An Explorative Study on Document Type Assignment of Review Articles in Web of Science, Scopus and Journals' Website

Accurately assigning the document type of review articles in citation index databases like Web of Science(WoS) and Scopus is important. This study aims to investigate the document type assignation of review articles in web of Science, Scopus and Journals' website in a large scale. 27,616 papers from 160 journals from 10 review journal series indexed in SCI are analyzed. The document types of these papers labeled on journals' website, and assigned by WoS and Scopus are retrieved and compared to determine the assigning accuracy and identify the possible reasons of wrongly assigning. For the document type labeled on the website, we further differentiate them into explicit review and implicit review based on whether the website directly indicating it is review or not. We find that WoS and Scopus performed similarly, with an average precision of about 99% and recall of about 80%. However, there were some differences between WoS and Scopus across different journal series and within the same journal series. The assigning accuracy of WoS and Scopus for implicit reviews dropped significantly. This study provides a reference for the accuracy of document type assigning of review articles in WoS and Scopus, and the identified pattern for assigning implicit reviews may be helpful to better labeling on website, WoS and Scopus

Verification of functional and non-functional requirements of web service composition

Abstract. Web services have emerged as an important technology nowadays. There are two kinds of requirements that are crucial to web service composition, which are functional and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements focus on functionality of the composed service, e.g., given a booking service, an example of functional requirements is that a flight ticket with price higher than $2000 will never be purchased. Non-functional requirements are concerned with the quality of service (QoS), e.g., an example of the booking service’s non-functional requirements is that the service will respond to the user within 5 sec-onds. Non-functional requirements are important to web service composition, and are often an important clause in service-level agreements (SLAs). Even though the functional requirements are satisfied, a slow or unreliable service may still not be adopted. In our paper, we propose an automated approach to verify combined functional and non-functional requirements directly based on the semantics of web service composition. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated on the real-world case studies, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Automated runtime recovery for QoS-based service composition

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Optimizing selection of competing features via feedback-directed evolutionary algorithms

Software that support various groups of customers usually require complicated configurations to attain different functionalities. To model the configuration options, feature model is proposed to capture the commonalities and competing variabilities of the product variants in software family or Software Product Line (SPL). A key challenge for deriving a new product is to find a set of features that do not have inconsistencies or conflicts, yet optimize multiple objectives (e.g., minimizing cost and maximizing number of features), which are often competing with each other. Existing works have attempted to make use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to address this problem. In this work, we incorporated a novel feedback-directed mechanism into existing EAs. Our empirical results have shown that our method has improved noticeably over all unguided version of EAs on the optimal feature selection. In particular, for case studies in SPLOT and LVAT repositories, the feedback-directed Indicator-Based EA (IBEA) has increased the number of correct solutions found by 72.33% and 75%, compared to unguided IBEA. In addition, by leveraging a pre-computed solution, we have found 34 sound solutions for Linux X86, which contains 6888 features, in less than 40 seconds.No Full Tex

The economic burden of cervical cancer from diagnosis to one year after final discharge in Henan Province, China: A retrospective case series study.

BACKGROUND: In China, the disease burden of cervical cancer remains substantial. Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines are expensive and not yet centrally funded. To inform immunization policy, understanding the economic burden of the disease is necessary. This study adopted a societal perspective and investigated costs and quality of life changes associated with cervical cancer from diagnosis to one year after final discharge in Henan province, China. METHODS: Inpatient records of cervical cancer patients admitted to the largest cancer hospital in Henan province between Jan. 2017 and Dec. 2018 were extracted. A telephone interview with four modules was conducted in Jun.-Jul. 2019 with a 40% random draw of patients to obtain direct non-medical costs and indirect costs associated with inpatients, costs associated with outpatient visits, and changes in quality of life status using the EQ-5D-5L instrument. Direct medical expenditures were converted to opportunity costs of care using cost-to-charge ratios obtained from hospital financial reports. For each clinical stage (IA-IV), total costs per case from diagnosis to one year after final discharge were extrapolated based on inpatient records, responses to the telephone interview, and recommendation on outpatient follow-ups by Chinese cervical cancer treatment guidelines. Loss in quality-adjusted life years was obtained using the 'under the curve' method and regression predictions. RESULTS: A total of 3,506 inpatient records from 1,323 patients were obtained. Among 541 randomly selected patients, 309 completed at least one module of the telephone interview. The average total costs per case associated with cervical cancer from diagnosis to one year after final discharge ranged from $8,066-$22,888 (in 2018 US Dollar) and the quality-adjusted life years loss varied from 0.05-0.26 for IA-IV patients. CONCLUSIONS: The economic burden associated with cervical cancer is substantial in Henan province. Our study provided important baseline information for cost-effectiveness analysis of HPV immunization program in China

