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Deep learning has been used in a wide range of areas and made a huge breakthrough. With the ever-increasing model size and train-ing data volume, distributed deep learning emerges which utilizes a cluster to train a model in parallel. Unfortunately, the performance is often far from linear speedup due to the communication overhead between cluster nodes. To address this challenge, this paper designs and implements Libra, a network aggregator, that utilizes in-network computation to optimize the communication for distributed DL training in two aspects: 1) reduce active connections and 2) aggregate exchanged network packets. We implemented our Libra on Intel Tofino switches, customized a lightweight host stack and integrated it into an open-source training framework PS-lite. The experimental result shows that our Libra can achieve 1.5~4 times speedup., 13 pages, 18 figures

Two low-carbon high-strength bainitic steels with/without molybdenum (Mo) addition were designed to investigate the effect of Mo on bainitic transformation, microstructure and properties. The results show that during austempering, Mo addition increases the amount of isothermal bainite transformation and slightly accelerates the bainite transformation kinetics. It is mainly attributed to the fact that there is the ferrite transformation in Mo-free steel but not in Mo-added steel even cooled at a very high cooling rate before austempering. In Mo-free steel, the formation of ferrite leads to the higher carbon content in untransformed austenite with higher stability and thus retards the isothermal bainite transformation kinetics. The ferrite transformation controlled by carbon diffusion is strongly inhibited in the Mo-added steel because Mo addition decreases obviously the diffusion coefficient of carbon and grain boundaries energies. In addition, the promoted effect of Mo addition on isothermal bainite transformation is stronger at lower austempering temperature. Mo addition leads to the more and finer bainite plates and increases the strength of low-carbon bainitic steel. Moreover, the volume fraction of retained austenite first decreases and then increases in Mo-free steel with the increase in austempering temperature, whereas it presents the inverse trend in Mo-added steel. Similarly, during continuous cooling process, Mo addition effectively retards the formation of high-temperature products and thus improves the tensile properties of low-carbon steels.

RFID localization is considered the key enabler of automating the process of inventory tracking and management for high-performance logistic network. A practical and deployable RFID localization system needs to meet reliability, throughput, and range requirements. This paper presents RF-Chord, the first RFID localization system that simultaneously meets all three requirements. RF-Chord features a one-shot multisine-constructed wideband design that can process RF signal with a 200 MHz bandwidth in real-time to facilitate one-shot localization at scale. In addition, multiple SINR enhancement techniques are designed for range extension. On top of that, a kernel-layer-based near-field localization framework and a multipath-suppression algorithm are proposed to reduce the 99% long-tail errors. Our empirical results show that RF-Chord can localize more than 180 tags 6 m away from a reader within 1 second and with 99% long-tail error of 0.786 m, achieving a 0% miss reading rate and ~0.01% cross-reading rate in the warehouse and fresh food delivery store deployment., Comment: To be published in NSDI 2023

A timely understanding of the spatiotemporal pattern and development trend of COVID-19 is critical for timely prevention and control. However, the under-reporting of cases is widespread in fields associated with public health. It is also possible to draw biased inferences and formulate inappropriate prevention and control policies if the phenomenon of under-reporting is not taken into account. Therefore, in this paper, a novel framework was proposed to explore the impact of under-reporting on COVID-19 spatiotemporal distributions, and empirical analysis was carried out using infection data of healthcare workers in Wuhan and Hubei (excluding Wuhan). The results show that (1) the lognormal distribution was the most suitable to describe the evolution of epidemic with time; (2) the estimated peak infection time of the reported cases lagged the peak infection time of the healthcare worker cases, and the estimated infection time interval of the reported cases was smaller than that of the healthcare worker cases. (3) The impact of under-reporting cases on the early stages of the pandemic was greater than that on its later stages, and the impact on the early onset area was greater than that on the late onset area. (4) Although the number of reported cases was lower than the actual number of cases, a high spatial correlation existed between the cumulatively reported cases and healthcare worker cases. The proposed framework of this study is highly extensible, and relevant researchers can use data sources from other counties to carry out similar research.

