An Iterative Scheme for Leverage-based Approximate Aggregation

The current data explosion poses great challenges to the approximate aggregation with an efficiency and accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach to calculate the aggregation answers with a high accuracy using only a small portion of the data. We introduce leverages to reflect individual differences in the samples from a statistical perspective. Two kinds of estimators, the leverage-based estimator, and the sketch estimator (a "rough picture" of the aggregation answer), are in constraint relations and iteratively improved according to the actual conditions until their difference is below a threshold. Due to the iteration mechanism and the leverages, our approach achieves a high accuracy. Moreover, some features, such as not requiring recording the sampled data and easy to extend to various execution modes (e.g., the online mode), make our approach well suited to deal with big data. Experiments show that our approach has an extraordinary performance, and when compared with the uniform sampling, our approach can achieve high-quality answers with only 1/3 of the same sample size.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition in tumor microenvironment

The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays crucial roles in the formation of the body plan and also in the tumor invasion process. In addition, EMT also causes disruption of cell-cell adherence, loss of apico-basal polarity, matrix remodeling, increased motility and invasiveness in promoting tumor metastasis. The tumor microenvironment plays an important role in facilitating cancer metastasis and may induce the occurrence of EMT in tumor cells. A large number of inflammatory cells infiltrating the tumor site, as well as hypoxia existing in a large area of tumor, in addition many stem cells present in tumor microenvironment, such as cancer stem cells (CSCs), mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), all of these may be the inducers of EMT in tumor cells. The signaling pathways involved in EMT are various, including TGF-β, NF-κB, Wnt, Notch, and others. In this review, we discuss the current knowledge about the role of the tumor microenvironment in EMT and the related signaling pathways as well as the interaction between them

Molecular Dynamic Simulation of Diffusion in the Melt Pool in Laser Additive Alloying Process of Co-Ni-Cr-Mn-Fe High Entropy Alloy

High entropy alloys (HEAs) can be manufactured in many conventional ways, but it becomes difficult of fabricating heterogeneous materials and structures. Selective Laser Melting (SLM) method generally melts pure elemental powders or prefabricated alloy powders without alloying process. In-situ alloying in SLM, which is also called Laser Additive Alloying (LAA), using pure elemental powders becomes a promising method for creating HEA with heterogeneous structures. However, the effect of the diffusion of elements in the molten pool on the formation of HEA remains unclear. In this paper, the well-discussed Cantor HEA was studied in an in-situ alloying situation, where pure elemental powders (Co, Cr, Mn, Ni, Fe) distributed on a powder bed were irradiated by laser and were subsequently allowed to cool back to room temperature. The diffusion of specific elements, with respect to their original clusters, was tracked via Mean Square Displacement (MSD) as well as the final composition of key locations. Our model was verified by showing a good agreement with the overall average diffusion rates of each element in the Cantor HEA qualitatively in other works from literature. Results initially showed that as the energy density increases, better diffusion was observed through a pixel overlay analysis about the mixing of different elements. The best-case scenario of diffusion from the pixel overlay map indicated a strong presence of 3 to 4 elements after the laser scanning. Given the conditions in the MD simulation, there was no apparent segregation of elements during the alloying process. In addition, we also conducted a simulation by implementing a 0.03 nm/ps laser scanning in a meander 2-track scan in order to completely melt the powder bed. After cooling and equilibration, Polyhedral Template Analysis was applied to analyze the crystal structure of the solidified powder bed in the presence of increasing components. When the powders of Cantor HEA were alloyed using LAA approach, all elements experienced a complex diffusion behavior, elements like Cr also experienced a relatively rapid diffusion compared to other elements. Despite this, Cr only diffused for a short period and diffused minimally during the in-situ alloying process. The analysis of element-specific behavior, such as diffusion, can provide a framework for the LAA production of HEA. This MD study provides a detailed analysis about the effect of diffusion on the formation of HEA system if in-situ alloying is adopted, the findings of this study can be used to guide the material design and the appropriate parameters for manufacturing process of new HEAs. This study can also be extended to analyze the effect of diffusion on the thermomechanical properties of HEAs

Hiding Access-pattern is Not Enough! Veil: A Storage and Communication Efficient Volume-Hiding Algorithm

This paper addresses volume leakage (i.e., leakage of the number of records in the answer set) when processing keyword queries in encrypted key-value (KV) datasets. Volume leakage, coupled with prior knowledge about data distribution and/or previously executed queries, can reveal both ciphertexts and current user queries. We develop a solution to prevent volume leakage, entitled Veil, that partitions the dataset by randomly mapping keys to a set of equi-sized buckets. Veil provides a tunable mechanism for data owners to explore a trade-off between storage and communication overheads. To make buckets indistinguishable to the adversary, Veil uses a novel padding strategy that allow buckets to overlap, reducing the need to add fake records. Both theoretical and experimental results show Veil to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art

Use of on-line flow cytometry for the characterization of physiological behavior in stress conditions during the bioprocess

Peer reviewe

The role of immunosuppression of mesenchymal stem cells in tissue repair and tumor growth

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have acquired great interests for their potential use in the clinical therapy of many diseases because of their functions including multiple lineage differentiation, low immunogenicity and immunosuppression. Many studies suggest that MSCs are strongly immunosuppressive in vitro and in vivo. MSCs exert a profound inhibitory effect on the proliferation of T cells, B cells, dendritic cells and natural killer cells. In addition, several soluble factors have been reported to involved in the immunosuppressive effects by MSCs such as TGF-β, HGF, PGE2, IDO and iNOS. These results suggest that MSCs can be used in the therapy of immune disorder diseases, prevention of organ transplantation rejection and tissue injury. In recent study, we demonstrated that MSCs in tumor inflammatory microenvironment might be elicited of immunosuppressive function. Thus, the application of MSCs in cancer therapy might have negative effect by helping tumor cells escaping from the immune surveillance