Service adaptation with probabilistic partial models

Web service composition makes use of existing Web services to build complex business processes. Non-functional requirements are crucial for the Web service composition. In order to satisfy non-functional requirements when composing a Web service, one needs to rely on the estimated quality of the component services. However, estimation is seldom accurate especially in the dynamic environment. Hence, we propose a framework, ADFlow, to monitor and adapt the workflow of the Web service composition when necessary to maximize its ability to satisfy the non-functional requirements automatically. To reduce the monitoring overhead, ADFlow relies on asynchronous monitoring. ADFlow has been implemented and the evaluation has shown the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Given a composite service, ADFlow achieves 25 %–32 % of average improvement in the conformance of non-functional requirements, and only incurs 1 %–3 % of overhead with respect to the execution time.No Full Tex

Optimizing selection of competing services with probabilistic hierarchical refinement

Recently, many large enterprises (e.g., Netflix, Amazon) have decomposed their monolithic application into services, and composed them to fulfill their business functionalities. Many hosting services on the cloud, with different Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., availability, cost), can be used to host the services. This is an example of competing services. QoS is crucial for the satisfaction of users. It is important to choose a set of services that maximize the overall QoS, and satisfy all QoS requirements for the service composition. This problem, known as optimal service selection, is NP-hard. Therefore, an effective method for reducing the search space and guiding the search process is highly desirable. To this end, we introduce a novel technique, called Probabilistic Hierarchical Refinement (ProHR). ProHR effectively reduces the search space by removing competing services that cannot be part of the selection. ProHR provides two methods, probabilistic ranking and hierarchical refinement, that enable smart exploration of the reduced search space. Unlike existing approaches that perform poorly when QoS requirements become stricter, ProHR maintains high performance and accuracy, independent of the strictness of the QoS requirements. ProHR has been evaluated on a publicly available dataset, and has shown significant improvement over existing approaches.No Full Tex

Automated synthesis of local time requirement for service composition

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore ANR-NRF French-Singaporean research program ProMi

TWIST Represses Estrogen Receptor-alpha Expression by Recruiting the NuRD Protein Complex in Breast Cancer Cells

Loss of estrogen receptor α (ERα) expression and gain of TWIST (TWIST1) expression in breast tumors correlate with increased disease recurrence and metastasis and poor disease-free survival. However, the molecular and functional regulatory relationship between TWIST and ERα are unclear. In this study, we found TWIST was associated with a chromatin region in intron 7 of the human ESR1 gene coding for ERα. This association of TWIST efficiently recruited the nucleosome remodeling and deacetylase (NuRD) repressor complex to this region, which subsequently decreased histone H3K9 acetylation, increased histone H3K9 methylation and repressed ESR1 expression in breast cancer cells. In agreement with these molecular events, TWIST expression was inversely correlated with ERα expression in both breast cancer cell lines and human breast ductal carcinomas. Forced expression of TWIST in TWIST-negative and ERα-positive breast cancer cells such as T47D and MCF-7 cells reduced ERα expression, while knockdown of TWIST in TWIST-positive and ERα-negative breast cancer cells such as MDA-MB-435 and 4T1 cells increased ERα expression. Furthermore, inhibition of histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity including the one in NuRD complex significantly increased ERα expression in MDA-MB-435 and 4T1 cells. HDAC inhibition together with TWIST knockdown did not further increase ERα expression in 4T1 and MDA-MB-435 cells. These results demonstrate that TWIST/NuRD represses ERα expression in breast cancer cells. Therefore, TWIST may serve as a potential molecular target for converting ERα-negative breast cancers to ERα-positive breast cancers, allowing these cancers to restore their sensitivity to endocrine therapy with selective ERα antagonists such as tamoxifen and raloxifene