributed in multiple organizations while the data security is becoming increasingly important. Federated Learning (FL), which enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a model without exchanging the raw data, has attracted more and more attention. Based on the distribution of data, FL can be realized in three scenarios, i.e., horizontal, vertical, and hybrid. In this paper, we propose to combine distributed machine learning techniques with Vertical FL and propose a Distributed Vertical Federated Learning (DVFL) approach. The DVFL approach exploits a fully distributed architecture within each party in order to accelerate the training process. In addition, we exploit Homomorphic Encryption (HE) to protect the data against honest-but-curious participants. We conduct extensive experimentation in a large-scale cluster environment and a cloud environment in order to show the efficiency and scalability of our proposed approach. The experiments demonstrate the good scalability of our approach and the significant efficiency advantage (up to 6.8 times with a single server and 15.1 times with multiple servers in terms of the training time) compared with baseline frameworks.Comment: To appear in CCPE (Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience

N′-[(E)-1-(5-Bromo-2-hydroxy­phen­yl)ethyl­idene]benzohydrazide

The C=N double bond in the title compound, C15H13BrN2O2, is trans E configured and the dihedral angle between the aromatic ring planes is 22.3 (1)°. The crystal structure is stabilized by intra­molecular O—H⋯O and inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds

(5-Bromo-2-hydroxy­phen­yl)(phen­yl)methanone

In the title compound, C13H9BrO2, the dihedral angle between the aromatic ring planes is 53.6 (1)°. The crystal structure is stabilized by intra­molecular O—H⋯O and inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonding and C—H⋯π inter­actions

Rotation-Invariant Transformer for Point Cloud Matching

The intrinsic rotation invariance lies at the core of matching point clouds with handcrafted descriptors. However, it is widely despised by recent deep matchers that obtain the rotation invariance extrinsically via data augmentation. As the finite number of augmented rotations can never span the continuous SO(3) space, these methods usually show instability when facing rotations that are rarely seen. To this end, we introduce RoITr, a Rotation-Invariant Transformer to cope with the pose variations in the point cloud matching task. We contribute both on the local and global levels. Starting from the local level, we introduce an attention mechanism embedded with Point Pair Feature (PPF)-based coordinates to describe the pose-invariant geometry, upon which a novel attention-based encoder-decoder architecture is constructed. We further propose a global transformer with rotation-invariant cross-frame spatial awareness learned by the self-attention mechanism, which significantly improves the feature distinctiveness and makes the model robust with respect to the low overlap. Experiments are conducted on both the rigid and non-rigid public benchmarks, where RoITr outperforms all the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin in the low-overlapping scenarios. Especially when the rotations are enlarged on the challenging 3DLoMatch benchmark, RoITr surpasses the existing methods by at least 13 and 5 percentage points in terms of Inlier Ratio and Registration Recall, respectively.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023 (camera-ready version

Enhanced excitability of small dorsal root ganglion neurons in rats with bone cancer pain

