IoT-B&B: Edge-Based NFV for IoT Devices with CPE Crowdsourcing

For embracing the ubiquitous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, edge computing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have been enabled in branch offices and homes in the form of virtual Customer-Premises Equipment (vCPE). A Service Provider (SP) deploys vCPE instances as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of generic physical Customer-Premises Equipment (pCPE) to ease administration. Upon a usage surge of IoT devices at a certain part of the network, vCPU, memory, and other resource limitations of a single pCPE node make it difficult to add new services handling the high demand. In this paper, we present IoT-B&B, a novel architecture featuring resource sharing of pCPE nodes. When a pCPE node has sharable resources available, the SP will utilize its free resources as a "bed-and-breakfast" place to deploy vCPE instances in need. A placement algorithm is also presented to assign vCPE instances to a cost-efficient pCPE node. By keeping vCPE instances at the network edge, their costs of hosting are reduced. Meanwhile, the transmission latencies are maintained at acceptable levels for processing real-time data burst from IoT devices. The traffic load to the remote, centralized cloud can be substantially reduced

IKKβ is Essential for Adipocyte Survival and Adaptive Adipose Remodeling in Obesity

IκB kinase β (IKKβ), a central coordinator of inflammatory responses through activation of nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB), has been implicated as a critical molecular link between inflammation and metabolic disorders; however, the role of adipocyte IKKβ in obesity and related metabolic disorders remains elusive. Here we report an essential role of IKKβ in the regulation of adipose remodeling and adipocyte survival in diet-induced obesity. Targeted deletion of IKKβ in adipocytes does not affect body weight, food intake, and energy expenditure but results in an exaggerated diabetic phenotype when challenged with a high-fat diet (HFD). IKKβ-deficient mice have multiple histopathologies in visceral adipose tissue, including increased adipocyte death, amplified macrophage infiltration, and defective adaptive adipose remodeling. Deficiency of IKKβ also leads to increased adipose lipolysis, elevated plasma free fatty acid (FFA) levels, and impaired insulin signaling. Mechanistic studies demonstrated that IKKβ is a key adipocyte survival factor and that IKKβ protects murine and human adipocytes from HFD- or FFA-elicited cell death through NF-κB-dependent upregulation of antiapoptotic proteins and NF-κB-independent inactivation of proapoptotic BAD protein. Our findings establish IKKβ as critical for adipocyte survival and adaptive adipose remodeling in obesity

On the Use of Generalized Volume Scattering Models for the Improvement of General Polarimetric Model-Based Decomposition

Recently, a general polarimetric model-based decomposition framework was proposed by Chen et al., which addresses several well-known limitations in previous decomposition methods and implements a simultaneous full-parameter inversion by using complete polarimetric information. However, it only employs four typical models to characterize the volume scattering component, which limits the parameter inversion performance. To overcome this issue, this paper presents two general polarimetric model-based decomposition methods by incorporating the generalized volume scattering model (GVSM) or simplified adaptive volume scattering model, (SAVSM) proposed by Antropov et al. and Huang et al., respectively, into the general decomposition framework proposed by Chen et al. By doing so, the final volume coherency matrix structure is selected from a wide range of volume scattering models within a continuous interval according to the data itself without adding unknowns. Moreover, the new approaches rely on one nonlinear optimization stage instead of four as in the previous method proposed by Chen et al. In addition, the parameter inversion procedure adopts the modified algorithm proposed by Xie et al. which leads to higher accuracy and more physically reliable output parameters. A number of Monte Carlo simulations of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data are carried out and show that the proposed method with GVSM yields an overall improvement in the final accuracy of estimated parameters and outperforms both the version using SAVSM and the original approach. In addition, C-band Radarsat-2 and L-band AIRSAR fully polarimetric images over the San Francisco region are also used for testing purposes. A detailed comparison and analysis of decomposition results over different land-cover types are conducted. According to this study, the use of general decomposition models leads to a more accurate quantitative retrieval of target parameters. However, there exists a trade-off between parameter accuracy and model complexity which constrains the physical validity of solutions and must be further investigated.This work was supported in part by National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant 41531068, 41371335, 41671356 and 41274010, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and EU FEDER under Project TIN2014-55413-C2-2-P, and China Scholarship Council under Grant 201406370079

