Data Management Solutions for Tackling Big Data Variety

Variety is one of the three defining characteristics of Big Data; the others being Volume and Velocity. There are several aspects of this data variety: diversity in data formats (text, video, audio) and structure (relational, graph etc), variety in access methodologies(OLTP, OLAP), and distribution heterogeneity within the workloads (read-heavy, high contention). Data management solutions for modern-day applications need to tackle this variety.This dissertation provides an understanding of the challenges associated with the different elements of variety, and proposes several solutions for efficiently handling its various aspects. First, the dissertation studies the challenges related to variety in data structure and access methodologies, and the resultant heterogeneity at the data infrastructure level. Applications now employ several data-processing engines with different underlying representations, like row, column, graph etc., to process their data. We propose Janus, which introduces a novel data-movement pipeline, which enables the use of different representations to support both high throughput of transactions and diverse analytics, while still ensuring consistent real-time analytics in a scale-out setting. Janus partitions the data at different representations, and allows distributed transactions and diverse partitioning strategies at the representations. Then, we propose Typhon and Cerberus, which define and enforce consistency semantics for application data spread across representations. Second, this dissertation proposes solutions for handling distribution heterogeneity within the workloads. Workloads can have have skewed distribution in terms of operation-type, data access or temporal variation. We propose strongly-consistent quorum reads for Raft-like consensus protocols, which can be utilized to scale read-heavy workloads. For supporting high contention transaction workloads, we integrate an existing dynamic timestamp allocation based concurrency control mechanism in a distributed OLTP setting, and analyze its performance. Third, we study IoT applications, which have to deal with both physical heterogeneity of the sensors, as well asdiverse data-processing demands. We propose a multi-representation based architecture catering to IoT applications, and also present the initial design of M-stream, a computation framework for enabling integration and monitoring of uncertain data from multiplesensors. Through analysis, illustrative examples and extensive evaluation of the proposed protocols, this dissertation demonstrates that the proposed solutions can be employed for efficiently handling the different aspects of variety of data-intensive applications

Ageing and Health– A Review

Dental care is vital to maintain natural teeth and enhance the quality of life for elderly people. Preserving good oral health starts early in life by developing healthy lifestyles, practicing appropriate self-care, and regularly using oral health services when available. The overall objective of dental therapy is to preserve dentition by preventing the progression of dental diseases. It should be integrated into overall health management of all geriatric patients and its maintenance is crucial to stability and functional health of the tissues. This review is intended to provide brief layout on diseases seen in older population, so as to render a professional service

Influence of Aircraft Flow Field on the Longitudinal Stability of a Missile

An air-to-air missile launched from a fighter aircraft needs to be stable at launch to enable safe separation from the aircraft, and less stable in the terminal phase of its flight to become highly maneuverable to intercept the targets. A study has been carried out to estimate the effect of the aircraft flow field on the longitudinal stability of the missile using an in-house developed 3-D grid-free Euler solver. Initially, the missiles are placed in the captive location in the launcher of the aircraft. One of the missiles is then moved to various pre-determined locations ahead of the wing of the aircraft, keeping the other missile at the captive location. The centre of pressure and stability margin of the missile is determined at these locations. It is observed that the presence of aircraft has a substantial effect on the longitudinal stability of the missile. The centre of pressure of the missile is seen to move aft as it leaves the launcher. As the missile moves, the centre of pressure reaches a maximum aft position and then moves forward till it reaches a position where the missile is free from the influence of the aircraft. It is observed that as the missile moves away from the region of strong influence of the aircraft, its aerodynamic characteristics approach asymptotically to that of the isolated missile.Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(3), pp.242-248, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.209

Utilization of Stem Cells in Dentistry: A Review

For centuries, scientists have known that certain animals can regenerate missing parts of their bodies. Humans actually share this ability with animals such as starfish which has the ability to regenerate lost arms and can grow an entire new limb. Researchers define stem cells as the clonogenic cells with the capability of self renewal and multi-lineage differentiation and also have the capabilities of generating complex tissues and various organs