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Primary and metastatic cancers that affect bone are frequently associated with severe and intractable pain. The mechanisms underlying the development of bone cancer pain are largely unknown. The aim of this study was to determine whether enhanced excitability of primary sensory neurons contributed to peripheral sensitization and tumor-induced hyperalgesia during cancer condition. In this study, using techniques of whole-cell patch-clamp recording associated with immunofluorescent staining, single-cell reverse-transcriptase PCR and behavioral test, we investigated whether the intrinsic membrane properties and the excitability of small-sized dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons altered in a rat model of bone cancer pain, and whether suppression of DRG neurons activity inhibited the bone cancer-induced pain.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our present study showed that implantation of MRMT-1 tumor cells into the tibial canal in rats produced significant mechanical and thermal hyperalgesia in the ipsilateral hind paw. Moreover, implantation of tumor cells provoked spontaneous discharges and tonic excitatory discharges evoked by a depolarizing current pulse in small-sized DRG neurons. In line with these findings, alterations in intrinsic membrane properties that reflect the enhanced neuronal excitability were observed in small DRG neurons in bone cancer rats, of which including: 1) depolarized resting membrane potential (RMP); 2) decreased input resistance (R_in); 3) a marked reduction in current threshold (CT) and voltage threshold (TP) of action potential (AP); 4) a dramatic decrease in amplitude, overshot, and duration of evoked action potentials as well as in amplitude and duration of afterhyperpolarization (AHP); and 5) a significant increase in the firing frequency of evoked action potentials. Here, the decreased AP threshold and increased firing frequency of evoked action potentials implicate the occurrence of hyperexcitability in small-sized DRG neurons in bone cancer rats. In addiotion, immunofluorescent staining and single-cell reverse-transcriptase PCR revealed that in isolated small DRG neurons, most neurons were IB4-positive, or expressed TRPV1 or CGRP, indicating that most recorded small DRG neurons were nociceptive neurons. Finally, using in vivo behavioral test, we found that blockade of DRG neurons activity by TTX inhibited the tumor-evoked mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia in bone cancer rats, implicating that the enhanced excitability of primary sensory neurons underlied the development of bone cancer pain.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our present results suggest that implantation of tumor cells into the tibial canal in rats induces an enhanced excitability of small-sized DRG neurons that is probably as results of alterations in intrinsic electrogenic properties of these neurons. Therefore, alterations in intrinsic membrane properties associated with the hyperexcitability of primary sensory neurons likely contribute to the peripheral sensitization and tumor-induced hyperalgesia under cancer condition.</p

Buyang Huanwu Decoction for Healthcare: Evidence-Based Theoretical Interpretations of Treating Different Diseases with the Same Method and Target of Vascularity

Buyang Huanwu Decoction (BHD) is a famous herbal prescription that has been used to treat stroke for centuries. Recent studies reported that the use of BHD had been extended to treat various kinds of disorders according to the TCM syndrome theory of Treating Different Diseases with the Same Method (TDDSM). Here, an overview of systematic reviews (SRs) of BHD for healthcare was conducted to interpret the TCM theory of TDDSM and its target of vascularity in an evidence-based manner. Literature searches were carried out in 5 databases to search SRs of BHD for any indication up to August 2013. Thirteen eligible SRs were identified which reported a wide range of vascular conditions. Based on the Overview Quality Assessment Questionnaire scores, the quality of included SRs was varied, with an average score of 4 points. We found that there is premature evidence for the use of BHD for healthcare, whereas BHD was well tolerable in all patients. BHD can be used to treat many disorders with the same therapeutic principle of invigorating Qi to activate blood circulation, which is essentially a manifestation of the TDDSM and is likely to account for targeting the specific pathogenesis of vascular diseases

Intra-articular Injection of Kartogenin-Incorporated Thermogel Enhancing Osteoarthritis Treatment.

To provide a vehicle for sustained release of cartilage-protective agent for the potential application of osteoarthritis (OA) treatment, we developed a kartogenin (KGN)-incorporated thermogel for intra-articular injection. We fabricated a poly(lactide-co-glycolide)-block-poly(ethylene glycol)-block-poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA-PEG-PLGA) thermogel as a KGN carrier for IA injection. OA chondrocytes were cultured in thermogel with or with no KGN to investigate the effect of KGN thermogel on cartilage matrix. The in vivo effect of KGN thermogel on OA was examined in a rabbit OA model. The KGN thermogel showed a sustained in vitro release of KGN for 3 weeks. OA chondrocytes proliferated well both in thermogel and KGN thermogel. In addition, OA chondrocytes produced higher amount of [type 2 collagen (COL-2) and glycosaminoglycan (GAG)], as well as lower level of matrix metalloproteinase 13 (MMP-13) in KGN thermogel that those in thermogel with no addition of KGN. The gene analysis supported that KGN thermogel enhanced expression of hyaline-cartilage specific genes Col 2 and AGC, and inhibited the expression of MMP-13. Compared with intra-articular injection of saline or thermogel containing no KGN, KGN thermogel can enhance cartilage regeneration and inhibit joint inflammation of arthritic knees in a rabbit ACLT-induced OA model at 3 weeks after the injection. Therefore, the KGN-incorporated PLGA-PEG-PLGA thermogel may provide a novel treatment modality for OA treatment with IA injection

