134 research outputs found
LERC: Coordinated Cache Management for Data-Parallel Systems
Memory caches are being aggressively used in today's data-parallel frameworks
such as Spark, Tez and Storm. By caching input and intermediate data in memory,
compute tasks can witness speedup by orders of magnitude. To maximize the
chance of in-memory data access, existing cache algorithms, be it recency- or
frequency-based, settle on cache hit ratio as the optimization objective.
However, unlike the conventional belief, we show in this paper that simply
pursuing a higher cache hit ratio of individual data blocks does not
necessarily translate into faster task completion in data-parallel
environments. A data-parallel task typically depends on multiple input data
blocks. Unless all of these blocks are cached in memory, no speedup will
result. To capture this all-or-nothing property, we propose a more relevant
metric, called effective cache hit ratio. Specifically, a cache hit of a data
block is said to be effective if it can speed up a compute task. In order to
optimize the effective cache hit ratio, we propose the Least Effective
Reference Count (LERC) policy that persists the dependent blocks of a compute
task as a whole in memory. We have implemented the LERC policy as a memory
manager in Spark and evaluated its performance through Amazon EC2 deployment.
Evaluation results demonstrate that LERC helps speed up data-parallel jobs by
up to 37% compared with the widely employed least-recently-used (LRU) policy
Flow Level QoE of Video Streaming in Wireless Networks
The Quality of Experience (QoE) of streaming service is often degraded by
frequent playback interruptions. To mitigate the interruptions, the media
player prefetches streaming contents before starting playback, at a cost of
delay. We study the QoE of streaming from the perspective of flow dynamics.
First, a framework is developed for QoE when streaming users join the network
randomly and leave after downloading completion. We compute the distribution of
prefetching delay using partial differential equations (PDEs), and the
probability generating function of playout buffer starvations using ordinary
differential equations (ODEs) for CBR streaming. Second, we extend our
framework to characterize the throughput variation caused by opportunistic
scheduling at the base station, and the playback variation of VBR streaming.
Our study reveals that the flow dynamics is the fundamental reason of playback
starvation. The QoE of streaming service is dominated by the first moments such
as the average throughput of opportunistic scheduling and the mean playback
rate. While the variances of throughput and playback rate have very limited
impact on starvation behavior.Comment: 14 page
MUBen: Benchmarking the Uncertainty of Pre-Trained Models for Molecular Property Prediction
Large Transformer models pre-trained on massive unlabeled molecular data have
shown great success in predicting molecular properties. However, these models
can be prone to overfitting during fine-tuning, resulting in over-confident
predictions on test data that fall outside of the training distribution. To
address this issue, uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods can be used to
improve the models' calibration of predictions. Although many UQ approaches
exist, not all of them lead to improved performance. While some studies have
used UQ to improve molecular pre-trained models, the process of selecting
suitable backbone and UQ methods for reliable molecular uncertainty estimation
remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present MUBen, which evaluates
different combinations of backbone and UQ models to quantify their performance
for both property prediction and uncertainty estimation. By fine-tuning various
backbone molecular representation models using different molecular descriptors
as inputs with UQ methods from different categories, we critically assess the
influence of architectural decisions and training strategies. Our study offers
insights for selecting UQ and backbone models, which can facilitate research on
uncertainty-critical applications in fields such as materials science and drug
discovery
SCULPTOR: Skeleton-Consistent Face Creation Using a Learned Parametric Generator
Recent years have seen growing interest in 3D human faces modelling due to
its wide applications in digital human, character generation and animation.
Existing approaches overwhelmingly emphasized on modeling the exterior shapes,
textures and skin properties of faces, ignoring the inherent correlation
between inner skeletal structures and appearance. In this paper, we present
SCULPTOR, 3D face creations with Skeleton Consistency Using a Learned
Parametric facial generaTOR, aiming to facilitate easy creation of both
anatomically correct and visually convincing face models via a hybrid
parametric-physical representation. At the core of SCULPTOR is LUCY, the first
large-scale shape-skeleton face dataset in collaboration with plastic surgeons.