VAV2, a guanine nucleotide exchange factor for Rac1, regulates glucose-stimulated insulin secretion in pancreatic beta cells

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: Rho GTPases (Ras-related C3 botulinum toxin substrate 1 [Rac1] and cell division cycle 42 [Cdc42]) have been shown to regulate glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) via cytoskeletal remodelling, trafficking and fusion of insulin-secretory granules with the plasma membrane. GTP loading of these G proteins, which is facilitated by GDP/GTP exchange factors, is a requisite step in the regulation of downstream effector proteins. Guanine nucleotide exchange factor VAV2 (VAV2), a member of the Dbl family of proteins, has been identified as one of the GDP/GTP exchange factors for Rac1. Despite recent evidence on the regulatory roles of VAV2 in different cell types, roles of this guanine nucleotide exchange factor in the signalling events leading to GSIS remain undefined. Using immunological, short interfering RNA (siRNA), pharmacological and microscopic approaches we investigated the role of VAV2 in GSIS from islet beta cells. METHODS: Co-localisation of Rac1 and VAV2 was determined by Triton X-114 phase partition and confocal microscopy. Glucose-induced actin remodelling was quantified by live cell imaging using the LifeAct-GFP fluorescent biosensor. Rac1 activation was determined by G protein linked immunosorbent assay (G-LISA). RESULTS: Western blotting indicated that VAV2 is expressed in INS-1 832/13 beta cells, normal rat islets and human islets. Vav2 siRNA markedly attenuated GSIS in INS-1 832/13 cells. Ehop-016, a newly discovered small molecule inhibitor of the VAV2-Rac1 interaction, or siRNA-mediated knockdown of VAV2 markedly attenuated glucose-induced Rac1 activation and GSIS in INS-1 832/13 cells. Pharmacological findings were recapitulated in primary rat islets. A high glucose concentration promoted co-localisation of Rac1 and VAV2. Real-time imaging in live cells indicated a significant inhibition of glucose-induced cortical actin remodelling by Ehop-016. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATION: Our data provide the first evidence to implicate VAV2 in glucose-induced Rac1 activation, actin remodelling and GSIS in pancreatic beta cells

CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow

Despite impressive performance for high-level downstream tasks, self-supervised pre-training methods have not yet fully delivered on dense geometric vision tasks such as stereo matching or optical flow. The application of self-supervised concepts, such as instance discrimination or masked image modeling, to geometric tasks is an active area of research. In this work, we build on the recent cross-view completion framework, a variation of masked image modeling that leverages a second view from the same scene which makes it well suited for binocular downstream tasks. The applicability of this concept has so far been limited in at least two ways: (a) by the difficulty of collecting real-world image pairs -- in practice only synthetic data have been used -- and (b) by the lack of generalization of vanilla transformers to dense downstream tasks for which relative position is more meaningful than absolute position. We explore three avenues of improvement. First, we introduce a method to collect suitable real-world image pairs at large scale. Second, we experiment with relative positional embeddings and show that they enable vision transformers to perform substantially better. Third, we scale up vision transformer based cross-completion architectures, which is made possible by the use of large amounts of data. With these improvements, we show for the first time that state-of-the-art results on stereo matching and optical flow can be reached without using any classical task-specific techniques like correlation volume, iterative estimation, image warping or multi-scale reasoning, thus paving the way towards universal vision models.Comment: ICCV 202

Risk Factors for Graft-versus-Host Disease in Haploidentical Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation Using Post-Transplant Cyclophosphamide

