88 research outputs found
Induction of synthetic lethality in mutant KRAS cells for non-small cell lung cancers chemoprevention and therapy
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in both men and women in the United States and worldwide. Despite improvement in treatment strategies, the 5-year survival rate of lung cancer patients remains low. Thus, effective chemoprevention and treatment approaches are sorely needed. Mutations and activation of KRAS occur frequently in tobacco users and the early stage of development of non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC). So they are thought to be the primary driver for lung carcinogenesis. My work showed that KRAS mutations and activations modulated the expression of TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) receptors by up-regulating death receptors and down-regulating decoy receptors. In addition, we showed that KRAS suppresses cellular FADD-like IL-1β-converting enzyme (FLICE)-like inhibitory protein (c-FLIP) expression through activation of ERK/MAPK-mediated activation of c-MYC which means the mutant KRAS cells could be specifically targeted via TRAIL induced apoptosis. The expression level of Inhibitors of Apoptosis Proteins (IAPs) in mutant KRAS cells is usually high which could be overcome by the second mitochondria-derived activator of caspases (Smac) mimetic. So the combination of TRAIL and Smac mimetic induced the synthetic lethal reaction specifically in the mutant-KRAS cells but not in normal lung cells and wild-type KRAS lung cancer cells. Therefore, a synthetic lethal interaction among TRAIL, Smac mimetic and KRAS mutations could be used as an approach for chemoprevention and treatment of NSCLC with KRAS mutations. Further data in animal experiments showed that short-term, intermittent treatment with TRAIL and Smac mimetic induced apoptosis in mutant KRAS cells and reduced tumor burden in a KRAS-induced pre-malignancy model and mutant KRAS NSCLC xenograft models. These results show the great potential benefit of a selective therapeutic approach for the chemoprevention and treatment of NSCLC with KRAS mutations
Efficient Traffic State Forecasting using Spatio-Temporal Network Dependencies: A Sparse Graph Neural Network Approach
Traffic state prediction in a transportation network is paramount for
effective traffic operations and management, as well as informed user and
system-level decision-making. However, long-term traffic prediction (beyond 30
minutes into the future) remains challenging in current research. In this work,
we integrate the spatio-temporal dependencies in the transportation network
from network modeling, together with the graph convolutional network (GCN) and
graph attention network (GAT). To further tackle the dramatic computation and
memory cost caused by the giant model size (i.e., number of weights) caused by
multiple cascaded layers, we propose sparse training to mitigate the training
cost, while preserving the prediction accuracy. It is a process of training
using a fixed number of nonzero weights in each layer in each iteration. We
consider the problem of long-term traffic speed forecasting for a real
large-scale transportation network data from the California Department of
Transportation (Caltrans) Performance Measurement System (PeMS). Experimental
results show that the proposed GCN-STGT and GAT-STGT models achieve low
prediction errors on short-, mid- and long-term prediction horizons, of 15, 30
and 45 minutes in duration, respectively. Using our sparse training, we could
train from scratch with high sparsity (e.g., up to 90%), equivalent to 10 times
floating point operations per second (FLOPs) reduction on computational cost
using the same epochs as dense training, and arrive at a model with very small
accuracy loss compared with the original dense trainin
YouNICon: YouTube's CommuNIty of Conspiracy Videos
Conspiracy theories are widely propagated on social media. Among various
social media services, YouTube is one of the most influential sources of news
and entertainment. This paper seeks to develop a dataset, YOUNICON, to enable
researchers to perform conspiracy theory detection as well as classification of
videos with conspiracy theories into different topics. YOUNICON is a dataset
with a large collection of videos from suspicious channels that were identified
to contain conspiracy theories in a previous study (Ledwich and Zaitsev 2020).
Overall, YOUNICON will enable researchers to study trends in conspiracy
theories and understand how individuals can interact with the conspiracy theory
producing community or channel. Our data is available at:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7466262
Dynamic Sparse Training via Balancing the Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off
Over-parameterization of deep neural networks (DNNs) has shown high
prediction accuracy for many applications. Although effective, the large number
of parameters hinders its popularity on resource-limited devices and has an
outsize environmental impact. Sparse training (using a fixed number of nonzero
weights in each iteration) could significantly mitigate the training costs by
reducing the model size. However, existing sparse training methods mainly use
either random-based or greedy-based drop-and-grow strategies, resulting in
local minimal and low accuracy. In this work, we consider the dynamic sparse
training as a sparse connectivity search problem and design an exploitation and
exploration acquisition function to escape from local optima and saddle points.