The aim of this paper is to achieve the radio frequency stealth (RFS) during the course of tracking by controlling the radiation energy and the interval of a radar. Firstly, we build the model of probability of interception with the once radiation during the course of tracking. Secondly, we establish the model of the cumulative probability of interception to describe the effect of RFS throughout the tracking process and obtain two solutions that are minimizing the probability of interception and the radiation times to reduce the cumulative probability of interception. Thirdly, we propose a self-adapting radiation energy control method (SARE) to minimize the probability of interception. Fourthly, we propose a self-adapting radiation interval control method (SARI) to minimize radiation times. Fifthly, combining SARE with SARI, we propose a SARE-SARI control method (SAEI) during the course of tracking. Finally, we compare SAEI with two others by simulation, and the results show the effect of RFS of SAEI is better than the other two, but we have to make a trade-off between the ability of RFS and the effect of tracking.

// Lili Huang 1 , Ming Shen 1 , Rongxin Li 1 , Xiangyu Zhang 1 , Ying Sun 1 , Pei Gao 1 , Hao Fu 1 , Hongqiang Liu 2 , Yang He 2 , Yuqing Du 3 , Jun Cao 2 , Yourong Duan 1 1 State Key Laboratory of Oncogenes and Related Genes, Shanghai Cancer Institute, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China 2 Department of Interventional Oncology, Dahua Hospital, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China 3 Department of Interventional Radiology, Shanghai Pudong New District Punan Hospital, Shanghai, China Correspondence to: Yourong Duan, email: yrduan@shsci.org Jun Cao, email: juncao11@sina.com Yuqing Du, email: du_yqsh@sina.cn Keywords: thermo-sensitive composite hydrogels, poloxamer 407, sodium alginate, sol-gel transition, transarterial embolization Received: April 12, 2016 Accepted: August 25, 2016 Published: September 1, 2016 ABSTRACT Interventional embolization therapy is an effective, most widely used method for inoperable liver tumors. Blood-vessel-embolic agents were essential in transarterial embolization (TAE). In this work, thermo-sensitive composite hydrogels based on poloxamer 407, sodium alginate, hydroxymethyl cellulose and iodixanol (PSHI), together with Ca2+ (PSHI-Ca2+) were prepared as liquid embolic agents for TAE therapy to liver cancer. With increasing temperature, PSHI exhibited two phase states: a flowing sol and a shrunken gel. Rheology tests showed good fluidity and excellent viscoelastic behavior with a gelation temperature (GT) of 26.5°C. The studies of erosion indicated that PSHI had calcium ion-related erosion characteristics and showed a slow erosion rate in an aqueous environment. When incubated with L929 cells, the thermo-sensitive composite hydrogels had low cytotoxicity in vitro . The results of analyzing the digital subtraction angiography and computed tomography images obtained from in vitro and in vivo assays indicated a good embolic effect in the renal arteries of normal rabbits. Angiography and histological studies on VX2 tumor-bearing rabbits indicated that PSHI-Ca2+ successfully occluded the tumors, including the peripheral vessels. In conclusion, PSHI-Ca2+ was a promising embolic agent for transarterial embolization therapy.

Objective: To compare the effectiveness, adverse effects, and cost-effectiveness of percutaneous neurolytic celiac plexus block (NCPB) versus traditional medication strategies for the treatment of patients with advanced cancer having severe upper abdominal cancer pain. Methods: This retrospective study included 81 patients with advanced upper abdominal cancer admitted to The Sixth People’s Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiaotong University between January 2013 and July 2014. The patients were divided into percutaneous NCPB (treatment) and medication for pain (control) groups. The outcomes were measured in terms of Numeric Rating Scale (NRS) score and Karnofsky Performance Status (KPS) score before treatment and on the 3rd, 7th, 14th, and 28th days posttreatment. The effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the therapy were assessed using analysis of the health economics. Results: The improvements in NRS score (1.42 ± 1.09 vs 4.03 ± 0.96, P < .01) and KPS score (65.55 ± 9.09 vs 63.03 ± 8.961, P < .01) in the treatment group were significantly superior compared to the control group on the 7th day of treatment, followed by no significant difference between the 2 groups on the 14th and the 28th day of treatment. Health economics evaluation revealed that the medicine-specific costs and total health care costs were significantly reduced in the treatment group compared to the control group ( P < .05), but no significant differences between the 2 groups ( P > .05) were seen in the costs of hospitalization, examinations, and treatment. Conclusion: The percutaneous NCPB method shows promising results and better cost-effectiveness for treating patients with advanced cancer having severe upper abdominal pain.