Quantitative Analysis of Polarimetric Model-Based Decomposition Methods

In this paper, we analyze the robustness of the parameter inversion provided by general polarimetric model-based decomposition methods from the perspective of a quantitative application. The general model and algorithm we have studied is the method proposed recently by Chen et al., which makes use of the complete polarimetric information and outperforms traditional decomposition methods in terms of feature extraction from land covers. Nevertheless, a quantitative analysis on the retrieved parameters from that approach suggests that further investigations are required in order to fully confirm the links between a physically-based model (i.e., approaches derived from the Freeman–Durden concept) and its outputs as intermediate products before any biophysical parameter retrieval is addressed. To this aim, we propose some modifications on the optimization algorithm employed for model inversion, including redefined boundary conditions, transformation of variables, and a different strategy for values initialization. A number of Monte Carlo simulation tests for typical scenarios are carried out and show that the parameter estimation accuracy of the proposed method is significantly increased with respect to the original implementation. Fully polarimetric airborne datasets at L-band acquired by German Aerospace Center’s (DLR’s) experimental synthetic aperture radar (E-SAR) system were also used for testing purposes. The results show different qualitative descriptions of the same cover from six different model-based methods. According to the Bragg coefficient ratio (i.e., β ), they are prone to provide wrong numerical inversion results, which could prevent any subsequent quantitative characterization of specific areas in the scene. Besides the particular improvements proposed over an existing polarimetric inversion method, this paper is aimed at pointing out the necessity of checking quantitatively the accuracy of model-based PolSAR techniques for a reliable physical description of land covers beyond their proven utility for qualitative features extraction.This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41531068, 41371335, and 41274010), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and EU FEDER under Projects TEC2011-28201-C02-02 and TIN2014-55413-C2-2-P, and China Scholarship Council (No.201406370079)

Permanent Genetic Resources added to Molecular Ecology Resources Database 1 December 2010-31 January 2011

This article documents the addition of 238 microsatellite marker loci to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Alytes dickhilleni, Arapaima gigas, Austropotamobius italicus, Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici, Cobitis lutheri, Dendroctonus ponderosae, Glossina morsitans morsitans, Haplophilus subterraneus, Kirengeshoma palmata, Lysimachia japonica, Macrolophus pygmaeus, Microtus cabrerae, Mytilus galloprovincialis, Pallisentis (Neosentis) celatus, Pulmonaria officinalis, Salminus franciscanus, Thais chocolata and Zootoca vivipara. These loci were cross-tested on the following species: Acanthina monodon, Alytes cisternasii, Alytes maurus, Alytes muletensis, Alytes obstetricans almogavarii, Alytes obstetricans boscai, Alytes obstetricans obstetricans, Alytes obstetricans pertinax, Cambarellus montezumae, Cambarellus zempoalensis, Chorus giganteus, Cobitis tetralineata, Glossina fuscipes fuscipes, Glossina pallidipes, Lysimachia japonica var. japonica, Lysimachia japonica var. minutissima, Orconectes virilis, Pacifastacus leniusculus, Procambarus clarkii, Salminus brasiliensis and Salminus hilarii

Preclinical Safety and Pharmacokinetics of Heat Stable Oxytocin in Sublingual Fast-Dissolving Tablet Formulation

The work reported here focuses on an evaluation of a novel heat stable formulation of a uterotonic peptide drug oxytocin involving stability testing under elevated temperatures and toxicokinetic response generated by sublingual (SL) administration in rabbits. The formulation was thermotolerant, maintaining the potency of oxytocin in the form of a fast-dissolving tablet at the end of 2-year storage at 30 °C/65% relative humidity with less than 5% loss in oxytocin content based on analytical high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The toxicokinetic results in rabbits showed that the fast-dissolving tablet was safe without any reactogenicity or toxicity associated with SL administration or the excipients present in the formulation. The SL route elicited rapid absorption of oxytocin in plasma within 5 min of administration although lower than intramuscular (IM) administration. IM resulted in area under the curve (AUC) values approximately 5 times higher than SL oxytocin. However, due to the limitations encountered during SL administration in an anesthetized rabbit model, the relevance of heat stable oxytocin formulation that has the flexibility to be adapted in different formats may warrant a human clinical study to determine whether therapeutically relevant plasma levels for treating postpartum hemorrhage can be generated via alternate non-injectable routes of administration

EdgePlace: Availability-aware placement for chained mobile edge applications

Mobile edge computing (MEC) literally pushes cloud computing from remote datacenters to the life radius of end users. By leveraging the widely adopted European Telecommunications Standards Institute network function virtualization architecture, MEC provisions elastic and resilient mobile edge applications with proximity. Typical MEC virtualization infrastructure allows a configurable placement policy to deploy mobile edge applications as virtual machines (VMs): affinity can be used to put VMs on the same host for inter-VM networking performance, whereas anti-affinity is to separate VMs for high availability. In this paper, we propose a novel model to track the availability and cost impact from placement policy changes of the mobile edge applications. We formulate our model as a stochastic programming problem. To minimize the complexity challenge, we also propose a heuristic algorithm called EdgePlace. With our model, the unit resource cost increases when there are less resources left on a host. Applying affinity would take up more resources of the host but saves network bandwidth cost because of colocation. When enforcing anti-affinity, experimental results show increases of both availability and interhost network bandwidth cost. For applications with different resource requirements, our model is able to find their sweet points with the consideration of both resource cost and application availability, which is vital in a less robust MEC environment