We further design an acquisition function and provide the theoretical
guarantees for the proposed method and clarify its convergence property.
Experimental results show that sparse models (up to 98\% sparsity) obtained by
our proposed method outperform the SOTA sparse training methods on a wide
variety of deep learning tasks. On VGG-19 / CIFAR-100, ResNet-50 / CIFAR-10,
ResNet-50 / CIFAR-100, our method has even higher accuracy than dense models.
On ResNet-50 / ImageNet, the proposed method has up to 8.2\% accuracy
improvement compared to SOTA sparse training methods
ARHI (DIRAS 3), an Imprinted Tumor Suppressor Gene, Binds to Importins, and Blocks Nuclear Translocation of Stat3
ARHI (DIRAS3) is an imprinted tumor suppressor gene whose expression is lost in the majority of breast and ovarian cancers. Unlike its homologs Ras and Rap, ARHI functions as a tumor suppressor. Our previous study showed that ARHI can interact with transcription activator Stat3 and inhibit its nuclear translocation in human breast and ovarian cancer cells. To identify proteins that interact with ARHI in nuclear translocation, we have performed proteomic analysis and identified several importins that can associate with ARHI. To further explore this novel finding, we have purified 10 GST-importin fusion proteins (importin 7, 8, 13, b1, a1, a3, a5, a6, a7 as well as mutant a1). Using a GST-pull down assay, we found that ARHI can bind strongly to most importins; however, its binding is significantly reduced with an importin a1 mutant which contains an altered nuclear localization signal (NLS) domain. In addition, an ARHI N-terminal deletion mutant (NTD) exhibits much less binding to all importins than does wild type ARHI ARHI and NTD proteins were purified and tested for their ability to inhibit nuclear importation of proteins in HeLa cells. ARHI protein inhibits interaction of Ran-importin complexes with GFP fusion proteins that contain an NLS domain and a beta-like import receptor binding domain, blocking their nuclear localization. Addition of ARHI also blocked nuclear localization of phosphorylated Stat3β. By GST-pull down assays, we found that ARHI could compete for Ran-importins binding. Thus, ARHI-induced disruption of importin binding to cargo proteins including Stat3 could serve as an important regulatory mechanism that contributes to the tumor suppressor function of ARHI
Suppression of Cross-Polarization of the Microstrip Integrated Balun-Fed Printed Dipole Antenna
The high cross-polarization of the microstrip integrated balun-fed printed dipole antenna cannot meet the demands of many engineering applications. This kind of antennas has high cross-polarization levels (about −20 dB). And we find that the high cross-polarization radiation is mainly produced by the microstrip integrated balun rather than the dipole itself. The very limited method to lower the cross-polarization level of this kind of antennas is to reduce the substrate thickness. In this paper, to improve the low cross-polarized performance, firstly, an equivalent model is presented to analyze the cross-polarization radiation. Secondly, a novel structure with low cross-polarization is proposed. The microstrip integrated balun is enclosed by a center slotted cavity. The E-field of the microstrip integrated balun is transformed parallel to the dipole arms by the slot, so the radiation of the cross-polarized component is suppressed. Measured results show that this structure can achieve a bandwidth wider than 40% while reducing the cross-polarization level to less than −35 dB within the frequency band
Neurogenesis Dynamics-inspired Spiking Neural Network Training Acceleration
Biologically inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted
significant attention for their ability to provide extremely energy-efficient
machine intelligence through event-driven operation and sparse activities. As
artificial intelligence (AI) becomes ever more democratized, there is an
increasing need to execute SNN models on edge devices. Existing works adopt
weight pruning to reduce SNN model size and accelerate inference. However,
these methods mainly focus on how to obtain a sparse model for efficient
inference, rather than training efficiency. To overcome these drawbacks, in
this paper, we propose a Neurogenesis Dynamics-inspired Spiking Neural Network
training acceleration framework, NDSNN. Our framework is computational
efficient and trains a model from scratch with dynamic sparsity without
sacrificing model fidelity. Specifically, we design a new drop-and-grow
strategy with decreasing number of non-zero weights, to maintain extreme high
sparsity and high accuracy. We evaluate NDSNN using VGG-16 and ResNet-19 on
CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet. Experimental results show that NDSNN
achieves up to 20.52\% improvement in accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet using ResNet-19
(with a sparsity of 99\%) as compared to other SOTA methods (e.g., Lottery
Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), SET-SNN, RigL-SNN). In addition, the training cost of
NDSNN is only 40.89\% of the LTH training cost on ResNet-19 and 31.35\% of the
LTH training cost on VGG-16 on CIFAR-10
PolyMPCNet: Towards ReLU-free Neural Architecture Search in Two-party Computation Based Private Inference
The rapid growth and deployment of deep learning (DL) has witnessed emerging
privacy and security concerns. To mitigate these issues, secure multi-party
computation (MPC) has been discussed, to enable the privacy-preserving DL
computation. In practice, they often come at very high computation and
communication overhead, and potentially prohibit their popularity in large
scale systems. Two orthogonal research trends have attracted enormous interests
in addressing the energy efficiency in secure deep learning, i.e., overhead
reduction of MPC comparison protocol, and hardware acceleration. However, they
either achieve a low reduction ratio and suffer from high latency due to
limited computation and communication saving, or are power-hungry as existing
works mainly focus on general computing platforms such as CPUs and GPUs.
In this work, as the first attempt, we develop a systematic framework,
PolyMPCNet, of joint overhead reduction of MPC comparison protocol and hardware
acceleration, by integrating hardware latency of the cryptographic building
block into the DNN loss function to achieve high energy efficiency, accuracy,
and security guarantee. Instead of heuristically checking the model sensitivity
after a DNN is well-trained (through deleting or dropping some non-polynomial
operators), our key design principle is to em enforce exactly what is assumed
in the DNN design -- training a DNN that is both hardware efficient and secure,
while escaping the local minima and saddle points and maintaining high
accuracy. More specifically, we propose a straight through polynomial
activation initialization method for cryptographic hardware friendly trainable
polynomial activation function to replace the expensive 2P-ReLU operator. We
develop a cryptographic hardware scheduler and the corresponding performance
model for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) platform
AutoReP: Automatic ReLU Replacement for Fast Private Network Inference
The growth of the Machine-Learning-As-A-Service (MLaaS) market has
highlighted clients' data privacy and security issues. Private inference (PI)
techniques using cryptographic primitives offer a solution but often have high
computation and communication costs, particularly with non-linear operators
like ReLU. Many attempts to reduce ReLU operations exist, but they may need
heuristic threshold selection or cause substantial accuracy loss. This work
introduces AutoReP, a gradient-based approach to lessen non-linear operators
and alleviate these issues. It automates the selection of ReLU and polynomial
functions to speed up PI applications and introduces distribution-aware
polynomial approximation (DaPa) to maintain model expressivity while accurately
approximating ReLUs. Our experimental results demonstrate significant accuracy
improvements of 6.12% (94.31%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-10), 8.39% (74.92%,
12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-100), and 9.45% (63.69%, 55K ReLU budget,
Tiny-ImageNet) over current state-of-the-art methods, e.g., SNL. Morever,
AutoReP is applied to EfficientNet-B2 on ImageNet dataset, and achieved 75.55%
accuracy with 176.1 times ReLU budget reduction.Comment: ICCV 2023 accepeted publicatio
Implementation of the CMOS MEMS Condenser Microphone with Corrugated Metal Diaphragm and Silicon Back-Plate
This study reports a CMOS-MEMS condenser microphone implemented using the standard thin film stacking of 0.35 μm UMC CMOS 3.3/5.0 V logic process, and followed by post-CMOS micromachining steps without introducing any special materials. The corrugated diaphragm for the microphone is designed and implemented using the metal layer to reduce the influence of thin film residual stresses. Moreover, a silicon substrate is employed to increase the stiffness of the back-plate. Measurements show the sensitivity of microphone is −42 ± 3 dBV/Pa at 1 kHz (the reference sound-level is 94 dB) under 6 V pumping voltage, the frequency response is 100 Hz–10 kHz, and the S/N ratio >55 dB. It also has low power consumption of less than 200 μA, and low distortion of less than 1% (referred to 100 dB)
- …