Concurrent Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Software-Transactional-Memory Based Applications

Typical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithms require the application requests to be executed sequentially, which may severely limit the throughput of the system considering that modern CPUs are equipped with multiple processing cores. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Byzantine fault tolerance framework for software-transactional-memory based applications that aims to maximize concurrent processing while preserving strong replica consistency. The approach is based on the idea of committing concurrent transactions according to the total order of the requests that triggered the transactions. A comprehensive performance evaluation is carried out to characterize the effectiveness and limitations of this approach

Neural Collaborative Subspace Clustering

We introduce the Neural Collaborative Subspace Clustering, a neural model that discovers clusters of data points drawn from a union of low-dimensional subspaces. In contrast to previous attempts, our model runs without the aid of spectral clustering. This makes our algorithm one of the kinds that can gracefully scale to large datasets. At its heart, our neural model benefits from a classifier which determines whether a pair of points lies on the same subspace or not. Essential to our model is the construction of two affinity matrices, one from the classifier and the other from a notion of subspace self-expressiveness, to supervise training in a collaborative scheme. We thoroughly assess and contrast the performance of our model against various state-of-the-art clustering algorithms including deep subspace-based ones.Comment: Accepted to ICML 201

Proactive Service Migration for Long-Running Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems

A proactive recovery scheme based on service migration for long-running Byzantine fault-tolerant systems is described. Proactive recovery is an essential method for ensuring the long-term reliability of fault-tolerant systems that are under continuous threats from malicious adversaries. The primary benefit of our proactive recovery scheme is a reduced vulnerability window under normal operation. This is achieved in two ways. First, the time-consuming reboot step is removed from the critical path of proactive recovery. Second, the response time and the service migration latency are continuously profiled and an optimal service migration interval is dynamically determined during runtime based on the observed system load and the user-specified availability requirement

Does Notch play a tumor suppressor role across diverse squamous cell carcinomas?

The role of Notch pathway in tumorigenesis is highly variable. It can be tumor suppressive or pro-oncogenic, typically depending on the cellular context. Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is a cancer of the squamous cell, which can occur in diverse human tissues. SCCs are one of the most frequent human malignancies for which the pathologic mechanisms remain elusive. Recent genomic analysis of diverse SCCs identified marked levels of mutations in NOTCH1, implicating Notch signaling pathways in the pathogenesis of SCCs. In this review, evidences highlighting NOTCH's role in different types of SCCs are summarized. Moreover, based on accumulating structural information of the NOTCH receptor, the functional consequences of NOTCH1 gene mutations identified from diverse SCCs are analyzed, emphasizing loss of function of Notch in these cancers. Finally, we discuss the convergent view on an intriguing possibility that Notch may function as tumor suppressor in SCCs across different tissues. These mechanistic insights into Notch signaling pathways will help to guide the research of SCCs and development of therapeutic strategies for these cancers

Acoustic test facility at Tianjin spacecraft AIT center of China

The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) designs and builds a new world-class Assembly, Integration and Test Center (AITC) at Tianjin, China. Modal, vibration and acoustic test facilities are built to support the future environmental testing needs of China space station program. The Reverberation Acoustic Test Facility (RATF) is about 4000 m3 in volume and can achieved an empty chamber acoustic overall sound pressure level (OASPL) higher than 156 dB. It is the largest acoustic facility in Asia. Beijing Institute of spacecraft Environment Engineering (BISEE) started its design and construction work from 2012 and put it into use at October of 2015. The RATF will provide an efficient support for environment testing needs of China and world’s space program in the future

The Paradoxical Effects of COVID-19 Event Strength on Employee Turnover Intention

As a global pandemic, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has brought enormous challenges to employees and organizations. Although numerous existing studies have highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic is a stressful event and empirically proved its detrimental effect on employee turnover intention, few scholars have noted that this pandemic can deteriorate the external economic and employment environment simultaneously, which may further complicate employees’ intentions to leave or stay in the current organization. Drawing on event system theory and social cognitive theory, this study aims to uncover two potential cognitive mechanisms of the complex impact of COVID-19 event strength on employee turnover intention. To examine the proposed model, this study employed a three-wave and time-lagged research design and collected data from a sample of 432 employees of four Chinese companies from different industries. The findings indicated that COVID-19 event strength was negatively related to perceived external employability, and ultimately curbed employee turnover intention. Yet, COVID-19 event strength also negatively predicted perceived organizational growth, thus influencing employees to exhibit intentions to quit. Moreover, organizational identification not only attenuated the positive effect of perceived external employability on turnover intention but also amplified the negative impact of perceived organizational growth on turnover intention. Further, organizational identification moderated the indirect effects of COVID-19 event strength on turnover intention through perceived external employability and perceived organizational growth. This study provided a comprehensive insight into scholars’ understanding of the COVID-19 downstream outcomes

PG-NeuS: Robust and Efficient Point Guidance for Multi-View Neural Surface Reconstruction

Recently, learning multi-view neural surface reconstruction with the supervision of point clouds or depth maps has been a promising way. However, due to the underutilization of prior information, current methods still struggle with the challenges of limited accuracy and excessive time complexity. In addition, prior data perturbation is also an important but rarely considered issue. To address these challenges, we propose a novel point-guided method named PG-NeuS, which achieves accurate and efficient reconstruction while robustly coping with point noise. Specifically, aleatoric uncertainty of the point cloud is modeled to capture the distribution of noise, leading to noise robustness. Furthermore, a Neural Projection module connecting points and images is proposed to add geometric constraints to implicit surface, achieving precise point guidance. To better compensate for geometric bias between volume rendering and point modeling, high-fidelity points are filtered into a Bias Network to further improve details representation. Benefiting from the effective point guidance, even with a lightweight network, the proposed PG-NeuS achieves fast convergence with an impressive 11x speedup compared to NeuS. Extensive experiments show that our method yields high-quality surfaces with high efficiency, especially for fine-grained details and smooth regions, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, it exhibits strong robustness to noisy data and sparse data

Effects of Dietary Carbohydrates with Different Molecular Complexity on Growth Performance, Feed Utilization, and Metabolic Responses of Juvenile Turbot Scophthalmus maximus

A 9 week study was conducted to evaluate the ability of juvenile turbot Scophthalmus maximus (initial body weight: 8.06 ± 0.08 g) to utilize carbohydrates of different molecular complexity (glucose, sucrose and dextrin) diets. Triplicate groups of fish were hand-fed each of the diets in a re-circulated water system. Results showed that weight gain rate and feed efficiency of fish fed dietary dextrin and the control diets were higher than those fed dietary glucose and sucrose diets (P dextrin > sucrose with the lowest occurring in fish fed dietary sucrose. Lipid content in muscle and liver was significantly higher in fish fed the control diet, and muscle glycogen was significantly highest (P sucrose > dextrin > control. Insulin was significantly highest (P<0.05) in fish fed dietary dextrin plasma. In fish fed the control diet total cholesterol in plasma was highest (P<0.05), and triacylglycerols in plasma of fish fed the control and dietary dextrin diets were significantly highest (P<0.05). In conclusion, the present study suggests that turbot can utilize dextrin more efficiently than glucose and sucrose