Privacy-Preserving Polynomial Computing Over Distributed Data

In this letter, we delve into a scenario where a user aims to compute polynomial functions using their own data as well as data obtained from distributed sources. To accomplish this, the user enlists the assistance of $N$ distributed workers, thereby defining a problem we refer to as privacy-preserving polynomial computing over distributed data. To address this challenge, we propose an approach founded upon Lagrange encoding. Our method not only possesses the ability to withstand the presence of stragglers and byzantine workers but also ensures the preservation of security. Specifically, even if a coalition of $X$ workers collude, they are unable to acquire any knowledge pertaining to the data originating from the distributed sources or the user

Multiplexed Streaming Codes for Messages With Different Decoding Delays in Channel with Burst and Random Erasures

In a real-time transmission scenario, messages are transmitted through a channel that is subject to packet loss. The destination must recover the messages within the required deadline. In this paper, we consider a setup where two different types of messages with distinct decoding deadlines are transmitted through a channel that can introduce burst erasures of a length at most $B$, or $N$ random erasures. The message with a short decoding deadline $T_u$ is referred to as an urgent message, while the other one with a decoding deadline $T_v$ ($T_v > T_u$) is referred to as a less urgent message. We propose a merging method to encode two message streams of different urgency levels into a single flow. We consider the scenario where $T_v > T_u + B$. We establish that any coding strategy based on this merging approach has a closed-form upper limit on its achievable sum rate. Moreover, we present explicit constructions within a finite field that scales quadratically with the imposed delay, ensuring adherence to the upper bound. In a given parameter configuration, we rigorously demonstrate that the sum rate of our proposed streaming codes consistently surpasses that of separate encoding, which serves as a baseline for comparison

Effects of phosphorus on chemical forms of Cd in plants of four spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) cultivars differing in Cd accumulation

In order to clarify how cadmium (Cd) chemical forms in planta relate to the genotype difference in Cd accumulation of spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.), two low-Cd and two high-Cd cultivars were compared under a hydroponic experiment with two concentrations of Cd (8.98 or 44.71 μmol Cd L(-1)). The concentrations of phosphorus in the hydroponic system were also adjusted to two levels (0.5 and 1.0 mmol L(-1)) to investigate the influence of phosphorus on the forms and accumulation of Cd in the tested cultivars. Average Cd concentrations in shoots were 8.50-10.06 mg kg(-1) for high-Cd cultivars and 6.11-6.64 mg kg(-1) for low-Cd cultivars a under lower Cd treatment and were as high as 24.41-31.35 mg kg(-1) and 19.65-25.76 mg kg(-1), respectively, under a higher treatment. Phosphorus significantly decreased Cd accumulation in the tested cultivars, and the effect had superiority over the cultivar alternation under higher Cd stress. Cadmium in the NaCl-extractable fraction of the plant tissues showed the greatest relationship to genotype difference of Cd accumulation. The difference in the capacity to binding Cd into F HAc, F HCl, or F Residue was another important mechanism involving in the genotype difference in Cd accumulation of spinach. Among them, average proportion of Cd in F HAc in low-Cd cultivars was higher than that in high-Cd cultivars in association with the effect of phosphorus

Dual-Modal Attention-Enhanced Text-Video Retrieval with Triplet Partial Margin Contrastive Learning

In recent years, the explosion of web videos makes text-video retrieval increasingly essential and popular for video filtering, recommendation, and search. Text-video retrieval aims to rank relevant text/video higher than irrelevant ones. The core of this task is to precisely measure the cross-modal similarity between texts and videos. Recently, contrastive learning methods have shown promising results for text-video retrieval, most of which focus on the construction of positive and negative pairs to learn text and video representations. Nevertheless, they do not pay enough attention to hard negative pairs and lack the ability to model different levels of semantic similarity. To address these two issues, this paper improves contrastive learning using two novel techniques. First, to exploit hard examples for robust discriminative power, we propose a novel Dual-Modal Attention-Enhanced Module (DMAE) to mine hard negative pairs from textual and visual clues. By further introducing a Negative-aware InfoNCE (NegNCE) loss, we are able to adaptively identify all these hard negatives and explicitly highlight their impacts in the training loss. Second, our work argues that triplet samples can better model fine-grained semantic similarity compared to pairwise samples. We thereby present a new Triplet Partial Margin Contrastive Learning (TPM-CL) module to construct partial order triplet samples by automatically generating fine-grained hard negatives for matched text-video pairs. The proposed TPM-CL designs an adaptive token masking strategy with cross-modal interaction to model subtle semantic differences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four widely-used text-video retrieval datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo and ActivityNet.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 202

