Self-Supervised Multi-Modal Sequential Recommendation

With the increasing development of e-commerce and online services, personalized recommendation systems have become crucial for enhancing user satisfaction and driving business revenue. Traditional sequential recommendation methods that rely on explicit item IDs encounter challenges in handling item cold start and domain transfer problems. Recent approaches have attempted to use modal features associated with items as a replacement for item IDs, enabling the transfer of learned knowledge across different datasets. However, these methods typically calculate the correlation between the model's output and item embeddings, which may suffer from inconsistencies between high-level feature vectors and low-level feature embeddings, thereby hindering further model learning. To address this issue, we propose a dual-tower retrieval architecture for sequence recommendation. In this architecture, the predicted embedding from the user encoder is used to retrieve the generated embedding from the item encoder, thereby alleviating the issue of inconsistent feature levels. Moreover, in order to further improve the retrieval performance of the model, we also propose a self-supervised multi-modal pretraining method inspired by the consistency property of contrastive learning. This pretraining method enables the model to align various feature combinations of items, thereby effectively generalizing to diverse datasets with different item features. We evaluate the proposed method on five publicly available datasets and conduct extensive experiments. The results demonstrate significant performance improvement of our method

Citrus aurantium

Citrus aurantium is rich in flavonoids, which may prevent osteosarcoma progression, but its related molecular mechanism remains unclear. Flavonoids were extracted from C. aurantium and purified by reparative HPLC. Each fraction was identified by using electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). Three main components (naringin, naringenin, and hesperetin) were isolated from C. aurantium. Naringenin inhibited the growth of MG-63 cells, whereas naringin and hesperetin had no inhibitory function on cell growth. ROS production was increased in naringin- and hesperetin-treated groups after one day of culture while the level was always lowest in the naringenin-treated group after three days of culture. 95 osteosarcoma patients who underwent surgery were assigned into two groups: naringenin group (NG, received 20 mg naringenin daily, n=47) and control group (CG, received 20 mg placebo daily, n=48). After an average of two-year follow-up, osteosarcoma volumes were smaller in the NG group than in the CG group (P>0.01). The rate of osteosarcoma recurrence was also lower in the NG group than in CG group. ROS levels were lower in the NG group than in the CG group. Thus, naringenin from Citrus aurantium inhibits osteosarcoma progression and local recurrence in the patients who underwent osteosarcoma surgery by improving antioxidant capability

The Importance of Learning Islamic History and Civilization of Malaysia in the Building of Human Capital and Identity of the Muslim Society in Malaysia

AbstractThe purpose of this research is to study the importance of learning Islamic History and Civilization in Malaysia for human capital building and identification of the muslim society in Malaysia. Its aim is to clarify the importance of this course, specifically at the Department of Arabic Studies and Islamic Civilization, and the need to produce graduates who are conversant in this field in order that they may utilise it in their lives regardless of whichever field they venture into. This study uses the library research method by analysis and evaluation with an argumentative as well as narrative approach. The results of study finds that knowledge and conversance in this field is integral in the formation of human capital and identity of the muslim society in Malaysia. Knowledge and conversance in this field would enable Malays to know the ‘true’ history of the muslim ummah in Malaysia. This knowledge is crucial to help them form and build a Malay-muslim generation in Malaysia, strongly attached to Malay traditions which have once brought the muslims to the pinnacle of success

Genomic analysis identified a potential novel molecular mechanism for high-altitude adaptation in sheep at the Himalayas

Sheep has successfully adapted to the extreme high-altitude Himalayan region. To identify genes underlying such adaptation, we genotyped genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of four major sheep breeds living at different altitudes in Nepal and downloaded SNP array data from additional Asian and Middle East breeds. Using a di value-based genomic comparison between four high-altitude and eight lowland Asian breeds, we discovered the most differentiated variants at the locus of FGF-7 (Keratinocyte growth factor-7), which was previously reported as a good protective candidate for pulmonary injuries. We further found a SNP upstream of FGF-7 that appears to contribute to the divergence signature. First, the SNP occurred at an extremely conserved site. Second, the SNP showed an increasing allele frequency with the elevated altitude in Nepalese sheep. Third, the electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) analysis using human lung cancer cells revealed the allele-specific DNA-protein interactions. We thus hypothesized that FGF-7 gene potentially enhances lung function by regulating its expression level in high-altitude sheep through altering its binding of specific transcription factors. Especially, FGF-7 gene was not implicated in previous studies of other high-altitude species, suggesting a potential novel adaptive mechanism to high altitude in sheep at the Himalayas

Rock-Climbing in the Region of the Bohemian Paradise in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Rock climbing in the cities of the Bohemian Paradise became widely popular already by the end of the 19th century. Quite specific qualities of the local sandstone attracted domestic as well as foreign climbers right from the beginning. After 1948, many of the regional climbers, whose qualities were undisputable even in the nationwide scale, remained reliant upon climbing merely within the borders of the former Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, majority of them were not allowed to travel abroad and thus they could not prove their skills and qualities worldwide. There was a very limited number of those who could participate in foreign expeditions and thus fulfil their dreams. The rare contact with foreign climbers became a source of new information, new styles and trends in climbing, and an access to new equipment and gear in general. To many domestic climbers, however, such sources remained unattainable, and without them they were often left to develop and produce their equipment by their own, until they were allowed to travel to the West. This paper, with the help of the method of the oral history and qualitative subject analysis, gives a concise picture of the history of rock climbing in the Bohemian Paradise in the context of the constraints set by the communist Czechoslovakia. The chapters trace the..

Additional file 6: Figure S2. of Exome sequencing reveals genetic differentiation due to high-altitude adaptation in the Tibetan cashmere goat (Capra hircus)

Protein-protein interaction network with the common SNP dataset. Notes: Proteins without connections were removed for clarity. Red circle, proteins related to hypoxia and the cardiovascular system from the GO categories; yellow circle, proteins related to the cardiovascular system from the literature; green dot, proteins related to hypoxia adaptation listed in a study by Zhang [9]. “line”: interaction with medium confidence; “bold line”: interaction with high confidence. (PDF 405 kb

Additional file 3: Table S2. of Exome sequencing reveals genetic differentiation due to high-altitude adaptation in the Tibetan cashmere goat (Capra hircus)

Functional gene categories enriched for the global SNP dataset. (XLSX 12 kb

Additional file 9: Table S6. of Exome sequencing reveals genetic differentiation due to high-altitude adaptation in the Tibetan cashmere goat (Capra hircus)

Primer and SNP information for verification using Sanger technology. (XLSX 13 kb