Endophyte Chaetomium globosum D38 Promotes Bioactive Constituents Accumulation and Root Production in Salvia miltiorrhiza

Salvia miltiorrhiza is known for tanshinones and salvianolic acids, which have been shown to have a protective effect against ROS, especially for cardiovascular diseases and other various ailments of human organs. Due to the low yield of tanshinones and their analogs in S. miltiorrhiza, multiple stimulation strategies have been developed to improve tanshinones production in plant tissue cultures. Endophytic fungi have been reported to form different relationships with their host plants, including symbiotic, mutualistic, commensalistic, and parasitic interactions. Thus we take the assumption that endophytic fungi may be a potential microbial tool for secondary metabolism promotion in medicinal plants. We recently isolated Chaetomium globosum D38 from the roots of S. miltiorrhiza and our study aimed to examine the effects of this live endophytic fungus D38 and its elicitor on the accumulation of tanshinones in the hairy root cultures of S. miltiorrhiza. Our results revealed that C. globosum D38 mainly colonized in the intercellular gap of xylem parenchyma cells of S. miltiorrhiza hairy roots during the long term co-existence without any toxicity. Moreover, both of the live fungus and its mycelia extract could increase the production of tanshinones, especially for dihydrotanshinone I and cryptotanshinone. The effect of the mycelia extract was much stronger than that of the live fungus on tanshinones synthesis, which significantly increased the transcriptional activity of those key genes in tanshinone biosynthetic pathway. Furthermore, the live C. globosum D38 could also be made into biotic fertilizer used for S. miltiorrhiza seedlings culture, which not only significantly promoted the growth of the host plant, but also notably enhanced the accumulation of tanshinones and salvianolic acids. We thus speculated that, in the soil environment D38 could form bitrophic and mutual beneficial interactions with the host and enhance the plant growth and its secondary metabolism on the whole so as to have facilitative effects on both tanshinones and salvianolic acids accumulation. In conclusion, Chaetomium globosum D38 was a highly beneficial endophytic fungus for the growth and metabolism of S. miltiorrhiza

Detection of DC electric forces with zeptonewton sensitivity by single-ion phonon laser

Detecting extremely small forces helps exploring new physics quantitatively. Here we demonstrate that the phonon laser made of a single trapped $^{40}$Ca$^{+}$ ion behaves as an exquisite sensor for small force measurement. We report our successful detection of small electric forces regarding the DC trapping potential with sensitivity of 2.41$\pm$0.49 zN/$\sqrt{{\rm Hz}}$, with the ion only under Doppler cooling, based on the injection-locking of the oscillation phase of the phonon laser in addition to the classical squeezing applied to suppress the measurement uncertainty. We anticipate that such a single-ion sensor would reach a much better force detection sensitivity in the future once the trapping system is further improved and the fluorescence collection efficiency is further enhanced.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2110.0114

Synthesis of MnO

Hierarchical MnO2 microfibers were prepared by using cotton as the template and KMnO4 as the precursor via an ultrasonic assistance route. The results of scanning electron microscope characterization showed that the concentration of KMnO4 had a significant effect on the morphology of MnO2 microfiber. At low concentration of KMnO4, the microfiber was composed of MnO2 nanorods with single crystal structure. With increasing the concentration of KMnO4, the secondary nanostructure of MnO2 microfibers had a transformation from nanorod to nanoparticle. The results of N2 adsorption-desorption analysis indicated that MnO2 microfibers had BET surface area of about 25 m2/g. This synthesis provides a new way to control the secondary nanostructure of MnO2 microfiber by adjusting the concentration of precursor. Furthermore, the mechanism for the replication was proposed and discussed