PuCRZ1, an C2H2 transcription factor from Polyporus umbellatus, positively regulates mycelium response to osmotic stress

Polyporus umbellatus is an edible and medicinal mushroom with the capacity to produce sclerotia. However, the mechanism of P. umbellatus sclerotia formation is unclear. CRZ1 is a C2H2 family transcription factor involved in the Ca2+-calcineurin signaling pathway, which has the function of regulating sclerotia formation, maintaining ion homeostasis, and responding to stress. In this study, we identified 28 C2H2 transcription factors in P. umbellatus genome, 13 of which are differentially expressed between mycelium and sclerotia, including PuCRZ1. Combining DNA affinity purification and sequencing (DAP-seq) and quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR), three genes (PuG10, PuG11, PuG12) were identified as putative PuCRZ1 target genes containing a putative binding motif (GTGGCG) within their promoter. Yeast single hybridization (Y1H) and EMSA further confirmed that PuCRZ1 can bind to the promoter region of PuG10, PuG11, and PuG12. PuCRZ1 gene could reduce the sensitivity of NaCl in yeast cells. Furthermore, overexpression of the PuCRZ1 target gene, especially the FVLY domain containing gene PuG11, could improve the mycelia growth rate and mannitol tolerance in P. umbellatus. These results demonstrate that PuCRZ1 in the Ca2+-calcineurin signaling pathway plays an important role in mycelia growth, as well as osmotic stress tolerance

Circulating Long Noncoding RNAs as Biomarkers for Predicting Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background/Aims: The anatomical complexity of the head and neck region and the lack of sufficiently specific and sensitive biomarkers often lead to the diagnosis of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) at advanced stages. To identify novel biomarkers for early diagnosis of primary HNSCC through a minimally invasive method, we investigated circulating long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) levels in plasma of HNSCC patients. Methods: The global lncRNA expression profiles of HNSCC patients were measured using microarray and next-generation RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data from both circulating and tissue samples. The diagnosis prediction model based on the lncRNA signatures and clinical features was evaluated by multi-stage validation and risk score analysis. Results: The data showed that 432 lncRNA transcripts were differentially expressed by fold changes of > 4 in circulating samples and 333 in tissues samples, respectively. Only 12 lncRNAs consistently emerged in these two kinds of samples. After the risk score analysis including a multistage validation, we identified three lncRNAs, namely, HOXA11-AS, LINC00964 and MALAT1, which were up-regulated in the plasma of HNSCC patients compared with those in healthy controls with merged areas under the curve (AUCs) in training and validation sets of 0.925 and 0.839, respectively. Conclusion: HOXA11-AS, LINC00964 and MALAT1 might be potential circulating biomarkers for the early detection of HNSCC in the future

Atypical radio pulsations from magnetar SGR 1935+2154

Magnetars are neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, frequently powering high-energy activity in X-rays. Pulsed radio emission following some X-ray outbursts have been detected, albeit its physical origin is unclear. It has long been speculated that the origin of magnetars' radio signals is different from those from canonical pulsars, although convincing evidence is still lacking. Five months after magnetar SGR 1935+2154's X-ray outburst and its associated Fast Radio Burst (FRB) 20200428, a radio pulsar phase was discovered. Here we report the discovery of X-ray spectral hardening associated with the emergence of periodic radio pulsations from SGR 1935+2154 and a detailed analysis of the properties of the radio pulses. The complex radio pulse morphology, which contains both narrow-band emission and frequency drifts, has not been seen before in other magnetars, but is similar to those of repeating FRBs - even though the luminosities are many orders of magnitude different. The observations suggest that radio emission originates from the outer magnetosphere of the magnetar, and the surface heating due to the bombardment of inward-going particles from the radio emission region is responsible for the observed X-ray spectral hardening.Comment: 47 pages, 11 figure

Construction of a cross-species cell landscape at single-cell level.

Individual cells are basic units of life. Despite extensive efforts to characterize the cellular heterogeneity of different organisms, cross-species comparisons of landscape dynamics have not been achieved. Here, we applied single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to map organism-level cell landscapes at multiple life stages for mice, zebrafish and Drosophila. By integrating the comprehensive dataset of > 2.6 million single cells, we constructed a cross-species cell landscape and identified signatures and common pathways that changed throughout the life span. We identified structural inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction as the most common hallmarks of organism aging, and found that pharmacological activation of mitochondrial metabolism alleviated aging phenotypes in mice. The cross-species cell landscape with other published datasets were stored in an integrated online portal-Cell Landscape. Our work provides a valuable resource for studying lineage development, maturation and aging