Hierarchical Cache-Aided Linear Function Retrieval with Security and Privacy Constraints

The hierarchical caching system where a server connects with multiple mirror sites, each connecting with a distinct set of users, and both the mirror sites and users are equipped with caching memories has been widely studied. However all the existing works focus on single file retrieval, i.e., each user requests one file, and ignore the security and privacy threats in communications. In this paper we investigate the linear function retrieval problem for hierarchical caching systems with content security and demand privacy, i.e., each user requests a linear combination of files, and meanwhile the files in the library are protected against wiretappers and users' demands are kept unknown to other users and unconnected mirror sites. First we propose a new combination structure named hierarchical placement delivery array (HPDA), which characterizes the data placement and delivery strategy of a coded caching scheme. Then we construct two classes of HPDAs. Consequently two classes of schemes with or without security and privacy are obtained respectively where the first dedicates to minimizing the transmission load for the first hop and can achieve the optimal transmission load for the first hop if ignoring the security and privacy constraints; the second has more flexible parameters on the memory sizes and a lower subpacketization compared with the first one, and achieves a tradeoff between subpacketization and transmission loads.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2205.0023

Approaches to the Total Synthesis of Puupehenone-Type Marine Natural Products

Puupehenones have been isolated from the marine sponge Chondrosia chucalla, which belong to a growing family of natural products with more than 100 members. These marine natural products have attracted increasing attention mainly due to their wide variety of biological activities such as antitumor, antiviral, and anti-HIV, and thus offer promising opportunities for new drug development. This chapter covers the approaches to the total synthesis of puupehenone-type marine natural products including puupehenol, puupehenone, puupehedione, and halopuupehenones. The routes begin with the construction of their basic skeletons, followed by the modification of their C- and D-rings. The contents are divided into two sections in terms of the key strategies employed to construct the basic skeleton. One is the convergent synthesis route with two synthons coupled by nucleophilic or electrophilic reaction, and the other is the linear synthesis route with polyene series cyclization as a key reaction

Coded Caching Scheme for Partially Connected Linear Networks Via Multi-antenna Placement Delivery Array

In this paper, we study the coded caching scheme for the $(K,L,M_{\text{T}},M_{\text{U}},N)$ partially connected linear network, where there are $N$ files each of which has an equal size, $K+L-1$ transmitters and $K$ users; each user and transmitter caches at most $M_{\text{U}}$ and $M_{\text{T}}$ files respectively; each user cyclically communicates with $L$ transmitters. The goal is to design caching and delivery schemes to reduce the transmission latency measured by the metric normalized delivery time (NDT). By delicately designing the data placement of the transmitters and users according to the topology, we show that a combinatorial structure called multiple-antenna placement delivery array (MAPDA), which was originally proposed for the multiple-input single-output broadcast channels, can be also used to design schemes for the partially connected linear network. Then, based on existing MAPDAs and our constructing approach, we propose new schemes that achieve the optimal NDT when ${M_\text{T}}+ {M_\text{U}}\geq N$ and smaller NDT than that of the existing schemes when (${M_\text{T}}+ {M_\text{U}}\leq N$, $\frac{M_\text{U}}{N}+\frac{M_\text{T}}{N} \frac{L}{K}\left\lceil \frac{K}{L} \right\rceil \geq 1$) or (${M_\text{U}}+ {M_\text{T}}< N, \frac{K}{L}\notin\mathbb{Z}^+$). Moreover, our schemes operate in one-shot linear delivery and significantly reduce the subpacketizations compared to the existing scheme, which implies that our schemes have a wider range of applications and lower complexity of implementation.Comment: 13 page

GENERATION OF CRACKS IN HIGHWAY EMBANKMENT ON BLACK COTTON SOIL

This research revealed the crack generation of the highway embankment from the water losing shrinkage of the wet black cotton soil (BCS), which is a type of soil with high swell-shrink potential. The road seepage meter was used to test the permeability of filling materials, which was used to replace BCS. The moisture content and embankment deflection of BCS foundation were measured after the rainy season. Based on the coupled consolidation theory for unsaturated soil, the change in additional tension stress of the embankment induced by water loss shrinkage of BCS was simulated by Abaqus. The results indicated that the rainfall seeped into the foundation through highly permeable refill materials to result in BCS expansion and decrease the embankment strength. After the rainy season, the additional tensile stress caused by water loss shrinkage of BCS induces cracking of highway embankment, and the maximum cracking depth often appears at the shoulder of highway. The deep and wide cracks are easy to appear in the low embankment constructed on a thick BCS foundation under strong evaporation

P2T: Pyramid Pooling Transformer for Scene Understanding

This paper jointly resolves two problems in vision transformer: i) the computation of Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) has high computational/space complexity; ii) recent vision transformer networks are overly tuned for image classification, ignoring the difference between image classification (simple scenarios, more similar to NLP) and downstream scene understanding tasks (complicated scenarios, rich structural and contextual information). To this end, we note that pyramid pooling has been demonstrated to be effective in various vision tasks owing to its powerful ability in context abstraction, and its natural property of spatial invariance is also suitable to address the loss of structural information (problem ii)). Hence, we propose to adapt pyramid pooling to MHSA for alleviating its high requirement on computational resources (problem i)). In this way, this pooling-based MHSA can well address the above two problems and is thus flexible and powerful for downstream scene understanding tasks. Plugged with our pooling-based MHSA, we build a downstream-task-oriented transformer network, dubbed Pyramid Pooling Transformer (P2T). Extensive experiments demonstrate that, when applied P2T as the backbone network, it shows substantial superiority in various downstream scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, and visual saliency detection, compared to previous CNN- and transformer-based networks. The code will be released at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/P2T

Bis[1,3-bis­(1-methyl-1H-benzimidazol-2-yl)-2-oxapropane]­cadmium dipicrate acetonitrile sesquisolvate 0.25-hydrate

In the title compound, [Cd(C18H18N4O)2](C6H2N3O7)2·1.5CH3CN·0.25H2O, the CdII ion is coordinated by four N atoms and two O atoms from two tridentate 1,3-bis­(1-methyl-1H-benzimidazol-2-yl)-2-oxopropane ligands in a distorted octa­hedral coordination environment. The lengths of the chemically equivalent Cd—O bonds [2.4850 (16) and 2.5488 (16)Å] are signiificantly different. One of the picrate anions is disordered over two sets of sites, with refined occupancies of 0.504 (15) and 0.496 (15). A 0.5-occupancy acetonitrile solvent mol­ecule is disordered over two sites with equal occupancies. The H atoms of a 0.25-occupancy solvent water mol­ecule were neither located nor included in the refinement