Closing the Network Diagnostics Gap with Vigil Behnaz Arzani, Selim Ciraci, Luiz Chamon, Yibo Zhu, Hongqiang Liu, Jitu Padhye, Geoff Outhred, Boon Thau Loo Vigil started with an ambitious goal: For every TCP retransmission in our data centers, we wanted to pinpoint the network link that caused the packet drop that triggered the retransmission with negligible diagnostic overhead or changes to the networking infrastructure. This goal may sound like an overkill—after all, TCP is supposed to be able to deal with a few packet losses. Packet losses might occur due to simple congestion instead of network equipment failures. Even network failures might be transient. Above all, there is a danger of drowning in a sea of data without generating any actionable intelligence.

With the tremendous popularity gained by container technology, many applications are being containerized: splitting into numerous containers connected by networks. However, current container networking solutions have either bad performance or poor portability, which undermines the advantages of containerization. In this paper, we propose FreeFlow, a container networking solution which achieves both high performance and good portability. FreeFlow is designed according to the observation that strict isolations are unnecessary among containers trusting each other, and it can significantly boost the communication quality of containers by compromising isolation a little bit. Specifically, we enable containers on the same physical machine to communicate via shared-memory and the ones on different physical machines communicate via high performance networking options, e.g. RDMA and DPDK. Naively wrapping up all the solutions together will result in poor potability of containers and huge complexity in application development. Instead, FreeFlow leverages a network abstraction which supports all common network APIs and a centralized network orchestrator which decides how to deliver data transparently to applications in the containers.

Spectral radiation detection in deep space background is an important fundamental research in the field of infrared target detection and identification. Based on the spectral radiation and scattering theory, the spatial distribution model of aerial target reflecting background radiation under complex environment is first built. Then the horizontal and pitch spectral radiation models of target are built based on target skin temperature distribution caused by aerodynamic heating. Combining the target motion equation and relative rotation matrix between target matrix and detector matrix, the process-oriented characteristic of spectral response signal with spatiotemporal variation is emphatically analyzed. The simulation results indicate that different target maneuver modes cause different characteristics of spectral response signal, which shows that a remarkable mapping relationship exists between the target maneuver mode and spectral response signal characteristic. Thus using the spectral response signal to identify target maneuver mode provides a feasible method, and the target posture and relative position are the main factors to affect the spectral response signal characteristic.

In this paper, we present F5 steganographic algorithm and its steganographic system, then we embed 35.5kb information (a txt document) into a 99.7kb JPEG image by using F5 steganographic system. The experimental result shows that when we choose k=3 which is based on utilization rate of the data(R), then the AC coefficients will be changed seldom while the information embedded in the image. The three domains method to steganalysis the stego-images is also analyzed in this paper. Extracting the three domains characteristics on the JPEG images to train the BP neural network classifier, we can set a threshold value to the BP neural network classifier to classify the JPEG images. The experimental results show the method using three domains offers a high accuracy to detect the image whether includes information or not.

In the title compound, C34H41N7O5·4H2O (systematic name: ethyl 3-{[2-({4-[(Z)-amino(hexyloxycarbonylimino)methyl]anilino}methyl)-1-methylbenzimidazole-5-carbonyl]pyridin-2-ylamino}propanoate tetrahydrate), the benzene and pyridine rings form dihedral angles of 5.4 (1) and 43.8 (1)°, respectively, with the benzimidazole mean plane. The terminal butyl group is disordered over two conformations in a 0.756 (10):0.244 (10) ratio. There is an intramolecular N—H...O hydrogen bond present. In the crystal, the water molecules are involved in the formation of O—H...O, O—H...N and N—H...O hydrogen bonds, which link the components into layers parallel to the ab plane.

A simple synthesis of ferrocenyloxazoline derived chiral N,P ligands and N,S ligands immobilized on a MeO- PEG-support is described. The metal complexes of chiral ligands have been successfully applied to 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reaction of azomethine ylides and asymmetric allylic substitution reaction, providing the products with up to 97% ee and 90% ee, respectively. The MeO-PEG-supported metal complex catalysts can be recycled easily and reused. Keywords PEG; ferrocenyloxazoline ligands; asymmetric catalysis