Named after the fossils of one of the oldest known human ancestors, our LUCY
dataset contains high-quality Computed Tomography (CT) scans of the complete
human head before and after orthognathic surgeries, critical for evaluating
surgery results. LUCY consists of 144 scans of 72 subjects (31 male and 41
female) where each subject has two CT scans taken pre- and post-orthognathic
operations. Based on our LUCY dataset, we learn a novel skeleton consistent
parametric facial generator, SCULPTOR, which can create the unique and nuanced
facial features that help define a character and at the same time maintain
physiological soundness. Our SCULPTOR jointly models the skull, face geometry
and face appearance under a unified data-driven framework, by separating the
depiction of a 3D face into shape blend shape, pose blend shape and facial
expression blend shape. SCULPTOR preserves both anatomic correctness and visual
realism in facial generation tasks compared with existing methods. Finally, we
showcase the robustness and effectiveness of SCULPTOR in various fancy
applications unseen before.Comment: 16 page, 13 fig
Enhanced Gene Transfection Efficacy and Safety Through Granular Hydrogel Mediated Gene Delivery Process
Although gene therapy has made great achievements in both laboratory research and clinical translation, there are still challenges such as limited control of drug pharmacokinetics, acute toxicity, poor tissue retention, insufficient efficacy, and inconsistent clinical translation. Herein, a gene therapy gel is formulated by directly redispersing polyplex nanoparticles into granular hydrogels without any gelation pre-treatment, which provides great convenience for storage, dosing and administration. In vitro studies have shown that use of granular hydrogels can regulate the gene drug release, reduce dose dependent toxicity and help improve transfection efficacy. Moreover, the developed gene therapy gel is easy to operate and can be directly used in vitro to evaluate its synergistic efficacy with various gene delivery systems. As such, it represents a major advance over many conventional excipient-based formulations, and new regulatory strategies for gene therapy may be inspired by it
Mortality Prediction with Adaptive Feature Importance Recalibration for Peritoneal Dialysis Patients
The study aims to develop AICare, an interpretable mortality prediction model, using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) from follow-up visits for End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) patients. AICare includes a multi-channel feature extraction module and an adaptive feature importance recalibration module. It integrates dynamic records and static features to perform a personalized health context representation learning. The dataset encompasses 13,091 visits and demographic data of 656 peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients spanning 12 years. An additional public dataset of 4,789 visits from 1,363 hemodialysis (HD) patients is also considered. AI Care outperforms traditional deep learning models in mortality prediction while retaining interpretability. It uncovers mortality-feature relationships, variations in feature importance, and provides reference values. An AI-Doctor interaction system is developed for visualizing patients’ health trajectories and risk indicators
Bilateral heterochronic spontaneous hemothorax caused by pulmonary arteriovenous malformation in a gravid: A case report
Bilateral heterochronic spontaneous hemothorax as a result of pulmonary ateriovenous malformation is a very rarely happened disease. A 34-year-old woman presented major symptoms with right-sided chest pain and shortness of breath. The following contrast-enhanced computed tomographic scan of the chest showed a large amount of fluid in the right thorax with mediastinal shift, but without major vessel injury and 2 small dense opacities in the apical segment of the right lower lobe and in the posterior aspect of the left lower lobe. The patient underwent local resection of the right lower lobe. The pulmonary ateriovenous malformation was further identified by pathological examination. One month after she was discharged home, the symptoms described above recurred. A follow-up computed tomographic scan of the chest showed a large amount of fluid in the left thorax. During the emergency operation, we found a bullous lesion in the left lower lobe and a small blood vessel overlying the lesion that was actively bleeding. As stated above, local resection of the left lower lobe was performed once more. Pathological result was the same as observed previously. There were no postoperative complications and she was discharged from the hospital after two weeks. Two months later, she successfully delivered a healthy female infant. Up to now, regular follow-up observation has shown her to be perfectly asymptomatic
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