Post-transplant cyclophosphamide (PTCy) has significantly increased the successful use of haploidentical donors with a relatively low incidence of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Given its increasing use, we sought to determine risk factors for GVHD after haploidentical hematopoietic cell transplantation (haplo-HCT) using PTCy. Data from the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research on adult patients with acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, myelodysplastic syndrome, or chronic myeloid leukemia who underwent PTCy-based haplo-HCT (2013 to 2016) were analyzed and categorized into 4 groups based on myeloablative (MA) or reduced-intensity conditioning (RIC) and bone marrow (BM) or peripheral blood (PB) graft source. In total, 646 patients were identified (MA-BM = 79, MA-PB = 183, RIC-BM = 192, RIC-PB = 192). The incidence of grade 2 to 4 acute GVHD at 6 months was highest in MA-PB (44%), followed by RIC-PB (36%), MA-BM (36%), and RIC-BM (30%) (P = .002). The incidence of chronic GVHD at 1 year was 40%, 34%, 24%, and 20%, respectively (P < .001). In multivariable analysis, there was no impact of stem cell source or conditioning regimen on grade 2 to 4 acute GVHD; however, older donor age (30 to 49 versus <29 years) was significantly associated with higher rates of grade 2 to 4 acute GVHD (hazard ratio [HR], 1.53; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.11 to 2.12; P = .01). In contrast, PB compared to BM as a stem cell source was a significant risk factor for the development of chronic GVHD (HR, 1.70; 95% CI, 1.11 to 2.62; P = .01) in the RIC setting. There were no differences in relapse or overall survival between groups. Donor age and graft source are risk factors for acute and chronic GVHD, respectively, after PTCy-based haplo-HCT. Our results indicate that in RIC haplo-HCT, the risk of chronic GVHD is higher with PB stem cells, without any difference in relapse or overall survival

Cross-domain based Event Recommendation using Tensor Factorization

Context in the form of meta-data has been accredited as an important component in cross-domain collaborative filtering (CDCF). In this research paper CDCF concept is used to exploit event information (context) from two UI matrices to allow the recommendation performance of one domain (Facebook- User-Event Matrix) to benefit from the information from another domain (Bookmyshow- Event-Tag Matrix). The model based collaborative filtering approach Tensor Factorization(TF) has been used to integrate Facebook provided User-Event context information with Bookmyshow Event-Tag context information to recommend events. In contrast to the standard collaborative tag recommendation, our CDCF approach uses one User-Event matrix of Facebook that takes another Bookmyshow Event-Tag matrix as additional informant. The proposed cross-domain based Event Recommendation approach is divided into three modules- i) data collection which extracts the unstructured dataset from the two domains Bookmyshow and social networking site Facebook using API’s; ii) data mapping module which is basically used to integrate the common knowledge/ data that can be shared between considered different domains (Facebook & Bookmyshow). This module integrates and reduces the data into structured events’ instances. As the dataset was collected from two different sites, an intersection of both was taken out. Therefore this module is carefully designed according to reliability of information that is common between two domains; iii) 3 order tensor factorization and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) used for most preferable recommendation by less pertinent result reduction. The proposed 3 order tensor factorization is designed for maximizing the mutual benefit from both the considered domains (organizer and user). Therefore providing three recommendations: For organizers: 1) system recommends places to conduct specific event according to maximum of attendees of a particular type of event at a specific location; 2) recommending target audience to organizer: those who are interested to attend event on the basis of past data for promotion purposes. For users: 3) recommending events to users of their interest on the basis of past record. Our result shows significant improvement in reduction of less relevant data and result effectiveness is measured through recall and precision. Reduction of less relevant recommendation is 64%, 72% and 63% for place recommendation to organizer, target audience recommendation to organizer and event recommendation to user respectively. The proposed tensor factorization approach achieved 68% precision, 15.5% recall in recommending attendees to organizer and 62% precision, 13.4% recall for event recommendation to user

Swarm Intelligent Optimized Method of Development of Noble Life in the perspective of Indian Scientific Philosophy and Psychology

Many times, the Human being is having the most deplorable ignorance about his own being. It usually remains in ‘Aatmik Abodhita’ or ignorance about Soul in men. i.e. at one hand, they don’t posses any desire at all to get true knowledge about their soul and on other hand their own various pleasure-seeking low-love produce in their soul intense soul darkness. This type of examining your ideas could not give good evidence. Scientist are working on behaviorism .They got success about rats and pigeons but had less success at understanding human beings. The paper is an effort to deal with Swarm Intelligent technique to deal with optimized method of development of noble life in the perspective of Indian scientific philosophy and psychology